"I should have thought," said the officer as he visualized the search
before him, "I should have thought that a pack of British boys―you're all
British, aren't you?―would have been able to put up a better show than
that―I mean―"
"It was like that at first," said Ralph, "before things―"
this is from the ending scene of Golding's Lord of the Flies novel.
We should stop expecting rational behavior from people in power. It suffices to watch Alexander Sokurov's Fairytale film and their conversations in purgatory between Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini all taken from archive material .
I love these more experimental, essayistic stints of yours (the macro in the micro and the micro in the macro).
And everything seems indeed to be connected.
Maybe the rhizome- idea is, after all, an apt metaphor, outside of "philosophical" university contexts.
And our perception of things seems to become more and more "integrated" (which is presumably good - who needs "veils" over motives and states of mind/intentions in times of polycrisis?!)
"Daylight" (and "sobering up" about all shades of reality) seems to be a much better source of illumination.
“but I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross-currents as there are right now.”
Hmmm.
Strange because I can not remember moments when the driving currents were so few.
But also when there were so many false attempts to mislead the public over reality.
Simple Truths are:
1. US empire has been collapsing since at least 2010. Economics – China. Military – US weapons superiority was based on access to 1990s chips and ruined by an MIC run for profit and hubris. Soft Power – Ukraine and Gaza (and Libya, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela) have been happening for decades – If you haven’t worked out who the bad guys are now you are living in a dream.
Inevitably for those who were watching the True world we would get Thucydides, the withdrawal by US from conflict with Russia and China, the bullying of Europe by US made explicit, the collapse of Nato. That is now history, It all happened. (The predicted always happens much faster than expected of not at all).
2. Inequality has moved to 1930s levels in west seeing almost no growth in west for 75% of pop. Fake Liberals have backed smaller and smaller minorities as cove for this (why would I pay 75% marginal tax when I am so a good person an care for even the Trans and the Israelis). “Authoritarian” states (China, Russia) meanwhile have done amazing thing for their extremely happy voters.
Of course we get cognitive dissonance all the time
3. Global warming vs imminent Fusion solutions with AI making an impact on both sides.
Confusion Factors
Everything else is just out there to confuse us.
Epstein? Seriously? There is nothing here except some minor bribes and adult prostitution. CIA/Mossad involvement again is not news.
Greenland. Venezuela?? Absolutely nothing is happening here. Tarriffs?? Since when has US internal tax policy been of interest?
So why are we being told the trivia are so important, and why is the important stuff so off the menu?
I think you and Adam need to re-read what I wrote.
Epstein is the news we read when we ignore reality.
Polycrisis is what we call it when we want to ignore Thucydides and Democracy/inequality.
There are no other "connections". It really is that simple. Thucydides explains the collapse of geo-policitics. Inequality explains the collapse of western societies.
So many Emperors! So little clothes! The confabulation of Larry Summers' outward and inner selves triggered a cascade of dropping pennies. It's not a metaphor. Our billionaire rulers, in and out of office are literally insecure teenagers.
I am surprised you and others have accepted Mr Carney’s mealy mouthed statement at face value.
“We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality“
Good grief, this is so wrong as to be deliberate. Has he been insulated from the protests for the past 26years? Did he miss the huge waves of protest at WTO in Seattle “The Battle for Seattle” or the huge protests at Genoa in 2001??? The huge protests are each G7, G8 and G20 after that? The 99% protest and Occupy Wall Street??? Occupy London?
Good grief how do you or anyone else within economics and international finance or sociology allow such a blatant misrepresentation of the facts and reality to be said uncritically.
Really? Or is this how Epstein gets away with it as everyone nods and goes along because “hey, it’s Mark Carney and I like what he is saying so why be the prude about such things…”
Either you call this out or just stop publishing your analysis because you ain’t speaking truth to power or getting power to speak the truth instead you are there to get the clicks and bask in your name being mentioned by Larry Summer (friend of Epstein) in the FT.
Marx wrote "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
That's correct, of course, but that's just half of it. The other half of it is that the powerful are often making decisions that are informed by bizarre psychosexual issues and delusions. I don't have to be a therapist to look at people like Greg Bovino, Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump, to understand that much of what motivates these freaks is deep unresolved Freudian type problems.
