Save the Cat?
Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy
I. The New Millennium
We are nearing the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century and the ‘millennial’ generation is entering the responsible years of our lives. I was born in 1994 and remember the hysteria of Y2K that surrounded the dawning of the new millennium, as well as the promise that high speed computing held for the future of humanity.
My parents were computer engineers who home-schooled my twin and I,1 so our household never took the hysteria seriously. Instead, it led to some impromptu lessons about the technical nature of the Year 2000 Problem from a mathematical perspective that precocious kids like us could understand.
Unfortunately, this education was not received by the general public, so there remains a lack of understanding about the philosophic implications of why some memory-starved computer programs couldn’t understand the difference between the year 1900 and the year 2000.2
The first signs that this lack of understanding would have serious implications for western society occurred soon after. A massive chasm was forming in the ‘knowledge gap’ between those who performed computer engineering and the general public (who increasingly relied on computer technology)…
On March 11, 2000 the ‘dot-com bubble’ that had been the engine of speculative trading in the late 1990s started to fade and the ‘dot-com crash’ began.
The startups and founders who best adapted to this economic cycle made a killing by leveraging their monopolistic fields of the computer market to ruthlessly acquire or bankrupt their competitors, as in the case of Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Bill Gates (Microsoft), or by selling up to live large like Elon Musk (PayPal).
Meanwhile, pension funds and the other vehicles of middle class wealth that hold up the stock market experienced pecuniary turbulence.
In the aftermath of the crash, the internet rebuilt itself from an anarchic vehicle for information sharing into an oligarchy of competing ‘platforms’ that vie to maximise their monetisation of users information, attention, and productivity in a very unregulated marketplace.
Unsurprisingly, this has made these high tech companies run by computer engineers and monopolists the most dominant global enterprises of the millennial age.
II. The Growing Divide
Unfortunately, the chasm of understanding between those who produced and engineered computational devices and the general public who relied on them continued to grow.
I experienced this first hand in my early professional life, particularly for a period in the 2010s where I worked as a ‘tier two technical support team leader’3 for the helpline of one of these ‘Magnificent Seven’ companies4 to fund the post-production of my feature film musical Portrait of a Knight (2018).
My homeschooling meant that I had done some programming in my youth, and I took one basic university course to further my understanding, but ultimately I wanted to be an artist so I pursued a Bachelor of Arts in Film (minor in Music) instead.
However, as anyone who has tried this knows, making films isn’t cheap and I found my rudimentary computer knowledge was in greater demand as I entered adult life.
Initially I enjoyed my ‘day job’ and quickly worked my way through the ranks by helping customers with basic user issues. However, once I was in management, I grew increasingly concerned about how little most of our customers and employees knew about the history of computational engines - I doubt that even 5% of them could have told me who Charles Babbage was.
While we were training some new recruits to support our devices, I raised this issue with the training team.
I obviously didn’t push for my employees to take an intensive academic course about computational logic starting with the abacus and moving through to the present day, but I did think it would be helpful if they at least knew the history of the internet. Most of our training materials covered no history prior to the development of Bluetooth technology (a feature of many of our devices), which first hit the shelves in 2001.
I was rebuffed in this request, the training was developed by experts at another company to maximise customer satisfaction and would not be changed to accommodate the ideas of one new middle manager.
Instead, more success was to be had in affecting our recruitment policies, where they made me a key cog in the next wave of employee recruitment and allowed me to ask unorthodox interview questions to test the problem solving of applicants.
What I found in this recruitment process was surprising.
Many of the applicants who held basic polytechnic qualifications in computer engineering were inflexible thinkers with a poor ability to explain their reasoning, but some millennials with unrelated qualifications (or no qualifications at all) could quickly grasp the problem solving necessary to help an exasperated customer.
My peers had noticed this trend amongst our current employees as well, so I presented our findings to upper management. In one particularly heated meeting, we were able to convince them to hire more ‘unqualified’ people who demonstrated good problem solving acumen.
I’d like to think this change was because my fellow team leaders and I convinced them of our case on its merits, but I suspect it was because ‘unqualified’ workers were cheaper for the business.
In 2018 I completed Portrait of a Knight and soon resigned from my ‘day job’ over a complicated argument about what I perceived to be violations of New Zealand labour regulations.5
Since then, I’ve held occasional fixed term customer service and compliance inspection roles at locally owned businesses and government agencies, but trying to interact with the Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy drove me literally psychotic6 so mostly I just chill out and make art.
III. The C.A.T.
A big, complicated word for a big, complicated concept. When I discuss the ‘Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy’ what I’m pointing to is a mode of economic, political, and social behaviour that has captured a large portion of human affairs in the early days of the new millennium.
Commentators have used words like ‘crony capitalist’, ‘neo-liberal’, ‘neo-marxist’, ‘neo-fascist’ and ‘technocratic’ to describe the concept in political economic terms, and ‘wokeism’7 to describe it in cultural terms, but essentially it is a re-feudalisation of western society. I’ve already provided my personal experience in the corporate sphere of ‘Big Tech’, but I’ll break this concept down into each of its component parts starting with corporate.
i. C is for Corporate
Another possible abbreviation for the Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy is corporant (CORPOR-ate AN-archo T-echnocracy). Corporant is an actual word, it is the third-person plural present active indicative of corporo in Latin.
Corporo is also the etymological root of the modern English words corporate and corporation that describe the corporant society of the 21st Century. Unfortunately, the rise of ‘Big Tech’ corporations has plagued citizens across the world as we have entered the new millennium.
In his book The Dying Citizen (2021), Victor Davis Hansen argues that the values of republican citizenship forged by the American experiment are dying.
The mesoi, which is the classical Greek word for the ‘middle ones’ - who are commonly referred to as the ‘middle class’, have been priced out of society by the rising cost of living and high taxation.
Meanwhile, in his home state of California, the owners of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and other high value corporations live a life of technocratic opulence in Silicon Valley.
Some of the ‘millennial’ children of the ‘baby boomer’ middle class have found work as corporate drones in ‘Big Tech’ or ‘Big Government’, but the autonomous and self-sustaining agrarian citizens who are the lifeblood of the mesoi are vanishing in the mist of corporate smog.
To compensate for their loss, California has imported a massive amount of unskilled illegal immigrants who are supported by state funded welfare services.
Hansen likens these to a new ‘peasant class’ designed to support the ‘elite class’ of technocrats who hold totalitarian social, economic, and political power in what is effectively a one party political state.8
While American values have been exported across the globe in the world order that emerged from the Second World Wars,9 the economic forces at play in the United States of America are very different to those in New Zealand.
