Part 1 covered the unchecked, exploding population growth of Africa, whose rate of growth is not slowing nearly as much as globohomo’s ridiculous scientific modeling indicated. Being unable to feed itself, Africa is at risk of a mass starvation event if there is ever a decrease of foreign aid, especially agricultural aid to the continent, and there is and will continue to be a mass exodus from Africa into Europe, seeking better job opportunities and higher quality of life. As a follow up point, arguably the smartest man in the world, Chris Langan, pointed out recently that globohomo maximized its deadly mRNA COVID vaccinations among white populations as a weapon of war, whose population growth rate is already flat or declining, while leaving Africa untouched. Africa had the lowest COVID vaccination rate of any populated continent on earth:
This section will cover the massive decline of natural resources worldwide to support the consumption patterns of 8 billion people on earth, which is rapidly heading toward 10 billion or more.
The unsustainable consumption of worldwide natural resources
This could be something like a ten part series, doing a deep dive into the rates of use and known reserves for each category of consumption. However, a highlight of a bunch of categories should provide a similar visceral impact. Let’s go through them.
Energy consumption per country serves as a proxy for general consumption. The more developed nations have much higher consumption rates than less developed, even though the population growth (as discussed in part 1) has been highest in Africa and (previously) Asia.
Worldwide energy use is mostly based on oil, natural gas, coal, and traditional biofuels. Alternative energy including nuclear, wind, hydropower, solar and other renewables are tiny percentages of the world’s energy use despite all the media hype. This is because they are so inefficient, except for nuclear, which is efficient but scares the public; fourth generation nuclear reactors are much safer than prior generations, and thorium-based nuclear reactors would be even safer and more sustainable.
Meanwhile, nitrogen fertilizer which powers the Green Revolution and allow half the planet to eat is a direct fossil fuel product processed primarily from natural gas. Modern agriculture is largely reliant on petroleum energy; half the world’s population relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer booster agricultural output in order to survive. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in turn relies on natural gas inputs. According to Wikipedia, it is estimated that no more than 3.7 billion people could be fed without this single fossil fuel agricultural input. Moreover, the essential mineral nutrient phosphorus is often a limiting factor in crop cultivation, while phosphorus mines are rapidly being depleted worldwide.
The UN’s FAO warns that 90% of Earth’s topsoil, the health of which is necessary for growing crops, is at risk by 2050:† Worthington et al. (from UK Soil Association Fact Sheet). Journal of Complementary Medicine 7:2161–2163 (2001).
National Geographic: The rise of industrial fishing has led to the harvesting of wildlife at rates too high for species to replace themselves. Today, over a third of global stocks are overfished, posing a threat to biodiversity and throwing ecosystems dangerously out of balance.
Environmental advocates maintain that plastics are largely single-use: A 2020 Greenpeace USA survey found that plastics with resin codes #3–7 are virtually impossible to recycle, because of limited facility processing capabilities and insufficient market demand. Lawsuits are currently ongoing against Walmart and Keurig Green Mountain, arguing that those companies have violated Federal Trade Commission guidance by presenting plastic items as recyclable. The corporate giants have defended themselves against the allegations and emphasized their commitment to sustainability. (Walmart said in a statement that the company is “a strong advocate for the environment” and recycling, while Keurig has maintained in court that its labels advise consumers to “check locally” regarding recycling options.)
Plastics are difficult to recycle
Think a how much plastics you use when you go to the grocery store. Here’s a representation:
How much trash does an average American family throw out in a week? See here for article and more photos
How do you think you and your family’s compares? Pretty much any family in America has similar waste habits.
The rates of animal extinction are at record highs and accelerating:See here for a list of recently extinct mammals. This isn’t taking into account humanity’s driving of many species to near extinction, such as what happened to the American buffalo, which is an especially disgusting story.
The industrialized food system is a complete horror show. The animals that aren’t at risk of going extinct are those that humans raise for consumption such as cows, pigs and chickens. 29 billion animals killed for food in the US alone in 2023 so far: here is more information on the numbers. But their lives are horrifically bad in the modern industrialized meat production system which breeds for economic efficiency; short, brutish lives, and in the dark and in pain, yanked from their mother’s embrace either at birth or close to birth. (This is a natural dilemma: our bodies are tuned to meat eating because of hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution as hunter gatherers, but we have no connection to the food we eat anymore.)How can one claim this planet is anything but a horror show nightmare based on this? (As a side note, note that the proclaimed worst group on earth in history, the Nazis, wanted to ban this kind of industrialized meat slaughter).
Deforestation: Over the decade since 2010, the net loss in forests globally was 4.7 million hectares per year. However, deforestation rates were much significantly higher. The UN FAO estimate that 10 million hectares of forest were cut down each year.
Air quality: Air quality in major cities worldwide, where a disproportionate amount of the world’s population live, have terrible air quality:According to the WHO 92% of the world’s population live in places where air pollution levels exceed healthy safety limits.Let’s also not forget about controversial chemical trails (“chemtrails”), which spray unknown poisons into the air we breathe for dubious reasons (weather modification? To make people sicker? As an experiment?). The media won’t cover it, of course… You can see the below in pretty much any well populated city in America, all you have to do is look up, but of course looking up and believing your own eyes is a “dangerous conspiracy theory that only dumb hicks believe”.
Water quality: Urban water supplies are highly compromised, with chemicals in water supply such as estrogen, birth control chemicals, fluoride etc. Drinkable water supplies are also being strained due to massively growing populations:
This article by Karen Hunt is a nice primer on who controls the limited resource of drinkable water.
The elite response to the decline of worldwide natural resources
As mentioned at the start of this essay, the elite response to the decline of worldwide natural resources is to attempt to institute neoliberal feudalism, where the consumption rates of almost everyone worldwide, except for the elites, shall be dramatically curtailed. They have to do this, under whatever false branding/ marketing it takes, whether it is “global warming” (as per William M. Briggs) or “climate change” or something else, because the alternative is catastrophe as resources run out with 10+ billion people demanding to be fed and provided a decent quality of life. Bringing online massive numbers of safer fourth generation nuclear reactors worldwide to provide energy could (and should) help with this problem, but would not solve it. Perhaps a much greater focus on thorium nuclear reactors could…
Regardless, these elites don’t want clean, safe, ubiquitous nuclear energy, because that doesn’t create a grift that allows them to separate themselves from the unwashed masses. They are and will continue to institute neoliberal feudalism as their preferred solution via massive inflation, the institution of freedom-killing CBDCs, ubiquitous woke AI, higher taxes and dramatically increased immigration, along with retarded, wildly inefficient “green” solutions such as solar and wind energies. Then they will slowly kill off the excess population, who Klaus Schwab advisor Yuval Harari (a Jewish homosexual atheist) calls “useless eaters”, with poisoned food and water, mRNA death jabs, war and other measures.
These extreme measures would not have been needed if we had an elite worth their salt. A proper elite, an elite based in noblesse oblige instead of noblesse malice, an elite not blinded by an extreme form of secular-but-religious based egalitarianism, would have come up with a plan on the front end when world populations were 20-25% of what they are now instead of the back end with a world population spiraling toward an unsustainable 10+ billion.
Combining a low, homogenous population (likely enforced with maximum number of children by the government, sorry libertarians), an emphasis on rural and farming communities instead of cities, with a local and national focus instead of global, a sustainable society with a high degree of recycling, environmentally conscious, not economic growth dominated, with precautionary principles for letting new chemicals into the environment and food supply, and a focus on clean, sustainable nuclear energy.
Malthus thought that the best option for humanity would be to consciously stay (well) below the Malthusian limiting factor(s) to growth instead of reaching those limits which always greatly expand human misery:
In later editions of his essay, Malthus clarified his view that if society relied on human misery to limit population growth, then sources of misery (e.g., hunger, disease, and war) would inevitably afflict society, as would volatile economic cycles. On the other hand, “preventive checks” to population that limited birthrates, such as later marriages, could ensure a higher standard of living for all, while also increasing economic stability. Regarding possibilities for freeing man from these limits, Malthus argued against a variety of imaginable solutions, such as the notion that agricultural improvements could expand without limit.
Herrnstein and Murray agree with Malthus in the policy recommendations they offered in The Bell Curve:
Discussing a possible future political outcome of an intellectually stratified society, the authors stated that they “fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent—not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but ‘conservatism’ along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below.”Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a “custodial state” in “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population.” They also predict increasing totalitarianism: “It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states.”
The authors recommended the elimination of welfare policies which they claim encourage poor women to have babies.
Our world elites have made a deal with the Devil. In return for unlimited control they have promised to do whatever it takes, no matter the moral, spiritual, physical or ethical lapses involved. Control above all, “imperium super omnia” is the motto that motivates them.
They are reckless, blind, arrogant and bloodthirsty – a very nasty combination. First they had to crush any attempts of rebellion and inegalitarianism from the masses, which led to the massive unchecked population explosion and the situation we are in today. And that’s why they are scrambling to address it on the back-end, a horrific upcoming process which will result in unimaginable misery for most of the world, instead of being able to do so responsibly and ethically on the front-end.
But here’s the thing about the Devil: he doesn’t keep his word. If our globohomo bloodthirsty elites “succeed” in destroying the world and bringing the masses to ruin, the Devil will ultimately betray his followers and send them along the same path that they previously sent everyone else.
Ultimately, the world is currently barreling toward the Wall-E scenario, where we consume everything and leave behind a dead husk of a planet in a mass worldwide die-off; the Sixth (and last?) Mass Extinction Event (unless we become multi-planetary so we can find and devour resources of other planets). At the very least upcoming increased competition for scarcer resources will lead to dramatically lower quality of living for almost everyone. A horrible and grim future.
Humanity, a swarm of locusts blindly devouring everything in sight, must become multi-planetary based on horrific current trends or risk extinction. Pictured is a SpaceX reusable Falcon 9 second stage
Wall-E’s vision of planet earth as a fully consumed desolate wasteland is the likely future for humanity unless collapse or becoming multi-planetary happens first.
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The Green Revolution is the least popularly understood one. Borlaug dramatically expanded crop yields via genetic crossbreeding and, combined with the widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers (800% increase between 1961 and 2019), parabolically increased the world’s population. Few people know Borlaug’s name, but you should; he is responsible for billions of additional humans on earth.
As Cochran and Harpending wrote in The 10,000 Year Explosion, “natural selection can proceed quite rapidly, and the past consists of long periods of near-stasis (in populations that were well matched to their environments) interspersed with occasional periods of very rapid change.”
Being in the midst of these changes, it is difficult to detach oneself and try to assess the state of the world from a zoomed-out perspective, to see how unique and unusual the situation we find ourselves to be. The previous post on The 10,000 Year Explosion reviewed the genetic changes that are occurring to humans as they continue to adapt to a sedentary, heavy carbohydrate agricultural lifestyle after millions of years as active hunter gatherers eating high protein diets.
This post covers these species-level changes from another angle: the environmental effects caused by this massive population explosion, and whether and to what extent humanity’s population growth and consumption patterns are long-term sustainable. To the extent they are not, what does that mean for the future?
The meaning of “environmentalism”
To set the proper framing let’s first discuss what the term “environmentalism” means. There are two uses of the term: the traditional meaning and the modern meaning.
The traditional meaning meant creating a sustainable world for future generations with a focus on clean air, clean water, conservation of natural resources, recycling, long-term protection of animals, biodiversity, etc.
The term was politicized by previous generations into a pro vs. con dialectic: profit-obsessed corporations who willfully disregarded the tragedy of the commons (exemplified by “Club for Growth”-tier Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Koch Brothers and Mitch McConnell1) versus bleeding-heart hippy conservationists.
The traditional meaning isn’t much in use anymore by the elites, but much of the public is confused by the hidden behind-the-scenes rebranding of the term.
Once the surface layers of feel-good buzzwords and spin are peeled back, the modern meaning is a combination of three ideas. These ideas are as follows:
Limiting CO2 emissions in wealthy countries in the name of “climate change” and “global warming”, in order to redistribute western wealth to browner/blacker communities and third world, low income countries to equalize the quality of life between the two. See here, here, here, here, here and here for examples. Also, this post by A Midwestern Doctor is a great primer on this switch-e-roo. Alex Honnold, an inspiration for his fearless mountain climbing, exemplifies the liberal consensus on this shift in a 2020 Instagram post;
The consumption patterns of the globohomo elite class remain undisturbed.
In other words, “environmentalism” today means the introduction of neoliberal feudalism. It is all about elite control over the masses; to the extent the term today relates to its traditional understanding, those are all now secondary or tertiary considerations. Globohomo and environmental organizations pay lip service to the traditional definition, but their priorities are much more sinister in actual application.
The skin-suiting of environmentalism is a sad thing. Who doesn’t want to create a better world for future generations? But the modern meaning is inherently politicized given the vast majority of people will have much lower qualities of life under neoliberal feudalism.
With that said, let’s review the greatest problem facing traditional environmental sustainability: unchecked, radical population growth.
An overview of humanity’s parabolic population growth
Let’s start by looking at a chart of the world’s population on a species-historical scale:
Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, sparked by plentiful and cheap energy in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, has resulted in exponential population growth. Production of the world’s major crops has increased by almost 5x in a 60 year period between 1965-2015:
According to The Atlantic, “In the 1870s—one of the most famous decades in the history of scientific and technological development—142 people per 100,000 died of famine globally. Today’s rate of famine deaths is about 99 percent lower than that of the late 1800s, despite the world’s population being roughly five times larger.”
Under Malthusianism population growth is potentially exponential, but the food supply or other resources is linear, therefore population growth eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event is called a Malthusian catastrophe:
A Malthusian catastrophe occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing famine or war, resulting in poverty and depopulation. Such a catastrophe inevitably has the effect of forcing the population to “correct” back to a lower, more easily sustainable level (quite rapidly, due to the potential severity and unpredictable results of the mitigating factors involved, as compared to the relatively slow time scales and well-understood processes governing unchecked growth or growth affected by preventive checks).
The planet has recently experienced the exponential population growth that Thomas Malthus warned about.
According to The 10,000 Year Explosion, “Malthus himself pointed out that factors other than food shortages can also limit population. Any negative factor that intensifies as population density increases can be the limiting factor – starvation and malnutrition are not the only possibilities. The key is which negative factor shows up at the lowest population density. We believe that the nature of the key limiting factor – which is not necessarily the same in all human populations – can have important effects on human evolution…”
We will review the continued growth trends of the world population below, especially centered in Africa, and then analyze what is very likely going to be the key limiting factor for population growth worldwide in the not-so-distant future: the extreme decline in the world’s natural resources, especially the plentiful natural gas necessary to increase yields via synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, the decline in nutrients in topsoil and the decline of biodiversity, all of which are necessary to keep agricultural yields high. This is Neo-Malthusianism in action.
Will hitting up against a potential key limiting factor of declining natural resources result in war, pestilence, famine as Malthus predicts? Would such shocks occur over a longer or shorter timeframe, and how bad could they potentially be? Consider how interconnected the world is, relying on a just-in-time distribution model with long and complicated worldwide supply chains and almost no on-hand reserves in order to boost “efficiency”, which could amplify the effects of systemic shocks.2 Is the world ready to grapple with long-term trends of declining quality of life?
Elon Musk is concerned in the other direction; he wants unlimited population growth. His reasoning is that the world economy is rooted in a model of “forever growth” and social safety nets are based on blatant ponzi schemes that need ever-increasing populations to sustain them. Faltering population growth could result in an economic death spiral. Musk tweeted:
Regardless, there will always be a Malthusian limit to population growth, and we will reach it, whatever it is.
Rates of global population growth and the problem of Africa exceeding projections
The following are projections for global population growth by Scientific American through 2100, which projects worldwide population topping out a little above 10 billion:
Per Scientific American, world population will top out a little over 10 billion in 2100
Of global population growth, most of it is currently coming from Africa:
African countries with the highest current total fertility rates are as follows:
See the fertility rates per country organized from most to least here. Whites in western countries all have well sub-replacement TFR (replacement is at 2.1).
Per the below chart, Asian population growth was quite rapid since the 1950s but is close to topping out, which will occur around 2050:
Meanwhile, Africa’s population is expected to triple by 2100. The World Economic Forum expects huge numbers of Africans to then emigrate to richer countries in search of better opportunities:
The expected population growth presents tough but obvious policy-making questions for governments on the continent especially given low human capital development. For its part, the United Nations already predicts that larger populations will make it “harder” for African governments to reduce poverty and hunger or boost local access to standard health and education.
Take Nigeria, which will see nearly 300% rise in its population. It ranked 152 (out of 157 countries) on the World Bank’s first ever Human Capital Index and overtook India as the poverty capital of the world in 2018. The failures of successive governments has also resulted in sustained emigration of Nigeria’s middle-class, typically among its best educated citizens, to Europe and North America, often without the intention of returning.
Yet, it’s a trend that will likely become even more pervasive across the continent as population growth results in more pressure on stretched amenities and infrastructure. More Africans, in search of better economic fortunes, standard of living and education, are expected to pursue opportunities for lives and jobs abroad.
As it turns out, these opportunities are increasingly becoming available as countries with aging and shrinking populations, like Japan, are already looking to plug skill and labour force gaps to sustain their economies by reversing strong anti-immigration policy stances.
Bill Gates personally shares significant responsibility for rapidly expanding African population growth via water, agriculture, vaccine and other initiatives, i.e. see here, here, here. On the surface these are kind and noble gestures, meant to elevate a continent out of poverty and disease — but those gestures are only “kind” so long as that population growth will both slow down/stop like other developing regions, and so long as it is sustainable, i.e. not reliant on large-scale foreign aid forever.
If population growth neither slows down/stops nor becomes sustainable, his surface act of kindness will only result in extraordinary misery down the road — “killing with kindness” — literally.
Is Africa’s growth slowing down? Gates is worried about it: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge,” Gates told reporters in a telephone briefing. “The biggest things are the modern tools of contraception,” Gates said. “If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children.”
But Africans don’t want to use contraceptives. According to a 2021 study, in sub-Saharan Africa, about 80% of young women either use a traditional method or do not use any form of contraception at all.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are adding people more rapidly than expected, said John Wilmoth, director of the United Nations’ Population Division and a co-author of the paper. The U.N. has been using the new probability model in its most recent projections.
“Fertility levels turn out to be higher today than was expected 10 years ago,” he said. “There’s been a worldwide reduction in fertility, even in sub-Saharan Africa over the last two decades. It’s falling, but slower than expected and more slowly than in other countries in Asia and Latin America.”
Earlier projections “took what happened in other countries, where birth rates came down and applied that across the board,” said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. “The big issue is with Africa. It had not gone down very fast.”
So basically it looks like UN, Gates and other elite policies are structured around data projections that are based on the same types of arrogant, faulty assumptions by the “smartest” and “brightest” (utterly politicized) “scientists” that led Al Gore to conclude that the ice caps would be melted by 2013.
What are you going to do, Bill, when African population growth doesn’t slow down enough according to your pie-in-the-sky “models”? What effect will your arrogant megalomania have on the world then? Will you be around to be responsible for the effects of your actions? Is this whole thing just some kind of reckless experiment for you?
There’s no better example of that than looking at the African continent. Given the cost of labor and the availability of land, Africa should be a net food exporter. But because of low productivity, it’s a net food importer. The urgency of the innovation pipeline comes both from the need to get African productivity up, but also the fact that the closer you are to the equator, the more damaging climate change is for agriculture. And Africa is the last place in the world where you have significant population growth. So it’s a huge challenge.
Some have recently claimed that Gates’s agricultural initiatives in Africa have failed. See here for critiques of Gates Foundation agricultural interventions in Africa.
