I'm glad you wrote such an incisive critique of Bret&Heather. For a while, I had the impression that you took them too much on faith - but you've proven me wrong.
Great take on Lindsay. Yes, he knows a lot of facts to criticize the left, but his "woke right" narrative - borrowed from others, including some smart provocateur leftists - is frustrating. Like Cofnas and Hanania, he doesn't understand conservatism. In fact, those two seem to hold it in outright disdain, which at least he does not.
On the other hand, the originators of toxic ideas shouldn't be easily dismissed. The influence of Marx, the Frankfurt School, feminist theory, and others—leading to trans ideology and beyond—may have served as catalysts for toxic movements that became virtually unstoppable, even without centralized coordination.
This post is one of your best, weaving together many threads you've explored in previous writings. It was a pleasure to read!
“A new poll finds 40% of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China. There is zero evidence for this.”
Ah, thank you much for the connections into Lindsay's work. I also take in most of his recordings, and have had my own attempts at summarizing where (and why) he gets his wires crossed. Your take on it is helping get my thoughts together on it.
I also like to take Lindsay's work with the greatest of sympathies. After all the gobbledygook and prattle he's loaded into his brain--to valiantly translate it for the rest of us--I could scarcely hope for his faculties to come out any less scathed and harrowed than they stand now.
The common conclusion: people tend to oversimplify cultures, groups, and systems, imagining they are more coherent and structured than they actually are. We like to believe in a few core “keys” that explain everything, even though reality is messy and random.
When faced with a messy reality, we prefer neat stories, whether it’s “my culture is guided by a few core values” (eg Left/Right) or “a secret group is pulling the strings.” This pattern-seeking helps us feel confident and connected, but it often leads us to mischaracterize events, cultures, or problems, sometimes in harmful ways.
Our desire for simplicity and coherence makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, because they offer the kind of neat, central explanation our minds crave when reality is actually messy.
Excellent analysis. However, I believe it leaves out an important phenomenon that weakens your thesis to some degree - political ponerology. There are sociopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians who understand and consciously exploit the cooperative group dynamics you outline here for personal gain, or even just out of sadism. In any society, and particularly in sick societies, such individuals tend to rise up through the ranks of institutions to positions of power and influence. And they use these institutions to carry out conspiracies.
Fauci and Collins are Exhibit A for this phenomenon. Funding gain of function research and then covering up the lab leak wasn’t just an emergent phenomenon resulting from pursuit of bureaucratic interests. It was a conscious conspiracy orchestrated by dark triad personalities. Same with promoting lockdowns and silencing the “fringe epidemiologists” who were presenting evidence and argument that undermined the case for lockdowns.
As you note, it wasn’t a Grand Conspiracy to serve outside interests like BigPharma or the Rothschilds or whoever (the “see through state”). It was, as you argue, a response to bureaucratic incentives.
But it wasn’t just that. It was Dark Triad personalities setting bureaucratic priorities and dictating the amoral means by which those priorities would be pursued. The Covid debacle does not happen absent Dark Triads at the top echelons of these bureaucracies. The ponerization of our institutions was a “but for” cause of Covid tyranny.
Were people of strong individual character like RFK Jr., Battacharaya, Kuldorf, Prasad, etc., running the show in 2020, things would have progressed much differently. Agree or disagree with these individuals on specifics, I would submit they all have the rare virtue of being neither conformists nor individuals who score high in the dark triad traits. Institutions led by such individuals behave very differently from institutions led by the Faucis and Collinses of the world. In a species made up predominantly of conformists, leadership (strong individuals of character versus Dark Triads) counts for a lot. The institutional characteristics you describe here are not inevitable. They follow from the sorts of individuals society and institutions elevate to positions of authority.
Oh yes, selection for Dark Triad personalities is one of the recurring problems of bureaucracies. I did not go very deeply into bureaucratic pathologies in the post, just pointed to their importance.