What this piece captures so powerfully isn’t just elite hypocrisy or psychological derangement, but a deeper displacement of agency itself.
What’s striking in the Epstein–Summers material is not moral failure per se, but how reflection, strategy, and even self-awareness remain vivid while no longer operating at the point where decisions can still be interrupted.
In that sense, this feels less like rupture-as-shock than irreversibility without seizure: agency migrating away from sites where judgment once bound outcomes, leaving clarity and insight to arrive after the fact—too late to alter the trajectory.
Polycrisis names the overload of events. But the harder problem is structural: when action persists without authorship, even the sharpest analysis becomes residual — a post-hoc narrative rather than a binding commitment.
The peril for intellectuals isn’t merely composure; it’s the quiet erosion of the very locus from which judgment could still matter.
Thank you, Adam Tooze! Fascinating, Summers consulting with Epstein on his amorous or sexual passion and Summers dispensing essential wisdom on China, at the same time, and how do the two connect in one man or in one mind? After the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, triggered, in part, by the contraceptive pill's arrival circa 1960, many people thought unbridled sex was a road to liberation, though that dizzy moment and in part foolish ideology is now largely forgotten or repressed in public memory. The Roman Polanski case, in 1977, was, in a way exemplary, a celebrated film director having sex - statutory rape - with a 13-year-old. New waves of feminism - and bitterness - rose, in part, as a reaction to the excesses of the sexual revolution, a revolution that did not really respond, in all respects, to women's desires and priorities. The question arose, then, but I think was buried in partisan passions and never properly addressed: Of what precisely should one be ashamed? Where should the limits be drawn? Donald Trump is one answer: Be ashamed of nothing! As for politics, Grand Strategy, and Strategies of Seduction, French literature has long been very good on the exercise of power in private sexual relations and in military and political relations. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, an artillery officer, who was a pioneer in ballistics, and served under Napoleon, published that classic novel of sexual warfare and seduction, Dangerous Liaisons, in 1782, just seven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution: the tactics of sexual conquest overlap with those of battle strategy. Also, with the present stage of bipartisan decadence shining forth in the US ruling class, one wonders: can the revolution be far away? Many other French works, notably the works of Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, of the Marquis de Sade , of Jean Genet, and of Dominique Aury (The Story of O), but also the works of Balzac and Stendhal and many others, deal with the relationship of the lust for power and the lust for sexual conquest or sexual power, how the two interact in the minutiae of human relationships and in the grand scheme of history. Power, as Henry Kissinger I believe observed, is a great aphrodisiac - infecting both those who possess power - and those who come into contact with it. The powerful often forget that they are mere mortals, and they mistake admiration and acquiesce for desire, infatuation, and, sometimes, even love. This can lead to great cruelty, intentional or inadvertant. Exploiting minors is of course beyond the pale and should be. One anecdote from the distant past. I was having dinner with four friends in a small rustic restaurant on the banks of the Seine in the late 1970s, the fading of the sexual revolution was well advanced. One of those present was a very attractive young journalist, a Communist, from the French Communist daily, l’Humanité. The very conservative - but also in his elite way populist - Gaullist, Jacques Chirac, later prime minister and then president of France, was then a very powerful mayor of Paris. He was know for his quickie sexual adventures, and his nickname was "Monsieur Five Minutes." The young Communist journalist had, she told us, been caught in an elevator for twenty minutes alone with Mayor Chirac. "What was he like?" we asked. She smiled, looked dreamy for a moment, gazed at the sky, and then at us, and grinned, and said, "He's the most charming man in the world!" Truly bipartisan. Silvio Berlusconi's libertinism was openly displayed - often with good humor - and not hidden behind a facade of straight-laced hypocrisy, as is so often the case in the Anglo Saxon world. An Italian friend of mine was at a small dinner party - eight guests - where Berlusconi was one of the guests. My friend was an implacable foe of Berlusconi's policies. She despised what he was doing to Italy. "So, what was he like?" I asked. "Absolutely charming," she said, "He told great jokes and even reverted to being the crooner he had been as a teenager." She paused. "I like him; but I hate his policies." O tempora, o mores! What times, what customs!! Those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end ... It is interesting, instructive perhaps, how a wave of liberation - getting rid of the fear of pregnancy, getting rid of all those repressive unreasonable puritan inhibitions and taboos, getting rid of all the cruel, itchy secrecy and shame, recognizing that man - and women too have sexual desires - and exploring all the multifarious aspects of oneself and of others - can end in decadence, cruelty, and exploitation.