Most notably, illegal immigration (the big issue of recent American election cycles) is not a major issue in New Zealand. Instead, we face a complicated infrastructure crisis caused by earthquakes, cyclones, and chronic under-investment in public services.
This has been exacerbated by the influx of legal immigration and international financial investments that are required to propel the ‘rock star’ economic model pioneered by former Prime Minister Sir John Key (2008 - 2016)10 and largely continued by subsequent administrations.
WARNING: OUR CURRENT ECONOMIC SITUATION IS SO COMPLICATED IT IS EXPLAINED IN GRAPHS NO MERE MORTAL COULD EVER HOPE TO UNDERSTAND…
As we can see, the corporant society of the new millennium thrives on bureaucracy, not meritocracy. It is coded in signs and symbols that are obfuscatory to the lay reader, intentionally hiding secrets that might affect corporate interests out of fear they will ‘spook the market’.
Since the adoption of Rogernomics in the 1980s, the New Zealand economy has been driven by public/private partnerships where the government funds corporations to perform essential economic tasks.
Our government holds loose reins over corporate State Owned Enterprises, Ministries, Public/Private Partnership Funds, etc… and is supposed to let the market decide which service providers receive the taxes it levies from our citizenry.11
However, the lobbying relationship between corporate entities and our elected legislators is too strong,12 allowing corporations to draft legislation that apportions subsidies, grants, and other funds from the government budget to companies that are failing in the market.
Meanwhile, these corporantists hide the failures of their corporations in bewildering graphical presentations like those above.13
So, with merit not rewarded in the public service or any other bureaucratic corporation, Kiwi institutions have crumbled in all the typical ways bureaucracies fail. These failure modes are amusingly detailed by British historian C. Northcote Parkinson in Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration (1958).
“Easily the queerest cabinet is that of New Zealand, where one member of which has to be announced as ‘Minister of Lands, Minister of Forests, Minister of Maori Affairs, Minister in charge of Maori Trust Office and of Scenery Preservation.’ The toastmaster at a New Zealand banquet must be equally ready to crave silence for ‘The Minister of Health, Minister Assistant to the Prime Minister, Minister in Charge of State Advances Corporation, Census, and Statistics Department, Public Trust Office and Publicity and Information.’ In other lands this oriental profusion is fortunately rare.”14
While corporate bureaucracies dominate the ‘left’ wing of millennial political thought in western societies, they are balanced by an equally powerful force on the ‘right’ wing. This force is a bit harder to define, but it is a form of ‘anarcho-technocracy’ where ‘Big Tech’ regulates society in ways that used to be the sole domain of state government.
ii. A is for Anarchy
Many thinkers have tried to explain anarchy over the years, but the best definitions I’ve seen are those offered by Alan Moore - the British writer and magician made famous by satirical works like V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989) and Watchmen (1985 - 1986).
In particular, Moore has three insightful quotes that demonstrate how anarchy permeates our contemporary society:
What is Anarchy?
“Anarchy – anarchon – no leaders. Which means, everybody is a leader. You can't have an official set of rules for anarchy. I tend to think such connections form casually, and break and form and break and form throughout our lives. If you look back ten years, you will remember a group of friends who you were productively involved with at that time, now some of them have drifted away, new people have come in. These are more naturalistic linkages, which exist while there is a need for them to exist. It's more like the way ants work.”15
How does it work?
“Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that. I am very fond of the anarchist proverb regarding laws – good people have no need for them, bad people pay no attention to them, what are they there for, other than as a symbol of power – ‘We can say this is law’.
It seems to me that the idea of leaders is an unnatural one that was probably thought up by a leader at some point in antiquity; leaders have been brutally enforcing that idea ever since, to the point where most people cannot conceive of an alternative.”16
Where does it exist in contemporary society?
“I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice.”17
By Alan Moore’s reckoning, the biggest gang (i.e. ‘Big Tech’) has taken over our society then stoked infighting about whether it is a ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist’ concern.
Unfortunately, I fear he is right about this. Since the 2010s, we have seen the outmoded conception of Capitalism vs Communism that defined the Cold War era be revived in the ‘Culture Wars’ that have engulfed western society.
In this series of ideological conflicts for control of the political sphere, the ‘left’ wing of corporate totalitarians has tried to impose a form of Neo-Marxism through government policy while the ‘right’ wing of anarcho-technocrats has promulgated a Neo-Liberal worldview favourable to multinational monopolies who produce technological products.
While ordinary citizens tried to ignore these political wars, the rise of power hungry ideologues became hard to avoid. The British comedians and political commentators Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry recently outlined the reasons for this in a podcast episode titled We Went To America… What The Media Didn’t Tell You.
In particular, there was a section where they reflected on the themes of ‘identity politics’ which drove the popular meme that ‘the personal is political’.
Francis Foster: “What identity politics did, and I don’t think we talk about it enough, it made everyone political. Most people aren’t political and, you know what, that’s a wonderful thing.”
“Most people aren’t that engaged with politics. They just want to be left to get on with their lives. Make a few bucks, have a nice house (or a decent house), where they can have a family and live a good life, and this crap was injected into every aspect of our lives. From the emails we received, to the meetings we attended, to the jobs that we applied for.”
“We were thinking, ‘Oh, but how do I frame this in this way? Oh, and as a white man, oh, and as a black woman…’ It’s all of this stuff that was pumped into our brains. We were thinking, ‘I don’t have the capacity to think about it, I don’t want to think about it, I just want to live a normal life’ and that was taken from us.”
In the above quote, Foster puts his finger on the key failing of our corporant society and the discourse that has dominated the new millennium thus far.
As politics has subsumed all other aspects of our lives, citizens have tribalised to the point where a political disagreement is seen as valid grounds to excommunicate friends from our social circles.
Meanwhile, the gangs of technocrats who populate the upper echelons of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ have seized ever more power for their monopolistic enterprises.
iii. T is for Technocracy
So, the millennial era is characterised by a state of anarchy. However, this is masked from the citizenry by the political wars that are used to manufacture their consent in election cycles.18
Whenever radical political and economic changes sweep through a civilization, unpacking their causes forces us back to antiquity and the classical Latin phrase, “Cui bono?”
Who does benefit from the alienation of citizens from their governmental institutions? Well, these two images provide an explanation:
While the Technocracy movement was initially birthed by the Great Depression of the early 20th Century,19 it has reached its zenith in the 21st Century as a tool of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and other elites of western societies.
The cartoon above shows the fundamental problem that technocrats are trying to solve, “how to make the human race behave?”
