I am guilty of the treason of optimism, and as such believe that a better world is possible as the current system passes away.
It being important to think of the future beyond reaction to the moment, here is an essay on the elephant in the room, whose rampage is so routine that we no longer recognise its magnitude.
This is the problem of SCALE - and it can be fixed.
Most of our problems are not political, but practical.
The machinery of state is not limited to slogans and rainbow ideology, but is partnered with a vast, if unapproachable, system. Human identity is increasingly patterned on its algorithms.
You can call this SCALE.
The Size, Complexity, Atomization, Liberalization and Elitism of mass society is the machinery of misery. It is an efficient mechanism of emergencies without reply.
This can change.
Today I return to the concept of SCALE - what it is, how it works, and why we should descale society.
CONTENTS
SCALE in practice:
Why SCALE matters
Madness in mass society
Food-like product
National Suicide
The Growth Model
Education
SCALE in theory:
Things Are Not The Same
The Opium of the People
Large SCALE disaster
Small is Meaningful
I explained the concept of SCALE in a previous post here:
WHY SCALE MATTERS
The performance we call politics is downstream of SCALE.
The debt, the consumer economy, the wars, the mass migrations and the increasing epidemic of mental disorder are realised by the concentration of human activity into vast megastructures.
The response to covid-19 and possibly its manufacture too are examples of SCALE, with the pharmaceutical industry being one instance of supra-national mechanisms seeking to standardise and commodify aspects of human behaviour with a global scope.
NATO too is an instrument of SCALE, but so are our huge schools, our inefficient and sprawling hospitals, and the high density housing developments in which we are expected to live.
None of the political structures of scale are designed to include human input. In fact, the efficiency of SCALE relies on coding human decency as an error.
This is the reason your boss talks like a robot and everything reduces to a recorded telephone cue. The hold music never stops.
The distance between the human dimension and this vast machine is almost unbridgeable. Especially in the cities, but not exclusive to them, there is no aspect of life which is not shaped by the forces of SCALE. At once inescapable and unapproachable, large scale bureaucracies have developed an immune response to human input.
This machinery of state produces statesmen to its specifications. Donations, patronage and sponsorship produce a compliant political and media class whose output serves to exclude unwanted input.
This is the reason we inhabit an ideology of national suicide. What is good for the machine is bad for man. It is driving us insane as well as into extinction.
MADNESS IN MASS SOCIETY
The politics of the machine is so deranged that it now rewards insanity. There are legal and workplace sanctions placed on the public mention of basic facts, not limited to “gender”, genocide and the wholesale destruction of our way of life.
Mental illness has become a badge of honour, attracting sympathetic writeups and legal protection for perverse delusions. The mainstreaming of madness is a means of making good the new normal, which is widespread pathological behaviour.
In brief, the sheer concentration of people in a small space is enough to promote insanity. Added to this, the patterning of personality on screen-based algorithms of reward leads to spiritual poverty, restructuring the reward centres towards epehemeral and momentary boosts gained at the expense of all the time not spent outside, in reality.
SCALE produces “small souled bugmen” - a hive of activities infused with a fervent desire for a meaning they can never provide.
We can escape this machine, and the way out begins with the family. From this basic unit, through kinship to a nation again, towards sensible relations with our brothers in mankind.
I was told by the man who came up with SCALE that the best way to see your life in this mechanical madhouse is to consider yourself a social missionary.
You will be able to hear him yourself soon, as I am going to interview him this weekend.
FOOD-LIKE PRODUCT
Pictures of people from the 1970s and 1980s show a remarkable absence of obesity. With over one in three now obese, what has changed?
Those Kodachrome families did not have gym memberships, superfood fads and smart watches counting steps.
The change has come from within. Food has been replaced in large part by food-like products.
What kind of system sells milk so cheaply that it drives dairy farmers to suicide?
NATIONAL SUICIDE
The politics of SCALE reduces to national suicide. Anti-natalist, open borders and for non-productive sexualised lifestyles, it is a cult of selves in the mouth of a Leviathan.
Mass migration is a product of SCALE, being a “magic bullet” for a bankrupt system of usury and debt. What kind of economic system requires the sacrifice of everything to produce less than nothing?
THE GROWTH MODEL
Our political leaders are managers. They are supposed to direct the economy to provide for some stability and prosperity. This is the basic duty of government, and its right to rule (or “legitimacy”) relies in the main on this.
The fact that their policies produce the opposite effect explains why public trust in government has evaporated.
Derelict in its duties to the ruled, and held in suspicion and contempt, the liberal ruling elite is a tyranny.
