Real ones will know the image above is an homage to the nesting Russian Doll sequence opening the great Alec Guinness-led adaptation of John Le Carré’s fantastically popular Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The sequence ends with a blank-faced doll at nest’s center; lifted away, it leaves the apprehensive viewer with a portentous set of vacant concentric rings, a small hollow nothing at its center, where the heart — of the conspiracy driving the labyrinthine plot — should be.
When it comes to bravery Le Carré was, I think, a case of credit received insufficient to credit due. He said more than anyone in Anglodom, certainly anyone near his level, about the criminal syndicate of international pharma and about the global money laundering machine that turned Russian funds of “unknown” provenance into squeaky-clean pounds and euros. Two phenomena about which it isn’t much of a stretch to say London was (if it isn’t still) world capital.
It’s not an exaggeration either to consider Le Carré concerned above all with Britain’s real-life version of Russia’s famous dolls.
Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” and his words in 1939 spoke eloquently to the Western sense of Moscow as the “other” — an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules, usually to the detriment of those who choose more open regulations…
But Churchill’s analysis was only part of a formula that seems as relevant now as it was then. Perhaps, he said, “there is a key” to the riddle of Russia, concluding, “That key is Russian national interest.”
The tale of Britain’s national interests toward its other major twentieth-century rival, Germany, is best left here to another place and time. In an ironic sense Le Carré would no doubt appreciate, the UK owed its momentous rise as a computational and cryptographic power to the Germans’ Enigma system (and the Poles who first cracked it). But the British had been well-nigh obsessed with riddles, puzzles, mysteries, and all other higher-order games of wit since at least the rise of the Victorian gentleman — something McLuhan, a longtime Sherlock Holmes appreciator for whom Holmes’s inductions stressed that effects “precede” causes, would have traced to the dominance of the print medium, which produced the dominance of the English language, of English thought and patterns of thought, and, via such paths, to the dominance of British commerce, British money, British Empire, and the real Great Game — played at ever-higher levers and layers of abstraction by men of surpassing wit.
At the beating heart of that rarified scene — “so overt it’s covert,” as Sherlock jokes in Guy Ritchie’s Holmes sequel A Game of Shadows (a line so strong it has its own song, composed by Hans Zimmer himself) — was the star whose visage graces the Anglo Doll above: John Maynard Keynes.
MR. UNIVERSE
I suppose it sounds ungenerous to say how unsurprising it is that the son of a Cambridge lecturer in moral sciences and a local social reformer would be from an early age a gay atheist, but the collapse of English and German Christianity in Keynes’s time among the children and grandchildren of Protestant faithful and even of Protestant ministers just can’t be ignored — even if Keynes, a huge and largely forgotten point in his favor, fought in vain to stop the victorious Britons from bankrupting and immiserating the German people after World War I, one of the West’s ugliest and most scourging examples of what could go wrong?-brain among its mental elite.
I’ve said a few words in the past about Keynes, specifically about the “beauty contest” that bears his name in the literature, and it’s here that our Anglo Dolls really come into view. On the face of it, the Keynesian Beauty Contest is an ingenious theory of equity markets, of the sort that made the mathematically-adept Keynes a giant of macroeconomics. Lift off the head, however, and another face—and another, and another—await inside. Here is Keynes in 1936 explaining how it all works:
It is not a case of choosing those that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.
Thirty-three, perhaps? Who knows. The sky is the limit in matters like these; the base of the Tower is broad, and strictly speaking it has no top floor.
That’s not Keynes but Tocqueville, right around 100 years earlier. Paradoxically, perhaps, deepening equality in the social environment drives the ever-greater straining on the part of the greatest wits to conceptualize a still more all-encompassing logical framework that what had just come before. Following Tocqueville, here we don’t simply mean material circumstances when treating the social environment but psychological ones, the personal and the shared converging toward what today is referred to so thirstily as collective consciousness. To finally tame, or at least ride, or at least forge, the human superorganism! To summon it forth, the highest degree yet attained in that great Beauty Contest in the sky, through the vast digital power swarming invisibly in the air — known, despite its material home underground, as the cloud!
This is the telos, the logical destination, of the Anglo Dolls, forever eating all previous dolls, a “cause” operationalized in distorted reflection of Marshall McLuhan’s maxim of media effects: in a new medium all previous media are trans-formed into content.
CULT FARMING
It would appear to be a one-way valve, this principle of compound technologization. McLuhan insisted — in keeping with the pattern of Catholic social theorizing from Tocqueville to Girard — that understanding, by way of knowledge, might suffice to save us from what we otherwise had wrought. Just how much the knowledge afforded only by practical and spiritual experience figured in to this understanding I hesitate to try to say. Girard’s mimetic theory of the Crucifixion and the casting out of Satan by Satan stopped short at the scandal of the Resurrection, which no psychological or social law could seem to apprehend. Tocqueville’s assessment of the statesmen’s prospect for reinvigorating religious devotion was “to give daily practical examples” that “wealth, renown, and power are the rewards of work, that great success comes when it has been long desired, and that nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.”
I have therefore no doubt that, in accustoming the citizens to think of the future in this world, they will gradually be led without noticing it toward religious beliefs. Thus the same means that, up to a certain point, enable men to manage without religion are perhaps after all the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith.
