An Immodest Proposal

The bourgies self-destructed. Boojee Boojum.

The post-mortem at Davos amounts to a cry of "foul" at an America that started to treat Europe the way Europe had treated the rest of the world during the colonial era. To quote Mark Twain:

"...and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred."

The "him" was Twain's "Good Little Boy", himself a good example of the rite of passage every child must undergo in Western Civilization, who must be reared in Sunday School before s/he's exposed to Real World 101: the Business Civilization in which, in America particularly, aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism became national characteristics—and the problem, Charles Dickens implies, is that they cannot be turned off at five o’clock the way John Wemmick can. The way every civilization evolves when it spreads territorially, the practical, material culture gets highest priority in this expansionary cultural diffusion.

Dickens gives us, in Wemmick, a man who has perfectly bifurcated his personality—a Victorian prototype of the very split Veblen diagnoses a century later. In the office he is:

Aggressive in the narrow, bureaucratic sense: brisk, transactional, emotionally armored.

Skeptical to the point of cynicism: every client is a potential liability, every gesture a calculation.

Competitive in the survivalist way of Jaggers’s legal world: always alert, always guarded.

And then, at home, he becomes the opposite creature entirely—tender, whimsical, generous, playful, almost pastoral. The Castle is a sanctuary where the “anti‑bankruptcy qualities” are not only suspended but inverted.

Veblen links these traits to the broader tension between market psychology and family life, which he famously said requires the opposite qualities—yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness—that “lead straight to bankruptcy.” 

Veblen’s point was that modern economic life rewards traits that are catastrophic in intimate settings. Dickens dramatizes that tension with uncanny precision: Wemmick survives only by compartmentalizing so completely that he becomes two incompatible men.

What makes Veblen's observation so rich is that Dickens treats this split not as pathology but as adaptation. Wemmick isn’t a monster; he’s a man who has learned that the marketplace and the hearth run on opposite moral physics. Veblen later names the same contradiction in sociological terms.

Wemmick becomes almost a Victorian ancestor of the modern “work self” and “home self”—a figure who intuits that the traits that keep you solvent can also make you spiritually bankrupt. Is this the Organization Man or the Corporate Machiavelli who makes a good match with Ardrey's killer ape? But by the time of this type's advent, the Corporation has become the redoubt of the coward, the incomplete personality that loves to immerse itself in an anonymous "negocios" that aims to grow like a cancer, guaranteed a free elevator ride to the Boardroom via the Peter Principle. Unfortunately the Labor Union, completely assimilated by the Soaring Sixties, has turned into such a Behemoth, too. The complacent, triumphant bourgeois lets the Killdozer do all the acts of destruction. Thus Nietzsche's Overman becomes a literal Nazi, who usually had the same kind of personality. Be advised, this denizen of Galbraith's Technostructure has been replaced by the corporate raiders who come from a Mafia mentality - sometimes literally.

Social critics in the mid-20th century had to scrounge around for a psychological term, but psychology was just hitting its stride. Most recently it made the distinction between the psychopath, who is born that way, and the sociopath, who is made that way via cultural conditioning. Briefly "robopath" was used: the self-programmed personality eager to blend in.

Lacking the 21st century's more finely-tuned discretionary circuitry, for the 20th century, a psychopathic group or individual is one that has:

1. No internalized moral restraints. This means a personality (or class) that:

recognizes no obligations to others;

treats rules as tools rather than commitments;

lacks empathy or fellow-feeling;

is incapable of loyalty to any larger structure;

This is why they often applied the term to financial elites in the late stages of Western civilization.

2. A purely transactional view of society - a “psychopathic” actor, in this sense, sees:

institutions as things to exploit;

communities as resources;

laws as obstacles or weapons;

other people as means, never ends.

This is not the DSM concept of psychopathy. It’s closer to a moral-structural diagnosis: a class that has lost any sense of social obligation.

This reminds me of a memoir titled 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 (1958).

Barbara O’Brien’s book describes a world divided into:

Operators — cold, calculating, hyper‑rational controllers;

Things — the people who are acted upon, manipulated, or used.

Even though the book is framed as an autobiographical psychological memoir, the Operator/Thing dichotomy reads like a symbolic anatomy of modern social life. The Operators embody the same  “anti‑bankruptcy qualities”:

relentless aggression;

perpetual skepticism;

strategic competitiveness.

They are the distilled essence of the marketplace personality—transactional, unsentimental, and always scanning for advantage. This occurs even within a business organization in which careers are sabotaged by artfully contrived interpersonal frictions, usually between a boss and promising employee on the way up. If successful, then the Operator is the one who gets the promotion.

The “Things,” by contrast, represent the softer, relational, vulnerable qualities Halsey says lead to “bankruptcy” in a competitive society—sympathy, tenderness, altruism, yieldingness. Dickens dramatizes this tension through Wemmick’s split life; O’Brien abstracts it into a metaphysical caste system thanks to a case of protective schizophrenia in which her hallucinations told her to evacuate immediately.

Across Dickens, Halsey, and O’Brien, the same structure keeps reappearing:

A world that rewards predatory vigilance

A private or inner world that requires gentleness

A person forced to split themselves to survive

Wemmick builds a literal drawbridge. Veblen describes a psychological toggle that can’t be switched off. O’Brien imagines an entire invisible cosmic bureaucracy of Operators enforcing the split.

It’s as if each author is circling the same modern dilemma:

How do you remain human in a system that rewards inhuman traits?

