Toldja So You Silly Persons

This subject is driving me crazy because it's so multifaceted. Hudson obsesses about rent. So does Varoufakis, but he's going after Bezos who gets his cut from every transaction you make despite the fact that he never produced any of the goods you're buying from him. This is rent, too. The extraction of wealth without creating it. Hudson emphasizes Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate which dominates domestic policy. Hall fusses about the dictatorship of the bond vigilantes who prevent governments from providing services. Now water has been privatized and sewage is floating in the Thames. Finance loves to cut corners. Keen technocratically models how private debt accumulation leads to instability and collapse.

The holistic phrase none of them use is how finance is in control of the economy as a whole, getting you every which way. This is the problem of overspecialization: each sector of economic activity behaves as if it were the whole economy. Let one sector dominate and it will injure the rest of the economy. First the other parts suffer (in the short run), then the whole economy does (in the long run). This is an epochal crisis because it threatens the entire civilization. For example, the second crisis, when trade turned into mercantilism, led to the series of wars that shook Europe from the middle of the seventeenth century to 1815, when the last great mercantilist Napoleon was defeated, I'll sing the praises of the century that followed some other time. I will only mention that this epochal crisis had two phases or substages. I'm pointing this out because financial capitalism has caused an epochal crisis that came in two substages also: before the Great Depression (and the world wars on either side of it) and now.

I’ve heard this tune before, in more centuries than I care to count. Every era has its priesthood, and every priesthood has its catechism. In this one, the high clergy are the holders of big capital—banks, funds, corporate treasuries, dynastic fortunes—and their doctrine comes in three neat articles of faith:

1. The State must fund itself by taxing you or borrowing from them.

2. If the State steps out of line, the markets will punish it.

3. If punishment fails, capital will simply vanish across the border.

They repeat these claims until people stop hearing them as claims and start hearing them as the structure of reality. Tillich would call it an “ultimate concern.” Duruy would call it a “modern superstition.” I call it a control system.

Are the claims true? In the same way a locked door is “true” to someone who never tries the handle. Western governments believe the doctrine, elect stewards who believe it, and run their fiat systems as if the markets were Olympus and the bond traders its capricious gods. Technically, the door isn’t locked. Politically, everyone behaves as if Cerberus is waiting on the other side.

That’s how ontologies work: you mistake the map for the terrain, then mistake the terrain for divine law.

The story goes back a long way. Venice, twelfth century: a government desperate for war funds forces loans from its wealthy citizens. Things go bad, the Doge ends up dead, and the loans get rolled into a perpetual interest machine. Five percent forever. The rich discover that if you never ask for your principal back, the world pays you tribute. That’s the seed of the whole thing.

Fast‑forward through coin markets, metal shortages, face‑value decrees, paper currencies backed by bullion, and you reach the Dutch and their centralized bonds. The VOC loved it—safe yields, no fuss. The English copied it in 1694, built a central bank, and the wealthy lined up like pilgrims at a shrine. By the eighteenth century, the bond markets had become a shadow legislature. Coffee‑house traders set the tone; politicians learned to listen. Friendly relations, they called it. Dependency, I call it.

Once central banks and ledgers existed, governments could create money by fiat when needed—wars, emergencies, existential threats. They did it quietly, because the belief system required secrecy. If the public ever realized the State could issue currency without kneeling to private lenders, the whole ontology would crack. Keynes saw the trick from inside the Treasury: fabricated bond sales to maintain the illusion.

The nineteenth century spread the model across Europe. The twentieth tried to restrain it—gold standards, Bretton Woods, capital controls. The wealthy hated every minute of it and built escape hatches like the Eurodollar market. When the gold exchange standard died in the ’70s, they saw both danger and opportunity. Fiat money meant governments could act sovereign. But only if they remembered they were sovereign. So the markets became the enforcement arm: bond yields as punishment, FX volatility as terror. All they needed were compliant politicians, central bankers, and media voices. Plenty available.

By 1979, capital controls were dropped. After that, money markets spread like an invasive species. The alliance—politicians, bankers, investors, media—sold the story that markets must discipline governments. And in return, markets rewarded themselves with safe yields and risk‑free profits. A tidy arrangement.