I explained the tyranny that has replaced Liberal pluralism here, with reference to Isaiah Berlin and his pupil, John Gray:
EDUCATION
Education at SCALE is a process of making people believe that things which are different are actually the same.
The fond memories you may have of your education do not signify the same experiences today.
Education these days is not the same as it was.
It teaches that people are the same, no matter the difference in their culture, behaviour, beliefs, morality, self discipline, talent, intelligence and wisdom.
It says that this thing is the same as that, when it is not.
Examples include:
Men dressed as women are the same as women
Mutilated girls are the same as boys
Same sex unions are the same as marriage
Our political system is the same as democracy
Noticing difference is the same as hatred
Words can be the same as violence
Beyond the explosive “culture war” emotions, there is the simple fact that different things are not the same thing, and cannot be expected to function in the same way.
I think this basic principle - of insisting on sameness wherever difference is found - is fundamental to “education”. It serves the general purpose of rounding the edges of the future components of the consumer machinery of mass SCALE.
If we can be made to think the same, we can forget our differences.
I beg to differ.
THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME
People like St Just and Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Richard Dawkins all belong to the Enlightenment tradition which sees in religion an amusing relic with obvious cultural power.
To them, it is an instrument to be retooled. The system we inhabit has largely realised their goal, perhaps best expressed by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, to continue religion minus God.
The idea is to preserve the structure of belief but to change its object. Arnold thought the new object - or idol - could be “culture”. The French revolutionaries made a Cult of Reason, and Mill along with others wanted to create a Religion of Humanity.
The obvious problem here is obscured by religious objection. In fact, the flaw in this plan is not founded on the absence of God, but on a simpler folly.
It is unreasonable to expect one thing to function exactly as another.
This was TS Eliot’s objection1 to the idea of Christianity without Christ. The Liberals, inspired by their revolutionaries and rationalists, wanted to replace one thing with a different thing - and expected things to stay the same, or even improve.
How would this pipe dream2 work out? Well, you can see for yourself.
We have
celebrity worship
a mainstream cult of sex
self indulgence as a virtue
sports player worship
fan culture
and a host of obsessive consumer behaviours such as collecting Funko Pops which display some deep drive for personal significance. Ideological loyalty, such as the performative attachment to the symbols of the Current Thing, is another instance of the zelotic attachment of the Godless Believer.
The Weimarisation of our culture is an expression of the riot of desires produced by nihilism.
The YOLO meme - “You Only Live Once” - the “Just Do It” mantra - these typify the grinning desperation of a life without higher purpose than satisfaction - of largely mass-produced desires.
This was one aspect of what Michael Polanyi called “moral inversion”3. Another product of SCALE, it explains why vices are now virtues, and why passing media fads attract intense emotional investment in the absence of any wider moral framework. At the end, all there is to worship is force.
This contextless passion is everywhere. War fever, trans fever, BLM fever, the hatred of the unvaccinated - even support for farming is now coded as “extremism”. This is the madness of our civilisation, which shades the mood of our friends and neighbours. Haunted by the ghost of the machine, they wail in unison with its algorithms.
THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE
The people now have other opiates than religion, including opiates themselves. Drug use is valorised in film and romanticised in the same way as crime. It has become banalised as a result. The living dead populate the streets of America, frozen by “tranq” - a cocktail of fentanyl or heroin mixed with the animal tranquilliser Xylazine.
It has now come to Europe.
LARGE SCALE DISASTER
The drug trade -legal and not- is an operation of SCALE.
It would be impossible without the vast machine we call the “economy”, which has now dissolved all borders. National frontiers and traditional modes of living have been corroded to a fading memory by aggressive measures to promote the lifestyles best suited to mass SCALE profit and politics.
Nullification is the result of an economy of desire, and chronic drug abuse is nested in a panoply of promoted addictions. Sex, food, holidays, clothes, gadgets, cars are bundled with identities.
The trans phenomenon is the pinnacle of the consumer promise, fusing erotic fantasy with technology and purchase power to promise a transcendent new identity. In reality, it is often a grotesque horror.
Crime itself was once a parallel culture, but is now indistinguishable from street and state-level life. It too is part of this new normal.
I did a three part series on our “Culture of Crime” last November, which at present is free to read here:
SMALL IS MEANINGFUL
Regular readers will be aware that I am a person of restricted growth (PORG).
No surprise then that I celebrate the goodness of small things. However, a big man who never claimed to be beautiful was also on the side of human scale.
In 1905, GK Chesterton said4
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world.
What did he mean?
He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions.
Chesterton references that great consumer champion - choice:
In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
He says that mass scale society creates an unreality-based community.
Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery.