One of the reasons that European, particularly English-to-British governance, was so successful was that it had an embedded mechanism for screening out such personalities, the duel of honour which acted as a character test. One of the deep problems of our societies is we have not developed any substitute mechanism for systematically weeding out bad characters.
Great comment. I only take an issue with the final conclusion: "The institutional characteristics you describe here are not inevitable." It appears similar institutions in virtually all Western countries were on the same boat on COVID - UK, France, Germany, Spain, etc. This leads to conclusion that bureaucratic dynamics more likely than not lead to similar outcome.
I hadn't realised the Fabian Society was still going.
On another point, as for Public Health "managing" public metabolic health so disastrously it can only be an immense amount of self-deception combined with wanting to keep their jobs. They blame 'the public' for still not taking their advice (examination of other people's shopping in supermarkets will reveal that this is only partly true, their advice, especially on things 'low fat' has been followed by many for 30-40 years) and that if they only get more money maybe they will finally convince people. For example, earlier today I read an article that assured readers that the problem with the '5-a-day' not working (implied) was that we actually needed to eat '10-a-day' - an article well larded with appeals to the fact that (no doubt poorly evidenced observational nutritional survey) 'research clearly supports' this conclusion. Though you would think that the fact that a high proportion of nutritionists and nurses etc. are overweight (it can't be all stress and shift work, though I'm sure that doesn't help) would give them pause, as I presume they follow their own guidelines. Then I hardly ever met a nutritionist who didn't turn up without a tray of bakes! And don't get me started on campaigns like baking treats to raise money for breast cancer. I deeply suspect that there are people in the field who realise it's all been a terrible mistake but are so riven by cognitive dissonance and perhaps shame that they will not talk until after they retire.
Quite. I remember the comment that, during the trials of Prof. Noakes, his supporters were lean and healthy while a lot of “official nutrition” line critics tended to be on the larger size…
The Fabians are now so big (141 MPs) that they’re a path for mediocre internationalists, to power. God knows how many are in the Judiciary and Whitehall, but without it even being a conspiracy it explains the mediocrity and the open borders.
This is an excellent steelmanning post for people who think like myself. There’s a brilliant response to made, but sadly most of the best candidates (Dave McGowan, Mae Brussell) have already been dispatched by Them.
But seriously, while disagreeing intensely with certain of your conclusions, you’ve highlighted factors which the parapolitically-inclined should always run through before making any further reach.
And you made me think of this:
The concept refers to a practice from **ancient China** where doctors were paid a **retainer or regular fee as long as their patients stayed healthy**, and payment was withheld if the patient fell ill[1][2][3][4][5]. This system was essentially a wellness-focused **subscription model**: patients saw their traditional Chinese medicine doctor routinely for preventive care, and only as long as they remained well did payments continue[2][3][5].
## How It Worked
- Patients paid their doctor a regular fee (like a subscription), not per visit or treatment[1][2][4][5].
- If the patient became sick, the doctor was not paid until restoring their health[1][3][2].
- Routine care included acupuncture, herbs, dietary advice, and lifestyle recommendations to maintain wellness[3][5].
## Historical Roots and Context
- This practice reflected the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) philosophy that emphasizes **prevention** and maintaining overall health, rather than just treating illness[2][3].
- Motivated doctors to keep patients healthy, unlike many modern pay-per-treatment models[1][4][5].
- Though not common in modern China’s medical system, the idea is still cited as an example of proactive healthcare and loyalty-based doctor-patient relationships[1][2][3][5].
In summary, it was a **prepaid, subscription-like system** focused on preventive care—doctors only received continuous payment as long as the patient stayed well[1][2][3][4][5].
Not having a go at you Lorenzo, but Ron's comment that: "It is not particularly interesting to attempt to determine how much 'not too bad' it might be."
The Royal College of Physicians UK (the same college that first reported on the harms of smoking) have put out a number of reports looking at literally hundreds of toxicological and biomarker studies into vaping and concluded that it is at least 95% safer than smoking..