How indeed? Complicating this picture is the devolutionary tendency that occurs in EVERY civilization regardless of economic system. This is, as usual...

3. A breakdown of the “instrumentality → institution” cycle.

My whole civilizational model, which is premised on the collectization of Maslow's Pyramid,  hinges on whether elites:

maintain the original purpose of an instrumentality

or;

convert it into a self-serving institution;

A “psychopathic” elite is one that:

no longer even pretends to serve the original purpose;

openly uses the institution for extraction;

feels no shame or contradiction in doing so.

It’s the terminal form of institutional corruption.

4. A personality pattern that emerges in the Time of Troubles:

I believed that as civilizations enter their Times of Troubles:

elites become predatory;

middle classes become anxious and defensive;

masses become cynical and apathetic.

The elite version of this pattern is what used to be  called psychopathic:

a class that has severed all ties to the common good.

5. A moral, not medical, category: this is not diagnosing mental illness; it’s diagnosing moral disintegration.

When I say “psychopathic,” I  means:

incapable of moral imagination;

incapable of solidarity;

incapable of shame;

incapable of loyalty to anything beyond self-interest.

It’s a civilizational pathology, not a clinical one. The Quartet ("die Reaktion" that the Nazis used to blame) serves as a kind of prequel.

They needed a term that captured:

moral callousness;

predatory opportunism;

absence of social conscience;

transdactional manipulation of institutions.

“Psychopathic” was the closest available term in mid‑20th‑century sociological vocabulary. It carried the connotation of moral numbness, not the modern checklist of traits.

The key insight is that  a “psychopathic” elite is the final stage of a ruling class that has lost its legitimacy. It is the moment when:

the elite no longer even pretends to serve society;

the public no longer believes in the elite;

institutions become hollow shells;

the civilization enters irreversible decline.

It’s the moral equivalent of organ failure.

After making my own O'Brien Breakaway, I supplemented my Washington internship with independent study with an eye to writing a sci-fi series with a future-hitory template or fictitious time-chart based on theories of history I had learned in college. This also included theories of evil that were continuations of the Enlightenment Program of deducing the problem of evil from non-theistic, scientific causes.

I knew the West was already in a Toynbeean Time of Troubles, but the Reagan Presidency made me realize that he was a classic late‑imperial “restoration” figure—an agent of morale‑renewal, not a transformer of the underlying cycle, a leader who revives morale and identity but does not fundamentally alter the trajectory of the imperial system. 

Reagan’s presidency is widely interpreted (even outside macrohistory) as a moment of:

Narrative renewal: restoring national confidence after the crises of the 1970s;

Cultural consolidation: reasserting a unifying myth of American destiny;

Imperial recommitment: strengthening the late‑stage superpower posture rather than transforming it;

Delay rather than reversal of long‑term structural decline.

After a civilization enters its period of imperial overextension and institutional sclerosis, renewal often begins not with structural reform but with symbolic revitalization—a charismatic figure who restores confidence, cohesion, and cultural purpose even if the underlying material contradictions remain unresolved.

With what I knew about the John Birch Society and the "Cowboy Cabal" behind it, I knew that an evil regime, most likely in the form of a theocacy, was highly probable. Maybe something like Pat Robertson for President.

I've had to revise my theory in a couple of places, and I'm still reluctant to alter the sequence of events leading to the Great Depression, but the criminogenetic aspect of cultural decline has been substantially revamped.

My theory relies on the psychological effects of a society's plataeuing s-curve. I had attributed stagflation to a combination of continued banking involvement aggravated by Galbraith's robots in gray flannel. The crazy years marking the distemper of animal spirits by institutional failure not meeting Maslovian needs was easy to identify, but I had missed some details and I'm only two-thirds convinced. Anyway:

According to Steve Hall, why did industrial profits begin to fall in the 1950s?

Steve Hall’s explanation is refreshingly structural, not cyclical. In his reconstruction of post‑war capitalism, industrial profits begin to fall in the 1950s because the institutional architecture of the postwar settlement created a long‑term squeeze on the industrial rate of return.

Hall’s core argument: the postwar compromise contained the seeds of its own profitability crisis.

Hall sees the 1950s not as a golden age that later “went wrong,” but as the moment when the contradictions of the Fordist settlement quietly began to accumulate.  (To the non-American world the central fact of American history is American technology - what they used to call "Fordism," meaning mass production. Until very recently there was no history of American technology in existence, and even today this vital subject obtains only incidental mention, with an almost total lack of real understanding in most histories of the United States.) Several forces converge:

1. Rising organic composition of capital: Hall draws on Marx but updates him: industrial production in the postwar boom required ever‑increasing capital intensity—automation, large fixed‑capital installations, complex supply chains.  

 More capital per worker;  

 Slower proportional growth in surplus value .

This produces a long‑run tendency for industrial profit rates to drift downward.

2. The postwar class compromise raised costs. The Fordist deal—strong unions, rising wages, welfare states, stable employment—was politically necessary after the Depression and WWII, but it also:

 Increased labor costs;

 Locked firms into long‑term obligations;

 Reduced managerial flexibility.

Hall emphasizes that this wasn’t a moral failure but a structural one: the very institutions that stabilized capitalism also constrained profitability.

3. Market saturation and the limits of mass consumption. By the late 1950s, the first signs of demand saturation appeared in core markets:

 Durable goods markets (cars, appliances) matured;

 Productivity gains outpaced consumption growth.