Compliant workers don’t complain about abusive working conditions, compliant citizens don’t revolt and happily pay all taxes that are levied upon them, compliant governments don’t regulate the technocratic corporations that want to solve the ‘human problem’.
There are two main reasons this once defunct ideology has sprung to life in the new millennium:
Firstly, the work of Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman in conjunction with that of American economist Richard Thaler has led to the development of Nudge theory and the wider field of behavioural economics.20
Secondly, the social media revolution and other new advances in networked computer technology have given elites a powerful way to experiment with solving the compliance problem at the heart of the Technocracy movement.21
The combination of a new model for human behaviour with a technology that can exploit this model for financial profit is how the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and other technocratic elites have benefited from our corporant society.
These corporate entities have been allowed to conduct experiments on the global human population with almost no accountability.
Whenever one finds a group of radical theorists who appear completely immune to the harms of their experiments, especially when their justification is that they are ‘saving humanity’, it is wise to approach them with a high degree of caution.
IV. A New Hope: Saving the Cat?
The system of Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy I’ve outlined in section III of this essay does not seem like it has benefited humanity as a whole in the new millennium.
So, why should we try to save it?
Well, my formal academic training is in Film and there is a concept from this field that doesn’t seem to be widely understood by the general public. This is the infamous theory of screenwriting known as ‘Save the Cat!’ that was popularised by Blake Snyder.
I’ve never liked Snyder’s theory for how to make the ‘perfect film’, but it was very popular so we briefly covered it in my university courses and it remains a popular topic of discussion in film production circles.
Since he published his book in 2005, Snyder has worked as a script consultant at studios such as Disney, DreamWorks, Laika and Nelvana and his gross simplification of how to craft an effective narrative has dominated the Hollywood landscape.
Essentially Save the Cat! is an attempt to teach any writer how to harness the financial model that was developed by Hollywood in the wake of its radical restructure - a restructure caused by the success of George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise when it began with its first installment in 1977.22
Like most millennials who are now of responsible age, I have a complicated relationship with the Star Wars franchise.
My dad saw the first film when it was released, but didn’t think much of it. He was a science nerd who went on to get a PhD in Physics before settling into computer engineering, and his fundamental objection was that there was no science in these films.
He understood their value as fantasy epics, but preferred the storytelling style of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings (1954 - 1955) and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1938 - 1958). Magical beings who performed magical acts made sense, spaceships who performed magical acts didn’t.
I loved the original films growing up, just as I did all the other ‘sci-fi-fantasy’ franchises. But, as I got older and was introduced to more serious films, I wandered away from the franchise model of film-making. I still go back from time to time, but by and large these franchises don’t hold a lot of appeal for me anymore.
However, the originators of the franchise model really did pull from a deep well of human knowledge. George Lucas in particular was a powerful proponent for the philosophy of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949).
Joseph Campbell’s scholarship synthesised work from the fields of anthropology, Jungian psychology, archaeology, and mythology to craft an understanding of the fundamental human experience across time.
His model of man was clearly framed by his Roman Catholic faith, but something about it resonated with the world when it was presented in the franchise model of George Lucas’ Star Wars.
Towards the end of Campbell’s life, he was invited to Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch where he took part in a six episode documentary series titled The Power of Myth (1988). The series is reminiscent of the contemporary podcast style,23 and in it Campbell was interviewed for 360 edited minutes by journalist and political commentator Bill Moyer about the relationship between The Hero of a Thousand Faces and Star Wars.
Bill Moyer: “Why are there so many stories of the hero, or of heroes, in mythology?”
Joseph Campbell: “Well because that’s what’s worth writing about. I mean even in popular novel writing you see, the main character is a hero or a heroine.”
“That is to say, someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself, or other than himself.”
Bill Moyer: “So in all of these cultures, whatever the costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?”
Joseph Campbell: “Well there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, the hero who has performed a war act or a physical act of heroism. Saving a life, that’s a hero act. Giving himself, uh, to another.”
“The other kind is the spiritual hero who has, learned or found a mode of experiencing the uh, supernormal range of human spiritual life and then come back and communicated it. It’s a cycle. It’s a going and a return that the hero cycle represents.”
“But then, this can be seen also in the simple initiation ritual where a child has to give up his childhood and become an adult. Has to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche, and come back as a self-responsible adult.”
“It’s a fundamental experience that everyone has to go through.”
As the above quote demonstrates, we need to follow the model of heroic storytelling and engage in the reform of our corporant society instead of burning it down. This is because we are already initiated into the corporantist way of life, so we might as well try to save us from ourselves.
i. Social Media and the Initiation of the ‘millennial’ Generation.
There is a growing corpus of scholarship about the ways in which the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and other high tech companies have affected the minds of millennial youth. One of the most popular proponents of the harms that have been inflicted on young people by social media is American sociologist Jonathan Haidt.
I haven’t read his new book pictured above, but he has been active in the ‘positive psychology’ movement since 1999 and has become increasingly vocal about his belief that the algorithms used by social media companies to drive user engagement have fundamentally damaged the way the ‘millennial’ generation relates to the complexity of adult life.
Personally, my mental health problems have been a bit more serious than ‘anxiety’ and have various root causes that I’ve discussed extensively in therapy, but in my psychotic states I have been prone to erratic social media posting.
Not only has it happened to me, I’ve witnessed the mental breakdowns of many of my peers being broadcast over social media too. Clearly, our generation is not coping with the daunting task of saving ourselves from the corporant society that infests every aspect of our lives.
That being said, those of us in the millennial generation who have managed to scrabble to some level of responsible adulthood (and have the sanity necessary to fully exercise our citizenship) are almost certainly the ones best placed to retool the corporant society we inhabit.
So, how do we start?
ii. Fiddling While Rome Burns
I’ve looked back to antiquity to explain how the society that modern Kiwis live in is a corporant one that has nuzzled its way into millennial life, and I feel our solutions lie in antiquity as well. For a start, there is a popular meme that has been taking social media by storm.
There are many variations, but the core joke is that ‘men are always thinking about the Roman Empire’:
Once upon a time, there was a great Roman Empire. As the first millennium A.D. began, Roma - the capital city of this great empire, was set on fire.
This didn’t happen once or twice, but recurred for centuries following their societal transformation from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. Their empire slowly decayed, though vestiges of it such as the Roman Catholic Church remain to this day.24
If we look at Campbell’s words about heroism, we can see that the path of the hero is either an act of physical sacrifice or a spiritual revelation. With regards to physical sacrifice, the simplest approach we can take is to make the sacrifices necessary to stay healthy and alive.