Failure of Africa’s ability to sustain itself should be viewed in the context of measured African IQs being the lowest in the world:
Gates acknowledges sub-Sahara Africa’s low average IQs, which he states is entirely due to disease and poverty: “The average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is about 82,” Gates said, “and that’s nothing to do with genetics or race or anything like that — that’s disease and that’s what disease does to you, and that’s why these things are such an extreme poverty trap.”
But IQ is highly heritable, the science of which is overwhelming:
Also see the famous book The Bell Curve, which discusses consistent and sustained IQ differences between population groups and how measurable IQ is the best predictor we have for an individual’s success in the modern world. And see IQ and the Wealth of Nations and its follow up IQ and Global Inequality (you can see how politicized globohomo has made scientific findings based on how transparently biased the Wiki links are).
Gates and the rest of the globohomo elite are basing their policies on blindly religious egalitarianism, tabula rasa “blank slate-ism”, which traces its roots back to Pauline Christianty (regardless of whether its proponents claim to be secular or atheist). Under this perspective all human group IQ differences, to the extent they exist, are due entirely due to poverty, racism and environmental reasons and not genetics, and they have based all of their modeling and policies around this religious belief.
Which brings us to another point: the complete devastation and destruction that African population growth (and the rapid removal of colonialism) has had on the native plants and animals of Africa.
The below video is a two hour famous documentary called Africa Addio. Read the Wiki entry. It’s a really special film; the filmmakers raced around Africa in a gonzo style as colonialism was ending and documented the complete chaos and destruction that the European withdrawal left in its wake, including huge massacres and destruction of wildlife. The filmmakers were almost murdered during filming; you would never see anything like this made today. It shows a side of Africa and the end of colonialism that you will have never seen or heard elsewhere. If you have the time, I give it my highest recommendation (but brace yourself for some extreme horrors):
Let’s sum this section up. The worldwide population is set to expand from 8 billion today (from 2.5 billion in the 1950s) to over 10 billion by 2100 if not higher. Africa’s population, which has the lowest continental IQ in the world, cannot sustain itself and relies on ever-increasing agricultural imports to survive; if those imports ever stop Africa will experience an immediate mass starvation event. The rapid population expansion is resulting in the complete destruction of wildlife in Africa, and putting enormous strains on infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources in unsustainable ways. Spillover population is likely to emigrate to other countries for better opportunities. Globohomo megalomaniacal lackeys like Bill Gates rely on unscientific, unsound model projections for their actions, which are about as accurate as Al Gore’s proclamation that the ice caps would melt by 2013. The world elites are high on their own supply and lack the intelligence, cognitive honesty or accurate worldview to act as proper stewards for the future generations of the world, given the central bank owners that rule everything are driven by noblesse malice and other elites are blinded by their belief in the egalitarian cult.
Only a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism has any hope of slowing this process down, if it’s even possible at this point (doubtful).
But Africa isn’t the only problem — the west and China are also using tremendous amounts of natural resources. The UN claimed in 2019 that humanity is gobbling up natural resources at an unsustainable pace. How unsustainable is this, what are our globohomo overlords doing about it, and how effective will their chosen policies be?
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1 Kaczynski was biting in his criticism of these types in Industrial Society and Its Future. Paragraph 50: “The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
And Note 13 to Paragraph 66: “Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, 31 exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.”
2 The fragility of the just-in-time distribution system may be covered in a future post, but basically world trade is so complicated and interconnected that disruptions may have long-lasting, far-reaching and potentially extremely deadly consequences. For example, a repeat of the Carrington Event or an EMP attack could result in a total system collapse and mass starvation. Also per this comment, the U.S. has no strategic transformer reserves. A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report suggests that if just 9 of 55,000 substations in key locations were destroyed and one transformer manufacturer was disabled, the entire U.S. grid “would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.” And in 2013, an anonymous attack on a Silicon Valley substation knocked out the facility for 27 days — a PG&E official called it a “dress rehearsal.”
Liberals have an interesting personality quirk: they insist on thinking of themselves as the forever-underdogs, no matter their more-or-less unbroken series of victories since the Protestant Reformation or, really, since Paul’s original transvaluation of values 2,000 years ago.
Their personality quirk seems to be rooted in two things: (1) their dutiful adherence to society’s never-ending push for egalitarianism, where tearing down the unequally successful “evil” is seen as “good”, and (2) the bizarre nature of the liberal mind, which lacks individualized self-esteem and gets it via self-identification with the group-think of liberalism.
Liberals as a mindless fish in a school of fish; each reacting off the subtle twitches of their neighbors to form synchronized action
The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential….
Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful….
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
Kaczynski’s explanations of leftist’s obsession with tearing down anything seen as “strong”, “successful” or “superior” synchs up easily with Paul’s original transvaluation of values, which was aimed at subverting and destroying Roman warrior values which valued greatness, strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV), “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:26-28), and “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him” (1st Corinthians 1:27).
Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell and with his own twist, Brett Andersen (who has a fantastic Substack) argues that the underlying belief structure of liberals, which he sarcastically calls the “vision of the anointed”, is roughly as follows:
All humans are basically equal (if given equal circumstances)
All humans are basically good (if given good circumstances)
All social ills are due to unequal/bad circumstances (given the right circumstances, all people will flourish)
It is our job to make circumstances better and more equal
Then we will bring about the kingdom of God on earth
These are tabula rasareligious beliefs that they hold against all empirical, scientific evidence to the contrary, even as they self-identify as science-believe rationalists.
Andersen continues, “If only we can enact the right policies, they seem to think, then we will put an end to crime, poverty, and inequality once and for all. As Sowell repeatedly demonstrates, the anointed think that there are solutions to perennial problems. In reality, there are only trade-offs.”
Compare this to his understanding of the vision of the inegalitarian, which Andersen labels as the “tragic” view:
Humans are not equal (and any attempt to make them so will be an authoritarian nightmare)
Humans are not basically good (pretending otherwise is naive and will lead to bad policy)
Social ills may or may not be due to bad policy (some social ills are perennial and the misguided attempt to eradicate them will be worse than the illness)
There are no solutions to social problems, only trade-offs (messing with complex systems always has unintended consequences)
Utopia is not for this world
Honestly, liberals are being reasonable here. They have fully, if blindly, internalized western society’s core egalitarian values, while you (if you’re reading this) likely have cognitive dissonance toward it – but a cognitive dissonance that for most dissidents and right-leaning individuals is unformed, inarticulated, it lurks in the mind as an uneasiness and a blind instinctive reaction against the latest egalitarian ratchet.1Until one embraces and accepts that an unacknowledged, unembraced belief in the inequality of all life lies at the heart of one’s unease, a person’s actions, thoughts and words will not properly synch.
The original transvaluation of values from warrior to priestly values
It is never enough
One of the core descriptors of the left, though, is that they are never content with their victories against inegalitarianism: they must always push for more of the Great Leveling. Kaczynski reviews this aspect of their thought process which results in never-ending greater, faster egalitarianism:
The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
Scott Alexander is a mincing leftist coward who will survey a thousand points of data that clearly indicate a heretical conclusion, and then shrug his shoulders and announce that no one can ever know what the data means, but he still has a way with words, and he called this the fifty Stalins argument,
One wishes to criticize Stalin, but the penalty for doing so is life imprisonment in a camp. The only allowable way then to express dissent is to say:
“Stalin, he is good, but he is not enough. What we need is fifty Stalins!” This is what the progressive does when she accuses woke corporate leaders of being cynical.
She doesn’t realize she is doing this. It’s all perfectly instinctive, to complain in a way that is safe and meaningless, in a way that, if it were taken seriously, would empower the powerful even more.
And the act of saying it causes her to believe what she is saying. This is how public declarations work, psychologically. When you make a statement publicly, it causes you to adjust your own belief of yourself, to think that the thing you have said is your real belief.
No one is immune to this kind of social pressure from within.
The response by the right feeds into leftist delusions
The right feed into leftist delusions in two ways:
The right allows the left to falsely argue that their beliefs are rooted in logic, rationality and science, instead of blind religious beliefs dating back 2,000 years. This is likely because many Americans on the right are religious Christians, and it would be nonsensical from their frame to attack their secular enemies by claiming they retain the ethics and metaphysics of their own religion. This gives the left the moral upper hand in arguments, because appeals to science and rationality beat appeals to God or religion in the modern era.
The right allows the left to believe that the left are the underdogs, and that there is an ongoing close and tight race between whether the left or right will win the latest cultural issue. This is fundamentally false: it allows the right to think their strategies are useful and their perspective is truthful, when it is really rooted in self-deception and confusion.2 This in turnallows the left to play their psychological mind-games where they self-identify as weak rebels against powerful authority. Robert Lewis Dabney complained about this disingenuous dynamic in 1897:
What is the truthful position, and the effective one, if you have the misfortune of dealing with a leftist? Well, the proper position is not to engage them at all, as they are either NPC or sociopaths and they won’t change their minds no matter what you say. But if you have to engage them, the truthful position is the correct one: leftists have all the power and have had all the power for at minimum hundreds of years, they are driven by a blind, radical faith in egalitarianism that they are most likely not consciously aware of, and their beliefs are objectively and scientifically false and only bring complete destruction and ruin in their wake. They are close-minded fanatics whose values derive directly from Pauline Christianity whether or not they self-identify as religious, secular or atheist, or whether they wear the cloak of “Trust the Science” politicized, corrupted Scientism.3
It’s better not to argue with Rob Reiner at all
This type of response ties power to responsibility. By leftists pretending that they are constantly rebelling against the big bad white western society, they can claim not to be responsible for their horrendous destructive actions, not just to others but to themselves mentally. If the response is that they have all the power, their power is rooted in blind faith, conservatives are powerless and merely meekly protest as their designated punching bag, and they are ruining everything, then the mental games they play to avoid responsibility cannot be applied.
Applying this argument to Star Wars
With all of this in mind, let’s use a popular movie example to demonstrate these principles. I hate to do it because it is such a nerdy, dorky, lame example, but let’s do it anyway because of the outsized effect it has had on society. Can one see why and how the original Star Wars trilogy has become so powerful over the past 50 years? And no, it’s not just about the application of Jung’s archetypes or Campbell’s hero journey, you dork.
The trilogy reinforces everything discussed above: the scrappy rebellion, marshaling its forces to defeat the big bad hierarchical establishment “order” against all odds and defeat and destroy it, thereby saving the universe and ushering in a new egalitarian age for all time!
But note how the trilogy ends: we never see *how* the victorious rebellion uses its power. We are never told what they do with it, which factions win out in this egalitarian utopia and who loses, because the left is fundamentally uncomfortable being in a position of strength and dominance and the use of power. Don’t get me wrong, it loves to revel in the use of power and destroy its enemies, but it is not comfortable with the acknowledgment, either to themselves or to others, that they have such power. If they were powerful they would, under Pauline Christian ethics, be “evil”, and who wants to think of themselves as evil?
The trilogy ends right when the rebels win. Voila! Raise the curtains, bask in the applause!
The prequel trilogy was weak and easily ignored. It had nothing to say about anything, riding on the coattails of the original trilogy and I guess it was kind of a character study of Anakin. But then look what Disney did with the new trilogy:
The Empire’s back, baby! Time to rebel again, whooooo!
Instead of addressing thorny issues regarding how the liberal, egalitarian rebels held and used their hard-won power, which would inevitably require trade-off, what do the producers do? They turn the protagonists back into rebels against a new hierarchical establishment order! How sad, weak, cowardly and pathetic is this? But also totally understandable given the nature of leftist thinking:they really, really do not want to think that they have power, because then they are responsible for their actions and they might have to see themselves as “evil”.
Karate chop those evil bad men, superwoman Daisy Ridley! Fight the power, rebel leader! Hee-ya! Kee-chaw!
But given how much less competent our rulers are versus a generation or two ago, and given how Lucasfilm put the incompetent woke idiot Kathleen Kennedy in control, the entire new trilogy has been butchered and the franchise IP ruined. Funny how that works…
Kaczynski correctly identified the idea that leftists do not want to believe that they have power, that they are always “rebelling” against the establishment for greater egalitarianism, but he misses the core point that they are acting fully in accordance with society’s core values which trace their origins to Paul of Tarsus.
The takeaway is that leftist actions are based in blind belief, not reason or science or rationality, and that they have all of society’s power and have had it for centuries or longer. They should be responsible for their actions and not hide behind false belief that they are the eternal underdog or that there is some constant ongoing tooth-and-nail super close battle between left and right (i.e. The West Wing, or its cynical version where everyone is corrupt, House of Cards, or the mix between the two, Lincoln).
The Star Wars saga exemplifies these principles in clear ways, but it’s repeated in much of mass media. For example, the very successful Handmaid’s Tale follows the same liberal logic: we are weak but together we are strong, fight the hierarchical power in the name of egalitarianism!
“The bad hierarchical high T religious guys really want to breed with us, we shouldn’t let them, should we girls?? But they’re soooo hot, they’re sooooo bad though, omigosh I’m sooooo conflicted!”
On the other hand, while the final season of Game of Thrones was correctly criticized for being rushed and truncated, George R. R. Martin’s decision to turn Girl Power Superhero Daenerys into a villain ruined the series for liberals because it was an attack on their religious beliefs in egalitarianism:
To be fair, it wouldn’t be very cinematic to film the true state of affairs: an all-powerful shitliberalism, bullying its retarded brother “conservatism” via a combination of brutal power politics, devious mindfucks and juiced by 2,000-year-old underlying egalitarian beliefs along with Rothschild ownership of the media and money supply, styling on its retarded brother forever-and-ever while pretending it is merely rebelling against the “all-powerful eternal menace.” I don’t think that message would be so appealing to the sensibilities of a population steeped in such egalitarian values. It might even leave a bitter taste in their mouths that could lead to cognitive dissonance against the established order. That would be bad for the establishment, so it is forbidden.
Lastly, switching gears from media to history, the story we have been told about World War 2 also fits into this paradigm. The official narrative is that the big, bad, inegalitarian, hierarchical Nazis tried to take over the world, and the scrappy Allies banded together and fended off their brutal attack on the world. The official narrative isn’t wrong (all effective narratives have aspects of truth to them, and the Nazis were brutal toward the Eastern European populations that it conquered) so much as it is incomplete in a very important way: industrial output wins wars, and the Allies dramatically outperformed the Axis in every single industrial category, from arms productions to oil production to military personnel to total population to tank and aircraft production, from a 3:1-10:1 ratio across all categories, and they had this critical information before going to war.4 That isn’t so good for the official narrative…
Ultimately, the real story is that the Axis were an ultra-violent rebellion against the emerging managerial, central bank owner controlled globalist egalitarian state, where Hitler attempted a failed transvaluation of society’s core values back to Roman warrior values. This was touched on previously here, but we will delve into this in more detail in an upcoming post…
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1 It’s too bad that Kaczynski seems mostly unaware of the ratchet effect and of the origins of egalitarianism; his manifesto does not mention Nietzsche and only mentions Christianity a single time where he downplays its origins: “Identification with victims by people not themselves victims can be seen to some extent in 19th century leftism and early Christianity, but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in any other movements, as they are in modern leftism.”
2 People naturally want to think they are winning and superior; thinking of your “team” as a forever-loser is disheartening and “demoralizing” regardless of its accuracy.
3 Scientism is science by committee, “scientific consensus”, or data modeling. It is false and politicized garbage. Real science equals experiments, controlling for variables as best one can, that are repeatable by independent third parties. No science that relies on data modeling (climate change/global warming or COVID as examples) is real science. The ongoing replication crisis shows that very little of official science is real science.
4 The President of the Reichbank, Hjalmar Schacht, had been deviously providing confidential information regarding all Germany’s economic developments to Montagu Norman, a fellow mason and Governor of the Bank of England.
The book offers an interesting thesis: technological advancement has supercharged Darwinian natural selection1 pressures in humanity, and the microevolutionary genetic changes resulting from the biggest change in human history – the neolithic agricultural revolution – are both ongoing and occurring extremely rapidly by historic norms. These changes are occurring 100x faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of human existence; if humans had always been evolving this rapidly, the genetic differences between us and chimpanzees would be far larger than it is.
A detailed look at the fossil record, combined with evidence from contemporary examples of natural selection, “makes it clear that natural selection can proceed quite rapidly, and that the past consists of long periods of near-stasis (in populations that were well matched to their environments) interspersed with occasional periods of very rapid change.”
These ongoing genetic changes are making humans more efficient in an environment of sedentary agriculture consumption, which is far different from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle we lived for millions of years. These changes can be studied based on DNA sequencing; many of the studies used data from the International HapMap project.
Genetic changes are naturally selected for based on their adaptive fitness (i.e. procreative and survival adaptive fitness) taking into account factors such as location, weather, culture, diseases and technology in an ongoing dance. Genetic changes influence human culture, economic and social developments, which then affects additional genetic changes.
Peasant farmers in a grain field
The authors also offer a unique example of recent rapid natural selection pressures: Ashkenazi Jews during the Middle Ages. According to their theory, the exclusive role that Ashkenazim played as money-lenders to Christian Europe for over a thousand years provided unique and intense selection pressures on their community. These pressures ultimately led to higher average verbal IQs compared to the surrounding populations (who were forbidden by the Church from being money-lenders), along with unusual increases in certain diseases not typically found in other groups. In turn (my addition) these natural selection pressures influence the Rothschilds and their allies’ central bank ownership domination we are experiencing today.
This post will delve into some of Cochran and Harpending’s arguments, framing them in the context of social, economic and political developments in the modern world, as well as briefly touch on the eugenics movement of the early 20th century.
Animal and plant artificial selection
Let’s start with a discussion of artificial selection, which involves humans deliberately breeding other species to emphasize or de-emphasize certain traits. The clearest examples of artificial selection are from animal domestication, where modern animals look and act very different from their wild ancestors yet branched off from their forebears only recently. For example, dogs were domesticated from wolves only between 9,000-34,000 years ago and now come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
A Chihuahua next to a Great Dane, both recently evolved from wolves
It is not just physical appearance that has changed. Dog behavior has changed as well, where they are good at reading human voices and gestures while wolves can’t understand us at all. Dog breeds are highly variant, differing greatly in abilities such as learning speed and capacity. For example, the number of repetitions required to learn a new command can vary by factors of ten or more from one breed to another. The typical border collie can learn a new command after 5 repetitions and respond correctly 95% of the time, whereas a basset hound takes 80-100 repetitions to achieve a 25% accuracy rate.
Basset hound
As another example, dog bite accident statistics are stark: biting is disproportionately distributed among breeds. A survey of attacks from 1982-2006 found 1 record of bodily harm attributable to border collies but 1,100 records attributable to pit bulls (in my opinion, “shitpits” should not be legal to own).
Even though 9,000-34,000 years is a remarkably fast evolution by historical standards to evolve dogs from wolves, this timespan can be shortened to within a human lifespan if applied in a rigorous, sustained and targeted manner. Starting in the 1950s Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev developed a domesticated fox in only forty years. In each generation he selected for tameness and only tameness, although selecting for tameness affected other traits such as coat color, skulls shape, and ear floppiness, in what is known as domestication syndrome. Presumably if you selected for another trait or traits – aggression, dominance, intelligence, creativity, sensitivity or whatever – those would also affect the animal’s physiognomy.
Domesticated silver fox
The details of the experiment are fascinating, per Wikipedia:
From the beginning, Belyayev chose foxes solely for tameness, allowing only a tiny percentage of male offspring, and a slightly larger percentage of females, to breed. The foxes were not trained, in order to ensure that their tameness was a result of genetic selection and not of environmental influences. For the same reason, they spent most of their lives in cages and were permitted only brief encounters with human beings.
