PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Morgoth's genius and Origins of Civilisation
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
133.95651
Summary
In this episode of Brokernomics, I talk about how I unlocked a new ability, and how I used it to change the way I look at the world. I also talk about why I think Morgoth's article on why Warhammer is post-deconstruction and not pre-modern is a brilliant piece.
Transcript
00:00:24.220
Now, in this episode, I wanted to take you through a couple of things and actually explain
00:00:33.980
that I've kind of unlocked a new ability, a way to look at the world, which I think
00:00:38.740
is actually going to be really quite handy now that I've got this new mental model.
00:00:42.940
And the next episode that I'm going to do, probably next week, is going to be, you know,
00:00:47.360
how does the British political system actually work?
00:00:50.240
Because if you advert the frame, if you ask what questions are saying to ask, how does
00:00:57.140
the system genuinely operate at a permission-based level?
00:01:03.400
And I don't think that the British, well, I say the British political system and basically
00:01:08.020
any Western political system at this point, it's not a democracy.
00:01:12.040
It's a credentialed, waiting, compliance system.
00:01:14.700
And the electorate are basically choosing managers to administer constraints that they
00:01:21.760
And by that, I mean either the electorate or the managers.
00:01:25.920
So you've got to stop analysing politics as preference segregation.
00:01:30.540
You've got to analyse it through a series of permission boundaries.
00:01:33.880
And if you do that, you then ask, OK, well, what actions are structurally impossible regardless
00:01:43.080
And I haven't finished thinking this through, but ultimately, it's not going to put political
00:01:51.080
It's probably going to put, I don't know, Bank of England or the Treasury at the top of
00:01:55.820
No, what I actually wanted to talk about is how did I unlock that ability and where did
00:02:05.020
Now, this is not going to be one of those, you know, standard pitches, because for all
00:02:08.500
I know, it's probably sold out by the time you get to watch this.
00:02:16.860
But no, what it actually is, is a bit of a homage to the genius of Morgoth, who wrote
00:02:27.120
Hopefully you haven't all got 4K screens at home and you now don't need to buy the magazine.
00:02:36.960
And I'm not here just to, you know, fluff Morgoth.
00:02:41.420
What I'm actually trying to do is explain why the tool set that he applied is so powerful.
00:02:49.860
Because actually, I think there is something genuinely interesting to learn about that element
00:02:56.360
So you don't need to know anything about Warhammer to get the benefit of this episode, because
00:03:04.300
What I'm talking about is the system of unveiling underlying truths and looking at what is the
00:03:12.420
right question, not just the question that you were presented with.
00:03:17.120
And also some of the techniques he used, which is, you know, just genuinely impressive.
00:03:21.880
So, oh, and you should buy Arnando as well, if you still can.
00:03:26.840
So first of all, base level analysis of the article, you know, he correctly identifies
00:03:32.540
Warhammer as post-deconstruction and not pre-modern.
00:03:36.180
A lot of commentators on Warhammer get this wrong.
00:03:38.360
They slot in as being either reactionary or, you know, ironic satire.
00:03:43.900
He looks at it as, OK, you know, what comes after irony is done eating everything.
00:03:55.000
And he's not exactly rejecting escapism outright.
00:03:58.780
He argues that 40k resonates because it does not offer, it doesn't console.
00:04:07.280
Only endurance and duty are acknowledged amongst a whole bunch of falsehoods that get thrown
00:04:16.440
You know, institutions persisting without legitimacy, narratives existing without belief.
00:04:26.080
And as soon as you take it to that level, you understand, OK, it's bigger than the article
00:04:31.440
That's a framing reference because the article of the reference is, that's where the article
00:04:40.080
And he basically ties it back to the political system that we're in.
00:04:43.500
And all of those things that I just said, they align clearly with that.
00:04:50.600
He uses Garrow, which is a character in that, correctly.
00:04:58.420
And he's picking him over the other characters that generally get picked because his defining
00:05:04.700
trait is not righteousness, but it's loyalty after it has been revealed that the system
00:05:21.100
And I mean, a couple of more basic points before I get to what I really want to talk about.
00:05:24.540
You know, the essay, I mean, it avoids nostalgia traps.
00:05:29.660
You know, it explicitly rejects return to 1988 thinking.
