Is Moloch Getting Covid Yet?

The first UK lockdown, that ran for several months from late March 2020, afforded me something very useful - time. So much time, in fact, that I could no longer keep my mind busy with all its usual tasks and I started to invest some of it widening my knowledge of the modern world.

Despite having just emerged from nearly two decades living in a spiritual community, I did not consider that I was a complete Rip van Winkle. No, I kept up with stuff. But I did not widen. I did not seek the new.

So I went on Twitter, a new experience for me, and began to check out all sorts of experts in all sorts of fields. I listened to podcasts, read WordPress blogs, watched videos and widened. I realised that, actually, I didn’t know it all already and that there was much for me to learn in this new world.

One podcast I encountered in this time completely stood out for me - Scott Alexander’s “Meditations on Moloch.” (Slate Star Codex - link at bottom). From its commencement, with a recording of Allen Ginsburg reading from his poem, Howl, right through 2 hours of Scott explaining the game theoretical ramifications of continuing on the way we were, I was hooked. Moloch gripped me. He was the metaphysical nemesis that the hero in me had been instinctively seeking.

Though written in the late 1950s, it seemed as though Ginsburg, someone I had never rated even in my beatnik-punk days, had seen prophetically into the future in the manner of an Old Testament prophet.

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Ginsburg had distilled this Carthaginian demon king from the post-war roots of industrial capitalism and had thus anthropomorphised the psychological essence of the force that continued to drive it onwards. It was Moloch.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven

Indeed they did. Generations of men driven to work their lives away to service Moloch’s mindless lust for categorisation, debasement and conquest - a blind, soulless need for control. Kept half starved on a skeleton diet of need-to-know justifications and promises of a better future, we had all complied and tried to make the best of it.

When Ginsberg stopped and Scott resumed I remained entranced. He tore into aspect after aspect of the modern world, pointing to how “the system” could never stop, even if it wanted to, until we were all dust. Multi-polar traps, algorithmically-driven short-termism, unstoppable governmental corruption, the list went on and on.

What Scott’s exposition of Game Theory showed me most clearly was the fallacy of living in hope. Of believing that, one day, the system might change. That one day, democracy would bring in human-centred values. That one day, the people would rise up and start a revolution. I saw it clearly. These things could simply never happen. Moloch had all bases covered.

And, actually, his main weapon was not the brutal servitude he had inflicted upon the world’s downtrodden, or the temporary comfort he granted the middle classes. Rather it was his capacity to constantly inspire hope. Hope that in the future things would get better. He dangled this carrot in front of our eyes, and we just kept on going. Moloch’s main mastery was his judicious use of hope to deceive.

When the podcast ended, I found myself deeply internally moved. For I had seen what Scott was pointing to. I had got it. We were already in the end of days.

Scott Alexander wrote and recorded “Meditations on Moloch” in 2014. I was a long way behind the times. But, of course, what had further ramped up the intensity of my experience was the ongoing situation with Covid.

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I had actually never been convinced by Covid from the very beginning. I wore my mask. I did my lockdown. I practised social distancing. I was a good boy and followed the rules. But I didn’t believe.

Back in the 90s, I had for a while been a huge fan of conspiracy theories. Someone had passed me a copy of David Icke’s “The Truth Shall Set You Free” and I was in - hook, line and sinker. It all made sense. The world was in the grip of an evil cult, and the mass media were its voice. They kept us working. They kept us down.

I believed for a while, a few years. I tried to convince others. All the usual stuff conspiracy theorists do. What lifted me out in the end was actually my own curiosity. Why was I spending hours on the internet researching this stuff, I began to ask myself? Did I really care about history? Did I really care about other people’s lives, to a depth that I would spend my waking hours reading about conspiracies? I had to admit that altruism was much more a latent trait within me. I was a selfish mf, if I was really honest. And what about my Dad, my adoptive father? Hadn’t I always rejected authority as simply being wrong? Hadn’t I struggled to find work, hating to have to do what another told me?

It took a year or two but I extricated myself from the conspiracy scene. I saw that, having had little positive experience of it in childhood, I would simply react distrustfully to authority. I saw that, actually, the new world the internet was opening up was by no means all bad. I moved on. But, despite moving on, I kept in my mind the one thing that I really respected Icke for so accurately elucidating - Problem; Reaction; Solution. This term referred to the sequence of steps, engineered by the mass media, that inevitably preceded any major, manipulated shift in world events.

In February 2020, as the spectre of Covid began to form on our collective horizon, I was aware of a considerable shift in mass media activity. They were going into Problem; Reaction; Solution in an unprecedented manner. Covid was a Problem. It was everywhere. Covid, Covid, Covid. They were pumping up the Problem and the Reaction was inevitable - Fear. People were getting more and more afraid with each newspaper they picked up. And it didn’t matter which paper you read. Left or right - it was all the same. Covid, Covid, Fear, Fear. And then, in late February, stories about the Solution began to manifest - Lockdown. The Chinese had gone into lockdown… and now they were okay. If you go into lockdown, then you will be alright. Covid; Fear; Lockdown. Problem; Reaction; Solution.

So, I didn’t believe. I assumed it was a manipulation game, designed to achieve some dubious end. Perhaps a 1929 Wall Street Crash-style situation was being engineered, where small companies would end up being bought for cents on the dollar by the big players. Maybe all those closet totalitarians in the UN were finally getting bored of waiting for capitalism to collapse and had decided to take matters into their own hands. Maybe the mass awakening of humanity was getting close and the forces of darkness were mounting one last challenge. Who knew? Not me! I was actually happy that I could admit to myself that I really didn’t know what was going on.

So, I was sitting there in my flat in Brighton in April 2020, now locked down and thinking to myself - well, what’s my role here? I didn’t feel like joining the protests that were starting to form. I attended one or two small ones on the Brighton sea-front, where a few dozen of us marched and chanted slogans, rather as though we were protesting about public sector wage cuts. I’d been there and done that.

And it was interesting to watch where my mind went in all this drama, to use the confinement to develop my self-awareness. But it wasn’t until I experienced Scott’s piece in all it’s compelling glory that a new possibility began to manifest in my mind… maybe the good guys are running Covid. Maybe this is the only way that we have a chance to avert Armageddon.

I knew the world could not change without a massive event to interrupt where we were heading. I knew democracy was just a bedtime story for the middle classes, that dominance hierarchies would inevitably do their thing, and that humans were actually easier to manipulate than sheep. I’d literally been watching these things happen for decades. But a global reset? Could this be the only way to stop Moloch in his tracks? Could this Carthaginian demon god be susceptible to Covid?

As I pondered the possibility over, I had to admit that, as much as a part of me reacted to being manipulated so, this might be the only way we could survive. I knew that hierarchies weren’t all bad. I knew that the so-called Illuminati were revered as transcendental saviours before Icke & Co took over their PR. I knew that not all secret societies were bent on humanity’s enslavement.

I have issues with impulse control. I would love to know the answer and be able to reveal it. I hate having to wait it out, moment by moment, watching this multi-act drama unfold, bit by bit. I hate it more than I can easily convey. I would love to know where all this is going. But I don’t.

Devaraj Sandberg 2020

• Meditations on Moloch - slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

• Moloch (Howl Part II), written and read by Allen Ginsburg - online here

• Moloch (a poem) by Devaraj - devaraj2.substack.com/p/moloch