Belyayev set down strict guidelines for the breeding program. Goldman said, “Starting at one month of age, and continuing every month throughout infancy, the foxes were tested for their reactions to an experimenter. The experimenter would attempt to pet and handle the fox while offering it food. In addition, the experimenters noted whether the foxes preferred to spend time with other foxes, or with humans.” After the fox had reached sexual maturity at an age of seven to eight months, “they had their final test and assigned an overall tameness score.”….
The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I. After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the “domesticated elite”, which “are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the 20th generation 35% were ‘elite’, and by the 30th generation 70% to 80% of the selected generation was ‘elite.’
Once the foxes in each generation had been classified according to the latest research, only the least fearful and least aggressive foxes were selected for breeding. Goldman said, “In each successive generation, less than 20 percent of individuals were allowed to breed”. The sole criterion for permitting them to breed was their tolerance of human contact….
Trut wrote in 1999 “that after 40 years of the experiment, and the breeding of 45,000 foxes, a group of animals had emerged that were as tame and as eager to please as a dog.” Fitch described the tame foxes as “incredibly endearing”. The New York Times wrote that they “were clean and quiet and made excellent house pets, though — being highly active — they preferred a house with a yard to an apartment. They did not like leashes, though they tolerated them.”
You can watch a video of the domesticated foxes below:
Changes in domesticated plants such as corn or maize have also changed remarkably in only 7,000 years. Humans used artificial selection to grow more and better crops, with more resistance to pests or droughts and with other beneficial attributes. Such dramatic changes are common in many varieties of domesticated plants and animals. Evolutionary genetics predicts that substantial change in almost any trait is possible in a few tens of generations.
Humans evolve quickly as well
Cochran and Harpending liken the rapidity of animal changes over successive generations to that of humans:
Biological processes that were once tightly regulated can be turned on all the time, as with lactose tolerance; turned off entirely, as with the caspase 12 gene, which increases the risk of sepsis when intact and which is inactivated in most populations; or turned off selectively, as with the Duffy mutation, a malaria defense that keeps a certain receptor molecule from being expressed on red cells while continuing to be expressed everywhere else. Some other changes are more like turning up the volume (sometimes all the way to eleven), as in some groups that have extra copies of the gene producing amylase, an enzyme present in saliva that aids in digesting starch….
We expect that differences between human ethnic groups are qualitatively similar to those between dog breeds – that the differences are evolutionary shallow, mostly involving loss of function, exaggerations of already-existing adaptations, neoteny, and so on [i.e. microevolution]. Although such changes cannot generate truly complex adaptations, changes in all those hundreds or thousands of genetic switches and knobs can still cause the sorts of evolutionary changes we see in dogs and other domesticated species; and these differences – such as those between Great Danes and Chihuahuas, or between teosinte and modern maize – are not so small. In other words, very significant evolutionary changes in response to agriculture were still possible….
Because the authors believe that all humans have a common ancestry within 100,000 years, and all humans outside of Africa have even more recent common ancestry (~50,000 years), “observable differences between populations must have evolved rapidly, which can only have happened if the alleles (gene variants) underlying those differences had strong selective advantages.
2016 research shows how after human ancestors split with the ancestors of Neanderthals, the two groups interbred at least twice—100,000 years ago, soon after modern humans first left Africa, and again between 47,000-65,000 years ago.
The alleles that are regional, those underlying the differences between populations, must also have had important effects on fitness. That’s what population genetics implies, and genomic information now confirms it.” Random mutations that end up conferring reproductive and reproductive survival advantages to their unique environments end up spreading among that population group, and they can do so relatively quickly depending on how large the advantage is:
…if a favorable mutation occurs on a chromosome, people with that mutation will have more children survive than average, so over time, more and more people will bear that mutation. If the advantage is large enough, the mutation can rapidly become common, before recombination completely reshuffles its original haplotype, rapidly enough that people bearing that mutation will also carry the original local haplotype that surrounded it when it first came into existence.
The mutation can affect many different things – skin color, metabolism, defense against infectious disease, central nervous system features, and any number of other traits and functions – and every major innovation in human history led to new selective pressures, which in turn leads to more evolutionary change.2 And all of these were dramatically impacted by the neolithic agricultural revolution.
Agricultural humans vs hunter gatherer humans
Modern humans had been hunter gatherers for almost all of their 300,000-500,000 year history, which suddenly changed when the last ice age receded about 11,700 years ago. The authors hypothesized that mating between humans and neanderthals may have created physiological and mental changes in humans – perhaps the introduction of new sophisticated language abilities – that led to this and many other innovations.3
Farming produces between 10-100x more calories per acre than foraging, and as a result from 10,000 BC to AD 1 the world population increased by roughly 100x:
World population did not rise for a few millennia after the Neolithic revolution
However, “the quality of the food was much worse than among hunter-gatherers, and the standard of living did not increase because population growth easily caught up with improvements in food production [Malthusianism]. Additionally higher population density, permanent settlements, and close association with domestic animals greatly increased the prevalence of infectious disease.” The carbohydrate portion of the human diet tripled, while the amount of protein tanked. Therefore:
There is every reason to think that early farmers developed serious health problems from this low protein, vitamin-short, high-carbohydrate diet. Infant mortality increased, and the poor diet was likely one of the causes. You can see the mismatch between the genes and the environment in the skeletal evidence. Humans who adopted agriculture shrank: Average height dropped by almost five inches.
There is numerous signs of pathology in the bones of early agriculturalists. In the Americas, the introduction of maize led to widespread tooth decay and anemia due to iron deficiency, since maize is low in bioavailable iron. This story is not new: Many researchers have written about the health problems stemming from the advent of agriculture. Our point is that, over millennia, populations responded to these new pressures. People who had genetic variants that helped them deal with the new diet had more surviving children, and those variants spread: Farmers began to adapt to an agricultural diet. Humanity changed.
Hunter gatherers had excellent and straight teeth, no cavities, and excellent health; when they adopted the western diet their teeth, general health and physiognomy rapidly declined. They also had much higher incidences of diabetes and alcoholism. These photos are from a series of studies by Weston Price: see also here and here.
The advent of agriculture has led to many rapid changes in the human population, which are ongoing:
Skeletal and muscular structure – The human skeleton has become more lightly built, our jaws have shrunk, our bones lighter, brow ridges have disappeared, and skull volume has decreased about 10% from 20,000 years ago. There may be direct trade-offs between muscle and brain function — hunter gatherers likely had stronger muscles than today.
Higher rates of elite reproduction – Agriculture also led to the creation of nonproductive elites due to excess food production, which was impossible under hunter-gatherers. This in turn greatly increased inequality. The fraction of men fathering the next generation was markedly higher as hunter-gatherers than in agricultural societies, for example. “Gregory Clark, in A Farewell to Alms, shows that in medieval England the richest members of society had approximately twice the number of surviving offspring as the poorest. The bottom of society did not reproduce itself, with the result that, after a millennium or so, nearly everyone was descended from the wealthy classes.” And those living in rural areas, like today, had many more children than those living in urban areas, which are known as “IQ shredders”.
Lactose tolerance – One of the important genetic adaptations that occurred after the introduction of agriculture and the domestication of cattle was a mutation 8,000 years ago that allowed adults to digest lactose, the main sugar in milk. This increased the efficiency of an agriculture diet by offering a consistent source of protein that those on this diet were otherwise deficient in. Dairying is much more efficient than raising cattle for slaughter: it produces about 5x more calories per acre. These pastoral communities could migrate and bring their cattle with them, compared to static agriculture societies, and raise a larger number of warriors, who were also taller and stronger. Cochran and Harpending theorize that the mobility afforded to the proto-Indo-Europeans by their lactose tolerance was a huge advantage that allowed them to spread over western Eurasia around 7,000 BC (the Kurgan hypothesis).
Skin changes to increase Vitamin D absorption – Humans on an agricultural diet suffered from Vitamin D deficiency which hunter gatherers did not; there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat. Such deficiency “would have been serious since it could lead to bone malformations, decreased resistance to infectious diseases, and cancer. This may be why natural selection favored mutations causing light skin, which allowed for adequate vitamin D synthesis in regions with little ultraviolet radiation.” Several major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the advent of agriculture.
Resistance to diseases – Infectious diseases spread in agricultural communities due to crowding (such as measles), garbage, contaminated food and water supplies, and new vermin such as rats and mice, which spread diseases such as typhus and plague. Infectious diseases among sedentary populations were devastating, and therefore farmers experienced strong selective pressures to adapt. Over time these communities dramatically improved their immune systems to resist these diseases, while hunter gatherers did not.One example of this is falciparum malaria which was especially prevalent in Africa. Africans developed sickle cells as an expensive malaria defense (expensive because it provides defenses with serious side effects). Europeans were not able to invade and conquer the heart of Africa because of these powerful tropical diseases, which Africans had resistance to and Europeans did not, until the 1800s when quinine became widely available.Another example is the American Indians exposure to Europeans in the New World: the Indians were hunter-gatherers and had no immunity to the diseases Europeans carried such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, leprosy and bubonic plague, along with other diseases in tropical and subtropical areas such as yellow fever, dengue fever, falciparum malaria, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and onchocerciasis. These diseases were all basically one-sided; relatively few pathogens went the other way, such as Syphilis. These diseases, especially smallpox, ultimately wiped out an estimated 90% of the indigenous population within a few centuries. This is the primary reason why Cortes and Pizarro were able to conquer the Aztecs and Inca with so few men. This happened in America, too, although the settler’s awful and deliberate wiping out to almost complete extinction of the Indian’s food source, the buffalo, certainly didn’t help, from an initial population of roughly fifty million to almost zero. European diseases also decimated Australia Aborigines and Polynesians. However, other countries conquered by the Europeans, such as the Philippines, India or Indonesia, did not see population collapses because they already had extensive contact with Old World populations and so their immune systems were built up to resist such diseases.
Domestication – Elites in agricultural communities wanted a docile population that could be taxed and controlled. Aggressive, combative people had reduced reproductive fitness under their control (as they would be incarcerated or executed), so selection pressures over time resulted in less aggressive people. “Since the elites were in a very real sense raising peasants, just as peasants raised cows, there must have been a tendency for them to cull individuals who were more aggressive than average, which over time would have changed the frequencies of those alleles that induced such aggressiveness ….selection for submission to authority sounds unnervingly like domestication.” This is a point that Ted Kaczynski emphasizes strongly in his writing as well: technological society selects for those population traits that more smoothly integrate into it, and “mental illness” is defined to a large extent by those personality traits that make smooth participation in civic society difficult.4
Delayed gratification and increased planning – Agricultural societies over time selected for those who possessed long-term planning abilities, given crops needed to be stored for reserves and a portion kept for re-planting. Reproductive fitness favored patience and self-control, a hard-work ethic, as well as selfishness due to private ownership of goods and private property. These traits were unnecessary in hunter-gatherer societies.
The earlier that a group was exposed to agriculture, the more adapted they became compared to late-comers; better adjusted to the diet, tougher against the new diseases, and better at tolerating crowding and hierarchy.
An example of accelerated natural selection: Ashkenazi Jews
Given that a variety of dogs possessing a huge variety of differing traits descended from wolves in less than 35,000 years, that humanity is rapidly changing due to the effects of the neolithic agricultural revolution, and that intense artificial selection can change the traits of a species within a human lifetime per Belyaev’s foxes, how rapidly can a human population change due to intense and sustained natural selection pressures?
According to Cochran and Harpending, a study of the Ashkenazi Jewish population during the Middle Ages can assist with answering this question. This group faced unusual and intense natural selection pressures which led to their population possessing both increased average verbal IQs as well as the prevalence of unusual diseases not commonly seen in other populations. They argue:
If a high-fertility subpopulation was reproductively isolated (or nearly so) for long enough, selective pressures specific to that social niche might cause them to evolve in an unusual direction and become significantly different from the surrounding population. We think this happened among the Ashkenazi Jews…the kind of natural selection that occurred among the Ashkenazim was possible because of the persistence over centuries of strong prohibitions against intermarriage and an odd social niche in which certain traits conferred high fertility. It’s a very unusual case, since few populations appear to have experienced the long-lasting reproductive isolation and unusual job mix required to get those results. There are all sorts of ways in which that process could have been interrupted; it’s being interrupted now, for example, through high rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews and by changes in fertility patterns.
Ashkenazis have the highest measurable IQ of any ethnic group, averaging around 112-115 compared to the European norm of 100 (although their visuospatial abilities are typically somewhat lower by about half a standard deviation than the European average). This doesn’t mean any particular Ashkenazi is intelligent, just that their group IQ bell curve is shifted rightward, which has a strong impact on the number of individuals out on the far edge of the distribution:
“This fact has social significance, because IQ (as measured by IQ tests or their equivalents, like the GRE or SAT) is the best available predictor of success in academic subjects and many jobs. Jews are just as successful in such jobs as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in those jobs and accomplishments with the highest cognitive demands” – 10x greater than their share of the population for scientists, earning more than a quarter of all Nobel science prizes, accounting for about half of 20th century world chess champions, they account for 22% of Ivy League students and are highly overrepresented as CEOs. (They are actually far more overrepresented adjusting for IQ compared to white populations, though, which raises separate questions about tribalism and nepotism5).
This was not the case in ancient times with Sephardic Jewish populations. Surviving writings from Greeks and Romans did not state that the Jews were unusually intelligent:
[Roman] history is irrelevant because the Jews, in those days, were much like other people. Most Jews then were farmers, just like most other people in settled populations, and they must have experienced evolutionary pressures similar to those experienced by other agricultural peoples. They were not intellectually prominent at that time.
They made no contributions to the mathematics and proto-science of the classical era. A fair amount of classical commentary on the Jews has been preserved, and there is no sign that anyone then had the impression that Jews were unusually intelligent. By “no sign,” we mean that there is apparently no single statement to that effect anywhere in preserved classical literature. This is in strong contrast with the classical Greeks, whom everyone thought unusually clever.
They key cultural precondition among the Jews – key, that is, to later events among the Ashkenazim – was a pattern of social organization that required literacy, that strongly discouraged intermarriage, and that could propagate itself over long periods of time with little change. That pattern (Rabbinical Judaism) had not always existed but gradually emerged in the centuries after Titus’s destruction of the Temple in the first revolt against the Roman Empire in AD 70. This happened first in Israel, then later in the Jewish community of Mesopotamia. It coincided with the development of the Talmud, a collection of writings about Jewish law, customs, and history. The Torah and the Talmud are the central documents of rabbinical Judaism.
Literacy, which does not itself require high intelligence, was probably important to the Jews in their shift from a nation to an urban occupational caste during and following the Diaspora, acting as an entree to many urban professions in which they at first had no special biological advantages. The prohibition against intermarriage mattered, because local selection pressures cannot change a population that freely mixes with neighbors. Intermarriage quickly dilutes the effect of beneficial alleles within a population, since the introduction of alleles from outside easily swamps the effects of selection within the group. Rabbinical Judaism’s long-term stability was also key, since natural selection takes many generations to effect large changes.
In addition to higher IQ, Ashkenazi Jews also have an unusual set of serious genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s, familial dysautonomia, and others that are up to 100x more common than in other European populations.
Cochran and Harpending believe that their higher IQ plus predisposition to unusual diseases have a single cause: that higher IQ arose from natural selection for success in white-collar occupations which as a byproduct produced susceptibility to these diseases. The alternative explanation for these odd diseases, the bottleneck hypothesis (i.e. there was only an initial small population which inbred), is likely incorrect because (1) the genetic diseases associated with the Ashkenazim are concentrated on only a few metabolic pathways, not scattered like one would expect to see if the bottleneck hypothesis was accurate; and (2) certain measurable genetic changes that would have been expected to occur if true did not happen.
The authors trace the development of the Ashkenazim in support of their argument:
When they first appear in the historical record [which began as a distinct community 1,200 years ago], the Ashkenazim are long-distance merchants who trade with the Muslim world. This is the beginning of a unique occupational pattern; there were no other European groups – or other Jewish groups, for that matter – who were noted for this. The majority of Jews had already given up agriculture, but the Jews of Islam, although urban, mostly worked in various crafts. The Ashkenazim apparently seldom had such jobs….
When persecution became a serious problem and the security required for long-distance travel no longer existed, the Ashkenazim increasingly specialized in one occupation, finance, left open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury.The majority of the Ashkenazim seem to have been moneylenders by 1100, and this pattern continued for several centuries. Such occupations (trade and finance) had high IQ demands, and we know of no other population that had such a large faction of cognitively demanding jobs for an extended period….
The Jews in this period were prosperous. Historian H. Ben-Sasson pointed out that “Western Europe suffered virtual famine for many years in the tenth and eleventh centuries, [but] there is no hint or echo of this in the Jewish sources of the region in this period. The city dweller lived at an aristocratic level, as befitted international merchants and honored local financiers.” Their standard of living was that of the lower nobility. The Ashkenazi Jews were thus spared malnutrition and occasional famine. This helped Jewish populations recover from their losses due to persecution; it may have affected selective pressures as well.
The persecutions due to religious hostility and commercial rivalries were quite serious; the First Crusade of 1096 resulted in the deaths of ~25% of the Jewish population in the Rhineland:
Massacres of the Jews of Metz during the First Crusade, by Auguste Migette
Expulsions and persecutions continued unabated throughout the Middle Ages:
Many of the expelled Jews moved east to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where they were moneylenders, tax-farmers, toll-farmers, estate managers, and proprietors of mills and taverns. According to the historian B.D. Weinryb, in the middle of the fourteenth century “about 15% of the Jewish population were earners of wages, salaries and fees. The rest were independent owners of business enterprises.” According to Cochran and Harpending,
For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 to 1650 or 1700, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge. In fact, it would have been impossible (back then) for the majority of any territorial ethnic group to have such white-collar jobs, because agricultural productivity would have been too low. 90% of the population had to farm in order to produce enough to feed themselves and a thin crust of rulers, scribes, soldiers, craftsmen, and merchants. Selection for success at white-collar tasks could only have occurred if those scribes and merchants could somehow become an ethnic group, one defined by occupation rather than location.
Ashkenazi Jews who were successful at these high-complexity jobs (including business leaders, prominent rabbis, and community leaders) had many children, and these children were much more likely than the surrounding population to survive until adulthood. The richer Jewish families had more children and the poorer families had fewer children. Compare this to Jews in the Islamic world, who mostly had “dirty”, low status jobs and had much greater competition for white-collar jobs from Greek Christians and Armenians, as well as from Muslims, so their selection pressures were entirely different than the Ashkenazi experienced. As a resultthe Jews in Islamic lands do not have high average IQ scores, are not overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields, and in Israel Ashkenazi Jews score on average 15-16 points higher on IQ tests than they do.
Repeat these pressures and outcomes for a thousand years, where the Ashkenazi interbred with one another with very little out-group marriage, with the richest and most successful money-changers and other middlemen in intellectually challenging roles having the most children, and over time the average verbal intelligence levels rose and rose and their genetics became more and more distinct. IQ is highly heritable as are other obvious features such as height.
In 1791 Napoleon gave legal equality to European Jews, and his conquests spread that policy over much of Europe. Thereafter Ashkenazis began to emerge as scientists and mathematicians. It is the combination of the exclusive role of Jews as money-lenders in the Christian middle ages along with their much higher average verbal IQs that set the stage for the Rothschilds and their allies’ central bank ownership that owns and rules the world today.