Incredibly provocative piece. The parallel reading of Summers' texts with his WaPo column is genuinely unsettling in how it reveals the overlap between geopolitical analysis and personal desire. I've seen academics compartmentalize before, but this collapse of registers between the strategic and the intimate is something else entirely. It's less polycrisis than a kind of cognitiveblur that pervades everything.
Had a weird reaction, wondering if this could become a foundational text for a leftist branch of QAnon. Might already exist, for all I know. Anyway, the less time I dwell on thoughts of an amorous Larry Summers, the better.
Well, sexual violence is about the thrill of power and dominance. Same drive that men who crave financial/government/business power possess. So, this isn't any kind of stretch of imagination. It's basically, "Duh."
"I should have thought," said the officer as he visualized the search
before him, "I should have thought that a pack of British boys―you're all
British, aren't you?―would have been able to put up a better show than
that―I mean―"
"It was like that at first," said Ralph, "before things―"
this is from the ending scene of Golding's Lord of the Flies novel.
We should stop expecting rational behavior from people in power. It suffices to watch Alexander Sokurov's Fairytale film and their conversations in purgatory between Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini all taken from archive material .
I love these more experimental, essayistic stints of yours (the macro in the micro and the micro in the macro).
And everything seems indeed to be connected.
Maybe the rhizome- idea is, after all, an apt metaphor, outside of "philosophical" university contexts.
And our perception of things seems to become more and more "integrated" (which is presumably good - who needs "veils" over motives and states of mind/intentions in times of polycrisis?!)
"Daylight" (and "sobering up" about all shades of reality) seems to be a much better source of illumination.
Inspiring writing! Thanks!
Rights. Decency. Respect for basic societal taboos. These were things that we claimed too.
At an even more elementary level, we claimed to be able to discriminate, to tell the difference between “good guys” and “bad guys”.
I am sorry, but for anyone who needed Epstein to stop believing in the above, I got a George Carlin quote
"It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it"
Polycrisis
“but I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross-currents as there are right now.”
Hmmm.
Strange because I can not remember moments when the driving currents were so few.
But also when there were so many false attempts to mislead the public over reality.
Simple Truths are:
1. US empire has been collapsing since at least 2010. Economics – China. Military – US weapons superiority was based on access to 1990s chips and ruined by an MIC run for profit and hubris. Soft Power – Ukraine and Gaza (and Libya, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela) have been happening for decades – If you haven’t worked out who the bad guys are now you are living in a dream.
Inevitably for those who were watching the True world we would get Thucydides, the withdrawal by US from conflict with Russia and China, the bullying of Europe by US made explicit, the collapse of Nato. That is now history, It all happened. (The predicted always happens much faster than expected of not at all).
2. Inequality has moved to 1930s levels in west seeing almost no growth in west for 75% of pop. Fake Liberals have backed smaller and smaller minorities as cove for this (why would I pay 75% marginal tax when I am so a good person an care for even the Trans and the Israelis). “Authoritarian” states (China, Russia) meanwhile have done amazing thing for their extremely happy voters.
Of course we get cognitive dissonance all the time
3. Global warming vs imminent Fusion solutions with AI making an impact on both sides.
Confusion Factors
Everything else is just out there to confuse us.
Epstein? Seriously? There is nothing here except some minor bribes and adult prostitution. CIA/Mossad involvement again is not news.
Greenland. Venezuela?? Absolutely nothing is happening here. Tarriffs?? Since when has US internal tax policy been of interest?
So why are we being told the trivia are so important, and why is the important stuff so off the menu?