If we reject the ‘quick fixes’ to our health problems offered by the ‘Medical-Industrial Complex’ (one of the sharpest fangs of corporant society), we will need to maintain our health through moderation and judiciousness to survive being the prey of the C.A.T.
As for spiritual revelation, conservative political commentators such as Ayaan Hirsh Ali, the Hoover Institute Fellows at Uncommon Knowledge, and psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson have been pushing thinkers to ‘wrestle with God’ and turn more seriously towards the teachings of Christ, but in my mind it is more important that we return to the fundamental idea of Logos rather than any specific religious manifestation pursuant to it.
More importantly, what did the Romans believe in the first millennium when their city was burning?
While many cults with varied beliefs had the right to freely practice their faiths, the only extant vestige left is the cult of Christ that grew in popularity throughout this time until it was eventually adopted as their official state religion.
This is what they said about the fundamental nature of spiritual revelation:
The Logos, translated as ‘Word’ above, that Roman Christians believed to be the foundation of their Theos (‘God’) is the etymological root of our English word logic today. This gets at the heart of both my objection to a ‘return to Christ’ and my Dad’s objection to Star Wars.
The problem is that, in the conception of the Greek speaking citizens who populated early Roman Christian society, Logos preceded Theos. The statement above could be formulated to read:
“The first principle is logic, with logic we posit a theory of existence predicated on our ‘God’ being logical.”
However, in our contemporary society we have become confused about the proper relationship between the logic that is inherently manifest in the ‘divine order’ of ‘God’s logic’ and the theories with which humans ‘represent’ this ‘divine order’.
This is why ‘magic beings’ who perform ‘magical acts’ makes sense, whereas ‘spaceships’ who perform ‘magical acts’ doesn’t. If one proceeds from the assumption that ‘magic’ is ‘real’ then it logically follows that ‘magic beings’ can perform ‘magical acts’. However, a ‘spaceship’ is a representation of a theory of physical engineering so it does not logically follow that a ‘spaceship’ can perform ‘magical acts’.
In Star Wars we can see this misunderstanding in action during the climax of its first installment Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).
In the segment clipped below, the hero (Luke Skywalker), saves the day by using the ‘force’ (a spiritual concept akin to the ‘animating principle’ which ‘Jedi’ like our hero can use in a ‘magical’ way) to guide his spaceship in battle.
No theory is offered to explain the logic of how this spiritual ‘force’ can interact with material objects like his spaceship. Instead we are left to ‘take it on faith’ that the spiritual ‘force’ of Luke’s logic is theoretically able to have magical effects on the material ‘spaceship’ that he is flying - even if the film never explains why.
This fallacy is exactly why we have ended up with the current relationship between humans and the forces of Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy. Gangs of radical corporant theorists believe themselves to have all the explanations for the observable logic of the world humans live in.
They have experimented on the global population with these theories, and asked us to ‘take it on faith’ that their theories are logically sound, but unfortunately the ‘reality test’ of their political and economic policies has proved that their underlying logic is flawed.
The main reason for the flaws in their logic is that logical thought is not the highest prized faculty of humans in our corporant society - it is crowded out by fame, status, and the political mess of bureaucratic leadership.
As logic is self-evident, it can not be curated to acquire fame and status in the ways that a theory can - so our economic and political systems place a greater value on theories instead.
It is in this failing that we can most easily reform the quagmire we find ourselves living in. Simply put, we can return to the meritocratic mode of governance that fundamentally underpins all representative democracies spawned from the Westminster Parliamentary system started by King Edward I of England in 1295.25
iii. The Meritocratic Hero in Representative Democracy
In New Zealand we live in a Representative Democracy that maintains vestiges of a Constitutional Monarchy, which is different both in kind and nature to the Athenian Direct Democracy that many mythologise as the ‘ideal’ democracy because it got the concept of Demokratia, the power of the people, off the ground.
Aristotle was a prominent critic of Athenian democracy: in his ancient text Politics he outlined that it was too vulnerable to demagogic take over.
Basically, mob rule is bad because if a big enough mob gets together they can be whipped into a frenzy by a charismatic speaker. He actually preferred Tyranny to Athenian Democracy, because at least with a tyrant in charge there would be order.
However, Aristotle’s favoured model of political leadership was that of the natural aristocracy - the middle between these two extremes of mob rule and the rule of a single tyrant.
While many modern revisionist historians have taken this to mean that natural aristocracy is a form of hereditary rule, mostly due to their belief in the success of the reforms that Diocletian enacted upon the Roman Empire’s aristocracy in late antiquity, this was not the natural aristocracy that Aristotle set out in his Politics.
The natural aristocracy referred to by Aristotle, the Westminster Parliamentary system of the Monarchs of Great Britain,26 and the Founding Fathers when they outlined the American constitution, was a meritocratic system.
Essentially the idea was that the heroic figures, those worthy of merit, in a society would be appointed or elected to run their state and chart a course for their society.
So, we need to return to some form of meritocracy in government. Logic is, of course, not the only useful human faculty that is missing from modern discourse.
iv. A Disturbance in the ‘Force’
Competent thinkers in a wide variety of disciplines have been ostracized and pushed to the margins of our civic society by the censorship vehicles that The Corporantist Creed has weaved into the fabric of its logically fallacious theories of ‘human behaviour’:
The Corporantist Creed goes something like this:
“We, the greatest thinkers of our age, seek to incorporate our new global corporation of Technocracy Inc. with the great and good human peoples. It is important to corporate upon a sound notion of ‘human’ that can be used to define a ‘human’ for the future personal, social, economic, political, and governance duties of the ‘human’ peoples.
We believe that a ‘human’ is a being who has the correct, ‘compliant’ orientation towards life and towards Technocracy Inc. Namely, that ‘human existence’ is a ‘dream’ where ‘humans’ are ‘prey’ to be hunted and experimented upon so that we may ‘test’ the theories of Technocracy Inc. ‘Humans’ who do not comply will be subject to ‘the corporate force’ of Technocracy Inc.
With this guiding creed we wish to form a society of ‘compliant humans’ who will seek nothing more than to ‘praise’ the ‘heroes’ of Technocracy Inc. - the greatest thinkers of our age who will surely solve the ‘human problem’ once and for all with their brilliant new corporation.”27
You, dear reader, are a human. So am I. Is this a creed that you believe would create a logical, stable, prosperous, and healthy civic society for humans like ourselves to inhabit?
I thought as much.