I would have thought that would have been pretty 'interesting' to those in Public Health charged with improving health. Instead they have largely been opposed. Whole countries have banned them with the support of WHO.
I was completely unaware of the gentleman, so I Wikipedia-ed him. I can see some similarities. I suspect I am more struck by the contingency of events than he is.
Probably because you, and I, are still more ... sprightly? Professor Mangabeira was a sort of Brazilian Henry Kissinger in the second Lula administration, but without the portfolio. Just a really, really thick accent. Eventually he discovered that Presidente Lula was more like Tony Soprano and not at all like JFK. Shook his hand once. He was very charming.
"The state is a basic ordering feature of any state society..."
Oh that's rather recent, or at least let's be clear that we are talking nation state as we currently know them. The government of England at the time of our Revolution wasn't even a state as we would recognize one now. Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community traces the centralization of institutional authority in the state (nation state, from liberal to totalitarian) and the concomitant diminishment of institutions (and their authority) outside of the state. The nation state itself is just a few centuries old and we're really talking about the state that has grown in the wake of The Great Enrichment (courtesy of Deirdre McCloskey). Prior to that the parasitic limit on what could be extracted out of the economy (as well as the competition for that from other institutions) greatly limited the scope of the state.
This confusing two different patterns: specifically, how intrusive the central apparatus of the state is compared to how much it creates basic structures.
Yes, it is absolutely true the modern state is why more intrusive than past state apparats were: indeed, one of the patterns of our time is the state and commerce between them squeezing out intermediary institutions.
Nevertheless, the monumental constructions of the past (Great Pyramid, Angkor War, Ming Great Wall, etc, etc) point to how much resources could still be squeezed out of societies by states. More to the point, state societies are hugely more complex than non-state societies.
Moreover, one can see a recurring pattern: a state imposes order on a region, population steadily increases, the pressure on resources from rising population increases the number of disruptively alienated, the state apparatus collapses under pressure, there is a population crash due to hugely increased disorder, a new state apparatus arises to re-impose order; rinse and repeat.
Looking at this pattern from c.800 to c.1820 across Eurasia, a feature of this pattern is the interludes tend to get shorter and state capacity tends to be higher after round of the process, as clearly embedded learning has taken place. The social hierarchies of these societies also vary according to how the state(s) operate in that region.
Yes, but an alliance between ruler and organised religion was normal, as priests, clerics, etc provided networks that reached into society. What you were pointing too were state apparats doing their own “reaching” within secular societies.
Indeed, much of the appeal of “wokery” is that it provides much of the institutional advantages of religion—zealots, moral projects, mechanisms to control discourse and legitimacy.
True, but "wokery" is very recent and only layered on top of what was already there. Progressivism built the infrastructure (which conservatives have duly conserved).
When religion and state are interwoven it is pretty difficult to argue that the state is really the more significant part, as compared to the western evolution of the state in the last couple of centuries. Up through the Renaissance, the Church was of vastly greater significance than any European state of the time (and many of those 'states' are not be found in the current geography).
That states come and go point to them NOT being creations of the underlying society. What makes the notion of civilisation makes sense is underlying institutional matrices, but they still require the structuring power of states to maintain themselves.
Also, the power of the Catholic Church was not greater than the states, its power rested on getting temporal power to support it. This was made very clear in the Wars of Religion but is a clear enough pattern in medieval history. Henry VIII proved to be as able as any Tang Emperor to abolish monasteries—the difference was he had to bargain with internal power-holders to do so.
It is important to know who wants you as dead as all those children and spouse and that nice house, along with a life a love-joy-hope and the upper middle class or higher with the wealth to exercise liberty and freedom without employer disrespect and creditor robo-call at all hours .. that life that was aborted before you even suspected there was a good possibility, aborted like 2 or 3 of our unborn children before they could do their squirmy wigglys and smiles.