The eugenics movement
The ongoing, rapid natural selection of humanity in light of changing technologies, especially the neolithic agricultural revolution, along with the incredibly fast evolution that can occur from artificial selection was to an extent known in the early 20th century, and the eugenics movement was widely accepted throughout Europe and America. Eugenics proponents encouraged a variety of measures to increase procreation for those considered to have good genetics and to discourage procreation for those considered to have bad genetics. Some high-status proponents included W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Trotsky, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, R.A. Fisher, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodor Roosevelt, Hellen Keler, Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, the list goes on and on…Lee Kuan Yew was also a major proponent of it, encouraging the smartest of society to marry smart spouses and encouraging the poor to be sterilized.
What happened to eugenics? It wasn’t scientifically discredited. Instead, after World War 2 egalitarianism became supercharged in response to Hitler’s failed attempt to transvalue the core values of western civilization and, due to the egalitarian ratchet effect, measures that were previously accepted for society’s benefit were discarded on cloaked religious grounds. Eugenics was one of those discarded policies. Academia is not willing to consider the implications of genetic differences among population groups, no matter how strong the evidence, as Brett Andersen eloquently points out.
In the modern era eugenics is still practiced to a limited extent, but not coercively. Genetic testing is regularly used to test for a variety of diseases before and during pregnancy, and a pregnancy can be terminated if major problems are found. CRISPR technologies for gene editing are showing increasing promise. And some people choose their mates to highlight certain traits, whether it be intelligence or athleticism. For example, elite bodybuilder John Brown picked his wife for her athleticism, and they had three sons, two of whom went to play in the NFL (Equanimeous and Amon-Ra St. Brown) and the third college football. If you want your children to exemplify (or to avoid) certain traits, this should be something you should keep in mind as well…
However, other than this there is an extreme (egalitarian caused) dysgenic trend which is in slow-motion imploding all of western civilization, a reverse Flynn effect. In prior generations the upper classes did most of the breeding, but in the modern era the lower classes are breeding much more rapidly. The prevalence of government welfare means that people who cannot otherwise support themselves are procreating; the selection pressures are to the lowest common denominator. Short sightedness and irresponsibility are actively encouraged. This is a disaster for society not even in the long term but in the present. Globohomo encourages this and intends to benefit from it, as they see a low IQ, dysgenic population as much less of a threat to their rule…
Conclusions
The 10,000 Year Explosion proves that humans and animals evolve based upon their own unique natural selection pressures based on technology, culture, location and environment, and therefore groups, like individuals, are unequal in many respects — respects that can’t be legislated away by fiat. Inegalitarianism is central to nature.
The proper role of eugenics is an interesting one and up for debate, especially if the hope is for society to undergo a partial transvaluation of values. Even if society decided to pursue widespread eugenics, which traits would be emphasized and who would make that determination? Who is to say they would be correct and not result in a loss of needed genetic diversity? That would be a lot of power to hand over to an individual, group or organization…and IQ isn’t everything; east Asian nations have the highest average IQs in the world, yet the world clamors to move to white western countries, and many rich east Asians move to America or Canada as soon as they have the money to do so. The quality of life and standards of living in the west are far better, with much higher community trust based on a shared system of values above and beyond base materialism, even though the average white IQ is less than east Asians. You can put a bunch of ultra-high IQ Indians, East Asians and Jews in San Francisco, yet the city is falling apart more than any other in America (and perhaps the world)…
San Francisco: possessing some of the “smartest” people in the world, but hell on earth
Ultimately, what is clear is that the dysgenic race to the bottom should be avoided; people should not have children if they cannot support them without welfare. Society’s incentive structure for who has children is all wrong. And policies like forceful sterilization of repeat violent criminals, refundable tax credits for those with genetic heritable defects who choose to sterilize themselves, and tax credits for high income couples who have children seem like easy and popular eugenic measures…
As Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, p. 76:
Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, “ugly.” A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.
Powerful words.
Lastly, one more thing. Back to the problem of evil.
Charles Darwin wrestled with the problem of evil and the nature of God in the context of natural selection. He could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering, such as the ichneumon wasp paralyzing caterpillars as live food for its eggs. Why would God have designed such a creature? This did not turn him into an atheist – he thought God could be the original mover, but has taken a hands off approach thereafter – but rather he came to think of himself as an agnostic.6 The malevolent Demiurge in control of material reality more readily solves this issue…
Darwin in 1878
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1 Darwin’s theory of evolution in “On the Origin of Species” is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarized as follows:
Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce, the population would grow (fact).
Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
Much of this variation is heritable (fact).
Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their heritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (fact).
This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).
2 According to the authors, people commonly “think that ancestry is something like mixing colors of paint: if you pour in equal amounts of blue and yellow, you’ll get green – and the paint will remain green. If a population were 90% Norwegian and 10% Nigerian, intuition says that nine-to-one mix will remain the case indefinitely. But intuition is wrong: if you placed that mixed population in Africa, certain alleles that were common in Nigerians – alleles that protected against malaria, or that made skin dark and resistant to skin cancer – would become more and more common over many generations. Eventually almost everyone in that population would carry the Nigerian version of those genes….We see this in animals too: white-tailed deer carry a brain worm that is fairly harmless to them but fatal to moose, so white-tailed deer are pretty good at displacing moose populations, and American gray squirrels imported to England carry a virus that they survive but that devastates the native red squirrel population.”
3 Given humans from Africa had migrated to Europe 50,000 years ago where the Neanderthals were long-situated (they disappeared within 10,000 years), such mating could have led to allele transfer that transferred adaptations to local conditions in Europe such as the ability to tolerate cold weather, resist local diseases, or adjust to big swings in the length of the day over the course of the year. Humans did not develop agriculture anywhere on earth during the Eemian period (the interglacial period of about 125,000 years ago), but they did so at least seven times independently in the Holocene, along with cave paintings, sculpture, jewelry, dramatically improved tools and weapons, and involved trade and exchange from hundreds of miles away. Introgression between species is common; it is ubiquitous among domesticated plants, but also common among animals such as breeding western European bees with African bees and among breeds of cattle.
Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the Papua New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP)
4 Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future, 14: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extend that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.”
5 Let’s look at Jewish student representation in higher education at Harvard as an example. In an analysis of Harvard undergrads, Ron Unz concluded that Jews and Asians constituted approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America. Also see here. A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. On the basis of Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European whites, and given Jews making up 2% of America and white Christians roughly 55-60% of the population, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or 4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish whites to Jews is around 1:1 or less.
Per Kevin MacDonald, Espenshade and Radford show that there is discrimination against poor whites and against non-urban whites—exactly the population groups that are least likely to be Jewish. There is a “a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites.” Additionally “when lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.” They also found that high school participation in commonly understood white middle America activities dramatically lowered admissions chances: “What Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to enormously reduce a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. … Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
6 In a letter to a correspondent at the University of Utrecht in 1873, Darwin expressed agnosticism:
I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.
Former President Donald Trump currently faces criminal charges in two cases, one in New York district court and one by the federal government in Florida. There are more potential criminal charges pending in Georgia as well as other looming federal charges, both in the document retention case and for January 6.
Meanwhile, according to an April NBC poll (polls should be taken with a grain of salt, because they are used by the establishment to mold and not just reflect public opinion), Republican primary voters overwhelmingly believe these charges are politically motivated Soviet-esque show trials:
And Trump’s lead has substantially grown over Ron “Meatball” DeSantis since April, showing the criminal charges have not harmed him among his base:
These are uncharted waters in America: criminal charges with more pending criminal charges against the front-running candidate for a national party. It is a sign that America has firmly descended into third world status, with all that entails…
“Here be dragons” (Latin: hic sunt dracones) means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
The upside down face in the middle kind of looks like Orange Man
The charges
Let’s briefly explore each of these cases and then offer an opinion where this is headed, tying it into the overarching neoliberal feudal framework. Keep in mind that the Republican presidential primaries are currently scheduled for between January and June 2024.
1. New York charges over Trump’s hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels:
Trump faces 34 felony counts with a scheduled trial date of March 2024. The charges are based on a “novel legal theory” which is quite weak – “as far from a slam dunk for prosecutors who are used to winning the vast majority of their cases”. Here’s another link; I could post a bunch of these. Prominent liberal legal experts have expressed unease over these charges. Step back and think about that for a second – bringing charges against a former president based on a novel legal theory which is far from a slam dunk? Think about how radical that is…
That being said, the New York City jury pool is heavily biased against Trump, with Biden securing 76% of the 2020 vote, and a jury could easily convict him for the crime of Orange Man Bad. (There is also an unsubstantiated contention that juries in political trials are being screened beyond normal voir dire measures using the NSA search databases to weed out any non-far leftists, which would explain the bizarre results of many recent high-profile politicized trials).
According to Sundance, the information in the Trump-retained documents at issue pertain to the establishment’s seditious, extreme criminal behavior for spying on the Trump campaign and prominent Republican supporters during Spygate, which is the most massive scandal in modern history, far dwarfing in size and scope anything Nixon allegedly did during Watergate.1 Trumpwanted to keep the documents as leverage against globohomo; he was not able to release them publicly because they were shielded by the FBI/DOJ/CIA under “active investigations” pertaining to “national security matters”, so he held onto them. The FBI raid and subsequent criminal charges, then, serves as a sword-and-shield maneuver: scoop up the documents so Trump can never release them, which would have smeared his enemies as actual criminals and exonerated his campaign and presidency, while prosecuting Trump for defending himself.
Globohomo’s sword-and-shield strategy is visualized by the Roman Testudo formation, moving forward offensively while in a defensive formation:
“For nearly two years, Willis’ office has been looking into whether Trump committed a crime during his January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the former president asked him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to beat Joe Biden in Georgia. The probe has since widened significantly and is also looking into allegations the Trump campaign plotted to send a group of fake electors to falsely claim that Trump had won the state in 2020, as well as claims of intimidation of election workers.”
The Georgia forewoman, a woman named Emily Kohrs, giddily gave an interview with CNN where she came across as a frothing-at-the-mouth pussyhat wearer, and even CNN admitted the interview was “odd”:
4. Pending federal criminal charges for Trump for January 6:
Over 1,000 Trump supporters have been thrown in prison, with more ongoing, over an unarmed, nonviolent protest where the only death was Ashlee Babbitt, a Trump supporter, and where the capitol police and secret FBI agent Ray Epps opened up the gates to allow crowds inside the building. Recently four Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy for January 6, and there is an ongoing effort to strip Trump lawyer John Eastman of his law license for trying to help Trump contest the election (Rudy Giuliani’s has already been suspended with possible pending criminal charges and there is also an effort to suspend former Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, who also helped Trump; legitimately insane Lin Wood agreed to forced retirement instead of disbarment).
Trump is under active investigation for his role in 1/6. Sundance argues that the federal entrapment of Trump supporters (with foreknowledge by both Schumer, Pelosi, McConnell and Pence) served multiple roles; one of the primary objectives was for Congress to invoke emergency powers so that congressional and Supreme Court challenges to globohomo’s obvious election fraud would not occur. They did not want to repeat the contentious Supreme Court face-down that occurred in 2000’s Bush vs. Gore.
If they were not able to entrap Trump supporters to enter the capital, globohomo had a backup plan to still invoke those measures: the so-called Capitol pipe bombs. “Under this scenario, the J6 pipe bombs were the insurance policy, in the event the feds couldn’t get the crowd to comply with the FBI provocations. If no one stormed the Capitol, the finding of the two pipe bombs would have then been the emergency needed to stop the process.” Which explains why the FBI has no interest in the DC pipe bomb suspects.
“Let’s fuck over the peasant masses again with our fake kayfabe! Yeah!”
The paucity of real charges against Trump is really something. They had to come up with a fake Trump/Russia smear and then go after him for hush-payments to Stormy Daniels and a host of these other nonsensical charges; it’s no wonder globohomo hates him so much, because they did not have any blackmail to keep him under their thumb. Under globohomo’s inverted reality structure, having political candidates who have committed massive criminal misdeeds is a good thing, and being clean is a terrible thing, because the former will do whatever they want while the latter has the potential to be a loose cannon. Trump is almost certainly the cleanest president in (at least modern) history.
Analysis
So there are a bunch of active (and very politicized and flimsy) criminal charges against Trump, scheduled to interrupt the Republican primary, and bigger ones upcoming.
How is Trump handling it? He is boisterous in public, claiming it is a massive witch hunt, but behind the scenes it looks like he is scared. He continues to ignore the base that won him 2016 by spending an inordinate amount of time pandering to minorities:
So here is the call: the call is that Trump is very likely going to prison. It will happen one way or another, even though all of the charges and potential charges are ridiculous both on their face and in the details, pushed by a malevolent, bloodthirsty regime that stole power in 2020 and is now ratcheting things up behind the scenes in major ways. I’m not sure how this will impact 2024; DeSantis has not been a beneficiary of these show trial charges (and he doesn’t have the physiognomy to benefit from it; he’s a squat little meatball). Only Vivek is gaining a bit. Perhaps globohomo waits to imprison him until after the upcoming rigged 2024 elections. Maybe throwing Trump in prison simply implodes the Republican party and allows Democrats to formally institute one party permanent rule.
I think the 2020 election will be looked back at historically, assuming humanity survives, as the moment of globohomo’s outright, direct seizure of power after decades of operating stealthily behind the scenes. As William M Briggs comments on liberal’s use of power on another issue here:
They have the power and they’re likely to get away with this. Others say that the law is “unconstitutional”, which it might be, but which is also meaningless, because those in power get to decide what this means in practice.
My take is that they are doing this because they understand how power works. Which is like this: (1) Get it, and (2) Use it. The got it, and they’re using it to shut down their opposition.
And as Rolo Slavsky has also commented in the context of Ukraine, most people simply follow the rulers whoever they are, and that is why globohomo puts so much value in their seizure of power:
That’s how authority works; people naturally follow orders from on high. It’s probably genetic even because following the chieftain used to be a viable strategy for survival. For most of history, there wasn’t such a huge disconnect between the ruler and the ruled. Both groups needed each other to a large extent and the captain went down with the ship if things got too bad. The interests of the ruler and ruled aligned more often than they didn’t….
That is why the fight for these positions of authority is so important. If the power of authority wasn’t so overwhelming, these positions wouldn’t be so coveted. Heretics could just go to the people directly, convince them using the logic of their arguments, and the deed would already be done – the people would be convinced to no longer obey the authorities. But this is not what happens. This is not the observable reality that we are dealing with. Hippy-style appeals to the power of the people to organize themselves without hierarchies or appeals to authority fall flat on their face because only a certain percentage of people are capable of thinking this way. Most people are always following the leader. The only real question is: who is the leader? It doesn’t have to be the president of a country or a general, mind you. It could be a cult leader or a celebrity artist or even a boss at the company.
Now, there is a small chance that globohomo uses the charges against Trump to fully skin-suit him (i.e. to turn him into one of their puppets), but he’s been skin-suited for years now, pushing the deadly untested mRNA “vaccines”, letting hordes of criminals out of prison, failing to pardon Assange, letting Kushner run the show, etc. I think globohomo is still furious that Orange Man snuck one by them in 2016; I think they hate that he is and always will remain a symbol for white middle America, which they viciously want to pulverize into dust. I don’t think they care about potential benefits of having a skin-suited “Republican populist” preside over the continued destruction of America, even if that helps de-fang Trump supporters (note that $11 trillion was printed under Trump’s watch during COVID; there is no political solution to America’s structural problems).
As Grant Smith persuasively argues, the left loves to use proxies in order to attack their ultimate targets without revealing the true nature of their attacks, either to themselves (for psychological reasons) or to their enemies (for practical reasons):
A proxy is a convenient substitute facilitating the guilt-free attack on something that would be otherwise forbidden. Where people tend to get lost here is that they try to imagine that all of their enemies are cynical sociopaths or stupid zealots. The reality is that everyone trying to control narratives at the expense of populism is somewhere along a vast continuum. Some understand that they want to reign over lesser humans who don’t deserve freedom and autonomy, others are delusional enough to believe that they need to guide the unwashed masses for their own good. Whether they believe their own bullshit or not, they need to identify and use a proxy when there is something they are trying to attack but can’t allow it look like they are attacking that way. The psychopaths can’t afford to be exposed as serial uncompromising hypocrites, the clueless can’t afford to see themselves as the hypocrites they are. All are unified by class interest.
In this case, globohomo wants to destroy Trump as a proxy for white middle class populism, without suffering the psychological or political consequences of a direct attack. Trump was right when he said “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, it set off a civil war that ended with the Romanov family being executed in 1918. The Romanov’s served as a Schelling point and a symbol for monarchy and the right; in other words, it was easier for all of the scattered, feuding tribes of the right to unite in support of them. By murdering their entire family in cold blood, the Bolsheviks removed the Schelling point, demoralized their enemies and made picking apart their re-feuding enemies much easier. They then set about wiping out millions of their enemies, who they deemed “kulaks”.
In much the same way, Trump is a Schelling point for right wing populists and those dissatisfied with the system, even though he is a flailing clown. By imprisoning Trump for the rest of his life, or possibly trying to execute him for “treason”, and going after his family and allies, globohomo can then turn their attention to who they really want to destroy and murder: you. (But not necessarily entirely in that order; the bolsheviks killed a lot of Tsarist supporters before killing the Tsar).
Check out this great Revolver article: “Are you ready to be an American kulak?” which further deepens the comparison. And the same ethnic group was dramatically overrepresented in presiding over the bloodshed as today…
The reaction
Globohomo is moving forward with their strategy in their offensive/defensive testudo formation. As they ratchet up charges against Trump (which, again, they are happy with being perceived as flimsy and political; the same reason why they shove Hunter Biden’s crimes in the public’s faces — they want to instigate a reaction), as they keep the southern border open with millions passing through, as they print trillions of dollars and give it to their friends and allies, as they try turning your kids transsexual, they appear more or less comfortable with the chance of provoking a violent reaction so that they have the pretext to crush it.
Modern history demonstrates that in order for a violent insurgency to be successful it would need to have either institutional backers or foreign support. Does the right have *any* institutional support in 2023 America? Does it make sense why globohomo purged the military and police forces of dissidents (the only institutions which had any right-wing support) during COVID under the pretext of the untested mRNA vaccines? And it is the same basic motivation why extremely well funded globohomo groups are viciously and baselessly slandering Justice Thomas (again) and Alito, to weaken the Supreme Court if any of globohomo’s extreme criminal activities get placed in front of them?
I’m not sure there will be a violent reaction regardless. 2017 Charlottesville removed the right’s offensive ability to organize; 1/6 removed their defensive ability to organize. It seems like the right is petrified, correctly, of any organization at this point, so I don’t suspect there will be any violent reaction based on anything the establishment does to Orange Man – regardless of America being the most heavily armed country in the world. I’ll likely do a separate post analyzing the possibility and success odds of a middle class uprising at some point.
I don’t have an answer here. If this was a game of chess, western civilization appears to have been checkmated. If there is any hope at all, it is the right soberly grappling with these issues and then coming to terms with and accepting the transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism that must happen before any real resistance is possible — politics is well downstream of society’s core beliefs — as well as a greater understanding of how the Rothschild central bank system works, so people stop confusing the red cape of Current Thing distraction from the matador.
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1 A declassified FISA report stated that the FBI ran 3.1 million illegal FISA searches on American citizens in 2017 alone, compared to 7,500 combined searches by the NSA and CIA in the same year. It later came out that the law firm Perkins Coie had its own NSA search terminal set up in its D.C. offices to spy on domestic opposition; it was placed there to provide the perpetrators protection. In 2023 the DOJ Inspector General revealed that more than 10,000 federal employees have access to the NSA database for surveillance inquiries (which show everything you have ever typed electronically on your computer or used on your phone), more than 3.4 million search queries were ran between 12/1/2020 and 11/30/2021, and approximately 30% were outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless search, showing the pattern of illegal governmental behavior is extreme and only expanding.