00:05:42.600
And that keeps it from degrading into sentimentality.
00:05:49.040
And that's actually doing a lot of work because normally that meme is a reference would be
00:05:56.500
In this article, it isn't because he captures something precise, an acknowledgement without
00:06:04.080
Yes, everything is broken and you can still act.
00:06:11.320
Most writings are going to either, you know, be critiques of modernity, you know, endlessly
00:06:17.620
without offering a posture for living inside it, or they're going to be false consolidation,
00:06:23.820
you know, progress and technocracy and nostalgia and irony.
00:06:27.080
You can see Hollywood films doing this all the time.
00:06:29.440
But this article, it does neither of those things.
00:06:32.260
It offers dignified persistence as a worldview, which is both unfashionable and psychologically
00:06:43.920
But there's one bit in particular that I wanted to highlight on this that changed my thinking.
00:06:54.160
So he's starting to allude to how you look at the world.
00:07:07.820
Martin's question, you know, the guy who wrote Game of Thrones, the answer to George R.R.
00:07:13.340
Martin's question, what would Aragorn's tax policy be?
00:07:16.960
is 10,000 psykers sacrificed daily to feed the energy into a corpse of a god emperor holding
00:07:30.180
Now, again, I'll explain this in a way that you don't need to know anything about 40k to
00:07:35.880
But it rejects a category error that Martin is making.
00:07:39.960
So Martin is making a provocation there, and he's assuming that moral or mythical legacy
00:07:53.600
That tax policy is modern and technocratic concern, and Aragorn is a pre-modern king.
00:08:01.760
So asking the question, he's already smuggled in a whole bunch of liberal bureaucratic assumption
00:08:16.700
And the point is, is that it's the wrong axis entirely.
00:08:22.180
He's not saying, I'm going to argue it on this.
00:08:28.580
Because Martin's critique of what would Aragorn's tax policy be, what he's trying to imply there
00:08:46.560
And he's trying to relay realism through governing mechanisms.
00:08:52.580
And the Warhammer answer is, well, seriousness is whatever must be done to prevent collapse.
00:09:00.620
And maturity is acknowledging horror without pretending it can be cleaned up.
00:09:07.020
And realism is cost, sacrifice, and a series of irreversible trade-offs.
00:09:13.640
Not government mechanics the way that Martin frames it.
00:09:16.880
So 10,000 psykers a day, I mean, it's obscene, and it's monstrous, and it's irrational by liberal standards.
00:09:25.740
And that's precisely why it's honest within its own metaphysics.
00:09:32.980
And it exposes the moral asymmetry, really, between worlds.
00:09:40.120
So in the Tolkien and even the Martin discourse, you know, evil is episodic.
00:09:51.400
But in the 40k world, evil is ambient and metaphysical, and it's permanent.
00:10:08.940
How many times in history before have we thought that we've won?
00:10:11.820
And dealing with degeneracy and leftism, all of the things that it is embodied in the left that we explicitly reject,
00:10:24.700
how many times have we won out over them in whatever form, going back however far you want to go back in history,
00:10:32.620
So once you accept that frame, governance stops being about justice and starts being about containment.
00:10:48.180
And actually, Carl made this point quite well in a tweet where he referenced this.
00:10:52.780
I forget what the fallback was, but somebody was saying,
00:10:56.160
yeah, but we don't actually sacrifice 1,000 psykers a day, do we?
00:10:59.520
And Carl was like, okay, we actually do sacrifice 1,000 people a day.
00:11:04.540
In the Western world, we easily sacrifice 1,000 people a day.
00:11:12.240
So while most people are reading 40K as sort of satire or, you know, fascistic or, you know, bureaucratic,
00:11:18.840
what he's doing in that line is he's reframing it as something colder and more disturbing.
00:11:25.900
A world where satire has failed because the emergency never ends.
00:11:30.400
Again, how does that relate cleanly to the world that we're living in?
00:11:33.940
So the horror isn't that the Imperium is sacrificing psykers.
00:11:39.300
The horror is, given the premise, that they are right to do so.
00:11:44.360
What that's doing is it functions as a compressed thesis in a statement.
00:11:49.340
So in one sentence, he's communicating a whole bunch of brilliant points.