--
I researched this well, so take a look at what this nation, West, and world should have been.
"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2223:, 14th July 2025, State's Organized Planned Disempowerment of the American Citizen"
And you might not believe that in the late 1950s and early 1960s that black communities were tight and many of us would accept the negatives of being black in society to live in such communities.
They were used as a testing protocol that was used to destroy our entire Nation.
"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2226:, 4th August 2025, Strong Black Communities were the Testbed in How to Destroy Middle-Class"
Lorenzo, this is a masterpiece of insight!
I'm glad you wrote such an incisive critique of Bret&Heather. For a while, I had the impression that you took them too much on faith - but you've proven me wrong.
Great take on Lindsay. Yes, he knows a lot of facts to criticize the left, but his "woke right" narrative - borrowed from others, including some smart provocateur leftists - is frustrating. Like Cofnas and Hanania, he doesn't understand conservatism. In fact, those two seem to hold it in outright disdain, which at least he does not.
On the other hand, the originators of toxic ideas shouldn't be easily dismissed. The influence of Marx, the Frankfurt School, feminist theory, and others—leading to trans ideology and beyond—may have served as catalysts for toxic movements that became virtually unstoppable, even without centralized coordination.
This post is one of your best, weaving together many threads you've explored in previous writings. It was a pleasure to read!
“A new poll finds 40% of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China. There is zero evidence for this.”
This didn’t age too well, NPR. 🤣
Ah, thank you much for the connections into Lindsay's work. I also take in most of his recordings, and have had my own attempts at summarizing where (and why) he gets his wires crossed. Your take on it is helping get my thoughts together on it.
I also like to take Lindsay's work with the greatest of sympathies. After all the gobbledygook and prattle he's loaded into his brain--to valiantly translate it for the rest of us--I could scarcely hope for his faculties to come out any less scathed and harrowed than they stand now.
Pairs well with Robin Hansons recent piece:
More Random Than We Realize
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/more-random-than-you-realize?selection=ffecb320-83d0-4dc1-8775-bf2afe36a2ee
The common conclusion: people tend to oversimplify cultures, groups, and systems, imagining they are more coherent and structured than they actually are. We like to believe in a few core “keys” that explain everything, even though reality is messy and random.
When faced with a messy reality, we prefer neat stories, whether it’s “my culture is guided by a few core values” (eg Left/Right) or “a secret group is pulling the strings.” This pattern-seeking helps us feel confident and connected, but it often leads us to mischaracterize events, cultures, or problems, sometimes in harmful ways.
Our desire for simplicity and coherence makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, because they offer the kind of neat, central explanation our minds crave when reality is actually messy.
Excellent analysis. However, I believe it leaves out an important phenomenon that weakens your thesis to some degree - political ponerology. There are sociopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians who understand and consciously exploit the cooperative group dynamics you outline here for personal gain, or even just out of sadism. In any society, and particularly in sick societies, such individuals tend to rise up through the ranks of institutions to positions of power and influence. And they use these institutions to carry out conspiracies.
Fauci and Collins are Exhibit A for this phenomenon. Funding gain of function research and then covering up the lab leak wasn’t just an emergent phenomenon resulting from pursuit of bureaucratic interests. It was a conscious conspiracy orchestrated by dark triad personalities. Same with promoting lockdowns and silencing the “fringe epidemiologists” who were presenting evidence and argument that undermined the case for lockdowns.
As you note, it wasn’t a Grand Conspiracy to serve outside interests like BigPharma or the Rothschilds or whoever (the “see through state”). It was, as you argue, a response to bureaucratic incentives.
But it wasn’t just that. It was Dark Triad personalities setting bureaucratic priorities and dictating the amoral means by which those priorities would be pursued. The Covid debacle does not happen absent Dark Triads at the top echelons of these bureaucracies. The ponerization of our institutions was a “but for” cause of Covid tyranny.