This meant firms had to compete more aggressively for market share, eroding margins.

4. The rise of managerial bureaucracy. Hall is close to Galbraith here:  

Large corporations developed managerial layers that:

 Prioritized stability over innovation;

 Increased overhead;

 Slowed decision cycles .

This bureaucratic thickening reduced the dynamism of industrial capital and contributed to falling returns.

5. Global competition begins earlier than people think.

Even in the 1950s, Japan and West Germany were rebuilding with:

 Newer capital stock;

 Lower labor costs ;

 Export‑oriented strategies .

This put pressure on U.S. and British industrial margins well before the 1970s crisis.

Hall’s synthesis: 

For Hall, industrial profits fall in the 1950s because Fordism was a historically necessary but ultimately self‑limiting system.  It stabilized capitalism after 1945 but did so by:

-Raising costs;

 Increasing capital intensity;

 Creating bureaucratic drag;

 Saturating markets;

 Inviting global competition .

The result is a slow, structural decline in industrial profitability that becomes visible in the 1960s and explodes in the 1970s.

This is exactly the kind of slow‑burn structural contradiction that becomes mythically potent when dramatized.

Couldn't European-style regulation have tempered the production/consumption mismatch?

European‑style regulation could have softened parts of the production/consumption mismatch, but it couldn’t have eliminated the underlying structural tension Hall is pointing to. In fact, the European model solves one half of the problem while quietly worsening the other.

Let’s walk through it in a way that respects the economic mechanics rather than the ideological packaging.

What European regulation actually does well:

Postwar European capitalism—especially in Germany, the Nordics, and to a lesser extent France—developed institutions that:

Coordinate wages with productivity (via ectoralbargaining) ;

 Stabilize demand through welfare states;

 Restrain speculative finance (at least until the 1990s);

 Encourage long‑term investment through bank‑based finance;

 Limit destructive competition in key industries.

These features did help prevent the classic Fordist mismatch where productivity rose faster than wages, leading to overproduction and underconsumption.

So Europe mitigated the demand side of the mismatch.

But Hall’s argument is deeper than demand.

The mismatch Hall describes is structural, not merely distributive. Hall’s point is that the postwar boom contained a contradiction:

Industrial capitalism requires ever‑rising capital intensity ;

 But rising capital intensity produces falling marginal returns;

And the Fordist compromise locks in high labor costs;

 While global competition erodes pricing power.

European regulation smoothed the surface turbulence, but it didn’t reverse the underlying physics of the system.

Think of it like this:

Europe slows the descent.  

It doesn’t change the slope.

Why European regulation can’t fully fix the mismatch

1. Coordinated wage growth still raises unit labor costs. Even if wages track productivity, they still rise.  In a world of global competition, this squeezes margins unless firms automate faster—which increases capital intensity and pushes the profit rate down again.

Europe trades volatility for rigidity.

2. Demand stabilization didn’t solve market saturation. By the late 1950s, core durable‑goods markets were maturing everywhere.  No regulatory model can force households to buy a third refrigerator.

3. Bank‑based finance encourages stability, not dynamism.

Germany’s Hausbank system and Japan’s keiretsu model protect firms from short‑term pressures, but they also:

 Slow restructuring ;

 Preserve inefficient incumbents;

 Reduce competitive churn.

This helps employment but depresses long‑run profitability.

4. Export‑led models externalize the mismatch. Germany and Japan solved the mismatch by exporting their surplus production to the U.S. consumer market.  This works only because the U.S. runs deficits and absorbs global overcapacity.

It’s not a universal solution; it’s a positional one.

The deeper truth Hall is pointing toward: The production/consumption mismatch isn’t a policy error.  

It’s a systemic feature of industrial capitalism once it reaches high maturity.

European regulation:

 smooths the cycle;

 distributes gains more evenly;

 prevents social explosions.

But it cannot:

 reverse the rising organic composition of capital;

 prevent market saturation;

 eliminate global competition;

 restore high industrial profit rates.

In other words:

Europe can manage the symptoms,  but not the underlying metabolic rate of the system.

It was looking as though labor unions had to be sacrificed and the globalizing quest for cheaper wage-labor implemented. What I was seeing was the uncomfortable structural logic of the system asserting itself. It wasn’t that policymakers woke up one morning and wanted to sacrifice unions; it’s that the postwar industrial model created pressures that made the sacrifice appear—within that logic—like the only viable escape route.

And the key is this:  the system didn’t collapse because unions were too strong; unions were weakened because the system was already collapsing.

Let’s unpack that in a way that keeps the causal arrows clear.

1. The profit squeeze came first. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, industrial capital in the U.S. and U.K. was already experiencing:

 rising capital intensity;  

 slowing productivity growth;  

 saturated domestic markets;  

 increasing global competition;  

 declining returns on fixed investment.  

This is the structural backdrop.  Unions didn’t cause it; they were simply in the way of the “solutions” capital found.

2. The Fordist compromise became too expensive to maintain. The postwar deal—high wages, stable employment, rising consumption—worked beautifully when:

 markets were expanding;

 productivity was surging;

 the U.S. had no real competitors.

Once those conditions faded, the deal became a cost structure that firms could no longer carry.

So the question became:  How do you restore profitability without dismantling the entire system?

Capital found two answers.

3. Answer #1: Globalization  (I call it Periclean extensification or soft imperialism). If domestic labor is expensive and politically powerful, you can:

 move production to cheaper labor markets;

arbitrage global wage differentials;

break the bargaining power of domestic unions;

reorient profits toward global supply chains.