00:12:07.600
And the reason it lands so hard is because it forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable possibility
00:12:14.980
that many of the modern demands that we have for seriousness or realism and good governance
00:12:22.720
are all luxuries of a world that believes the foundational layer of those civilisations are still intact.
00:12:31.400
And what he's using Warhammer to describe is imagine they aren't and then aren't still honestly.
00:12:37.820
So my first reading of this is that he's rejecting the posture of managerialism
00:12:45.080
in favour of doing whatever is necessary to survive.
00:12:48.840
But actually, it goes much deeper than that, doesn't it?
00:12:51.040
Because managerialism versus survival, that's only the outer layer of this.
00:13:04.080
Because managerialism, I mean, it assumes a number of things.
00:13:07.740
That the system is stable, that problems are solvable, that trade-offs are reversible,
00:13:17.540
But the completed line says that, you know, none of this is true.
00:13:22.260
It's not policy, it's maintenance of existence.
00:13:28.680
Continuity and surplus and time and moral optionality.
00:13:32.540
And the imperium, which is why he picks this as a subject to talk about,
00:13:38.280
The next thing I'd say is that it replaces legitimacy with necessity.
00:13:44.600
So in the liberal mindset, legitimacy leads to authority, and then that leads to action.
00:13:51.000
But in 40k, necessity leads to action and retroactive justification.
00:13:59.060
And again, which of those is closer to the world that we actually live in?
00:14:19.920
And again, apply that back to the modern world.
00:14:34.380
Because the alternative is the extinction of the liberal world order.
00:14:37.920
Again, you know, it's a brilliant inversion of the frame.
00:14:49.460
Where modernity has explicitly tried to delete it.
00:14:52.820
So Martin's question smuggles in, you know, a post-enlightenment assumption.
00:14:57.960
That politics is administration over material conditions.
00:15:03.520
And he's saying, no, politics is downstream of metaphysical war.
00:15:07.500
And the bit about hell itself is doing real work here.
00:15:10.360
Because in 40k, chaos is not a metaphor or an ideology.
00:15:16.720
And once that's true, the whole enlightenment settlement, it just collapses.
00:15:20.660
And it turns sacrifice, something we're, of course, allergic to these days.
00:15:29.780
You know, women and children can be sacrificed in the Western world.
00:15:37.740
It turns sacrifice from a moral failure into a structural requirement.
00:15:43.420
So the modern ethic is, let's treat sacrifices as tragic and avoidable and evidence of failure.
00:15:52.380
Whereas 40k treats sacrifices as baseline and unavoidable.
00:15:58.040
And evidence that the universe itself is hostile.
00:16:03.040
And this is why the line is so disturbing in a way that satire doesn't.
00:16:09.620
What it is instead asking is, what is the price?
00:16:14.380
Because we live in a world that still demands sacrifice.
00:16:24.560
And the Warhammer framing simply removes the lie.
00:16:37.420
You know, you've got this empire with the dead emperor propped up on the throne.
00:16:54.100
And faith is instrumental and it's not epistemic.
00:16:58.620
And that is post-modernism, after disbelief, after irony, after deconstruction.
00:17:06.560
And what remains is basically operational faith.
00:17:09.500
And we do this because it stops breaking the world.
00:17:12.080
Now, if he had written managerial liberalism fails in civilizational emergencies or something like that,
00:17:21.960
Instead, he inverts your view to show a universe that is at a permanent state of emergency.
00:17:31.940
Where administrators have been replaced by sacrifice.
00:17:36.320
And, you know, the budget has been replaced by a corpse on life support.
00:17:42.220
So the line that he's saying there is not Warhammer is more realistic than Tolkien.
00:17:49.360
What it's saying is, is that in the Tolkien and Martin world, they assume the world can be healed.
00:17:57.000
And the Warhammer world assumes it can only be held together and at a cost.
00:18:03.520
So once you accept that premise, asking about tax policy isn't just shallow, it's insane.
00:18:12.900
So this is, I think, this article is one of those rare moments where genre fiction is doing first-order political theology,
00:18:26.420
while most political commentary is stuck at second-order administration.
00:18:31.040
And the article lands because it's an articulation of something that they can feel but can't yet name.