2 Successful because it kept the Obama-era figures from being criminally prosecuted or investigated and it paralyzed the Trump administration; there was no substance to the underlying Russian charges so it was never meant to prosecute Trump.
3 It’s hard to know from the outside how “smart” Eisen and Weissman, and others of their ilk, are. The leaked Strzok/Page text messages suggest these characters are devious and clever, and that they spend the vast majority or all of their “job” strategizing and conspiring how to keep and gain more power, both to establish primary plans as well as develop branch contingencies (or as Strzok/Page called it, “insurance policies”).
I hate to be the bearer of bad news; it feels like half of this blog is spent criticizing the right wing takes that are propagated elsewhere. The direction of these attacks revolve around explaining that standard right-wing perspectives share the underlying morality of the left that they so bitterly complain about, rendering their criticisms toothless and ineffective; additionally they don’t understand the structure of the modern world, how power ultimately rests with the owners of the world’s central banks who use divide and conquer tactics on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation so the masses are too busy infighting to focus on their theft.
To be outraged by or even to spend much of one’s time on the latest battle in the culture war (regardless of its merits) is to miss the forest for the trees; such attention feeds and strengthens globohomo narratives as a whole as the reaction in their desired action-reaction-synthesis (or thesis-antithesis-synthesis) Hegelian dialectic.
But this is intended as a hopeful, educational attack against the right; their impulses for order, stability, the rule of law, transparency and justice are fundamentally correct impulses, especially in this age of ultra-priestly values; they are allies, and they need to clear their head of the endless streams of nonsense that prattle around in their skulls. So let’s go through the standard right-wing take as well as the dissident approach (from my perspective) to the issues covered so far in this Substack. The following also serves as a compilation for new readers of the Neofeudal Review posts made so far.
Russia/Ukraine
Right wing take: Russia is standing up for Christian values against the decadent globohomo west.
Right wing take: Transgenderism is evil and we must resist it with all our might.
Dissident take: Resisting transgenderism is destined to fail, just like resisting gay marriage or a bunch of other cultural war issues in the past, because it does not address the root cause of the problem, which is the push for egalitarianism rooted in Pauline Christianity itself (even if the people pushing it are secular, atheist, or communist).
Congress
Right wing take: we must work the system harder to increase populist representation in the House and Senate.
Dissident take: populists have never had significant support in Congress nor will they ever unless there is a transvaluation of society’s core values.
Cryptocurrency
Right wing take: cryptocurrency is a great hedge against the abuse of fiat currencies.
Dissident take: cryptocurrency is as corrupted as fiat because of the nature of tether, which acts as a central bank. It prints funds from nothing just like the Federal Reserve does with dollars.
Government structure
(Far) right wing take: we need a dictator to institute law-and-order.
Dissident take: What’s needed is a two pronged approach; a law-and-order approach against radical leftists combined with a major focus on rebuilding the middle class. Both are required synergistically to be effective. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Pyotr Stolypin in Russia are figures who pushed effective government structures in this manner.
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson
Right wing take: Both are heroes to the right.
Dissident take: they’re both compromised. While they both have some positive values, they are nowhere near hero worthy.
Trump vs DeSantis
Right wing take: Split camps arguing passionately for one or the other.
Dissident take: They are both very flawed candidates and it’s hard to get excited for either, although on balance Trump is better.
Resisting anti-white leftist trends
Right wing take: Trump or another figure will be able to figure out a solution to the radical anti-white leftism permeating society.
Dissident take: Negative anti-white trends are in such an advanced state that it may be impossible to effectively resist it, much like Julian the Apostate’s failed attempt to preserve Hellenism because the pro-Christian trends were already so far advanced. Also, material reality is likely controlled by the Demiurge, who is malevolent and enjoys torturing souls for unknown reasons.
Owners of modern society
Right wing take: The owners of modern society are the ultra-high networth billionaires, mostly hypocritical leftist like George Soros and Bill Gates, who coordinate through groups like the World Economic Forum.
Dissident take: The owners of modern society are a few families who own the central banks of the world, and Soros and Gates are among their higher-level lackeys. This situation came about because Jews were treated as an errant cousin religion by Christians and were allowed a special monopoly as money-lenders for centuries, a profession which Christians were forbidden from entering. Multinational groups like the WEF, Bilderberg Group, Round Table, Trilateral Commission, and The Council on Foreign Affairs merely coordinate the strategies of the central bank owners.
Collapse/accelerationism
Right wing take: Things are going to come to a head and society will collapse under its dead weight; then the real men can pick up the pieces.
Right wing take: People are fat due to low willpower, easy living, and eating lots of fast food.
Dissident take: Most of the cause of the obesity epidemic is the ubiquitous use of seed oils in most prepared foods while eating out, declining testosterone levels, poisoned food/water and the completely unknown synergistic effects of chemicals in the environment.
Liberal talent
Right wing take: There is nothing to value at all about liberals and they should be addressed as a group, like rooting against the other team in a football match.
Dissident take: One can acknowledge the talent and positive values of opponents even if one shares strongly divergent political views; doing the former does not devalue the latter, in fact it strengthens the maturity of the argument and helps to steel-man it.
Are these explanations needlessly demoralizing, regardless of accuracy?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: Western civilization is in a rather precarious position at present, and it’s better to explore difficult ideas even if it is more black-pilled and depressing than consuming hopium. The Q movement (a government operation styled on the Soviet’s Operation Trust) was always loathsome for this reason.
But I’m not trying to doom-post without cause; life is hard enough without piling on needless grimness. None of this writing is a call to passivity and despair. Rather the hope is that a sober assessment of how bad things are will ultimately lead to a push toward a partial transvaluation of the egalitarian values as the root cause of these problems. This critical insight is so far removed from the vast majority on the right that they are in no position to resist globohomo effectively today even if they want to.
Also, I hope some of these analysis and predictions are wrong — if so I’ll be somewhat embarrassed, wipe the egg off my face and update my worldview accordingly. As referenced in the preface to the large Neoliberal Feudalism philosophical essay, “The presented framework should be judged by its predictive value for future events and how well it illuminates current and past events, based on an attempt to understand the perennial laws that govern material reality and human nature.” I’m not perfect and the current iteration of these beliefs has taken many years of trial and error, and I’ve gotten a lot wrong over the years (much less so these days, unfortunately; it seems the black pilled take is almost always the correct one).
Lastly, I’ve recently updated each post in the Neoliberal Feudalism essay with many new images, charts, and figures. I’ve come to appreciate the importance of visual aids in conveying messages on Substack, and I hope to continue making iterative improvements so my writing gets easier and more fun to read.
Thanks for following.
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Below is the weight chart for Americans from 1960-2010:
Average weight gain for a man of about 30 pounds, and for a woman 25 pounds, over a 50 year period. Wonderful…
Compare actual average weights to a height/weight chart from 1959 on what was considered healthy:
How do you compare?
Based on this model most Americans have an “undesirable weight” and would be considered either fat or obese — i.e. if the average male is 5’10” and medium framed, their desirable weight would have been 146-160 lbs, yet average male weight is now 195 lbs, 27% above that range.
Instead of calling the average male or female fat compared to 1959 standards, though, the medical establishment simply revised upwards the standards of what constitutes a normal, healthy weight to meet the averages of today.
Below are a couple photos of beaches in the 1950s. Not a single fat person in sight:
Compare to beaches today:
I don’t think these photos are cherry-picked. There were basically no fat people in the 1950s, and if you go to any beach today the amount of fatness and obesity is all-encompassing.
Here are the current and projected obesity rates from the Rockefeller Foundation:
Approaching the obese singularity, where the combined weight of the obese is equivalent to a black hole that will suck you in.
Average daily calorie consumption has increased by 759 calories/day between 1960 and 2010, a 27% increase.
Did Americans suddenly just get hungrier? Lazier? Worse impulse control? What would cause people in a 60 year period to suddenly eat an average of 27% more?
Could this be due to Americans eating out more, with worse food quality?
Americans now eat out more than they consume food at home.
What about the composition of those increased 759 calories/day? What is that increase comprised of?
425 of those calories are from vegetable oil, which is ubiquitous when eating out; it basically can’t be avoided. That leaves a much smaller 334 calorie differential.
Per an analysis of many studies by P.D. Mangan, vegetable oils cause obesity and lead to insulin resistance. The vast increase in vegetable oil consumption is because the American Heart Association wrongly advised replacing saturated fat with it. Thanks for your expert guidance, AHA.
187 of those calories is due to increases in grain consumption:
The rest is attributed to slight increases in alcohol, sugar, and meat consumption.
So most of the differential is accounted for by eating out, the ubiquitous use of seed oils when eating out, and increased consumption of grains (which is much less filling than meat consumption).
Also see here. Which are in turn hugely decreased from a couple hundred years ago:
By historic terms everyone reading this is a soyboy.
Other explanations
Here are some other direct causes of increased obesity and decreased testosterone, some of which are from here:
Omega 6 PUFA consumption, primarily from eating fried foods, has risen through the twentieth century and especially after World War 2, driving an increase in obesity, chronic disease, and decreases in testosterone levels.
Chemicals and plastics. Synthetic plastic was invented in 1907 and the use of plastics has increased ever since. Plastics accumulate in the environment and in our bodies and are known to disrupt testosterone. There is a large number of other chemicals that we are exposed to as well, such as flame retardants in furniture and preservatives in food. The use of agricultural chemicals greatly expanded post-1950s and also lowers testosterone levels.Europe uses a precautionary principle when it comes to introducing new chemicals into foods, but the United States does not; worse, there is close to zero understanding of the synergistic effects of added chemicals (and the U.S. allows more than 10,000 of them) — in other words, one chemical on its own added to food may be relatively safe for consumption, but added with another and it may become wildly unsafe. No one knows what synergies are safe and what aren’t, there’s the fun! Your body is a giant modern-era medical experiment for short-sighted corporate profits.Or consider PFAS chemicals which have been linked to an increased risk of cancer, asthma and thyroid disease, as well as liver damage and decreased fertility. Called “forever chemicals” because they do not degrade in the environment, PFAS are so widespread that levels have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans, according to a 2015 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fluoride and other chemicals in the water supply. The government deliberately adds fluoride to our drinking water which is unhealthy and decreases testosterone levels.
Radio waves. One study found that mice exposed to a long cell phone call every day had much lower testosterone. So does exposure to electromagnetic fields. Our world is awash in radio waves. Over the 20th century this has grown from almost nothing to ubiquitous nonstop exposure today. 5G towers seem to melt drones. What does it do to your body? No one knows!
Porn, which is ubiquitous and offered to the masses for free as a loss leader by globohomo, lowers testosterone levels.
Social changes. People feel less independent and more helpless, defeated and disoriented in the face of high technology, the loss of “traditional values,” mass media, transnational corporations, high amounts of regulation, and cultures that value intense education and professional work for large companies. Internalizing these attitudes likely affects hormones. One study found that Americans in 2007 were much more likely to be mentally ill than in 1938.
Why are they doing this?
The contention is that none of this is accidental, all of this is planned by the central bank owners. Globohomo wants you to be an obese, low IQ soyboy addicted to or dying from fentanyl, watching Netflix and porn and transitioning to the opposite gender, obsessed with race, gender, and sexual orientation grievances which you complain about to other soymen and bearded women on Reddit in between watching the latest capeshit as you age out of child-having years and as globohomo rapes the world and prepares you to be a sacrificial offering to the Demiurge, if you don’t kill yourself first. If you are weak then you are easy to control, and you will never rebel.
Wheee! The immature millennial capeshit-watching soy-men, childless and assetless, approaching death. At least they have Reddit. This photo would be better if the guy was obese, with a neckbeard, in a Star Wars t-shirt, and the thing he was riding broke from the weight.
What can one do?
Try to eat more meals at home, avoid vegetable oils, eat high protein and lower carb diets, and engage in moderate amounts of weightlifting. P.D. Mangan is an excellent resource for this stuff (his recommendations boil down to “sun, steak and steel”, but he covers cutting edge science – to the extent the modern world has any real science left – with level-headed takes). If you want to go for an extreme diet, Dr. Shawn Baker has dramatically improved the health of a lot of people with a carnivore diet, but I’ve found it too difficult to stick with.
Be conscious that our elites want you to be sick, mentally and physically, and drag you down to the lowest common denominator. Consciously doing what you can to raise yourself above their sick and twisted plans is a good thing.
With that said, too many on the right view fixing these things as a panacea that will solve all your problems, both personal and political ones. Their implied “logic” seems to be:
Step 1: Lift and eat healthy, no more porn!
Step 2: ???
Step 3: All your problems are solved!
Unfortunately it is partially a John Carter Ghost Dance cope, i.e. a distraction from society’s complete implosion and descent into the hell of neoliberal feudalism, and weightlifting and eating healthy will not magically fix these things.
Still, as long as one’s expectations are limited and realistic there’s plenty of good that you can do.
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The ring-wing on Substack is an interesting community. Perhaps I have been led down a particular niche in terms of the people I follow and the writers who are recommended to me, but it seems like a heavy focus of this community is writing about how evil the left are for pushing a transsexual agenda both through society as a whole and especially targeted to children.
Now, I agree with the right that the left’s position on this is deeply immoral. But if one steps back and looks at it on a historical basis, it’s just another battle in a much larger culture war, a culture war the right always loses.
The way it works is as follows: the left decide that some newly created/defined victimized group needs protection, and there is an oppressor group which must be overthrown in order to help the victims. Currently it is the trannies; straight people and normal culture are oppressing them! Before trannies it was gay marriage; straight people and normal culture are oppressing them! Or how about the obese, or the disabled – able-bodied and thin people are oppressing them! And before that it was various minority groups; white culture is oppressing them! As well as women: male culture is oppressing them! Overthrow the evil oppressors! Or from the economic side with communism — the capitalists are exploiting the workers! Workers of the world unite!
Can you see the unifying element of all these disparate historical battles? It should be clear: it stems from the push for egalitarianism, that “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”, which derives from Christianity and specifically from Paul. “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV), “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:26-28), and “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1st Corinthians 1:27).1
Here is a crude, basic chart showing over a 2,000 year period how the push for egalitarianism in all its forms has intensified over time:
Chart notes: Core societal values do not sit still; they get reinforced and progress to stronger and stronger levels over time as a ratchet effect. This is why opposition to any specific spot along the path toward more-equality (at a faster and faster pace) is destined to fail, because it has not addressed the core beliefs that have resulted in that egalitarian push in the first place. The central bank owning Rothschilds and their allies accelerate the egalitarianism push but are not the root cause of it.2
This ratchet effect has commonalities with what Brett Andersen refers to as the cultural ratchet effect, which he defines as follows:
Michael Tomasello (the developmental psychologist mentioned earlier), in his 1999 book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, describes the “ratcheting” process by which cumulative cultural evolution occurs. This process requires, in the first place, a kind of blind imitation, in which people imitate their cultural models without any rational explanation for their actions. This is referred to in the literature as “overimitation”. Chimpanzees don’t do this. If you show a chimpanzee how to perform a certain task, they will only imitate actions that are causally relevant to the task at hand. Human beings will imitate even irrelevant actions. This may seem irrational, but it is absolutely necessary for the cultural ratcheting process….
Imitation, however, is not enough for the cultural ratcheting process to work. The other side of the coin is innovation, or the propensity to tinker with culturally evolved products. Without some level of innovation, cultural products would not change over time….
Cumulative cultural evolution requires both the conservative impulse to imitate and the progressive impulse to tinker. These two processes — imitation and innovation — make up the ratcheting effect by which complex cultural products (e.g., institutions, practices, technologies, etc.) evolve over time.
The egalitarian ratchet effect, like the cultural ratchet effect, builds on itself over time as a process of imitation and innovation, animated by society’s core values.
However, because complete equality is impossible to achieve via raising up the lower performing groups, the only way to achieve pure equality is by flattening down and destroying those who excel more than baseline. This ultimately cumulates in one of three ways:
the leftist singularity, i.e. genocide of the disfavored group(s) as seen in communism under Mao, the “kulak” liquidation under Lenin/Stalin, and Pol Pot’s butchery of 25% of his population, to try to achieve the desired final egalitarian state, which ultimately fails anyway because pure equality is impossible;
Societal weakness results in conquest by foreign powers; or
A societal transvaluation of values occurs.
Tracing the ratchet effect of egalitarianism over time
2,000 years ago, Rome’s values were warrior-centric, valuing strength, greatness, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, hierarchy, nobility, what could be accomplished in the here and now. According to Nietzsche in his first treatise in “On the Genealogy of Morality”, the Roman aristocracy used a “good” vs “bad” system of morality; what was good were the traits that separated them from the masses. Paul of Tarsus inverted and transvalued those values for the gentile population, offering them a value system of “good” vs “evil”: what was “good” was subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering and self-hatred – the herd mentality; what was “evil” were those who were inegalitarian, i.e. those with traditional “good” values. Paul offered the masses these inverted values as a weapon of war in the Jewish battle against the Roman Empire to rile up the masses against the Roman elites, which was too strong to defeat militarily (although they certainly tried).
Nietzsche’s treatise is an important one; in my opinion the key essay to understand society over the past two thousand years, and can be read here. It’s not long.
After priestly values conquered Rome, which took about 400 years, and even though Rome itself was conquered by barbarians and the western Empire fragmented, a Christian Europe ultimately reached a kind of balance: it possessed extreme priestly egalitarian core values, but it was held in check by a rigid hierarchical Catholicism. And this structure lasted, more or less, for about a thousand years.
What changed the fundamental dynamic at that point? An advancement in technology: The Guttenberg printing press. The free dissemination of the written word at a cheap, affordable price resulted in the population asking why they needed Catholic priests as gatekeepers to knowledge at all. Protestantism under Martin Luther and Calvin then removed the hierarchical guardrails at the heart of Catholicism; then egalitarianism evolved through various permutations such as the French Revolution (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”) through mainstream Protestantism to Unitarianism, which took over the university system in America before dropping their belief in God (while keeping the underlying value beliefs) as a way to outcompete their religious brethren in an environment that favored the separation of Church and State. This is why so-called atheists such as Richard Dawkins are merely Christians in denial; although they may no longer believe in God, they still believe in all of the fundamental values of the Christian religion going back two thousand years.
As historian Tom Holland (author of the excellent book “Dominion”) explains in an eloquent eight minute video segment below, liberals, secularists, communists, atheists, are all essentially Christians in their beliefs and metaphysics:
Specifically Holland says,
“I would say to look at the most obvious one because it’s the symbol of Christianity, if you look at the cross, it’s such an odd thing to have as a focus of veneration, and to have as a fundamental symbol of civilization. Because a cross is a symbol of torture. And to the Romans it was an emblem of their power to torture to death their inferiors. So crucifixion was inflicted on those who opposed Roman power in the provinces. But it’s also the paradigmatic fate that is visited on slaves who rebel against their masters. And everyone who’s seen Spartacus remembers the rows of crosses lining the Appian way. It’s a billboard advertising the ability of Rome to crush rebellion by the weak, and therefore it serves as a symbol of the powerful over the powerless. Christianity absolutely upends that it says the cross is a symbol of the powerless triumphing over the powerful, the slave triumphing over its master, of the victim triumphing over the torturer, and this is such a radical notion its hard to express how radical it is. And the idea that the last shall be first, that there is inherent dignity and value and power in being a victim, this is something that would have been utterly bewildering to the Romans. And it takes a long time for first the Roman world and then the world of the Germanic conquerers in the west and so on to properly synthesize and understand it. And thats why I think in a way we are so habituated to it that it takes an effort to understand just how weird and strange that idea is.