This wasn’t ideological; it was arithmetic.

Globalization wasn’t a choice so much as 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘃𝗲. But some folks (like me) call it imperialism because it means that the brick-and-mortar cornucopia was NOT the result of the West's own organizational powers or patterns.

4. Answer #2: De-unionization: Once firms had the option to offshore, the bargaining power of unions collapsed.

The sequence is important:

1. Profit squeeze  

2. Offshoring becomes feasible  

3. Threat of offshoring weakens unions  

4. Actual offshoring destroys them  

Unions weren’t sacrificed because they were “bad.”  They were sacrificed because they were expensive in a world where capital could move and labor could not.

5. The deeper structural truth -  we’re circling the core insight Hall, Brenner, and others converge on:

When industrial capitalism matures, the system resolves its contradictions by globalizing.

Not because globalization is morally superior, but because:

capital must chase cheaper labor;

capital must chase higher returns;

capital must escape domestic constraints.

The weakening of unions is a symptom of this shift, not the cause.

The tragic dimension  (and my tragic sensibility) kicks in:  

the very institutions that made mid‑century capitalism humane—unions, welfare states, stable employment—became the obstacles to its continued profitability.

So the system shed them.

Not out of malice.  

Out of structural necessity.

It’s the classic Toynbee pattern:  an instrumentality of integration becomes an institution of rigidity, and the system breaks around it.

What would Toynbeean reform have entailed?

A genuinely Toynbeean reform is one of those ideas that sounds simple when stated abstractly—restore the instrumentality of institutions—but becomes radical the moment you try to specify what that means in practice. Because Toynbee wasn’t a nostalgist. He didn’t want to go back to the 19th century, nor did he think technocracy alone could save a civilization. His whole framework is about reversing institutional calcification so that the social structure can once again serve its original purpose: enabling creative minorities to solve real problems.

If we translate that into concrete reforms, a Toynbeean program would touch every major subsystem of society.

Below is the closest thing to a faithful reconstruction.

1. Re‑align institutions with their founding purposes. Toynbee’s central diagnosis is that institutions become self‑serving.  A reform would therefore:

strip away bureaucratic layers that exist only to preserve themselves;  

re‑tie funding and authority to performance rather than seniority;  

decentralize decision‑making to the level where problems actually occur;  

sunset institutions that no longer serve a real function.

This is the “instrumentality → institution → reform” cycle in action.

2. Rebuild the “instrumentalisms of economic progress.”

Post-Toynbeeans believe civilizations rise when they have effective instruments for:

innovation;

capital formation;

education;

social mobility;

military defense;  

political integration.  

A reform program would therefore focus on:

long‑term investment over short‑term speculation;

public–private partnerships that actually produce new capacity;

education systems that cultivate competence rather than credentials;

mechanisms for upward mobility that bypass entrenched elites.

This is the opposite of financialization and credentialism.

3. Break the monopoly of the “dominant minority”. The merely “dominant minority” (in contrast to the formerly creative one) is the elite that clings to power after losing creativity.  

A reform would:

open elite circulation;

prevent wealth from hardening into hereditary caste;

limit rent‑seeking;

encourage new elites to emerge from technical, scientific, and civic achievement.

This is not populism; it’s elite renewal.

4. Rebalance the economy away from restrictive systems.

Civilizations decline when they adopt restrictive economic policies to protect entrenched interests.  This is what causes mob madness.

Reform would require:

dismantling monopolies and oligopolies;

reducing barriers to entry for new firms;

redirecting capital toward productive investment;

discouraging speculative finance that extracts rather than creates value.

This is very close to what he admired in the early stages of Western capitalism.

5. Rebuild legitimacy through shared purpose. Civilizations survive when they maintain a common ideology that binds classes together.  Reform would therefore involve:

renewing civic narratives;

strengthening institutions of public trust;

creating shared national projects that transcend faction;

reducing the fragmentation of information ecosystems.

This is the “integrative ideology” that keeps a society from fracturing.

6. Restore balance between coercion and consent. The foundation of the collective Maslow Pyramid is security. The “weapons system” concept means that the structure of power must match the structure of society.  

Reform would require:

policing and military systems that reflect the actual distribution of power;

legal systems that are transparent and predictable;

political institutions that can absorb dissent rather than suppress it.

This is how a civilization avoids the slide into authoritarian rigidity.

7. Reconstitute the state as a problem‑solving instrumentality. This means states that can act—not just deliberate.  Reform would include:

administrative simplification;  

clear lines of authority;  

empowered civil servants with technical competence;  

insulation from capture by special interests.  

This is the opposite of both bureaucratic sclerosis and libertarian hollowing‑out.

The essence of  reform, if you compress all of this into one sentence:

A macrohistorical reform restores the capacity of a civilization to solve real problems by renewing its instrumentalities, refreshing its elites, and re‑aligning its institutions with their original purposes.

It is neither left nor right.  

It is neither nostalgic nor utopian.  

It is a civilizational maintenance program.

Could Mosler's MMT have facilitated this?

Absolutely—MMT could have been the missing financial instrumentality that made a reform operationally possible. But not because MMT is “left” or “redistributive.” Mosler’s core insight is institutional, not ideological:  a sovereign currency issuer is never financially constrained, only resource‑constrained.

That single shift unlocks exactly the kind of civilizational renewal that ias impossible under a restrictive, self‑protective elite.