Could governments shut it down? Technically, yes. Primary‑market discipline, fixed‑rate non‑tradable bonds, capital controls. A few coordinated nations could break the spell. But belief systems defend themselves. Machiavelli said fear is the best enforcer. In this era, the fear is market wrath—divine punishment for disobedience.

Every civilization I’ve seen has its version of this: an institution that starts as a useful problem-solving tool and ends as a deity. Tillich would say the markets have become the “god beyond which there is no other.” Duruy would say the modern world has mistaken its own machinery for fate.

I’ll put it simpler: The markets aren’t gods. They’re just men with levers. But as long as everyone believes the levers are sacred, the system stays locked.

Escaping this belief system will take the same kind of courage it took to walk out of the medieval Church. And like all such escapes, it starts with someone realizing the door was never locked in the first place.

Carl Sagan was preaching to an audience that was already breaking up and stampeding from the theater because they thought the Blob was after them. Since this Blob ain't from outer space, they began fighting each other in the street instead, seeing each other as The Enemy. “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” so it's time for a showdown. There isn't even enough to divvy up. Or so it seems. This is because nothing extra is being made, and if it is, it ain't from around here. The Celestial Heathens make our wares now, and they didn't steal our jobs; those jobs were handed to them.

It wasn't even about religion, it was about the secular consensus that was breaking up because Kenynesoid praxis was flawed, not its theoria. In such times, faith is broken, hope is broken, God save us but kill the strangers.

It has gotten so those with the luxury to preach coexistence do so because they're winning the class conflict. They can afford to because they're being remunerated by the Empire that is vampirizing the Global South. What, little ol' us?

The Soaring Sixties were mighty nice, and honester. Each enjoyed their share of disposable income. The Keynesoid paradigm was fresh then, a brief continuation of the Bestest Century that Ever Was.

What am I doing?? I'm not a(n) historian of events, but a theorist of civilizational mechanics. My method is structural, not romantic. I'm pruning the Long Century, isolating the French Revolution as a local political reconfiguration within Western civ, not the pivot into the next civ phase. The real pivot point is 1815 because this is when a new organizational pattern asserted itself — modern scientific medicine, sanitation, vaccination, and later anesthetics and antibiotics. These are what make life worth living.

The French Revolution changed political sovereignty. France became a nation-state rather a dynastic survival, a medieval residue. It changed elite composition (aristocracy → bourgeoisie).

The Marxists are itching for a rematch. The current epochal crisis has roused them from hibernation. My toldja-so dance.

The Revolution altered institutional forms (centralized bureaucracy, conscription instead of goddam royal mercenaries, secular law). But none of these changes created a new takeoff. They reorganized the political superstructure, not the civilizational engine. Nappy 3 had to play hard-eyed catch-up.

1815 marked a material transformation like the kind that increases a civ's ability to mobilize energy, resources, and population in a splendid new way. Between 1815, as a side effect, Western civ underwent the sanitation revolution (sewerage, water filtration, urban hygiene). Vaccination (smallpox becomes controllable). Anesthetics (ether 1846, chloroform 1847). Antisepsis (Lister, 1867). Early bacteriology (Pasteur’s germ theory, 1860s–70s). You jokers take these so much for granted that you're gonna lose 'em.

The French Rev didna dae dis. But the Paris School of Medicine did. It flourished AFTER the Revolution during the post-Napoleonic period.

You folks sho' is crazy. 1815 marks the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars (a silly attempt at a Universal State defending decrepit mercantilism) as the moment when West-Civ finally had the nous and wherewithal to adopt and diffuse these medical and sanitary innovations. The R&D drew on the surplus generated by the new org-investment pattern. The “Long Century” 1789–1914) is a political periodization. My periodization is civilizational. I ain't interested in ideological continuity, political narratives, romantic historiography, or the “spirit” of the age (more the result of the change than the cause. Your fussbudgetary squawks on Facebook and Xitter shows that you still are caught up in these soap operas. I care about organizational patterns of investing surpluses into increasing returns — the technologies and organizational forms that increase a society’s ability to mobilize resources. God damn your GoFundMe charities. Band-Aids.

The French Revolution reorganized sovereignty; 1815–1870 reorganized survival. Your Skinner Box can't give me what I want or need. I don't want it back.