If we continue the metaphorical allegory of George Lucas’ Star Wars, then we see that the problem in our corporant society is that ‘the force’ has too many Sith (technocratic actors who favour Theos over Logos) and not enough Jedi (heroic actors who favour Logos over Theos).
Humans inherently sense this ‘disturbance in the force’ and it is grappling with this problem that leads the ‘return to Christ’ movement amongst conservative thinkers.
Funnily enough, the Jedi movement is actually pretty popular in New Zealand. As our civic society has turned away from the ‘God’ of our national anthems God Save New Zealand & God Save the King, we have looked for other beliefs to fill this void.
For most of the new millennium, censuses have revealed a strong uptick in the amount of ‘Jedi Knights’ inhabiting the islands of New Zealand.
This satirical Jedi movement comes from the forces in Australasian society that have influenced the conception of ‘God’ in the South Pacific.
New religious movements like the Jedi Order, and in fact the reason that George Lucas chose to represent Logos with a ‘force’ instead of a ‘God’ in Star Wars, have occurred because human society has engaged in widespread religious syncretism since the end of the Second World Wars.
As British colonial culture has blended with the islands of Australasia, the common belief in ‘God’ has been heavily influenced by the dream-time of indigenous Australia and Te ao Maori or The Maori Worldview of indigenous New Zealand belief.
While I’ve never been a Jedi myself, I have always been fascinated by mythology. In seeking to understand the religious syncretism of the millennial age first hand, I attended workshops, seminars, and retreats in Buddhism at the Wellington Buddhist Centre.
Most of the members of this sangha (spiritual community) were Kiwi atheists or former members of the Anglican Christian faith who no longer believed in the Anglican conception of God.
These disparate individuals had found the spiritual teachings of Buddhism enlightening, and in 2020 I produced a short documentary where they explain the concept of Maranga mai ki te maramatanga from Te ao Maori and how it applies to Buddhism.
This religious syncretism, where the concepts of different ‘streams’ of religion converge and mingle with each other, is the dominant religious practice of the millennial age - not just in Australasia but across the developed world.
One of the reasons for this is the work of 20th Century philosophical thinkers such as Alan Watts, the Anglican minister and Zen Buddhist monk who practiced a form of lay ministry in San Francisco during the 1960s.
Here is his summary of Buddhist belief for those unfamiliar with the concept:
Now, today we’re going to talk about Buddhism. Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. You could, in a way, call it a reform of Hinduism, or Hinduism stripped for export. It originates in northern India, close to the area that is now Nepal, shortly after 600 B.C. There was a young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha, who became the man we call the Buddha. Now, the word “Buddha” is not a proper name, it’s a title, and it’s based on the Sanskrit root budh, which means “to be awake.” And so you could say the Buddha is the man who woke up from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be, and found out who he was, who he is.
V. The Empire Strikes Back: Awakening from the Dreams of Cats
How do we reform a government that has allowed too many bureaucrats to populate its inner workings?
On August 28, 1963, there was a ‘man with a dream’. As part of a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom he delivered a soaring address to his fellow marchers that would have a lasting impact on human affairs.
Here is the dream of the influential American 20th century activist, minister, and political philosopher Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of it’s creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
This is one orientation towards human affairs but, at a similar time in British history, the novelist and critic Eric Arthur Blair (more commonly known by his ‘nom-de-plume’ or ‘pen name’ of George Orwell) saw a different dream starting to shape reality.
In his amusing satire Animal Farm (1945), Blair presented this alternative notion of ‘equality’ that was sweeping through human society in the wake of the Second World Wars.
The book begins with the animals of a farm freeing themselves from the tyranny of their human overlords. However, disharmony soon settles amongst the ‘free’ inhabitants of Animal Farm as a new dictum is painted on the barn door.
This is the dictate of the technocrats, corporantists, poorly oriented anarchists, and other ‘elite’ thinkers who currently ‘rule’ our society with their theoretical understandings of human affairs.
Some humans, namely those who ascribe to their radical theories, are ‘more equal’ or, put another way, ‘more worthy’ than their fellow men. This is not self-evident (logical), so an ever increasing bureaucracy has evolved to force compliance with this ideal.
To save this ‘dream society’ or ‘utopian’ vision of the future, we need to face the daunting task of reforming its bureaucracy. We need to get involved with their policy agenda, submit to their select committee hearings, make Official Information Act (1982) requests, and generally engage with our elected representatives as informed citizens of our nation.
Elected representatives are there to listen to their constituents, we pay them to perform this service, and they have occasionally been known to value citizens concerns over the money offered by corporate lobbying groups.
The problem with our politicians and political parties is that they have become too comfortable fielding ‘softball’ questions from our partisan legacy media, and other corporate funded media interests, who lobby them behind closed doors.
These politicians have largely forgotten how to actually win an electorate in a serious political model, and rely on outdated modes of communication known colloquially as the legacy or ‘mainstream’ media to shield themselves from the vox populi - the voice of their constituent peoples.
Many of them are fine politicians, but it would help us all if they stopped speaking with a forked corporate tongue and started behaving like authentic human beings. Full authenticity is impossible of course, lying is considered too essential to the ‘art’ of politics, but they could at least be consistent in their values and beliefs around policy reform.
If not, we need to vote them out.
i. Why should we ‘Save the Cat’ at all?
While it appears that there are actions the ‘millennial’ citizenry could take to maintain the healthy physical and spiritual approach necessary to ‘reform’ or ‘awaken’ the corporantist model of society, we are still left with the fundamental question that headlines this essay:
“Save the Cat?”
Why should our citizenry, who have been used and abused by corporantists, care about saving humanity from the harms their disruptive, radical theories inflict across the globe?
One may assume that these ‘evil’, ‘rich’, ‘greedy’ humans have bought this upon themselves, and therefore it is not one’s place to ‘reform’ or ‘awaken’ them from their faulty thinking.
Instead, those amongst our citizenry who hold this viewpoint advocate for ‘eating the rich’ that have gorged themselves upon the human suffering caused by their corporantist ideals.
As we can see, the ‘poor’ citizens of the new millennium appear to be converging upon an alliance with ‘good’ corporations (signified in this meme by the cats with bows around their collars) to ‘eat the rich’ aka the ‘capitalists’ who have been enriched by corporantism.
The problem I have with this ‘eat the rich’ meme is that thinkers who espouse it appear to have a limited view of history, and assume corporantism to be a ‘capitalist’ or ‘neo-liberal’ invention of the 20th Century.
However, in this essay I have shown that corporantism is a combination of forces whose roots stretch all the way back to antiquity.