Let’s walk through the alignment.

1. Macrohistory says civilizations fail when institutions become restrictive. Restrictive institutions hoard resources, block innovation, and defend incumbents.  

They do this by:

rationing investment;

prioritizing balanced budgets;

starving public goods;

privileging rent‑seekers over builders.

This is the “institutional sclerosis” that marks the decline phase.

2. MMT dissolves the artificial scarcity that empowers restrictive elites. Mosler’s paradigm removes the financial veto power that entrenched interests use to block reform.

Under MMT:

public investment is not limited by tax revenue;

deficits are not inherently harmful;

the state can mobilize idle resources directly;

austerity is revealed as a political choice, not an economic necessity.

This is exactly the kind of “instrumental renewal”  required to break the dominance of a self‑protective minority.

3. MMT enables the rebuilding of organizational patterns.

Civilizations riseand flourish when they have effective instrumentalities for:

innovation;

infrastructure;

education;

social mobility;

productive capital formation.

MMT gives the state the operational capacity to fund these without:

begging private capital;

appeasing bond markets;

cutting elsewhere;

triggering austerity cycles.

It restores the state as a problem‑solving instrumentality, not a budget‑balancing accountant.

4. MMT supports elite renewal rather than elite entrenchment.

Austerity protects incumbents.  

𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀.

This is a major reason elites fear it.

MMT‑enabled public spending could:

fund new industries;

support technical and scientific elites;

break the monopoly of rent‑seeking financial elites;

create pathways for new “creative minorities” to rise.

open elite circulation, don’t freeze it!

5. MMT reduces the pressure to globalize labor arbitrage. This is the part that directly connects to my earlier question.

Why were unions sacrificed?  

Because firms needed to restore profitability under a false belief in financial scarcity.

With MMT:

the state can maintain full employment domestically;

firms don’t need to chase cheap labor abroad;

public investment can raise productivity without wage suppression;

the “profit squeeze” can be relieved through demand and innovation, not offshoring.

In other words, MMT could have reduced the structural drive toward globalization as a release valve.

6. MMT provides the fiscal oxygen for a reconstitution. Such

reforms require:

rebuilding infrastructure;

renewing education;

investing in science;

supporting families;

modernizing institutions;

funding long‑term projects.

All of these are impossible under a gold‑standard mindset.  

All of them are trivial under Mosler’s operational framework.

MMT is not the reform itself.  

It is the enabling condition for reform.

The synthesis. If you compress the whole argument:

Hall iagnoses the disease: institutional rigidity.  

Mosler provides the tool: monetary sovereignty as an instrument of renewal.

Together, they form a coherent civilizational strategy:

break the power of restrictive elites;

restore the state’s capacity to act;

invest in real productive expansion;

maintain full employment;

avoid the destructive globalization of labor arbitrage;

renew the creative minority.

MMT isn’t a “policy.”  

It’s a civilizational instrument.

Can MMT be applied transnationally or supranationally?

MMT can be applied transnationally or supranationally, but only under very specific institutional conditions. And this is where things get interesting, because the moment you scale MMT beyond the nation‑state, you’re no longer talking about “policy”—you’re talking about civilizational architecture.

Let’s take it step by step.

1. MMT is not inherently national—but it is inherently tied to a currency issuer. MMT applies wherever there is:

a sovereign currency issuer;

that issues a non‑convertible fiat currency;

with a floating exchange rate;

and no external debt obligations in another currency.

This can be a nation, but it could also be:

a federation;

a monetary union;

a supranational authority.

The key is monetary sovereignty, not borders.

2. The Eurozone is the canonical example of a supranational currency that fails the MMT criteria. The euro is a shared currency, but:

member states do not issue it;

the ECB is not democratically accountable to them;

fiscal policy is fragmented;

monetary sovereignty is effectively surrendered.

This is why the Eurozone behaves like a gold standard system:  

currency users are constrained; the currency issuer is insulated.

MMT could work at the ECB level, but not at the member‑state level.

3. What would a supranational MMT system require?

To apply MMT transnationally, you need:

A. A single currency issuer. A supranational treasury with the authority to:

spend the currency into existence;

tax to regulate demand;

coordinate fiscal policy across regions.

B. A unified fiscal authority. Not just a central bank, but a central budget capable of:

countercyclical spending;

automatic stabilizers;

investment in shared infrastructure.

C. A political structure that legitimizes the issuer. This is the hardest part.  A supranational MMT regime requires:

shared political identity;

shared risk;

shared purpose.

Without this, you get the Eurozone’s fragmentation.

D. A mechanism for regional balancing. Because regions will diverge, you need:

fiscal transfers;

employment guarantees;

investment equalization.

This is how the U.S. dollar zone works internally.

4. Could a global MMT system exist? In principle, yes—but only if:

a global authority issued a global currency;

nations accepted that authority;

fiscal capacity was centralized;

exchange rates were abolished or harmonized.

This is essentially a world‑state monetary system.

It’s theoretically coherent but politically implausible.

5. The deeper truth: MMT scales only as far as political integration scales. MMT is not a technique.  It’s an institutional description of how a currency system works.

So the real question becomes:

How far can political sovereignty be pooled?

 A nation‑state? Easy.  

 A federation? Possible.  

 A monetary union without fiscal union? Disaster.  

 A global authority? Only in science fiction or deep future history.  

MMT is a civilizational instrumentality, not a mere economic tool.