And its why actually I think the modern who has most profoundly and unsettlingly understood just how radical that idea is, how radical the idea that the cross of all things should become the emblem of a new civilization was a man who was not just an atheist but a radically hostile anti-Christian atheist Frederick Nietzsche, and Nietzsche said this is a repellant thing. Nietzsche identified the power and the glory and the beauty of classical civilization and he thought that Christianity was notoriously a religion for slaves and he saw in the emblem of Christ nailed to the cross a kind of disgusting subversion of the ideals of the classical world, privileging of those who properly should be ground beneath the heels of the mighty, and he saw it as a kind of sickness that then infected the “blonde beast”, that this primordial figure of the warrior gets corrupted and gets turned into a monkish figure who’s sick with poverty and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, and Nietzsche thought it was disgusting. Now those ideas, however vulgarized, of course feed into a very septic subject which is fascism.
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral/ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching the idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptible, as something to be crushed….
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity.“
The above eight minute segment is part of an hour interview which can be viewed here if one cares to; it’s a very illuminating and interesting interview throughout.
After crypto-Christians superficially dropped their belief in God and thought of themselves as secular to get around the separation of Church and State, they pushed those values onto the world. And it really went into hyperdrive after the Christian west defeated Hitler in World War 2; Hitler’s failed attempt at transvaluing priestly values back into Roman inegalitarian hierarchical values resulted in a supercharged reinvigoration of these priestly values.
Within 100 years the white percentage of the world population dropped from 25% to 6.5% (1900-2000), in America from 90% to 60% (1965-2020) and in other European countries a lesser but still strong percentage; the west experienced massively declining birthrates, declining morals, and an intense and omnipresent push for egalitarianism in all its forms. For example, Obama didn’t come out in favor of gay marriage until 2012; yet only ten years later in 2022 Tucker Carlson, the furthest right figure allowed on air until his termination, was also in favor of gay marriage.3 “Far right” Ted Cruz recently told Uganda they were extremely evil for not allowing it.
The unhinged, parabolic nature of this extreme push for equality as currently exemplified by the transsexual movement cannot be separated from the history that is described herein; nor can it be effectively opposed. Sure, you can boycott Target or Bud Light or watch “What is a Woman?” or whatever, but meanwhile transsexualism continues to spread and globohomo continues to indoctrinate your children. The mega-corporations that are subject to boycotts receive all sorts of backchannel benefits that more than make up for the inconvenience of their betrayal of their core customer base (which is the same reason why Disney pushes child sex grooming).
After transsexualism triumphs, up next will be pushes for pedophelia and beastiality (“sexual attraction” equality) and white genocide (like is currently happening on a low-level in South Africa), among who knows what other horrible, deviant practices we can’t even imagine at this time. Given the parabolic nature of the moves, it will happen faster and faster, over a shorter and shorter period of time.
What can be done if pushing back on transsexualism isn’t and won’t work?
The answer is that there needs to be a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism. To be able to say without caveat or further explanation: this world is unequal, it will always be unequal to a degree, and instead of trying to push down greatness and nobility in order to achieve equality for all (because the bottom cannot be raised up enough in anything to make up for the gap), we should accept that inequality is a part of life and those that can be great should be great.
There are two types of transvaluation that can occur: partial and full. In a full transvaluation of values to Roman style warrior values, inequality is promoted as an ideal and the poor, the destitute, the obese and dumb are discarded like genetic detritus, both individually and as classes. Taken to an extreme, that means extermination of the out-groups. Hitler’s zeal for lebensraum was so great that even though the Ukrainians and other Soviet satellite states greeted the Nazis as liberators, they ended up resisting them because of how extreme and harsh the Nazi policies were. Perhaps their resistance played a key role in the outcome of the war.4 This exterminationism is also what blogger Cesar Tort promotes, for example (Cesar has interesting historical points sometimes but he really is quite extreme).
Tom Holland is correct in his criticism of those who push pure warrior values, though, as he states in “Dominion”:
“The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a particularly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those whose triumph is to be taken for granted.”
Let’s not forget that Christianity was so successful because it appealed to such a tremendous number of people who were otherwise valueless in Roman society.
There is a third possibility other than just pure warrior and pure egalitarian values.
The other possibility is a partial transvaluation of values, where one seeks a balance between warrior and priestly values, between egalitarianism and in-egalitarianism. This can take many forms; above the stability brought upon by 1,000 years of Catholic rule can be attributed to the balance between the two energies (also see the Byzantine Empire). To value strength, nobility, honor, while still acknowledging that the worse off have value, with a measure of humility and grace; one could say that Lee Kuan Yew exemplified this balance as he brought up Singapore from nothing to a massive success using his combination of strong-armed dictatorship along with building up a large middle class; he approached things from a Confucius standpoint, focused on the betterment of society, and he did not let politically incorrect ideas around the inherent inequality between different groups (Chinese vs. Malays, Muslims vs. Confucists, men vs. women, etc) get in the way of doing what it took to advance the interests of the nation as a whole.
Society works best in balance, and currently all we have is extreme egalitarian values, with no ability to argue that hierarchy and inequality is both okay and proper on its own terms, and you are not a “bad” person for acknowledging that; that society’s egalitarianism is not based in “reason” or “rationality” but rather a pure, intense religious belief dating back 2,000 years that has become unmoored from reality; that the goal should be to re-center and match society with reality as much as possible, and that to deny reality is only going to cause pain and suffering for both individuals and groups in the long term. There are characteristic differences between groups of people, between men and women, between races, between people of different sexual orientations, on the level of a bell curve; that to deny those differences is to inevitably result in assigning blame wrongfully to other groups, and that instituting even more measures to try to “correct” for it is just not going to work and will end up dragging society down to the lowest common denominator.
Tom Holland identifies the transvaluation of values argument but, perhaps correctly, does not step over the line; to argue even for a partial transvaluation of values could impact his quite successful writing career. In “Dominion” he skipped over World War 2 entirely; one can infer he did this entirely intentionally based on his statements in the above interview.
People ask what can be done to resist globohomo at this time. There is nothing outwardly that can be done on a political level; any populist revolution is guaranteed to fail, just as Trump’s did, due to Kynosargas’s accurate criticisms about the weaknesses of right-wing populism. It is a time for inward focus and education about the transformation of values that must occur if there is to be a hope for future change.
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1 Or see Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, section 51: “Christianity was not “national,” it was not based on race–it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core–the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is well–constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offense to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying: “And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised”: this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence triumphed.”
2 The Rothschild and ally central bank owners use egalitarianism as divide et impera tactics in order to increase their wealth, but the reason the Christian masses go along with it is because they have accepted the religious belief in equality as pushed by Paul. If they didn’t have that religious belief they would treat (for example) Jews as just another non-special sect among many like the Romans did, instead of at minimum the “former chosen people” who believe in half of their holy book and historically received special carve-out privileges as money lenders (Christians and Muslims were forbidden from money lending). Judaism was the only religion that Christians did not ban when they took over the Roman Empire. This strange dynamic continues today with Jews having a -40 favorability toward evangelicals while evangelicals are +39 toward Jews per polling.
3 He slid it in quietly mid-op ed: “It’s pretty interesting when you think about it. So this is a bill signing, affirming the legality – legalizing once again, gay marriage, which most people support in this country. Should people be able to get married if they love each other? Yeah, they should. That’s fine. Not that controversial a point at this stage.”
4 To be fair, there were a tremendous number of communist partisans behind enemy lines, and it was quite difficult to tell friend from foe. Leon Degrelle argues in his autobiography “The Eastern Front” that extremely harsh early Nazi policies in Eastern Europe were later made much more mild once they understood that the general population were not virulent Bolsheviks, but the general opinion had turned against them by that time.
As Julian studied philosophy and religion, his half-brother Gallus ruled the East as a tyrant. He and his wife Constantina, the sister of Constantius, were eager to amass a fortune, and they used blackmail, the sale of public offices, and confiscation of assets to get it. They were bloodthirsty and terrorized, raped and murdered the population over whom they ruled even as Gallus professed to be a serious believer in Christ (Constantina oddly became venerated as a Christian saint in the Middle Ages based on rumors that had nothing to do with the historical record).
However, a food shortage in Gallus’s territory grew worse and his attempts at price fixing failed. The population was on the verge of revolt. Constantius realized he had to recall Gallus or risk wider unrest, but having had much experience defeating threats to his rule – avoiding war with his co-Emperor brothers, murdering family members, then successfully destroying the attempted usurpation of Magnentius, Vetranio, and Silvanus – he proceeded cautiously. Constantina traveled to Constantius to try to avert civil war but she died on the way, severing the main link between the two relatives. Gallus was recalled by Constantius after taking measures to ensure he could not rebel and then executed.
Julian, fearful he would murdered next, joined a religious order at Nicomedia in an attempt to hide, but he was discovered, arrested, and then held for six months incommunicado at Como. The Grand Chamberlain eunuch Eusebius called for Julian’s execution; Constanius’s wife Euseiba argued that he was the last of their line and must be spared on that basis. He was ultimately spared in a close call and allowed to continue his studies at Athens.
When he reached Athens, Julian noticed the decline of Greece compared to ancient times:
As a race, [the Greeks] are much changed. They are no longer noble. They have been too often enslaved, and their blood mixed with that of barbarians. Yet I do not find them as sly and effeminate as certain Latin writers affect to. I think that the Old Roman tendency to look down on the Greeks is no more than a natural resentment of Greece’s continuing superiority in those things which are important: philosophy and art. All that is good in Rome today was Greek. I find Cicero disingenuous when on one page he acknowledges his debt to Plato and then on the next speaks with contempt of the Greek character. He seems unaware of his own contradictions…doubtless because they were a commonplace in his society.
As Julian looked at the eight hundred year old Painted Portico of the Battle of Marathon, he commented:
These young men and their slaves – yes, for the first time in history slaves fought beside their masters – together saved the world. More important, they fought of their own free will, unlike our soldiers, who are either conscripts or mercenaries. Even in times of peril, our people will not fight to protect their country. Money, not honor, is now the source of Roman power. When the money goes, the state will go. This is why Hellenism must be restored: to instill again in man that sense of his own worth which made civilization possible, and won the day at Marathon.
Depiction of the Battle of Marathon in the Painted Portico (reconstitution)
Julian then met with Prohaeresius, one of the leading rhetoricians and teachers of the era. Prohaeresius was cagey about his own beliefs, but he told Julian he would become Emperor based on the prophecy of an oracle. Using oracles to inquire about future Emperors was forbidden by law and punishable by death; it’s easy to see how such prophecy could undermine the authority of the current Emperor.
“Is it predicted?” I was as bold as he. I incriminated myself, hoping to prove to him my own good faith.
He nodded. “Not the day, not the year, merely the fact. But it will be tragedy.”
“For me? Or for the state?”
“No one knows. The oracle was not explicit.” He smiled. “They seldom are. I wonder why we put such faith in them….Now it my guess, Julian, that you mean to restore the worship of the old gods.”
My breath stopped. “You presume too much.” My voice shook despite a hardness of tone which would have done justice to Constantius himself. Sooner or later one learns the Caesarian trick: that abrupt shift in tone which is harsh reminder of the rod and axe we wield over all men.
“I hope that I do,” said the old man, serenely.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that. You are the master.”
He shook his head. “No, you are the master, or will be soon. I want only to be useful. To warn you that despite what your teacher Maximus may say, the Christians have won.”
“I don’t believe it!” Fiercely and tactlessly I reminded him that only a small part of the Roman population was actually Galilean….Most of the civilized world is neither Hellenist nor Galilean, but suspended in between. With good reason, a majority of the people hate the Galileans. Too many innocents have been slaughtered in their mindless doctrinal quarrels. I need only mention the murder of Bishop George at Alexandria to recall vividly to those who read this the savagery of that religion not only toward its enemies (whom they term “impious”) but also toward its own followers….
Like so many, [Prohaeresius] is in a limbo between Hellenism and the new death cult. Nor do I think he is merely playing it safe. He is truly puzzled. The old gods do seem to have failed us, and I have always accepted the possibility that they have withdrawn from human affairs, terrible as that is to contemplate. But mind has not failed us. Philosophy has not failed us. From Homer to Plato to Iamblichos the true gods continue to be defined in their many aspects and powers: multiplicity contained by the One, all emanating from truth. Or at Plotinus wrote: “Of its nature the soul loves God and longs to be at one with him.”….
“I see it differently. That is all. But try to be practical. The thing has taken hold. The Christians govern the world through Constantius. They have had almost thirty years of wealth and power. They will not surrender easily. You come too late, Julian. Of course if you were Constantine and this were forty years ago and we were pondering these same problems, then I might say to you: “Strike! Outlaw them! Rebuild the temples!” But now is not then. You are not Constantine. They have the world. The best one can hope to do is civilize them. That is why I teach. That is why I can never help you.”
Julian also met with the Hierophant of Greece when he was in Athens, who was the holiest of men and the custodian and interpreter of the mysteries of Eleusis which went back at least 2,000 years or more. Julian told him he wanted to be initiated into all the mysteries: the lesser, the greater, and the highest. He told the Hierophant that it was his hope to support Hellenism in its war with the Galileans.
[The Hierophant] was abrupt. “It is too late,” he said, echoing Prohaeresius. “Nothing you can do will change what is about to happen.”
I was not expecting such a response. “Do you know the future?”
“I am Hierophant,” he said simply. “The last Hierophant of Greece. I know many things, all tragic.”
I refused to accept this. “But how can you be the last? Why, for centuries…”
“Prince, these things are written at the beginning. No one may tamper with fate. When I die, I shall be succeeded not by a member of our family but by a priest from another sect. He will be in name, but not in fact, the final Hierophant. Then the temple at Eleusis will be destroyed – all the temples in all of Greece will be destroyed. The barbarians will come. The Christians will prevail. Darkness will fall.”
“Forever?”
“Who can say? The goddess has shown me no more than what I have told you. With me, the true line ends. With the next Hierophant, the mysteries themselves will end….Whether you are Emperor or not, Eleusis will be in ruins before the century is done.”
I looked at him closely…despite his terrible conviction, this small fat man with his protuberant eyes and fat hands was perfectly composed. I have never known such self-containment, even in Constantius.
“I refuse to believe,” I said at last, “that there is nothing we can do.”
He shrugged. “We shall go on as long as we can, as we always have.” He looked at me solemnly. “You must remember that because the mysteries come to an end makes them no less true. Those who were initiated will at least be fortunate in the underworld. Of course one pities those who come after us. But what is to be must be….I shall instruct you myself. We shall need several hours a day. Come to my house tonight.” With a small bow he withdrew.
Julian was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and would be the last Roman emperor to experience it. Priscus wrote years later that “The Hierophant liked [Julian] but thought he was doomed, or so he told me years later. The Hierophant was an interesting man….he realized with extraordinary clarity that our old world was ended. There were times I think he took pleasure in knowing he was the last of a line that extended back two thousand years. Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don’t in the least mind being last.”
The Return of Persephone – Frederic LeightonHenryk Siemiradzki, “Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis”
Julian was then raised up by Constantius to be Caesar of Gaul (modern day France); again, it was a close call. Eusebia advocated on his behalf whereas the eunuch Eusebius wanted him put to death. Constantius explained the reason for rising Julian up:
“The world is too big for one person to govern it.” My heart beast faster for I knew now what was to come. “I cannot be everywhere. Yet the imperial power must be everywhere. Things have a habit of going wrong all at once. As soon as the German tribes get loose in the north, the Persians attack in the south. At times I think they must plan it. If I march to the East, I’m immediately threatened in the West. If one general rises up against me, then I must deal with at least two more traitors at the same time. The empire is big. Distances are great. Our enemies many.”
Constantius then married Julian to his ugly sister Helena who was a decade older and who looked like a man. “Helena was a good woman but our moments of intimacy were rare, unsatisfactory, and somewhat pathetic, for I did want to please her. It was never pleasant, making love to a bust of Constantine.” Helena was ultimately pregnant twice, and even though Eusebia had saved Julian’s life, she had Helena’s two pregnancies secretly terminated (one via medicine resulting in miscarriage, one by having the midwife cut the umbilical cord of the newborn too deep) out of worry it would result in Constantius divorcing her and finding another wife who could have children. Nasty business, imperial succession…
Julian was raised up to Caesar on November 6, 355, then sent to Gaul to battle the roaming German bands despite never having a day of combat experience or training. Constantius also tried to undermine him at every turn, subjecting him to the authority of others, cutting his funds, reducing his troops to a minimum, and having him constantly spied on. “Constantius sent me here to die. That’s why I was given no army,” he complained. Julian turned out to be an excellent soldier and general, though, and he ended up evicting the Germans from Gaul and won a famous battle at the Battle of Strasbourg, which earned Constantius’s envy and jealousy.
Eusabia, Julian’s protector in the court, then died. Constantius, who was at war with King Sapor of Persia (but who refused to take action in such war), ordered Julian to send most of his troops, including his best troops, to Constantius. This created a major dilemma for Julian: he had promised his Gallic troops that they would not be sent outside of Gaul, and he also would not have enough troops to defend Gaul from the Germans if he sent the troops away. Furthermore, Julian had heard that one of Constantius’s generals who hated Julian would be given control of Gaul as soon as Julian sent out the troops. Was it another set-up to overthrow Julian like Constantius overthrew Gallus?
Julian’s Gallic troops, furious at the thought of being sent abroad, forced his hand and proclaimed him Emperor; if he did not accept he could be torn to pieces by the mob. His wife/Constantius’s sister told him to accept; she was still furious over Eusebia’s murder of her two children. Julian had great reluctance, though: Constantius had a much bigger army and had much experience crushing usurpers.
The final factor in favor was a dream Julian had as he slept, still uncertain:
I dreamed and, as often happens, I found in dreaming what I must do awake. I was seated in my consular chair, quite alone, when a figure appeared to me, dressed as the guardian spirit of the state, so often depicted in the old Republic. He spoke to me. “I have watched you for a long time, Julian. And for a long time I have wished to raise you even higher than you are now. But each time I have tried, I have been rebuffed. Now I must warn you. If you turn me away again, when so many men’s voices are raised in agreement with me, I shall leave you as you are. But remember this, if I go now, I shall never return.”
Julian awoke in a cold sweat. He made up his mind and accepted the title of Emperor from the troops.
Julian proclaimed Emperor.
Julian was mild in his written communication with Constantius and signed his letters to him as Caesar and not Emperor. According to Priscus, “Julian was determined to be merciful [to Constantius’s allies]. He saw himself in the line of Marcus Aurelius. Actually, he was greater than that self-consciously good man. For one thing, he had a harder task than his predecessor. Julian came at the end of a world, not at its zenith. That is important, isn’t it…? We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose.” Constantius bribed his way out of the Persia war and turned his attention to Julian.
Julian had been consulting the oracles and sacred books and making sacrifices to the Gods; all signs agreed that he would prevail and that Constantius would fall. “Yet I did not neglect the practical. Every prophecy is always open to interpretation and if it turns out that its meaning was other than what one thought, it is not the fault of the gods but of us who have misinterpreted their signs. Cicero has written well on this. I particularly credit dreams, agreeing with Aristotle that important messages from heaven are often sent to men as they sleep.” The guardian deity of Rome came to Julian in another dream and spoke very plainly, in verse, that he would win, and a friendly priest consulted the Sibylline books at Julian’s request and according to the secret report Julian would be the next Emperor with a stormy but long reign (the latter part of which turned out to be wrong, assuming it wasn’t a lie to placate Julian).