In this time, it is suggested by Alan Moore that some leader came up with a concept that one could describe as leadership over the common people (known more commonly as ‘tyranny’) and all such subsequent leaders have brutally enforced this corporantist decree ever since.
Because of this, our ‘millennial’ citizens are not the first humans who have grappled with the challenges of an overwhelming tyranny.
While ‘eating the rich’ has grown in popularity as a solution to the ‘problem’ of corporantists since the publication of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto (1848), serious thinkers have roundly dismissed the solution of ‘communism’ proposed in this influential publication.
This rising tide of ‘eat the rich’ thinkers leaves me, and others who think like me, with a fear of being ‘eaten’ as we do not believe that ‘rising up’ and ‘tearing down’ the ‘capitalist’ enterprises of our society is the key to ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ once and for all.
Personally, my belief is that we should acknowledge the advancements in material prosperity that corporantism has achieved, while maintaining no illusions that our democratic institutions are currently equipped to regulate the excessive monopolist practices of these ‘capitalists’.
In fact, this idea of ‘reform’ by ‘eating the rich’ has cropped up across history when leaders have become overly tyrannical.
In one famous case, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon of the Roman Republic and took dictatorial power over its government in an act that would lead his society to eventually reform as the Roman Empire. He was soon stabbed to death in the Senate for his ‘tyrannical’ aspirations and a state of chaos befell the citizens of Roma.
One of the best dramtisations of this chaos is Julius Caesar (1599), where British writer William Shakespeare played out Caesar’s demise.
In Act III of his play, Brutus (one of the primary players in the senatorial assassination of Caesar) delivers a speech replete with themes similar to the current rhetoric of the ‘eat the rich’ movement.
Soon after, another prominent Roman takes the stage. Mark Antony, a stout defender of the necessity of Caesar’s actions in restoring order to the Roman Republic, gives this speech to his fellow Romans.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
In Anthony’s deft attempts to praise Caesar without violating the edicts of senators like Brutus who have seized power, we can see the problem of the ‘eat the rich’ mentality that many citizens have adopted.
While I could perform a lengthy exegesis of these themes, comedy is usually the best medicine - so I present this seminal scene from British comedy troupe Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979) to sum up the logical fallacies of these ‘eat the rich’ thinkers.
FRANCIS: “We're gettin' in through the underground heating system here, up through into the main audience chamber here, and Pilate's wife's bedroom is here. Having grabbed his wife, we inform Pilate that she is in our custody and forthwith issue our demands. Any questions?”
COMMANDO XERXES: “What exactly are the demands?”
REG: “We're giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State, and if he doesn't agree immediately, we execute her.”
MATTHIAS: “Cut her head off?”
FRANCIS: “Cut all her bits off. Send 'em back on the hour every hour. Show them we're not to be trifled with.”
REG: “Also, we're demanding a ten foot mahogany statue of the Emperor Julius Caesar with his dock hangin' out.”
LORETTA: “What? They'll never agree to that, Reg.”
REG: “That's just a bar-- a bargaining counter. And of course, we point out that they bear full responsibility when we chop her up, and that we shall not submit to blackmail!”
COMMANDOS: “No blackmail!”
REG: “They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.”
LORETTA: “And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.”
REG: “Yeah.”
LORETTA: “And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.”
REG: “Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!”
XERXES: “The aqueduct?”
REG: “What?”
XERXES: “The aqueduct.”
REG: “Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.”
COMMANDO #3: “And the sanitation.”
LORETTA: “Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?”
REG: “Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.”
MATTHIAS: “And the roads.”
REG: “Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--”
COMMANDO: “Irrigation.”
XERXES: “Medicine.”
COMMANDOS: “Huh? Heh? Huh...”
COMMANDO #2: “Education.”
COMMANDOS: “Ohh...”
REG: “Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.”
COMMANDO #1: “And the wine.”
COMMANDOS: “Oh, yes. Yeah...”
FRANCIS: “Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.”
COMMANDO: “Public baths.”
LORETTA: “And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.”
FRANCIS: “Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.”
COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
REG: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
i. How to edify the Kiwi ‘millennial’ citizen on the correct approach to Save the Cat!
So, it seems that an influential political manifesto published in the 19th Century holds too much sway amongst thinkers of our ‘millennial’ citizenry for them to effectively organise and reform our corporant society.
Due to this concept of ‘communism’ suggesting a war be waged against the forces of ‘capitalism’, the ‘eat the rich’ mentality has gained hold amongst many citizens of my generation.
As I do not favour this approach, I feel like demonstrating an alternative ‘manifesto’ based upon a civic, lawful approach to rectifying the errors of corporantist thinking may be in order.
In my mind, the best solution to the ‘problem’ of corporantism is to get down to the nitty-gritty of what it takes to be a citizen in a Representative Democracy and how we can use our powers of citizenship to reform our emergent Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy in a meritocratic direction.
Here’s a five page political ‘manifesto’ that I’ve whipped up to help our citizens realise their powers and manifest these reforms:
ii. The Responsible Millennial?
As this satirical manifesto demonstrates, the only ‘force’ in our society that would need to change to ‘balance’ the Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy is the actions of the ‘millennial’ citizenry.
With self-responsibility, civic virtue, and logical understanding these ‘starry eyed’ peoples could manifest their dreams of a freer, fairer world into being.
As a ‘millennial’ citizen myself, I’m well aware there are stereotypes about our citizenry and that these are not without a grain of truth. Elders in human societies constantly chide the new generation for not having enough respect for themselves or others to be citizens. This was as true in antiquity as it remains today.
Elders call the new generation ‘lazy’, ‘self-entitled’, ‘anxious’, or all manner of other words because they challenge the long standing corporant ideal of technocratic rule through compliance, a status quo that these elders hope will play nice with them and gently nuzzle them in their increasing senility.
Unfortunately, the elder generations have been hoodwinked. The corporant ideology has risen through our society and promoted a new idea known as D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) & E.S.G (Environment, Social, Governance) designed to hand totalitarian power of the state over to the C.A.T. (Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy).
The fallacies of corporantist logic mean they genuinely believe that the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mindset of equal outcomes being privileged over equal opportunity in society means they have been practicing a form of meritocracy already.
This is not the case: equality of outcome only succeeds by normalising exceptional outcomes back to the mean, whereas equality of opportunity in a genuinely meritocratic society succeeds by celebrating exceptional or ‘heroic’ outcomes.28
Popular party political movements across the globe have realised this, and tend to trumpet their candidates in nominally representative democracies as representing the meritocratic ideal.