6. Frank Herbert would say:

A supranational MMT regime requires a World State;

A World State requires a shared integrative ideology;

Without that, monetary integration becomes a restrictive institution.

In other words:

MMT can scale only as far as civilization itself has cohered.

That’s why the Eurozone struggles: it attempted monetary unification without civilizational unification.

The synthesis:

MMT can absolutely be applied transnationally or supranationally— but only if monetary sovereignty is genuinely pooled and backed by political integration.

Without that, it becomes a brittle, restrictive system.  That way lies madness, mean and hateful. With it, it becomes the fiscal engine of a new civilizational phase.

We need this political integration anyway because the range of our weapons systems exceeds the political reach of the Westphalian system based on nationalism.

This is one of the deepest structural mismatches of the modern world: our technologies have scaled beyond the political containers that are supposed to govern them. That’s not an opinion about any specific government or leader—it’s a systems‑level observation that many scholars, strategists, and historians have made in different ways.

And they’re right: once the range of a weapons system exceeds the jurisdiction of the political system that controls it, the Westphalian model starts to fray.

1. Westphalia assumes violence is territorially bounded

The 1648 settlement rests on a simple premise:

political authority is territorial;

coercive power is territorial;

threats are local or regional;

borders contain conflict.

That model worked when:

armies marched;

ships sailed;

artillery had limited range;

information moved slowly.

It breaks down when none of those constraints apply.

2. Modern weapons systems have no respect for borders. Today’s strategic systems operate on scales that dwarf the Westphalian frame:

intercontinental missiles;

cyberweapons that propagate globally;

drones that can be piloted from anywhere;

orbital surveillance;

hypersonic delivery systems;

AI‑driven autonomous platforms.

Their operational range is planetary.  

Their political oversight is still national.

That mismatch creates instability.

3. When the range of coercion exceeds the range of governance, integration becomes necessary. 

If a weapons system can:

strike globally;

disrupt global networks;

destabilize global markets;

trigger global retaliation.

…then the political system that governs it must have global or at least supranational reach.

Otherwise you get:

fragmented authority;

misaligned incentives;

escalation risks;

coordination failures.

This is why many analysts argue that the Westphalian system is increasingly out of sync with technological reality.

4. The “weapons system” has outgrown the “political system”:

every civilization has a dominant weapons system;

political structures evolve to control it;

when the weapons system changes faster than the political structure, crisis follows.

Today’s weapons system is:

global;

instantaneous;

networked;

asymmetric.

But our political system is:

territorial;

slow;

fragmented;

sovereignty‑bound.

5. Political integration isn’t optional—it’s a stability requirement.

This doesn’t mean a world government.  

It means political structures that match the scale of the technologies they regulate.

Examples of partial attempts:

NATO command integration;

EU defense coordination;

Five Eyes intelligence sharing;

global cyber norms;

nuclear non‑proliferation regimes.

But these are patchwork solutions.  They don’t yet constitute a coherent supranational political architecture.

6. The deeper civilizational point. When the means of destruction become global, the means of governance must scale accordingly. Otherwise:

deterrence becomes brittle;

crises become unmanageable;

escalation becomes accidental;

sovereignty becomes performative rather than functional.

The technological substrate has already globalized; the political superstructure has not.

We can explore what a supranational political architecture would look like—one that can actually govern 21st‑century weapons systems without erasing local sovereignty,  where weapons, money, and sovereignty all have to be rewoven at a new scale, supranational architecture that:

matches the range of modern weapons systems;

can use MMT‑style monetary sovereignty;

doesn’t simply erase local polities into a gray world‑state.

1. First principles: what has to be true.

Cliodynamic constraints:

Instruments over institutions: structures must stay problem‑solving, not self‑protective. 

Creative minority: the system must allow new elites to rise through competence, not inheritance.  

Integrative ideology: there has to be a shared story big enough to bind factions.

Additional constraints:

Weapons range: governance must match the operational scale of nuclear, cyber, orbital, and AI systems.  

Monetary capacity: there must be at least one issuer with MMT‑style fiscal freedom at the appropriate scale.  

Pluralism: local cultures and polities must remain meaningful, not decorative.

So the architecture has to be layered, not monolithic.

2. Layer one: local and national sovereignty (kept real, not symbolic).

Function: identity, culture, everyday governance, most law.

Local polities handle education, health, land use, policing, civil law.  

Nation‑states retain defense forces, tax systems, and political representation.  

Key cliodynamic point: these levels remain instrumental organizations of integration for their populations, not hollow shells.

They are not abolished; they are nested.

3. Layer two: a supranational security architecture.

Function: govern weapons whose range exceeds borders.

Shared command frameworks for nuclear, orbital, and strategic cyber systems.  

Joint rules of engagement and escalation protocols.  

Integrated early‑warning and verification systems.  

Standing crisis councils with binding authority over certain classes of weapons.

This is the new “weapons system” control layer—the political form that matches the new means of coercion.

It doesn’t run everything. It runs what can end everything.

4. Layer three: a supranational monetary‑fiscal instrument (MMT‑style)

Function: stabilize the system and fund shared projects at the same scale as the risks.

A supranational treasury that issues a fiat currency used for:  

climate and biosphere stabilization;

global health and pandemic response;

critical infrastructure (data, energy, space, oceans);

employment guarantees in crises;

Floating exchange between this currency and national currencies, or gradual internalization (like a “super‑euro” done right).  