Julian moved against Constantius into Illyricum, but Constantius bribed two of his legions to switch loyalties at a key location. Constantius’s army was three times the size of Julian’s and moving toward him. Julian was in despair, but then the news came:
Constantius was dead.
Constantius had died of a fever. There were many omens he had experienced – waking dreams and nightmares, among other signs (such as Constantius seeing a headless man facing west strung up on the road they traveled on) that he was about to lose power and die. “Shortly afterwards, when we came to Antioch, the Emperor told Eusebius that he had a sense that something which had always been with him was gone.” “The Spirit of Rome. These are the signs,” Julian said.
Perhaps Constantinus was poisoned. Regardless, he proclaimed Julian the legitimate emperor in his last will and testament as the last surviving member of his bloodline. Julian was now sole and legitimate Emperor of Rome.
Julian’s Pro-Hellenic Reforms as Emperor
As Emperor Julian made a host of changes, some of which are as follows:
He immediately made worship of the old gods legal and acceptable.
He instituted treason trials against some of his enemies, such as the eunuch Eusebius who was executed.
He fired the imperial eunuchs and much of the imperial staffwho were dramatically overpaid.
He directed funds for rebuilding and restoration of the old temples which were in extreme disrepair and neglect.
He removed the tax exemption from “Galilean” (his term for Christian) priests, and insisted that all lands and buildings which had been seized by the Galileans be restored (Constantinople contained a tremendous amount of items looted by the Christians from Hellenist temples and properties).
He declared religious freedom to all, which set the Arians and Athanasians against each other again.
He issued another edict which removed the right of the bishops to use public transport at the state’s expense.
Because one of Christianity’s major advantages over Hellenism was its centralized system of regional Bishops, Julian planned to copy that model and institute similar centralization for Hellenism: “I suggest we fight them on their own ground. I plan a world priesthood, governed by the Roman Pontifex Maximus. We shall divide the world into administrative units, the way the Galileans have done, and each diocese will have its own hierarchy of priests under a single high priest, responsible to me.”
Julian also wanted to put a stop to the Christian’s theft of Hellenic rites and holy days by preventing their teaching Latin instead of Greek to students. Among other things this meant that most of the teachers in the schools were Christians. Julian’s solution was to abolish the Latin curriculum and make the schools all teach Greek again, forbidding Christians from teaching.
He removed all Galileans from the Scholarian Guard and refused to allow any Galilean to be governor of a province.
He removed the cross from all military and civic insignia, as well as from the coins he minted, substituting instead images of the gods.
He also took direct charge of the army with his loyal Mithraic Gallic troops at its core, which allowed him to dominate the army.
He exiled noted Christian leader Athanasius, who when told of his exile responded famously, “It is a little cloud which will soon pass.”
He also wanted to institute Hellenic almsgiving to compete with Christian almsgiving:
One reason why the Galileans grow ever more powerful and dangerous to us is their continual assimilation of our rites and holy days. Since they rightly regard Mithraism as their chief rival, they have for some years now been taking over various aspects of the Mithraic rite and incorporating them into their own ceremonies. Some critics believe that the gradual absorption of our forms and prayers is fairly recent. But I date it from the very beginning. In at least one of the biographies of the Galileans there is a strange anecdote which his followers are never able to explain (and they are usually nothing if not ingenious at making sense of nonsense). The Galilean goes to a fig tree to pick its fruit. But as it is not the season for bearing, the tree was barren. In a fit of temper, the Galilean blasts the tree with magic, killing it. Now the fig tree is sacred to Mithras: as a youth, it was his home, his source of food and clothing. I suggest that the apologist who wrote that passage in the first century did so deliberately, inventing it or recording it, no matter which, as a sign that the Galilean would destroy the worship of Mithras as easily as he had destroyed the sacred tree….
I set about reorganizing…no, organizing Hellenism. The Galileans have received much credit for giving charity to anyone who asks for it. We are now doing the same. Their priests impress the ignorant with their so-called holy lives. I now insist that our priests be truly holy. I have given them full instructions on how to comport themselves in public and private.”
One may note that Julian’s attempts to centralize Hellenism and provide almsgiving to compete with Christianity were still (1) steps along the route toward ever-increasing centralization, as on a historical timeline centralization always beats decentralization; and (2) steps toward Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values toward a focus on the poor and destitute, which was simply not a focus under a system of pure warrior values. Historian Tom Holland believes Christianity impacted Julian’s value system more than he cared to acknowledge publicly or even probably to himself.1
Julian presiding at a conference of sectarians, Edward Armitage, 1875
Priscus and Libanius both thought that Julian didn’t go hard enough against the Christians, that Julian preferred to debate and negotiate with them instead of use violence: “In a way, it was a pity that he was not a Tiberius, or even a Diocletian. Had he turned butcher, he might have got his way…an emperor whose sole intent is their destruction might succeed through violence, especially if he were at the same time creating an attractive alternate religion. But Julian had made up his mind that he would be a true philosopher. He would win through argument and example. That was his mistake. One has only to examine what the Christians believe to realize that reason was not their strong point.”
Julian’s Downfall
The magician Maximus told Julian that he had spoken to Cybele, the Great Mother, who told him that “One who is now with us shall be with him until he reaches the end of the earth and finishes the work which that spirit began, for our glory….Alexander! You are to finish his work…[In Persia] and India and all that lies to the farthest east…You are Alexander.” Priscus stated if he had known the madness that Maximus was whispering in Julian’s ears then he would have loudly objected, but Julian kept this close to his chest.
Meanwhile Julian sent Oribasius to Delphi to consult the Oracle, which was in a very sad state. “The works of art which had one decorated the numerous shrines are all gone. Constantine alone stole 2700 statues. There is no sight quite so forlorn as acres of empty pedestals. The town was deserted except for a few tattered Cynics.” The Oracle was still functional but was very old with no replacement in sight. After performing the ritual, the Oracle said, “Tell the King: on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water-springs that spoke are still. Nothing is left the god, no roof, no shelter, and in his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.” A terrible prediction that Julian would fail in his quest.
Priscus thought the Oracle was in the pay of the Christians knowing what importance Julian set by oracles, and that if the priestess was genuine she would have done everything possible to see that Delphi was restored. But the Oracle turned out to be correct…the Hierophant of Greece, too, who hinted that Julian would fail.
War with Persia
Julian decided on war with Persia. He traveled to Antioch as he was gathering his army and sacrificed at the temple of Zeus; he had performed the ritual slaughter of the bull “ten thousand times” before and there was little he did not know about auguries. But it was not what he wanted to see: the bull stumbled on the way to the alter, which was a bad omen. Then Julian killed the bull and took out the liver for examination:
The omen was appalling. Parts of the liver were dry with disease. I examined it carefully. In the “house of war” and in the “house of love” death was the omen. I did not dare look at Maximus. But I knew he had seen what I had seen. Entirely by rote, I continued the ceremony, held the sacrifice aloft to Zeus, studied the entrails with Maximus, repeated the old formulas. Then I went inside to complete the ceremonies.
To my horror the temple was crowded with sightseers; worse, they applauded as I entered. I stopped dead in my tracks at this impiety and said, “This is a temple not a theatre!” I had now made a complete hash out of the ceremony. If even one word is misplaced in a prayer, the entire ritual must begin again from the beginning. By speaking to the crowd, I had broken the chain that links the Pontifex Maximus with the gods. Cursing under my breath, I gave orders to clear the temple, and to begin again. The second bull – undrugged – tried to bolt just as I raised the knife, again the worst of omens.”
Julian ordered the Jewish temple at Jerusalem rebuilt, because “the Nazarene predicted that the temple of the Jews would be forever destroyed…if I rebuild it, the Nazarene will be proved a false prophet.” The rebuild started but the Christians immediately sabotaged it; Julian planned to restart work but was not able to do so before he died. Julian ordered the bones of the Christian Babylas removed from its shrine thinking it polluted the land of sacred Apollo; then temple of Apollo was burned to the ground in response, a sacrilege and a direct affront to his sovereignty.
A famine struck the land, and Julian responded to the stress by going mad with animal sacrifice:
“On one day at Daphne, he sacrificed a thousand white birds, at heaven knows what expense! Then a hundred bulls were sacrificed to Zeus. Later, four hundred cows to Cybele. That was a particularly scandalous occasion….everyone was shocked at the ritual scourging of a hundred youths by the priestesses….the ultimate rites were a confused obscenity. But Julian grimly persisted, on the ground that no matter how alarming some of these rites may appear to us, each is part of our race’s constant attempt to placate the gods. Every ancient ceremony has its own inner logic, and efficacy. The only fault I find with Julian is that he was in too great a hurry. He wanted everything restored at once. We were to return to the age of Augustus in a matter of months. Given years, I am sure he could have re-established the old religions.”
According to Priscus, “I am sure that if the gods (who probably don’t exist) really wanted to speak to us, they could find a better messenger than the liver of a bull or the collapse of an old priest during a ceremony. But Julian was an absolute madman on this subject.”
Julian received a vision that his life was in danger of a violent end, and there was public rumors that Julian’s days were numbered due to the famine and his religious beliefs. Ten Christians were arrested for plotting Julian’s murder (which was discovered only one day before they were going to kill him) and were executed. Then there was an earthquake at Nicomedia, which Julian read as a mixed omen, and the Sibylline books had a clear message for Julian: do not go beyond the boundaries of the empire this year.
Libanius had good advice for Julian: “I only wish that you would put off going [to war] until next year. You have set in motion a hundred reforms. Now you must see to it that they take effect. Otherwise, the Galileans will undo everything the moment you are out of sight. You cannot control them from the field or even from the ruins of Ctesiphon.” Julian acknowledged the advise but thought that he would be able to push through better reforms if he had the glory from a Persian victory; he was obsessed with Maximus’s prediction that Julian would be greater than Alexander.
Julian went to war against the Persian King Sapor. Of his soldiers half were loyal Gallic Hellenists and half were potentially disloyal Christians. His strategy was brilliant and he took city after city, town after town, then defeated Sapor at the gates of the Persian capital, but his general (who was Christian) did not pursue the fleeing Persian troops into the open city. Sapor proposed a generous peace on favorable terms to Rome, but Julian did not accept it because of his madness of Alexanderian glory swimming in his head. Instead, he turned it down quietly (he did not tell his troops about the offer, who would have rebelled if they had known) and then in complete madness burned his ships so his troops would have no recourse other than continue to fight.
Seeing this madness, Sapor responded by setting fire to all farmland in all directions, which deprived Julian’s troops of food to forage. Then reinforcements to Julian did not arrive as expected (because they had been bought off by the Persians). Julian did not have siege engines to take the capital, so he was forced to retreat in disgrace.
The route of Julian’s failed campaign against the Persians. Note how his army desperately turned around after failing to conquer Ctesiphon, the Persian capital.
On the route back Julian was killed, likely by one of his Christian soldiers. Maximus said the locals called the place where Julian fell Phrygia, fulfilling the prophecy about where he would fall. The extent to which his statement was true is unknown.
There had been repeated rumors of attempts on Julian’s life during the campaign, and he was ambushed by Persians at one point early on in a manner where it looked like they knew in advance he would be there. Julian’s murder during the Roman retreat was made to look like a death caused by the pursuing Persians because of fear of retribution by Julian’s loyal Gallic troops; no Persian ever claimed the bounty on Julian’s head, and Julian was killed by a Roman spear.
The death of Julian.
Julian had experienced signs that disaster was coming; inspection of the liver of another bull he sacrificed indicated disaster. Julian threw down the sacrificial knife in response and shouted to the sky in frustration, “Never again will I sacrifice to you!” The omens continued to be bad and the auguries confused. Then the gods were silent. “I prayed more than an hour to Helios. I looked straight at him until I was blind. Nothing. I have offended. But how? I cannot believe that my anger at the war god would turn all heaven against me. Who else will do their work?” Julian had a dream that the Spirit of Rome had deserted him, and when he woke up he saw a star fall in the west, a sign of a falling Emperor.
In Vidal’s novel Julian’s assistant broke the straps of Julian’s armor (Julian had died without wearing any, responding to a sudden Persian attack) and admitted to murdering Julian. This former assistant, Callistus, later become quite rich, rewarded by the other Christian conspirators for his deed. Bizarrely, Callistus had written a very affectionate “Ode to Julian” after Julian’s death. He was asked, “How could you write such an affectionate work about the man you murdered?” Callistus was perfect in his astonishment. “But I admired him tremendously! He was always kind to me. Every word I wrote about him was from the heart. After all, I am a good Christian, or try to be. Every day I pray for his soul!”
Julian in Context
Future Emperors were all neutral or pro-Christian, and Julian’s death spelled the end of attempts to revive Hellenism.
Less than fifty years after Constantine the death penalty was announced for any who dared to sacrifice. In AD 399 the Christian emperor Theodosius announced that “if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”2In AD 423, the Christian government announced that any Hellenists who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently and ominously: “We now believe that there are none.”3Damascius, who was the last scholarch of the neoplatonic Athenian school, fled to Persia with seven followers under fear of death from the Christians, but life there was unbearable and he and his followers eventually returned where they faded into obscurity. For more information tracing the Christian destruction of the Hellenist world post-Constantine, see here.
The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1510), fresco at the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.
Barbaric Disciple states, “What God is going to help people like this? I like the old adage, “God helps those who help themselves.” You have to prove your worth to The Gods. Make agreements with them. Show your superiority and why you should be loved by The Gods.” Yet Julian did all of this; he was fanatical in his devotion to them, he sacrificed so much to them, he reopened their temples, he read all the signs, and while the Gods protected him from Constantius and lifted him up to Emperor, they promptly abandoned him within a couple years and he was assassinated likely by a Christian soldier. If the Gods were real and had power, why would they abandon their most ardent follower in the last chance they had to remain relevant for thousands of years? The well-known fickleness of bickering Gods doesn’t explain it.
Ultimately Julian came too late — the cult of Christianity had metastasized by the time of his reign and he was always likely going to fail, with or without the help from the Gods. It’s an analysis of societal trends, not appeals to Gods that resulted in Christianity’s victory. Christianity had certain memetic improvements regarding centralization and almsgiving, as well as its Heaven-vs-Hell carrot-and-stick that Hellenism couldn’t compete with as a motivating factor (everyone went to Hades) that gave it massive advantages over Hellenism and which is why Julian tried to copy them. As Prohaeresius said, perhaps if Julian had come a couple decades earlier before the trends were so firmly established he could have won. After all, a population naturally follow its leaders (as argues) which is why Constantine had so much success in spreading Christianity in the first place.
But that also raises questions about the woke religion today and how metastasized it is. Trump couldn’t even put a small dent in the woke religion. Personally I think it’s likely too late and the end result of currenttrends is probably wokeness destroying western civilization and resulting in white genocide, followed by the potential total collapse of humanity itself. Regardless, one should try to do what one can to avoid this fate.
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Behind the selfless ascetics of Julian’s fantasies there lurked an altogether less sober reality: priests whose enthusiasms had run not to charity, but to dancing, and cross-dressing, and self-castration. The gods cared nothing for the poor. To think otherwise was ‘airhead talk’. When Julian, writing to the high priest of Galatia, quoted Homer on the laws of hospitality, and how even beggars might appeal to them, he was merely drawing attention to the scale of his delusion. The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance. Certainly, there was little in the character of the gods whom Julian so adored, or in the teachings of the philosophers whom he so admired, to justify any assumption that the poor, just by virtue of their poverty, had a right to aid. The young emperor, sincere though he was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.
‘How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.’ Julian could not but be painfully aware of this. The roots of Christian charity ran deep. The apostles, obedient to Jewish tradition as well as to the teachings of their master, had laid it as a solemn charge upon new churches always ‘to remember the poor’. Generation after generation, Christians had held true to this injunction. Every week, in churches across the Roman world, collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked, and the sick had been raised. Over time, as congregations swelled, and ever more of the wealthy were brought to baptism, the funds available for poor relief had grown as well. Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge. Elaborate and well-organised, these had progressively embedded themselves within the great cities of the Mediterranean. Constantine, by recruiting bishops to his purposes, had also recruited the networks of charity of which they served as the principal patrons. Julian, clear-sighted in his loathing of the Galileans, understood this very well. Trains of clients, in the Roman world, had always been an index of power – and bishops, by that measure, were grown very powerful indeed. The wealthy, men who in previous generations might have boosted their status by endowing their cities with theatres, or temples, or bath-houses, had begun to find in the Church a new vent for their ambitions. This was why Julian, in a quixotic attempt to endow the worship of the ancient gods with a similar appeal, had installed a high priest over Galatia, and urged his subordinates to practise poor relief. Christians did not merely inspire in Julian a profound contempt; they filled him with envy as well.
Emperor Julian, known colloquially as “The Apostate” for being the last Hellenist1 emperor and for his vigorous attempts to reinvigorate the polytheistic Gods of the ancient world, is one of history’s most interesting figures. Despite serving as Emperor for only two years during a period in which the Roman Empire was already in steep decline (361-363 AD), he served as an outsized inspiration in the centuries thereafter for his ill-fated attempt to restore Hellenism during Christianity’s ascendancy. In the preface to his incredible novel “Julian”, Gore Vidal states:
“Julian has always been something on an underground hero in Europe. His attempt to stop Christianity and revive Hellenism exerts still a romantic appeal, and he crops up in odd places, particularly during the Renaissance and again in the nineteenth century. Two such unlikely authors as Lorenzo de’ Medici and Henrik Ibsen wrote plays about him. But aside from the unique adventure of Julian’s life, what continues to fascinate is the fourth century itself. During the fifty years between the accession of Julian’s uncle Constantine the Great and Julian’s death at thirty-two, Christianity was established. For better or worse, we are today very much the result of what they were then.”
What Nietzsche described as the transvaluation of values from Roman warrior values of strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility to Christian priestly values of subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering and self-hatred – values ubiquitous in the modern West – were solidified in the fourth century. Julian served as the desperate, final gasp of a dying Hellenism trying to resist the forces which had been set in motion centuries before by Paul. Julian’s struggle holds a romantic appeal because the odds of him prevailing in his attempt were so low, because of his unique blend of warrior and scholar attributes, and because he was the last attempt at resisting Christian slave morality revolution until a failed attempt in the 20th century.2
Not many people know the details of Julian’s life, so I thought I would offer an overview of it. I will quote liberally herein from Vidal’s superbly researched novel. Vidal, although a wealthy patrician (as opposed to a plebian or “prole” i.e. proletariat), homosexual3, and atheist who had a bone to pick with Christianity, was a serious student of history, making extensive use of contemporary sources. Per Vidal, Julian’s “life is remarkably well documented. Three volumes of his letters and essays survive while such acquaintances as Libanius and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus wrote vivid accounts of him. Though I have written a novel, not a history, I have tried to stay with the facts.”4 He eloquently describes a dying ancient world and the birth of a new Christian one, and his novel was written for a mass audience when average IQs were twenty points higher than they are today.5
The purpose of this essay is three-fold:
To provide clarity on the transvaluation of values from Hellenism to Christianity which affects us to this day;
To bring to life, in a small way, a very alien way of living: one focused on animal sacrifice and prayer before multiple Gods, all seen as aspects of the One; on dream interpretation, prophecy and signs from the Gods, often ambiguous and open to interpretation, regularly colored by ego and hidden objectives; and
To demonstrate that when cultural forces reach certain levels, they are extremely difficult to reverse even if one gives a superhuman effort. There are parallels with Donald Trump, who tried to revert America by a couple of decades against the tides of wokeness (supercharged by the Rothschild-owned central banks) swamping and destroying white western civilization. Trump was no Julian, though, and had the heart and soul of a small-minded merchant.