However, this will not lead to reform of our governmental system, as most of these candidates are charlatanous demagogues of the specific variety Aristotle warned us of.
They have too much skin in the game, and are unlikely to seriously reform our corporant governments without sustained pressure from citizens. Relying on these figures to be our heroes will do us no good, instead we must engage in the work of actively reforming the mess we find ourselves in.
One of the primary things that prompted me to write this essay was watching a recent video by gaming commentator and reviewer Legendary Drops on YouTube.
“I’m really happy that Steam made these changes, outside of DRM they are one of the few companies that in a lot of cases usually stand up for their customers, because if you make a platform for your customers, who would have guessed it, they actually use it.”
“Maybe try to think about that Epic…”
“That said, I think that there’s still a lot of rules that need to be put in place, a lot of areas which are incredibly vulnerable when it comes to some of these companies. It sucks that there’s not really anybody out there that’s a voice for us in the first place.”
“I’m talking about, like outside of social media, there’s plenty of people online who will talk about these things (myself included) but there’s nobody in government that really understands a lot of these issues and I’m probably not going to see anybody like that for at least a few more years until, I guess, some of us gamers grow up and get responsible.”
What struck me about this video was his mixed feelings about the news that Steam, the world’s largest online video game marketplace, had recently changed its regulations to stop some of the predatory practices many game developers had inflicted upon their customers over the last 10 years.
As you can see from the quote above, this semi-anonymous fellow millennial is disappointed by how his civic society has failed to keep pace with monopolistic tech companies.
He is right that our ‘millennial’ citizenry need to hold a healthy grasp of our representative democracy and get responsible.
Other nations have their own challenges but, here in New Zealand, there is actually a way for us to start engaging with civic society about issues like his.
VI. The Return of the Jedi: Merit in the New Millennium
The process of action described by my satirical manifesto A Manifesto for the Edification of the ‘Millenial’ Kiwi Citizen, or How to Stop Worrying and Reform the C.A.T (Corporate Anarcho-Technocracy) that finds Prey amongst the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive Branches of 21st Century Governmental Politics may take years to fully manifest.
Indeed, if it manifests at all, it will only do so because citizens discover the logical paradoxes and contradictions at the heart of contemporary society for themselves.
I maintain the utmost confidence that my fellow citizens will one day see these fallacies without being ‘nudged’ in the ‘right’ direction, but that is because I am not a ‘technocrat’ who is interested in ‘solving’ the ‘human problem’ once and for all.
Instead, I believe that all humans are created equal, imbued with a ‘divine spark’ known commonly as ‘conscious thought’ and an awareness of ‘the force’ of this ‘spark’. This animating principle of human affairs is made manifest in their self-evident right to the pursuit of their dreams.
However, a ‘corporantist’ ideology has risen amongst human society, and it has promised them easy answers to life’s hard questions.
While we await the inevitable emancipation of Man, who has once again shackled himself to a false tyranny, we can continue to enjoy the camaraderie of our fellow citizens and work on improving our physical and spiritual conditions.
There has been much division in our nation caused by the false corporantist tyranny, and we must begin to heal from it through meritocratic engagement with our governmental institutions. I suggest we do this in calmness and good grace, with a healthy dose of skepticism and comedy about the unfortunate tragedies that are sure to befall the corporantists and their muddled ideology.
One of the best historical satires of how these malicious corporantists have advanced to the position of being the ‘heroes’ who ‘lead’ our society can be found in the song When I Was a Lad by Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert from the opera H.M.S Pinafore; or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor (1878).
As our current government continues to indulge in the mixed metaphor of ‘turning the ship around’ to get New Zealand ‘back on track’, this comic opera seems an appropriate place to turn when looking for the bonhomie with which to mock their fallacious logic and corporantist mode of thinking.
The H.M.S Pinafore is a fictitious ship in The British Navy, an organisation that adopted a bureaucratic model of corporantist governance during the Victorian Era,29 and Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera popularly mocked the ‘brave’ and ‘worthy’ individuals who had climbed the ranks of their society.
In the show, Sir Joseph Porter (First Lord of the Admiralty) sings of how he achieved his lofty post:
The shadow of these themes still rests upon the islands of New Zealand, and many of our current governmental agencies are staffed (and legislated) by those whose rise through the ranks of our ‘meritocratic’ society matches the ‘good fortune’ of Sir Joseph Porter.
If one has the time and energy to save these unfortunate souls from their muddled thinking by launching into civic action, there are three particularly relevant pieces of legislation that are currently before the New Zealand parliament.
i. The Digital Services Bill
Just prior to the 2023 General Election, the incumbent government placed the Digital Services Tax Bill before the house - but little progress has been made on it since.30
While the incumbent government was voted out in a landslide, this bill has been renewed by the ‘victorious’ new coalition government who now find themselves with the unfortunate and deplorable task of governing our citizenry.
The Digital Services Bill has stalled amongst the various cogs of our bureaucracy since the new government took office, and there remains much debate and speculation about how this bill might proceed.
The basic legislative goal of the Digital Services Tax Bill is to impose a 3% tax on many members of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and all other corporations that provide certain digital services to New Zealand citizens and residents.
Right now the process of outlining how the bill will achieve its aims is taking place in back rooms out of view from the public,31 and it appears that our dying legacy media have successfully lobbied the current government to pass the bill so that the revenue generated by it can be apportioned to save them from the realities of the market.
However, this is an exceedingly narrow view of how this bill and the revenue it generates could be implemented in the New Zealand economy. The Digital Services Tax Bill is a springboard for a much wider debate about the role of multinational corporations in our private, public, political, and civic spaces where one may easily fall prey to their economic predations.
If my manifesto is to weave itself into being, one of the immediate actions implied in it would be for Kiwis to keep their eyes on this bill, and edify their elected representatives of the vast implications that the bill holds.
Namely, that it is ‘the force’ for regulating how we tax then apportion revenue from companies like the ‘Magnificent Seven’ - multinational corporations who provide digital services to our people and avow their corporantist creed of technocracy and greed.
ii. The Mental Health Act & The Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill
I’ll be paying more attention to the Mental Health Act and Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill select committee submissions for the reasons outlined in the footnotes below,32 but all three of these bills are relevant to solving the current crises that the ‘millennial’ generation is facing.
The Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill is a potential (but flawed) bulwark against the predatory invasions of corporantist ideologues into our lives as private citizens. The Mental Health Act update deals with the human liberty required for truth seeking anarchic expression to emerge. The Digital Services Bill puts regulations on the monopolistic excesses of the technocrats.