Automatic stabilizers across regions to prevent collapse and beggar‑thy‑neighbor spirals.

This is the “instrumentality of flourishing” at the civilizational level: it funds problem‑solving without being hostage to private capital or austerity ideology.

5. Layer four: integrative ideology and elite renewal.

Without this, the whole thing becomes a brittle empire.

Shared narrative: not “one world government,” but “shared survival and shared projects” (weapons, climate, biosphere, data).  

Elite circulation:  

 supranational roles filled by demonstrated competence (science, diplomacy, administration),  

term limits and rotation between local/national/supranational posts,  

transparency and hard constraints on rent‑seeking.  

Civic rites and symbols: visible, recurring rituals that dramatize the shared stakes (think: climate assemblies, disarmament renewals, infrastructure inaugurations).

See this as the reconstitution of a creative minority at a higher scale—not replacing local elites, but interweaving them.

6. Safeguards against institutional sclerosis.

The architecture must build in its own capacity for self‑correction.

Sunset clauses on supranational authorities unless periodically renewed.  

Crisis review mechanisms after every major incident (military, financial, ecological).  

Constitutionalized transparency: budgets, decisions, and data are public by default.  

Citizen assemblies at multiple levels with real agenda‑setting power.

The meta‑goal: keep the supranational layer an instrumentality, not a frozen institution.

7. Transitional path (how you get there without fantasy).

Not a blueprint, just a plausible arc:

Phase 1: strengthen and formalize existing regimes (NPT, cyber norms, climate compacts) into more binding frameworks.  

Phase 2: create limited‑mandate supranational treasuries for specific domains (climate, pandemics, shared infrastructure).  

Phase 3: integrate security and fiscal compacts where the risks are clearly planetary (nuclear, AI, biosphere).  

Phase 4: codify the layered architecture in a constitutional framework that preserves local sovereignty while binding weapons and money at the higher scale.

Each step is sold not as utopia, but as risk management: aligning governance with the actual range of our tools.

Our technological substrate has already globalized,  

but our political superstructure has not.

 nuclear weapons outscale national sovereignty;

cyberweapons ignore borders;

orbital systems operate above jurisdiction;

global supply chains exceed national control;

climate systems exceed national mitigation;

pandemics exceed national health systems.

The “century of recovery” in our context would be the period when humanity:

builds supranational governance for weapons whose range is planetary;

constructs a monetary instrument (MMT‑style) that can fund shared survival;

renews elite circulation at a higher scale;

re‑establishes legitimacy through shared risk and shared purpose;

rebuilds infrastructure and capacity after institutional exhaustion.

This is not utopian.  

It’s structural.

4. In other words:  the civilization that comes after the Westphalian interregnum.

expansive;

confident;

exploratory;

commercially integrated;

politically plural but economically interlinked.

It’s the civilization that becomes possible after the recovery has rebuilt the foundations.

Could the next creative minority emerge from those involved in the global supply chains? I'm thinking of a work force (probably already stratified) with an incipient systems-theoretic outlook encoded into their neuroglandular systems. I believe Steve Hall has been formulating a theory about this subjectivity along lines similar to my  concept of outlook, a stratified global supply‑chain workforce with an emergent systems‑theoretic subjectivity—is exactly the kind of overlooked social stratum from which creative minorities often arise.

𝟭. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆‑𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗱.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲—𝗱𝗼𝗰𝗸𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀, 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁𝘀, 𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘄𝘀, 𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮‑𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘀—𝗮𝗹𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺.

They experience:

interdependence (every node depends on every other);

feedback loops (delays propagate, bottlenecks cascade);

non‑linearity (small disruptions create large effects);

material realism (things must move, or nothing works);

temporal discipline (timing is everything);

cross‑cultural coordination (the system is inherently transnational).

This is not an ideological worldview.  It’s a habitus—a lived, embodied systems‑theoretic orientation.

Veblen would call this an outlook.  Hall would call it a subjectivity produced by material conditions.  I'm calling it a neuroglandular encoding, which is exactly right: it’s not learned; it’s internalized. Unfortunately, historically, it's trauma-bonded and multigenerational like slave PTSD and possibly Trumpism.

2. Why this group resembles Toynbee’s “creative minority” . Creative minorities (like the merchants who emerged among the nobles near the end of feudalism) have three traits:

A. They solve real problems. Supply‑chain workers solve problems that are:

concrete;

time‑sensitive;

high‑stakes and...

global.

They already operate as a distributed problem‑solving network.

B. They possess a new outlook. Their worldview is:

systemic;

material;

non‑ideological;

cooperative;

anti‑parochial;

complexity‑literate.

This is exactly the kind of new mental model that creative minorities bring.

C. They are not yet an entrenched elite. They are:

numerous;

globally distributed;

not captured by legacy institutions;

not dependent on rent‑seeking;

not ideologically rigid.

They are a latent elite, not yet self‑conscious.

3. Hall’s theory of subjectivity argues that:

people internalize the contradictions of the system;

subjectivity is shaped by material pressures;

new economic forms produce new psychological forms;

late capitalism generates hybrid, ambivalent, system‑aware subjects.

He’s describing the emergence of a systems‑conditioned personality type.

He’s not thinking about supply‑chain workers specifically, but his framework fits them perfectly:

they internalize global flows;

they experience the fragility of the system;

they feel the contradictions between finance and material reality;

they develop a tacit awareness of interdependence;

they are haunted by the system’s brittleness.