Almost a hundred years ago, Chesterton - who being round himself was used to the circumspection of the vast - had the measure of SCALE and the small souled digital cavemen it breeds.
A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness.
It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.
It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
Neither science nor reason can explain why we are here, nor how we are to live. We inhabit the results of the most sincere attempt to force these tools to speak.
It has robbed us of the ability to make compromises based on the recognition of immutable difference. Instead, we are told to simply invent new “facts”, which are checked by the mass-scale media.
There is good reason to wish to inhabit a nation and not a market. A nation is a family. A market is a myriad of transactions, having no connection between men but commerce.
Buying and selling has its place, but the replacement of food-like products for thought is a result of the standardisation of “culture” through assimilation into an efficient machine with global ambitions.
The magnitude of SCALE has reduced man to a full stop. It has made him punctuation in a sentence he cannot pronounce. This bewildering complexity is itself soluble. Man does not have to live as a mere subject to a monopoly.
The enemy of SCALE is everything meaningful to mankind. SCALE seeks to replace everything with itself.
The culture wars are simply the removal of culture by SCALE, to replace distinction with uniformity - imposed by the elites that SCALE requires and empowers. This system produces its own meanings, to be passively consumed as a sort of convenience food. What is waste in this system is what is precious to you.
It aims to become both subject and object, and it is simply a matter of efficiency if everything you cherish is edited out of its terms and conditions.
What is important here is that the politics of “no alternative” is dying. The ghost of the machine is its ideology, which is dissolving like a vampire dessicated in the daylight of reality.
From this dawn can come a new beginning. It is one we can reshape, practically, to suit the dimensions of man and all that he holds dear.
The task of the new politics is the descaling of society.
I have arranged an interview with the man who came up with SCALE, and will post it here when it is done.
James Matthew Wilson wrote an essay called “TS Eliot: Culture and Anarchy” in 2014,
“Arnold’s intention was to make religion viable in an age of unbelief by equating it alternately with literature and morality, and by suggesting that it was part of a wider whole called “culture.” This had the effect of reducing different things to each other or, in Eliot’s signature phrase, of trying to make things “substitute” for one another.”
He wrote a book of the same name, which was published in March 2024. Wilson points out that Arnold’s vision of “culture” replacing Christ has actually been realised, citing celebrity and sports-player worship, alongside the consumption of what is now called art.
A pipe dream is a vision produced by opium, formerly smoked in pipes. Jean Cocteau wrote about his in “Opium: The Diary of his Cure”, and Coleridge is said to have produced Kubla Khan when inspired by the opiated tincture of laudanum.
To see Cocteau’s self-painted tomb in Milly-la-Foret, or to read Coleridge, is to see how even our fantasies have degraded under SCALE.
Polanyi said in On Moral Inversion this process leads to power-worship.
“Although modern people are driven by powerful moral aspirations, they are also inclined, due to their reductionist outlook on human being, to deny the reality of these aspirations.
Conceptual frameworks such as Marxism, while ostensibly proclaiming that amoral desires are immanent in moral motivations, impregnate backhandedly some material ends with the fervour of moral passions.
Thanks to these frameworks, these people can embrace the reductionist outlook and the moral aspirations, henceforth covered with a scientific disguise which conjures away the contradiction between those commitments.
This is a process of moral inversion.
As they are disposed to recognize moral value to brute force, some of them even offer their moral support to naked power.”
I am indebted to Kevin Michael Grace, whose very droll and erudite broadcasts during lockdown helped me not go completely loopy. I learned about Polanyi and moral inversion from him, whose work is an object lesson in the risus sophisticus.
Mr Grace destroys the seriousness of our enemies with laughter, and their laughter with seriousness. He is aptly named.
Just a couple of notes.
On society as anthill, especially the "postmodern" kind, read Guido Giacomo Preparata.
A well-kept secret: the usury-based banking system that sucks in all loose money through compound interest drives people into urban environments because the velocity of money there (speed of spending) can run flat-out, being a desperate means to spend it before the bank vacuums it up.
The happiest state of western society was the towns of medieval Europe when the Church had outlawed usury.
A basic guaranteed income distributed to people regularly would allow local communities and economies to flourish where they could enjoy food sovereignty above all.
Thanks.
Richard C. Cook
"Noticing difference is the same as hatred".
I had so many laughs reading this, thanks Frank!
And tears as well, as this-
"We can escape this machine, and the way out begins with the family. From this basic unit, through kinship to a nation again, towards sensible relations with our brothers in mankind." - used to be a possibility.
My " family" now are strangers from my town and from around the world, and they are better friends than my family or friends ever were.
Choices sure have been scaled down in healthy company, but some of the best meals come from a limited pantry 🌞