00:18:39.060
The sense that we move from one governing society into maintaining a failing reality.
00:18:45.620
And that's kind of where I want to go next week with reinverting the frame of how does power actually work in the Western political system.
00:18:59.180
So let me just read it again, because I want to pick it apart a little bit more.
00:19:08.120
The answer to George R. Martin's question, what would Aragorn's tax policy be?
00:19:12.140
Is 10,000 psykers sacrificed daily to feed energy into the corpse of a god-emperor,
00:19:17.160
holding the line against the forces of hell itself?
00:19:25.660
So Martin's question assumes that the world is governable and the institutions are stable and the problems are solvable
00:19:37.580
and the time horizons are going to be long enough for policy to matter.
00:19:46.020
You know, managerial realism is plausible procedures.
00:19:57.000
Absolutely something we have lost sight of in the modern world.
00:20:00.200
So it's replacing moral discourse with survival logic.
00:20:08.720
It's based in fairness and burden-sharing legitimacy.
00:20:17.080
You then get sacrifice and necessity and endurance.
00:20:22.540
So it refames power as maintenance and not authority.
00:20:29.400
Aragorn's power flows from legitimacy and renewal.
00:20:32.880
The emperor's flows from constraint and brutal upkeep.
00:20:39.560
And I love this about what he does, is he collapses the irony by being too sincere to parody it.
00:20:49.560
You know, on the surface, the claim sounds insane.
00:20:52.780
But it is literal, it's procedural, it's ongoing, and it's non-negotiable.
00:20:56.460
So effectively, he's answering a literary critique with political theology.
00:21:04.480
Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of, okay, what is it that does sustain order?
00:21:16.120
And what happens when God is dead but must still function?
00:21:19.840
And it resonates because it mirrors our moment without allegory.
00:21:29.100
You read that and you think, institutions persist without belief.
00:21:42.280
What he's doing is he's answering the wrong question with the right truth.
00:21:46.500
The genius is not that he says, I don't know, Aragon wouldn't have a tax policy.
00:21:57.600
What it says is, it's insane to ask that question at all.
00:22:03.720
Asking that question means that you don't understand what is happening.
00:22:08.160
And that's not a rebuttal, but it's a diagnosis.
00:22:10.960
Before I move on, I also want to talk about the technique that he's using.
00:22:15.340
Because I also think that the technique itself is subtly brilliant.
00:22:22.640
And you've got to bear in mind that Morgoth is almost the very definition of salt of the earth.
00:22:44.940
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if he, you know, quit school before A-levels or something like that.
00:22:49.980
I mean, I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me.
00:22:54.160
So what that means is he's using these tools intuitively.
00:22:58.380
And he's not deploying them based on theory in the academic sense.
00:23:03.860
He's using them in a very specific and powerful toolkit.
00:23:10.740
So I wanted to go below through the techniques that he's using and describing them functionally rather than in credential terms.
00:23:18.600
So first thing, he goes straight for frame inversion.
00:23:25.560
And this is one of the key things that I learned from this and one of the key abilities that unlocked it me is don't argue within the frame.
00:23:34.300
Change the frame so completely that the original question becomes incoherent.
00:23:40.240
Because Martin there was asking a policy question.
00:23:44.260
And the response moves immediately to ontology.
00:23:55.920
And this is a really high level technique because it avoids point scoring.
00:24:00.960
And instead it forces the reader to renegotiate the premise on which they're having the discussion.
00:24:07.500
And most writers will never do this because they're trained to respond.
00:24:21.260
He deliberately answers the question in the wrong category.
00:24:29.760
And what that does in the readers is it creates a cognitive shock.
00:24:37.220
The reader can immediately sense that something deeper has been exposed.
00:24:41.880
And actually this is a fairly classic move in philosophy and theology.
00:24:46.480
But he's doing it here narratively and rhetorically.
00:24:53.140
The third technique that he's using is metaphysical literalism.
00:24:59.400
He treats metaphysical claims as operationally real.
00:25:15.440
And most writers will instinctively hedge metaphysics as symbolism.
00:25:27.000
The readers feel the consequences rather than being told about them.
00:25:30.820
It certainly doesn't read like he's trying to be clever.
00:25:43.560
Where you can watch the whole episode for as little as five pounds a month.