This is a proto‑technocratic, proto‑ecological, proto‑global subjectivity. This is the seed of a new outlook.

4. Why supply‑chain workers could become a creative minority  

Because they sit at the intersection of:

material production;

global coordination;

technological systems;

ecological constraints;

energy flows;

infrastructure fragility.

They understand the world as a network of dependencies, not as a set of isolated nations or ideologies.

They are the only major workforce whose daily experience is already planetary.

And they have leverage: if they stop, the world stops.

This is the same structural position that:

medieval merchants held before the rise of capitalism; engineers held before the industrial revolution;

bureaucrats held before the rise of the modern state.

A new elite often emerges from the people who understand the system better than the people who nominally run it.

5. What would catalyze their emergence?  

Three things:

A. Crisis  

A major supply‑chain shock (pandemic, war, climate disruption) that reveals their indispensability.

B. Consciousness

The realization that they are not just workers but operators of the planetary metabolism.

C. Organization  

Not unions in the old sense, but networked guilds or systems‑operator councils that coordinate across borders.

This is how a creative minority becomes self‑aware.

6. The deeper pattern is a convergence:

Toynbee’s creative minority;

Hall’s subjectivity under late capitalism;

The material reality of global supply chains;

The need for supranational governance;

The mismatch between weapons range and political reach;

The emergence of a systems‑theoretic worldview.

All of these point toward the same possibility:

The next creative minority may be the first truly planetary one.

Not national.  

Not ideological.  

Not aristocratic.  

Not managerial.  

But systemic, material, networked, and global.

Is it possible that this minority's mythos can be based on Wayne Dyer's animistic participatory cosmology?

It’s structurally plausible that a creative minority emerging from global supply‑chain operators, systems‑thinkers, and logistics‑world subjectivities could adopt (or reinvent) something very much like Wayne Dyer’s animistic, participatory cosmology as their mythic framework.

And the reason is subtle:  Dyer’s metaphysics is not “New Age fluff” — it is a cosmology built around interdependence, intentionality, and non‑separateness. Those are precisely the experiential truths that a planetary systems‑operator class lives every day.

1. The supply‑chain subjectivity is already proto‑animistic.

This workforce experiences the world as:

a mesh of interdependent flows;

a living system where every node “responds”;

a network that “pushes back” when stressed;

a field of feedback loops that feel almost sentient;

a global organism with moods, rhythms, and fragilities.

This is not mystical.  

It’s phenomenological.

When you live inside a system that behaves like a living being, it’s natural to develop a worldview in which:

systems have agency;

flows have intention;

the world is participatory;

consciousness is relational.

Dyer’s cosmology is a spiritualized version of this same experiential pattern.

2. Dyer’s metaphysics is a perfect mythic translation of systems theory. Dyer’s core claims:

Everything is connected.  

Intention is a field, not a personal whim.  

The universe is participatory, not inert.  

Boundaries are illusions of perception.  

The ego is a local turbulence in a larger flow.  

Translate these into systems language and you get:

Complex interdependence.

Distributed causality.

Emergent behavion.

Non‑linear feedback.

Local agents embedded in global dynamics.

The metaphysics and the systems theory rhyme.

A creative minority often emerges where a technical worldview and a mythic worldview converge into a single coherent outlook.

3. The “outlook” requirement is satisfied. A creative minority must possess:

a new way of seeing;

a new way of interpreting experience;

a new way of legitimizing action;

a new way of binding people together.

Dyer’s cosmology, reframed through a systems‑operator lens, offers:

a unifying metaphysics (interdependence);

a moral orientation (participation rather than domination);

a psychological stance (ego as instrument, not master);

a civilizational ethos (alignment with flows rather than coercion).

This is exactly the kind of integrative ideology Kroeber believed was necessary for reconstitution.

4. Hall’s subjectivity theory dovetails perfectly  

Hall argues that late capitalism produces:

hybrid subjectivities;

ambivalent agency;

awareness of systemic fragility;

a sense of being embedded in flows;

a longing for meaning beyond individualism.

Dyer’s cosmology gives that subjectivity:

a language;

a mythic frame;

a sense of purpose;

a participatory ontology.

It’s not that Hall is “influenced” by Dyer — it’s that both are describing the same emergent psychological terrain from different angles.

5. Why this mythos is especially suited to a planetary creative minority. A global systems‑operator elite would need a mythos that:

transcends national boundaries;

legitimizes cooperation;

sacralizes interdependence;

dissolves zero‑sum thinking;

integrates technology and spirituality;

frames the planet as a living system;

encourages humility before complexity.

Dyer’s animistic participatory cosmology does all of this effortlessly.

It is:

non‑sectarian;

non‑dogmatic;

compatible with science;

emotionally resonant;

scalable across cultures;

easily syncretized with ecological ethics;

naturally aligned with systems thinking.

It’s the kind of mythos that could become the “integrative ideology” of a new civilizational phase.

6. The synthesis   — a creative minority emerging from global supply‑chain systems could absolutely adopt a mythos akin to Dyer’s participatory cosmology.

Because:

their lived experience is already systemic;

their worldview is already interdependent;

their subjectivity is already post‑individualist;

their work already feels like participation in a living global organism;

their psychological needs align with Dyer’s metaphysics;

their civilizational role requires a unifying, non‑parochial mythos.

In other words:

Dyer’s cosmology is the spiritual grammar of a systems‑age creative minority. How will it function as the integrative ideology of a post‑Westphalian civilization?