Were people of strong individual character like RFK Jr., Battacharaya, Kuldorf, Prasad, etc., running the show in 2020, things would have progressed much differently. Agree or disagree with these individuals on specifics, I would submit they all have the rare virtue of being neither conformists nor individuals who score high in the dark triad traits. Institutions led by such individuals behave very differently from institutions led by the Faucis and Collinses of the world. In a species made up predominantly of conformists, leadership (strong individuals of character versus Dark Triads) counts for a lot. The institutional characteristics you describe here are not inevitable. They follow from the sorts of individuals society and institutions elevate to positions of authority.
Oh yes, selection for Dark Triad personalities is one of the recurring problems of bureaucracies. I did not go very deeply into bureaucratic pathologies in the post, just pointed to their importance.
One of the reasons that European, particularly English-to-British governance, was so successful was that it had an embedded mechanism for screening out such personalities, the duel of honour which acted as a character test. One of the deep problems of our societies is we have not developed any substitute mechanism for systematically weeding out bad characters.
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Dueling.pdf
(Ignore the horrible econ-speak of “unobservable social capital”: substitute character and the analysis works fine.)
Great comment. I only take an issue with the final conclusion: "The institutional characteristics you describe here are not inevitable." It appears similar institutions in virtually all Western countries were on the same boat on COVID - UK, France, Germany, Spain, etc. This leads to conclusion that bureaucratic dynamics more likely than not lead to similar outcome.
I hadn't realised the Fabian Society was still going.
On another point, as for Public Health "managing" public metabolic health so disastrously it can only be an immense amount of self-deception combined with wanting to keep their jobs. They blame 'the public' for still not taking their advice (examination of other people's shopping in supermarkets will reveal that this is only partly true, their advice, especially on things 'low fat' has been followed by many for 30-40 years) and that if they only get more money maybe they will finally convince people. For example, earlier today I read an article that assured readers that the problem with the '5-a-day' not working (implied) was that we actually needed to eat '10-a-day' - an article well larded with appeals to the fact that (no doubt poorly evidenced observational nutritional survey) 'research clearly supports' this conclusion. Though you would think that the fact that a high proportion of nutritionists and nurses etc. are overweight (it can't be all stress and shift work, though I'm sure that doesn't help) would give them pause, as I presume they follow their own guidelines. Then I hardly ever met a nutritionist who didn't turn up without a tray of bakes! And don't get me started on campaigns like baking treats to raise money for breast cancer. I deeply suspect that there are people in the field who realise it's all been a terrible mistake but are so riven by cognitive dissonance and perhaps shame that they will not talk until after they retire.
Quite. I remember the comment that, during the trials of Prof. Noakes, his supporters were lean and healthy while a lot of “official nutrition” line critics tended to be on the larger size…
The Fabians are now so big (141 MPs) that they’re a path for mediocre internationalists, to power. God knows how many are in the Judiciary and Whitehall, but without it even being a conspiracy it explains the mediocrity and the open borders.
This is an excellent steelmanning post for people who think like myself. There’s a brilliant response to made, but sadly most of the best candidates (Dave McGowan, Mae Brussell) have already been dispatched by Them.
But seriously, while disagreeing intensely with certain of your conclusions, you’ve highlighted factors which the parapolitically-inclined should always run through before making any further reach.
And you made me think of this:
The concept refers to a practice from **ancient China** where doctors were paid a **retainer or regular fee as long as their patients stayed healthy**, and payment was withheld if the patient fell ill[1][2][3][4][5]. This system was essentially a wellness-focused **subscription model**: patients saw their traditional Chinese medicine doctor routinely for preventive care, and only as long as they remained well did payments continue[2][3][5].
## How It Worked
- Patients paid their doctor a regular fee (like a subscription), not per visit or treatment[1][2][4][5].
- If the patient became sick, the doctor was not paid until restoring their health[1][3][2].