So far as popular piety might be maintained, Tocqueville had recommendations, too:
I find that in order for religions to maintain their authority, humanly speaking, in democratic ages, they must not only confine themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters: their power also depends very much on the nature of the belief they inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the obligations they impose. The preceding observation, that equality leads men to very general and very extensive notions, is principally to be understood as applied to the question of religion. Men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator; whilst, on the contrary, in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven.
And so we are thrown back on the question of why, in a time and place where competition among striving minds conforms to and converges toward the concentration and universalization of thought and ideas, America should be such a factory for idols, false gods, heresies, cults, and apostasies. Tocqueville witnessed the propensity in American society for religious fragmentation and the propensity in the American individual for religious mania. He saw both arise from the uniformity of social and psychological conditions. These, he maintained, drove Americans to reach with increasing desperation for the experience of breakthroughs — cathartic emancipations from the “invisible barriers” blocking swift advancement when everyone wants the same things and pursues them in the same ways.
The pressure to distinguish oneself by the alacrity and ambition with which one competes to best conform pushed Americans past the point where “their reason gives way,” leading to the same pattern of prideful yet envious scrambling to grasp what they fear will slip swiftly from reach. Whenever they secure a precious slice of spare time, they plow it into politics instead of rest and recreation. Captivated by the image of the perfectibility of man in the unity of the cosmic whole, they throw themselves in their religious life toward theologies and forms of worship that promise a direct and unmediated experience of the divine.
Translation, in America the spiritual pressure, theological (pertaining to God) and psychological (pertaining to the soul) alike, is always to stampede past all intermediate and particular details and figures — dietary observances; saints, bishops, monasteries; relics, icons, frescos, churches distinguishable from town halls; even churches themselves, or the whole liturgical and doctrinal inheritance of the ancient faith. Americans are especially apt to try substituting Jesus for the whole of his Church, or one Person of the Trinity for the three. The temptation is overwhelming to collapse the Christian religion for the sake of immediacy into a high-concept universalist unitarian ethos or a low-latency “charismatic” practice of ecstatic physicality.
So it is not surprising to see these two expressions of democratic post-Christianity themselves converge into the emergent faith of the cyborg theocracy — the religion of Pride in the protean superorganism that purifies infinite identities through the tautological lie that “Love is Love.” A fusion of software and hardware accelerating into a divinity all-consuming to the calculating, imagining mind and all-enabling to the passionate will and flesh. Here is a monstrosity so meta as to win all Keynesian Beauty Contests, capable (in the imagination of its adherents) of swallowing up and digesting almost anything — tech, Jesus, the works.
In this schema the algorithm must optimize for generating a functional infinity of cults. In the way that apparent anarchy is largely a farm league of petty tyrants, of tremendous use to a tyrannical regime — and in the manner of the underground serving as a perpetual recruitment pool for the masters of “intelligence” tradecraft — the rampant factionalism in a regime such as ours is a cult farm from which the great centralizers have engineered a rich and constant harvest (at least until the seed corn is gone). The more the centralization, the more factionalism and the greater proliferation of cults: this is the model, the Anglo model, that Tocqueville sensed but did not see.
SHELL GAME
The steep price of becoming an Anglo Doll regime is plain enough. Rueful jokes and criticisms about policies that “invade the world and invite the world” miss the core point: as a globalizing regime remakes the world it its image, it increasingly becomes the world in a literal sense: a multifarious realm of shifting and shimmering interests, intrigues, and identities, of combinations and cabals, ever more alien and hostile to citizenship and civics and the coherent, cohesive constitution of a civil body — the politeia in the absence of which there can be no politics.
It only makes sense that a state within a state should wield power over such a world within a world. But inevitably there will be rivals vying for control over that deeper state, and for control or influence over at least some element of one or more other factions. On the face of it, it’s a logic that points with a bony finger toward a conflict, not very out in the open, between various powers trying to dominate the world-within-the-world that America has become. It is sometimes unclear in this environment whether America is better seen as the inner or the outer doll — the metaworld overarching planet Earth or the denser sphere at its center toward which all gravity pulls. The easy answer is that it toggles, depending on the circumstances of the various players and their adeptness at moving up and down the scale of the Beauty Contest, playing the notes, wringing out melodies, captivating ears and quickening hearts…
In the wilderness of mirrors (and black mirrors) that this superpolitics has become under digital conditions, it is functionally impossible for American citizens to engage in citizenship. They cannot deliberate or decide how to respond to circumstances the details and directors of which are impenetrable to them; they sink into a new kind of servitude where not only the distinction between combatant and civilian disappears but between person and environment, battler and battlefield.
How to parse this situation in light of the 2024 election is not quite anyone’s guess, but it strains the faculties at most Americans’ disposal. Considering world factions competing for power and sway in America, the share with a strong interest in ridding the country of the sitting administration is dwindling — even among America’s sharpest critics or adversaries. That places extraordinary pressure on those factions which do want the administration to be replaced, whether by their own people or relatively more or less witting allies and enablers. Among these, it appears vanishingly few believe that Donald Trump is a viable vehicle to place energy and resources behind, whether on the basis of personality and character or simply of persistent “state capacity” to deny him the White House. Yet even these few are too many to coalesce harmoniously around Trump’s main political challenger outside the administration. Is there any reason to believe that the most likely faction to come out on top in that sub-conflict is the one made up of domestic patriots out of power and lacking the sponsorship or support of another, external faction?