Thank you M DROY - a good beginning to your piece, but a very poor ending.
It is difficult to actually see your connections.
Adam said his integrated conclusions much more clearly
I think you and Adam need to re-read what I wrote.
Epstein is the news we read when we ignore reality.
Polycrisis is what we call it when we want to ignore Thucydides and Democracy/inequality.
There are no other "connections". It really is that simple. Thucydides explains the collapse of geo-policitics. Inequality explains the collapse of western societies.
EVERYTHING ELSE IS SMOKE AND MIRRORS.
So many Emperors! So little clothes! The confabulation of Larry Summers' outward and inner selves triggered a cascade of dropping pennies. It's not a metaphor. Our billionaire rulers, in and out of office are literally insecure teenagers.
1. O please. Simping for Carney aside, his real gripe wasn't with the end of the much hyped "Rules Based International Order(R)".
He was whining when he found out that canada and europe are also on the menu.
https://indi.ca/wolves-crying-wolf-canada-denmark-etc/
2. Was it not written of old that there is never "just one" cockroach? That for every cockroach we see, there are a hundred you don’t see?
Epstein was assuredly the one cockroach we aaw. The glittering Davos set you so adore are rotten tonthe core. A whited sepulchre.
3. We haven't seen any of Epstein's videos yet. There are assuredly many Kodak moments to bebhad in them.
To Feral: hn.cbp's commentary (and Adam's) are much closer to the real world than yours.
I furnish numerous assertions. Which do you disagree with and what is your specific basis for doing so?
I am surprised you and others have accepted Mr Carney’s mealy mouthed statement at face value.
“We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality“
Good grief, this is so wrong as to be deliberate. Has he been insulated from the protests for the past 26years? Did he miss the huge waves of protest at WTO in Seattle “The Battle for Seattle” or the huge protests at Genoa in 2001??? The huge protests are each G7, G8 and G20 after that? The 99% protest and Occupy Wall Street??? Occupy London?
Good grief how do you or anyone else within economics and international finance or sociology allow such a blatant misrepresentation of the facts and reality to be said uncritically.
Really? Or is this how Epstein gets away with it as everyone nods and goes along because “hey, it’s Mark Carney and I like what he is saying so why be the prude about such things…”
Either you call this out or just stop publishing your analysis because you ain’t speaking truth to power or getting power to speak the truth instead you are there to get the clicks and bask in your name being mentioned by Larry Summer (friend of Epstein) in the FT.
Marx wrote "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
That's correct, of course, but that's just half of it. The other half of it is that the powerful are often making decisions that are informed by bizarre psychosexual issues and delusions. I don't have to be a therapist to look at people like Greg Bovino, Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump, to understand that much of what motivates these freaks is deep unresolved Freudian type problems.
What this piece captures so powerfully isn’t just elite hypocrisy or psychological derangement, but a deeper displacement of agency itself.
What’s striking in the Epstein–Summers material is not moral failure per se, but how reflection, strategy, and even self-awareness remain vivid while no longer operating at the point where decisions can still be interrupted.
In that sense, this feels less like rupture-as-shock than irreversibility without seizure: agency migrating away from sites where judgment once bound outcomes, leaving clarity and insight to arrive after the fact—too late to alter the trajectory.
Polycrisis names the overload of events. But the harder problem is structural: when action persists without authorship, even the sharpest analysis becomes residual — a post-hoc narrative rather than a binding commitment.
The peril for intellectuals isn’t merely composure; it’s the quiet erosion of the very locus from which judgment could still matter.
"Was it too clean. Too composed?
Too much the cool, put-together guy at the orgy?"
If so, that's on us, not Carney.