- Routine care included acupuncture, herbs, dietary advice, and lifestyle recommendations to maintain wellness[3][5].
## Historical Roots and Context
- This practice reflected the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) philosophy that emphasizes **prevention** and maintaining overall health, rather than just treating illness[2][3].
- Motivated doctors to keep patients healthy, unlike many modern pay-per-treatment models[1][4][5].
- Though not common in modern China’s medical system, the idea is still cited as an example of proactive healthcare and loyalty-based doctor-patient relationships[1][2][3][5].
In summary, it was a **prepaid, subscription-like system** focused on preventive care—doctors only received continuous payment as long as the patient stayed well[1][2][3][4][5].
Sources
[1] Lessons in corporate health - from ancient China https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/09/corporate-health-ancient-china/
[2] Ancient TCM Doctors Get Paid Regularly when Patients Stay Healthy https://www.drxiangjun.com/blog/ancient-doctors-dont-get-paid-when-patients-fell-sick
[3] Pay the doctor only if he keeps you well - Saratoga.com https://www.saratoga.com/healing-arts/2009/05/the-beauty-of-chinese-medicine/
[4] What If Doctors Were Paid to Keep People Well? https://nutritionstudies.org/what-if-doctors-were-paid-to-keep-people-well/
[5] What if you only paid doctors when you were healthy? - Seagate World https://www.seagateworld.com/2015/06/western-medicine-get-paid-when-you-get-sick/
As a former smoker, now vaper, people often scratch their heads as to why those in Tobacco Control are so opposed to safer forms of nicotine. But as Lorenzo explains, just look at the incentives: https://arielleselyaphd.substack.com/p/the-state-of-academic-research-on-1ce
Thanks for the link, useful one, ta.
"Nicotine as a neurostimulating addictive substance with a short half-life"
So is caffeine.
"Specifically, in psychiatric patients, it is known to destabilize mood and impair aggression control."
Do you have references for this?
"For this reason, the majority if not all will inevitably be low-value studies".
lol. You should take a look at the majority of studies coming out of Tobacco Control opposed to nicotine use.
"because there is little of substantive value to uncover."
You do realize that 8 million people worldwide die from smoking every year? And that those deaths are due to the smoke not the nicotine?
"Sure, if this helps you, all the better, but it is not a worthy cause to fight for".
So preventing 8 million early deaths per year is not worth Public Health effort?
Ron’s comment is about vaping specifically, not about cigarettes.
Not having a go at you Lorenzo, but Ron's comment that: "It is not particularly interesting to attempt to determine how much 'not too bad' it might be."
The Royal College of Physicians UK (the same college that first reported on the harms of smoking) have put out a number of reports looking at literally hundreds of toxicological and biomarker studies into vaping and concluded that it is at least 95% safer than smoking..
I would have thought that would have been pretty 'interesting' to those in Public Health charged with improving health. Instead they have largely been opposed. Whole countries have banned them with the support of WHO.
"Beyond, I will let these comments hang for a day and delete them as they are irrelevant to Lorenzo's post."
Good for you Ron.
Your writing sometimes reminds me of Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Some might consider this an insult, some a compliment.
I was completely unaware of the gentleman, so I Wikipedia-ed him. I can see some similarities. I suspect I am more struck by the contingency of events than he is.
Probably because you, and I, are still more ... sprightly? Professor Mangabeira was a sort of Brazilian Henry Kissinger in the second Lula administration, but without the portfolio. Just a really, really thick accent. Eventually he discovered that Presidente Lula was more like Tony Soprano and not at all like JFK. Shook his hand once. He was very charming.
The question was raised why Henry Kissinger had a much thicker German accent than his brother. The answer? “Henry never listens to anyone.”
His brother deserves a prize.
Brilliant 👌
"The state is a basic ordering feature of any state society..."