As a caveat, there’s a bit of a feeling of hesitation in describing Julian’s life. The reason for this hesitation is because hyper crypto-Christians in the modern era – secularists, leftists, communists, atheists – have saturated society from top to bottom with attacking Christianity from an even more leftist pro-egalitarian perspective, so it feels on the surface like piling on and joining in their attacks. However, there is little in common between Julian’s life as a reaction to restore Hellenism with those of modern leftists who view the world through a prism of nihilism, materialism and ressentiment.
With that said, let’s begin.
Historical Background
The Roman empire in the fourth century was deep into its process of conversion to Christianity. In the below time-lapsed video you can follow its spread year-by-year since the time of Christ. One can see the enormous changes that occurred when Constantine I “The Great”6 converted in 312AD supposedly after a vision he had at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and imposed the religion throughout the empire7:
Compare the religion’s spread with the borders of the Roman Empire itself in the 4th century:
A little over ten years after the newly Christian Constantine took power, laws began to be passed restricting “the pollutions of idolatry.” During his reign it was decreed that “no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practice divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all.” Under Constantine’s son Constantius II it was ordered that the Hellenist temples were to be closed. In AD 356 it became illegal on pain of death to worship images. “Pagans” began to be described as “madmen” whose beliefs must be “completely eradicated.”8
According to historian Edward J. Watts in “The Final Pagan Generation”,
The ‘final pagan generation’…is made up of the last group of elite Romans…who were born into a world in which most people believed that the pagan public religious order of the past few millennia would continue indefinitely. They were the last Romans to grow up in a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority. This critical failure of imagination is completely understandable. At the beginning of the second decade of the fourth century there had never been a Christian emperor, and the childhood and early adolescence of members of this generation living in the East coincided with moments when the resources of the Roman state were devoted to the suppression of Christianity. The longest-lived of this group died in an empire that would never again see a non-Christian sovereign, and that no longer financially supported the public sacrifices, temples, and festivals that had dominated Roman life in their youth. They lived through a time of dramatic change that they could neither anticipate nor fully understand as it was unfolding.9
There are easy parallels between this final “pagan’“ generation and the wokeness swamping the West today.
It was into this environment where Julian was born.
Julian’s Early Life as a Christian
Julian was born in 331 into the family of the reigning emperor Constantine I. His father was Constantine’s younger half-brother, and his mother was a daughter of a high-ranking bureaucrat who died shortly after his birth.
Constantine’s death set off a power struggle among his sons which was ultimately won by Constantius II, Julian’s cousin. To cement his rule Constantius ordered the murder of Julian’s father and older brother, an uncle, and several cousins, a dozen murders in all, sparing Julian and his half-brother Gallus due to their youth. Constantius jointly ruled the empire with his two siblings until they both suffered untimely ends, leaving him as sole emperor.
Julian grew up under armed guard, always wondering if Constantius was going to change his mind and have him and Gallus executed. Constantius’s Christian beliefs stood in stark contrast to his murderous actions, and planted the first seeds of what became Julian’s antagonism against the religion even as he was rigorously educated in it:
I must have been staring too obviously at the ceiling, for the Bishop [Eusebius] suddenly asked me, “What is the most important of our Lord’s teachings?”
Without thinking, I said, “Thou shalt not kill.” I then rapidly quoted every relevant text from the new testament (much of which I knew by heart) and all that I could remember from the old. The Bishop had not expected this response. But he nodded appreciatively. “You have quoted well. But why do you think this commandment the most important?”
“Because had it been obeyed my father would be alive.” I startled myself with the quickness of my own retort.
The Bishop’s pale face was even ashier than usual. “Why do you say this?”
“Because it’s true. The Emperor killed my father. Everybody knows that. And I suppose he shall kill Gallus and me, too, when he gets around to it.” Boldness, once begun, is hard to check.
“The Emperor is a holy man,” said the Bishop severely. “All the world admires his piety, his war against heresy, his support of the true faith.”
This made me even more reckless. “Then if he is such a good Christian how could he kill so many members of his own family? After all, isn’t it written in Matthew and again in Luke that…”
“You little fool!” The Bishop was furious. “Who has been telling you these things? [Your tutor] Mardonius?
I had sense enough to protect my tutor. “No, Bishop. But people talk about everything in front of us. I suppose they think we don’t understand. Anyway it’s all true, isn’t it?”
The Bishop had regained his composure. His answer was slow and grim. “All that you need to know is that your cousin, the Emperor, is a devout and good man, and never forget that you are at his mercy.” The Bishop then made me recite for four hours, as punishment for impudence. But the lesson I learned was not the one intended. All that I understood was that Constantius was a devout Christian. Yet he had killed his own flesh and blood. Therefore, if he could be both a good Christian and a murderer, then there was something wrong with his religion. Needless to say, I no longer blame Constantius’s faith for his misdeeds, any more than Hellenism should be held responsible for my shortcomings! Yet for a child this sort of harsh contradiction is disturbing, and not easily forgotten.
Julian’s faith in Christianity was further shaken by the Arian crisis, where Christians murdered each other en masse in a dispute over the Nicene Creed regarding whether Christ was of the same substance (Homoousion), or of a similar substance (Anomoeanism) to God. In a walk around the city with Gallus and their tutor Mardonius, they watched two old men get beaten up by a dozen monks armed with sticks who shouted all the while, “Heretic! Heretic!”
“But aren’t they all Christians?” I asked. “Don’t they believe in Jesus and the gospels?”
“No!” said Gallus.
“Yes,” said Mardonius. “They are Christians, too. But they are in error.”
Even as a child I had a reasonably logical mind. “But if they are Christians, like us, then we must not fight them but turn the other cheek, and certainly nobody must kill anybody, because Jesus tells us that…”
“I’m afraid it is not as simple as all that,” said Mardonius. But of course it was. Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.
In a culture that was still somewhat polytheistic and rooted in a tremendously long history of religious tolerance, Hellenists were astonished at how narrow-minded and intolerant the Christians were. To Christians Jesus was the way, the truth and the light, and every other religion along with the Christians who believed the wrong doctrines were not merely wrong but plunged its followers into a demonic darkness which risked eternal damnation. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.10
The First Council of Nicaea, with Arius depicted beneath the feet of emperor Constantine the Great and the bishops
At the same time young Julian was drawn to learning about the old Gods:
Some months later when Mardonius and I were alone together in the palace gardens overlooking the Bosphorus, I questioned him about the old religion. I began slyly: was everything Homer wrote true?
“Of course! Every word!”
“Then Zeus and Apollo and all the other gods must exist, because he says they do. And if they are real, then what became of them? Did Jesus destroy them?”
Poor Mardonius! He was a devoted classicist. He was also a Galilean. Like so many in those days, he was hopelessly divided. But he had his answer ready. “You must remember that Christ was not born when Homer lived. Wise as Homer was, there was no way for him to know the ultimate truth that we know. So he was forced to deal with the gods the people had always believed in…”
“False gods, according to Jesus, so if they’re false then what Homer writes about them can’t be true.”
“Yet like all things, those gods are manifestations of the true.” Mardonius shifted his ground. “Homer believed much as we believe. He worshipped the One God, the single principle of the universe. And I suspect he was aware that the One God can take many forms, and that the gods of Olympus are among them. After all, to this day God has many names because we have many languages and traditions, yet he is always the same.”
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemusdepicting a scene from Homer’s Odyssey, showing Odysseus (Ulysses) standing on his ship deriding Polyphemus, one of the cyclopes he has recently blinded, who is disguised behind one of the mountains.
As Julian and Gallus grew they continued to fear that they would be executed by Constantius, but Constantius and his wife Eusebia were unable to have children (the rumor was it was a curse from the Gods because he killed so many of his family members) and they were kept alive because they were the last of the family line.
Although he continued to be schooled in Arianism, Julian preferred philosophy to religion and he was introduced to the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, who wrote the famous work “Against the Christians” which was later censored and every copy burnt (Julian would later copy him with his own “Against the Galileans”), and became close personal friends with the physician Oribasius.
Eventually Constantius allowed Julian to study philosophy in Constantinople, separating from Gallus. Constantius’s nefarious Grand Chamberlain Eusebius studied Julian carefully and concluded he was harmless: “At seventeen I was the worst sort of Sophist. This probably saved my life. I bored Eusebius profoundly and we never fear those who bore us. By definition, a bore is predictable. If you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him. I am sure that in that one interview I inadvertently saved my life.”
Julian’s Conversion to Mithraism
In January 350 Julian received permission to move to Pergamon to stay with Oribasius, whose friendship with Julian was a well-kept secret. Oribasius then brought Julian to see Sosipatra, a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic:
When we arrived at her house, Sosipatra came straight to me, knowing exactly who I was without being told. “Most noble Julian, welcome to our house. And you too, Ecebolius [Julian’s guard and instructor]. Oribasius, your father sends you greetings.”
Oribasius looked alarmed, as well he might: his father had been dead three months. But Sosipatra was serious. “I spoke to him just now. He is well. He stands within the third arc of Helios, at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to the light. He advises you to sell the farm in Galatria. Not the one with the cedar grove. The other. With the stone house. Come in, most noble prince. You went to see Aedesius today but his wife turned you away. Nevertheless, my old friend will see you in a few days. He is sick at the moment but he will recover. He has four more years of life. A holy, good man.”
Priscus and Libanius, reading Julian’s journal retrospectively, had differing takes on Sosipatra: Priscus thought she was a boring, tedious, and a monster, but “a remarkable magician. Even I came close to believing in her spells and predictions. She also had a sense of drama which was most exciting. Julian was completely taken in by her, and I date his fatal attraction to this sort of thing from that dinner party”, while Libanius thought she talked too much. Julian’s meeting with Sosipatra continued:
When the sons had withdrawn, Sosipatra sent for a tripod and incense. “And now you will want to know what the gods advise you to do. Where to go. With whom to study.” She gave me a dazzling smile.
I blurted out, “I want to study here, with you.” But she shook her head, to Ecebolius’s relief. “I know my own future and a prince is no part of it. I wish it were otherwise,” she added softly, and I fell in love with her on the spot, as so many students had done before me.
Sosipatra lit the incense. She shut her eyes. She whispered a prayer. Then in a low voice she implored the Great Goddess to speak to us. Smoke filled the room. All things grew vague and indistinct. My head began to ache. Suddenly in a loud voice not her own, Sosipatra said, “Julian!”
I looked at her closely. Her eyes were half open but only the whites showed: she slept while the spirit possessed her. “You are loved by us beyond any man alive.” That was puzzling. “Us” must mean the gods. But why should they love a Galilean who doubted their existence? Of course I had also begun to question the divinity of the Nazarene, which made me neither Hellenist nor Galilean, neither believer nor atheist. I was suspended somewhere between, waiting for a sign. Could this be it?
“You will rebuild our temples. You will cause the smoke of a thousand sacrifices to rise from a thousand altars. You shall be our servant and all men shall be your servants, as toke of our love.”
Ecebolius stirred nervously. “We must not listen to this,” he murmured.
The voice continued serenely. “The way is dangerous. But we shall protect you, as we have protected you from the hour of your birth. Earthly glory shall be yours. A and death when it comes in far Phrygia, by enemy steel, will be a hero’s death, without painful lingering. Then you shall be with us forever, close to the One from whom all light flows, to whom all light returns. Oh, Julian, dear to us…Evil!” The voice changed entirely. It became harsh. “Foul and profane! We bring you defeat. Despair. The Phrygian death is yours. But the tormented soul is ours forever, far from light!”
Sosipatra screamed. She began to writhe in her chair; her hands clutched at her throat as though to loosen some invisible bond. Words tumbled disjointedly from her mouth. She was a battle-ground between warring spirits. But at last the good prevailed, and she became tranquil.
“Ephesus,” she said, and her voice was again soft and caressing. “At Ephesus you will find the door to light.”
Sosipatra continued, confirming various secrets to the participants that no one else could have known. She said that Julian was to restore the worship of the true gods, that the goddess Cybele was his protectress, and at Ephesus Julian would meet and be instructed by Maximus, another Neoplatonist philosopher known to be a magician.11 She said to Ecebolius, “He has no choice, you know. At Ephesus his life begins.”
Cybele enthroned, with lion, cornucopia, and mural crown. Roman marble, c. 50 AD.
Priscus, reading Julian’s journal, believes this meeting was a well-planned plot, to which Libanius agreed:
They were all in on it. Years later, Maximus admitted as much. “I knew all along I was the right teacher for Julian. Naturally, I never dreamed he would be emperor”…Maximus then got Sosipatra and Aedesius to recommend him to Julian, which they did. What an extraordinary crew they were! Except for Aedesius, there was not a philosopher in the lot.
From what I gather, Julian in those days was a highly intelligent youth who might have been “captured” for true philosophy. After all, he enjoyed learning. He was good at debate. Properly educated, he might have been another Porphyry or, taking into account his unfortunate birth, another Marcus Aurelius. But Maximus got to him first and exploited his one flaw: that craving for the vague and incomprehensible which is essentially Asiatic.
Julian traveled to Ephesus where he went to the magician Maximus’s house, which was on the slopes of Mount Pion; a hidden door led into the mountain itself where he met Maximus in a cave filled with natural smoke. Instead of doing tricks, though, Maximus offered up a shrewd attack on Christianity:
“In letters to the Romans and to the Galatians, Paul declared that the god of Moses is the god not only of Jews but also of Gentiles. Yet the Jewish book denies this in a hundred places. As their god says to Moses: “Israel is my son, my first-born.” Now if this god of the Jews were indeed, as Paul claimed, the One God, why then did he reserve for a single unimportant race the anointing, the prophets and the law? Why did he allow the rest of mankind to exist thousands of years in darkness, worshipping falsely? Of course the Jews admit that he is a ‘jealous god.’ But what an extraordinary thing for the absolute to be! Jealous of what? And cruel, too, for he avenged the sins of the fathers on guiltless children. Is not the creator described by Homer and Plato more likely? That there is one being who encompasses all life – is all life – and from this essential source emanates gods, demons, men? Or to quote the famous Orphic oracle which the Galileans are beginning to appropriate for their own use, ‘‘Zeus, Hades, Helios, three gods in one Godhead.’”
“From the One many…” I began, but with Maximus one never needs to finish sentences. He anticipates the trend of one’s thought.
“How can be the many be denied? Are all emotions alike? Or does each have characteristics peculiarly its own? And if each race has its own qualities, are not those god-given? And, if not god-given, would not these characteristics then be properly symbolized by a specific national god? In the case of the Jews a jealous bad-tempered patriarch. In the case of the effeminate, clever Syrians, a god like Apollo. Or take the germans and the Celts – who are warlike and fierce – is it accident that they worship Ares, the war god? Or is it inevitable? The early Romans were absorbed by lawmaking and governing – their gods? The king of Gods, Zeus. And each god has many aspects and many names, for there is as much variety in heaven as there is among men. Some have asked: did we create these gods or did they create us? That is an old debate. Are we a dream in the mind of diety, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality? Though one may not know for certain, all our senses tell us that a single creation does exist and we are contained by it forever. Now the Christians would impose one final rigid myth on what we know to be various and strange. No, not even myth, for the Nazarene existed as flesh while the gods we worship were never men; rather they are qualities and powers become poetry for our instruction. With the worship of the dead Jew, the poetry ceased. The Christians wish to replace our beautiful legends with the police record of a reforming Jewish rabbi. Out of this unlikely material they hope to make a final synthesis of all the religions ever known. They now appropriate our feast days. They transform local deities into saints. They borrow from our mystery rites, particularly those of Mithras. The priests of Mithras are called ‘ fathers.’ So the Christians call their priests ‘fathers’. They even imitate the tonsure, hoping to impress new converts with the familiar trappings of an older cult. Now they have started to call the Nazarene ‘savior’ and ‘healer.’ Why? Because one of the most beloved of our gods is Asklepios, whom we call ‘savior’ and ‘healer’….
I betray no secret of Mithras when I tell you that we, too, partake of a symbolic meal, recalling the words of the Persian prophet Zarathustra, who said to those who worshipped the One God – and Mithras, ‘He who eats of my body and drinks of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation. That was spoken six centuries before the birth of the Nazarene….As [Zarathustra] lay dying, he said, ‘May God forgive you even as I do.”‘ No, there is nothing sacred to us that the Galileans have not stolen….
No one can tell another man what is true. Truth is all around us. But each must find it in his own way. Plato is part of the truth. So is Homer. So is the story of the Jewish god if one ignores its arrogant claims. Truth is wherever man has glimpsed divinity. Theurgy can achieve this awakening. Poetry can. Or the gods themselves of their own volition can suddenly open our eyes.”
Priscus thinks Maximus’s strategy here was a shrewd one: “Then he offers Julian Mithras, a religion bound to appeal to our hero. Mithras was always the favorite deity of Roman emperors, and of many soldiers to this day. Also, Maximus knew that he would be sure of a special relationship to Julian if he were the one who sponsored him during the rites.” Julian agreed with Maximus and asked to take the secret initiation rites into Mithraism; he said he would publicly pretend to be Christian as that was required of him by Constantius. On the day of his initiation he found out that his half-brother Gallus had been risen to Caesar of the East by Constantius (the rank of Caesar was one below that of Emperor). Julian was nineteen years old.
Mithras killing the bull (c. 150 CE; Louvre-Lens)
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Part 2 explores Julian’s path to becoming Emperor, his initiation into the mysteries of Eleusis, his pro-Hellenist reforms, his downfall, and contextualize his rule in a historical setting, explaining how the lessons of Julian’s life remain relevant today as the horrors of wokeness threaten to subsume western civilization itself.
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1 “Pagan” was a Christian term of contempt for Hellenists, meaning “rural” or “rustic”, because the rural areas are always last to adopt the new ideologies fermented in metropolitan areas. The term Hellenist will be used in this essay as a neutral label unless quoting from another source that uses the term pagan.
2 Indeed, Hitler was a big fan of Julian for his attempt to prevent the original transvaluation of values, where he stated in his Table Talks: “When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn’t know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians….It would be better to speak of Constantine the traitor and Julian the Loyal than of Constantine the Great and Julian the Apostate.”
3 In the context of Vidal’s homosexuality and his writings on the ancient world I cannot help but think of the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, which read “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
4 One can see a partial bibliography of Vidal’s sources here.
6 Note that the labeling of Constantine as “The Great” (despite murdering his wife — he allegedly boiled her in a bath because of a suspected affair with his son and converted to Christianity because the priests of the old Gods said he was too polluted to be purified of these crimes, per Catherine Nixey in “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World”, 100) is precisely in the context of victorious Christian history, as is Julian’s “The Apostate”.
7 This is a very important battle in another context, as it spelled the final defeat and the disbanding of the Praetorian Guard which had been the true power behind the Emperors for centuries; something that may be discussed further in a future post, as its parallels to the modern day FBI, CIA and DOJ are many.
11 Maximus hid from Julian during Julian’s civil war with Constantius, which Julian was expected to lose, then showed up after Julian won. Later after the Persian campaign when Maximus was in trouble, he and his wife decided to commit suicide. She killed herself, then Maximus changed his mind and lived for awhile longer. Around 370, Emperor Valens was informed that a group of individuals had consulted an oracle to find out who the next emperor would be, and were told that Valens would be succeeded by a man whose name began with the letters Theod. (which turned out to be true). Maximus was then executed, but he warned that whoever executed him would suffer a terrible fate and a cruel death, which then befell Valens.