I’ve highlighted these three bills to give some direction to any reader who has been stirred to action by this essay, but there is no need to rush into action as human affairs are largely self-correcting if one exists in a society where time, suffering, and sacrifice are properly valued.
If you feel this is not the case in your society, then you may be one of the ‘brave’, ‘foolhardy’, ‘idealistic,’ ‘heroes’ who feel ‘compelled’ by my satirical manifesto to ‘take action’ and ‘reform’ your society. For those readers determined to rush to civic action, it is wise to heed the warnings about the rotten life of politics on pages 4 and 5 of the manifesto.
And now, exeunt, I bid you adieu with this Shakespearean message from my business, Divine Pitch Creations:
On the 22nd of December, I’ll be inhabiting the role of Snug (the joiner who performs as a lion) in a community production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595) on the 22nd of December at Otari-Wilton’s Bush in Wellington.
Earlier this week, I filmed the above video of our fairy band performing the original tune You Spotted Snakes by local composer Jonathan Berkhan. The video is a demonstration to help the kids playing fairies learn the song, but it is still a nice note to sign off on.
YOU SPOTTED SNAKES
You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.
Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.
POSTSCRIPT:
This is the first draft second draft third draft fourth fifth draft of this essay. Please get in touch if you notice any corrections that need to be made for style, clarity, grammar, punctuation, or other concerns.
If you like this format of non-fiction writing and think I should continue to explore it, consider subscribing. This Substack will remain a free place for my musings and those of others, I have no intention of charging fees or censoring discourse.
I’m not a complete weirdo I swear, I attended one year of primary school in Italy and intermediate/high school/university in New Zealand in addition to my home-schooling.
I’m a well socialised autodidact and only a semi-crazy artist, so I recommend home-schooling.
In this case, Wikipedia seems a pretty reliable source. However, beware of the censorship battles that unfold amongst their volunteer editors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
Tier two technical support team leader is corporatese gobbledygook for ‘I managed 20 senior help desk workers’ but it was my official job title.
A Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) prevents me from disclosing which ‘Magnificent Seven’ company I performed these tasks for, but I lived in Wellington where this article was published in the Dominion Post (the local ‘paper of record’).
NDA on this too, but I resigned with an understanding that the issues were being addressed through new employee contracts to be signed ASAP.
I intend to make a submission to the Select Committee for the Mental Health Bill by December 20, 2024 and will likely publish this on my Substack.
Suffice it to say that since 2020 I have experienced many of the degrading and torturous conditions in New Zealand psychiatric institutions that according to Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier breached the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
During these psychotic episodes I was diagnosed with ‘bipolar disorder’ as a simple explanation for my symptoms. However, I no longer take any psychiatric medication and am considered by my community to be a relatively sane citizen again. One of the main thinkers who inspired me on my journey to recover without medication was fellow psychotic and 1994 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics, John Nash.
My thoughts on the current Mental Health Bill are complicated, I appreciate the shift away from psychiatric medicine but I hold concerns about involuntary treatment order regulations as it took me many legal battles to prove my constitutional rights regarding these.
Contrary to popular belief, ‘wokeism’ is not just a cultural phenomenon of the political left wing. Konstantin Kisin and Andrew Doyle make a compelling case for it also existing on the right wing of politics.
As always, Horseshoe theory applies and I feel ‘wokeism’ is just a manifestation of the principles of this theory in the current ‘culture war’.
California hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the United States of America’s First Past The Post electoral system since 1988 and the Democratic party has controlled the majority of its internal legislature for a long time.
Victor Davis Hansen encourages usage of the term Second World Wars instead of World War II. World War II implies a singular conflict in the specific 1939 - 1945 period, whereas his lens on military history describes a broader period of conflict between the ‘Axis’ and ‘Allied’ powers in the early 20th Century.
Here’s an article from 2014 that expounds on the economic theories of the ‘rock star’ model https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/new-zealands-key-unlocks-rock-star-economy/ and here’s a recent podcast where Sir John Key looked back on his time as Prime Minister.
I should note that we are still technically subjects of the Crown of King Charles III of the United Kingdom. Despite being an almost entirely self governing nation state, New Zealand remains a Dominion of the Crown of the United Kingdom, even if it has held practically autonomous rights of statehood since 1947.
For more information about Public/Private partnerships failing in the market, see my previous Substack about the collapse of SolarZero:
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From page 45 of Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration (1958).
https://libquotes.com/alan-moore/quote/lbn6e4c
https://libquotes.com/alan-moore/quote/lbr3h3f
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/580304-i-believe-that-all-other-political-states-are-in-fact
While Dr. Noam Chomsky’s work in linguistics has been increasingly discredited, his political work in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988, with Edward S. Herman) is still a good description of how the ‘legacy media’ that dominated the 20th century continues to propagandise for western elites in the 21st Century.
Using Wikipedia again, but this article only talks about the historical origins of Technocracy and has little information on its modern variation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
For more information about these developments, check out Michael Lewis’ excellent book The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2017).
Nothing has demonstrated this more than The Twitter Files (2022 - 2023) where the collusion of ‘Big Government’ and ‘Big Tech’ was revealed to the public by independent journalists whom Elon Musk allowed to view internal communications after he purchased the platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
For more on how Star Wars changed Hollywood, check out gossip columnist Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998).
In actuality, both of these types of media presentation are plays upon the interview format of talk radio that developed in the early 20th century.
For more information about the ‘cliodynamic’ cycles of history, check out Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War (2007).
https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-works/fact-sheets/pbrief7/
Unfortunately the Westminster system did partially fall for the idea of a hereditary natural aristocracy. Not just a hereditary monarch, but also hereditary seats in the House of Lords, thought at least it has a democratic House of Commons or Parliament.
I’m obviously making this Corporantist Creed up for dramatic effect… Though closely study the work of New Zealand’s Chief Censor as this obfuscatory office still exists in our nation.
In New Zealand this ‘normalisation’ of ‘exceptional outcomes’ is known as ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’, where Kiwis will tear down the achievements of anyone we sense is getting too much of an ego about them.
Parkinson expertly outlays the ever expanding bureaucracy of the British Royal Fleet as well as New Zealand’s Cabinet in his 1958 book.
https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/54HOOOCProgressLegislation1/f5d0247d627605f7b1591b3910d2c19954554798
https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/07/02/ministers-will-shake-the-facebook-and-google-money-tree-for-nz-media/
Footnote 6 addressed why The Mental Health Act is so personally meaningful, but here is a useful summary of what The Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill may do for our constiutional framework. https://substack.com/home/post/p-151792495