Oh that's rather recent, or at least let's be clear that we are talking nation state as we currently know them. The government of England at the time of our Revolution wasn't even a state as we would recognize one now. Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community traces the centralization of institutional authority in the state (nation state, from liberal to totalitarian) and the concomitant diminishment of institutions (and their authority) outside of the state. The nation state itself is just a few centuries old and we're really talking about the state that has grown in the wake of The Great Enrichment (courtesy of Deirdre McCloskey). Prior to that the parasitic limit on what could be extracted out of the economy (as well as the competition for that from other institutions) greatly limited the scope of the state.
This confusing two different patterns: specifically, how intrusive the central apparatus of the state is compared to how much it creates basic structures.
Yes, it is absolutely true the modern state is why more intrusive than past state apparats were: indeed, one of the patterns of our time is the state and commerce between them squeezing out intermediary institutions.
Nevertheless, the monumental constructions of the past (Great Pyramid, Angkor War, Ming Great Wall, etc, etc) point to how much resources could still be squeezed out of societies by states. More to the point, state societies are hugely more complex than non-state societies.
Moreover, one can see a recurring pattern: a state imposes order on a region, population steadily increases, the pressure on resources from rising population increases the number of disruptively alienated, the state apparatus collapses under pressure, there is a population crash due to hugely increased disorder, a new state apparatus arises to re-impose order; rinse and repeat.
Looking at this pattern from c.800 to c.1820 across Eurasia, a feature of this pattern is the interludes tend to get shorter and state capacity tends to be higher after round of the process, as clearly embedded learning has taken place. The social hierarchies of these societies also vary according to how the state(s) operate in that region.
OK, but the constructions you're talking about there are religious as much as state, save the Great Wall.
Also, those “religious” constructions were by the states, not by the priesthoods.
Yes, but an alliance between ruler and organised religion was normal, as priests, clerics, etc provided networks that reached into society. What you were pointing too were state apparats doing their own “reaching” within secular societies.
Indeed, much of the appeal of “wokery” is that it provides much of the institutional advantages of religion—zealots, moral projects, mechanisms to control discourse and legitimacy.
True, but "wokery" is very recent and only layered on top of what was already there. Progressivism built the infrastructure (which conservatives have duly conserved).
When religion and state are interwoven it is pretty difficult to argue that the state is really the more significant part, as compared to the western evolution of the state in the last couple of centuries. Up through the Renaissance, the Church was of vastly greater significance than any European state of the time (and many of those 'states' are not be found in the current geography).
That states come and go point to them NOT being creations of the underlying society. What makes the notion of civilisation makes sense is underlying institutional matrices, but they still require the structuring power of states to maintain themselves.
Also, the power of the Catholic Church was not greater than the states, its power rested on getting temporal power to support it. This was made very clear in the Wars of Religion but is a clear enough pattern in medieval history. Henry VIII proved to be as able as any Tang Emperor to abolish monasteries—the difference was he had to bargain with internal power-holders to do so.
It is important to know who wants you as dead as all those children and spouse and that nice house, along with a life a love-joy-hope and the upper middle class or higher with the wealth to exercise liberty and freedom without employer disrespect and creditor robo-call at all hours .. that life that was aborted before you even suspected there was a good possibility, aborted like 2 or 3 of our unborn children before they could do their squirmy wigglys and smiles.
--
I researched this well, so take a look at what this nation, West, and world should have been.
"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2223:, 14th July 2025, State's Organized Planned Disempowerment of the American Citizen"
https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2223
---
And you might not believe that in the late 1950s and early 1960s that black communities were tight and many of us would accept the negatives of being black in society to live in such communities.
They were used as a testing protocol that was used to destroy our entire Nation.
"Multiverse Journal - Index Number 2226:, 4th August 2025, Strong Black Communities were the Testbed in How to Destroy Middle-Class"
https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2226
--
Yes, they are that evil. Look at Gaza and know we all were always Gazans to them.
Congratulations, you have utterly missed the point of my post.