Thank you, Adam Tooze! Fascinating, Summers consulting with Epstein on his amorous or sexual passion and Summers dispensing essential wisdom on China, at the same time, and how do the two connect in one man or in one mind? After the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, triggered, in part, by the contraceptive pill's arrival circa 1960, many people thought unbridled sex was a road to liberation, though that dizzy moment and in part foolish ideology is now largely forgotten or repressed in public memory. The Roman Polanski case, in 1977, was, in a way exemplary, a celebrated film director having sex - statutory rape - with a 13-year-old. New waves of feminism - and bitterness - rose, in part, as a reaction to the excesses of the sexual revolution, a revolution that did not really respond, in all respects, to women's desires and priorities. The question arose, then, but I think was buried in partisan passions and never properly addressed: Of what precisely should one be ashamed? Where should the limits be drawn? Donald Trump is one answer: Be ashamed of nothing! As for politics, Grand Strategy, and Strategies of Seduction, French literature has long been very good on the exercise of power in private sexual relations and in military and political relations. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, an artillery officer, who was a pioneer in ballistics, and served under Napoleon, published that classic novel of sexual warfare and seduction, Dangerous Liaisons, in 1782, just seven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution: the tactics of sexual conquest overlap with those of battle strategy. Also, with the present stage of bipartisan decadence shining forth in the US ruling class, one wonders: can the revolution be far away? Many other French works, notably the works of Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, of the Marquis de Sade , of Jean Genet, and of Dominique Aury (The Story of O), but also the works of Balzac and Stendhal and many others, deal with the relationship of the lust for power and the lust for sexual conquest or sexual power, how the two interact in the minutiae of human relationships and in the grand scheme of history. Power, as Henry Kissinger I believe observed, is a great aphrodisiac - infecting both those who possess power - and those who come into contact with it. The powerful often forget that they are mere mortals, and they mistake admiration and acquiesce for desire, infatuation, and, sometimes, even love. This can lead to great cruelty, intentional or inadvertant. Exploiting minors is of course beyond the pale and should be. One anecdote from the distant past. I was having dinner with four friends in a small rustic restaurant on the banks of the Seine in the late 1970s, the fading of the sexual revolution was well advanced. One of those present was a very attractive young journalist, a Communist, from the French Communist daily, l’Humanité. The very conservative - but also in his elite way populist - Gaullist, Jacques Chirac, later prime minister and then president of France, was then a very powerful mayor of Paris. He was know for his quickie sexual adventures, and his nickname was "Monsieur Five Minutes." The young Communist journalist had, she told us, been caught in an elevator for twenty minutes alone with Mayor Chirac. "What was he like?" we asked. She smiled, looked dreamy for a moment, gazed at the sky, and then at us, and grinned, and said, "He's the most charming man in the world!" Truly bipartisan. Silvio Berlusconi's libertinism was openly displayed - often with good humor - and not hidden behind a facade of straight-laced hypocrisy, as is so often the case in the Anglo Saxon world. An Italian friend of mine was at a small dinner party - eight guests - where Berlusconi was one of the guests. My friend was an implacable foe of Berlusconi's policies. She despised what he was doing to Italy. "So, what was he like?" I asked. "Absolutely charming," she said, "He told great jokes and even reverted to being the crooner he had been as a teenager." She paused. "I like him; but I hate his policies." O tempora, o mores! What times, what customs!! Those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end ... It is interesting, instructive perhaps, how a wave of liberation - getting rid of the fear of pregnancy, getting rid of all those repressive unreasonable puritan inhibitions and taboos, getting rid of all the cruel, itchy secrecy and shame, recognizing that man - and women too have sexual desires - and exploring all the multifarious aspects of oneself and of others - can end in decadence, cruelty, and exploitation.
Incredibly provocative piece. The parallel reading of Summers' texts with his WaPo column is genuinely unsettling in how it reveals the overlap between geopolitical analysis and personal desire. I've seen academics compartmentalize before, but this collapse of registers between the strategic and the intimate is something else entirely. It's less polycrisis than a kind of cognitiveblur that pervades everything.
Had a weird reaction, wondering if this could become a foundational text for a leftist branch of QAnon. Might already exist, for all I know. Anyway, the less time I dwell on thoughts of an amorous Larry Summers, the better.
Thanks - it will take metaphor to lead us out of the ashes.
I found this pretty thought-provoking. But I am also a bit annoyed by it because it also kind of promotes the very thing it wants to critique.
Well, sexual violence is about the thrill of power and dominance. Same drive that men who crave financial/government/business power possess. So, this isn't any kind of stretch of imagination. It's basically, "Duh."