Professor Georgy Ganev joins Bob to explain that, contrary to the claims of David Graeber and the MMTers, the barter origin of money has not been refuted.

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“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note than in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent hold less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p per cent (where p is greater than n) and so forth. They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered. On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at the distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends upon how the distribution came about.” (page 232)

– Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick, First published in 1974.

I wonder if any of the leaders of today’s political parties in the UK have read it, still less understood the profound way that the late Harvard professor eviscerated egalitarian “patterned” ideas of justice more incisively than arguably anyone else, before or since. Somehow, I doubt they have.  In this day and age of talk about wealth taxes and other horrors, Nozick is well worth reading again.

Kafka’s short story “Judgment” (or “Verdict”: “Das Urteil”) from 1912 is more actual today than ever: it provides the portrait of a weak father who drives the subject to suicide. Georg, a young merchant, sits in his room and writes a letter to his friend who some years ago left for Russia to set up a business that is now failing, informing him that he is engaged to marry Frieda, a girl from a well-to-do family. Breaking out of his reverie, George decides to check on his father who, though quite ill, appears huge. Georg informs his father that he has just written a letter to his friend, updating him on his upcoming marriage. His father questions the existence of the friend in Russia and accuses Georg of deceiving him about the happenings of the business. Georg insists on having his father lie down in bed for a while; because of this, the father claims his son wants him dead. Moreover, he admits to knowing his son’s friend, and, in fact, to having been carrying on a correspondence with him concurrently with Georg’s. He claims to have swayed the friend’s loyalty from Georg to himself, and that the friend reads the father’s letters while disposing of Georg’s without reading them. He makes Georg feel terrible, suggesting that Georg has ignored his friend ever since he moved away to Russia. The father does not appreciate Georg’s love and care, maintaining he can take care of himself. Georg shrinks back into a corner, scared of his father and his harsh words – the father accuses him of being selfish and finally sentences him to “death by drowning.” Georg feels himself pushed from the room; he runs from his home to a bridge over a stretch of water, wings himself over the railing and plunges, apparently to his death.1

Trump’s hour-long speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23 was a pure exercise of his Daddy Cool role: he unleashed an extraordinary tirade which sounds like an explosion of Georg’s father. Britain and Europe are “going to hell” because of immigration; climate change is to be dismissed as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”; plus he openly declared the Culture war with Europe2 – his speech was one big judgment/condemnation, exactly like Georg’s overblown father who condemns his son to suicide. And, as in Kafka’s story, Europe is running to a bridge to kill itself as a united global power it should be. Plus one should note that in spite of his pro-Ukrainian turn, Trump and Putin both oppose the European multicultural and pro-LGBT+ stance. Although he advised Europe to help Ukraine regain all its territory and to bomb Russian planes and drones if they enter NATO territory, he didn’t say the US will help Europe. It is clear what his aim was: in the case of a direct Europe-Russia war, Trump will again play a big peace-keeper and negotiate an armistice…

An extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes, a change whose logic was described a century ago by Henri Bergson. In his “Two Sources of Morality and Religion,” where, in an oft-quoted (by me also) passage, Bergson describes how on August 4, 1914, when war was declared between France and Germany, he experienced a strange “feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete: who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?”3 Crucial here is the modality of the break between before and after: before its outburst, the war appeared to Bergson “simultaneously probable and impossible: a complex and contradictory notion which persisted to the end”;4 after its outburst, it all of a sudden became real and possible, and the paradox resides in this retroactive appearance of probability:

“I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been, and this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.”5

An event is thus experienced first as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe it will effectively occur and thus dismiss it as impossible), and then as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen. And is this not what is happening today, right in front of our eyes? A decade ago, the public debate on torture or the participation of neo-Fascist parties in a West European democratic government was dismissed as an ethical catastrophe which is impossible, which “really cannot happen”; once it happened, we immediately got accustomed to it, accepting it as obvious… What I am afraid of is that, if a larger military conflict explodes between Russia and NATO countries, it will obey the same logic. Now we talk about it without really believing this war can happen; once it explodes (if it will), I predict we will simply get used to it.

But the central change going on now is the rise of new populist nationalism in so-called Western democracies. It takes place not only in the US (Trump), France (Le Pen) or Italy (Meloni). The key country at this moment is the UK, and I think the phenomenon described by its partisans as “the awakening of the people” is largely the result of the utter failure of the “moderate” center or Left. Anti-immigrant populists shamelessly circulate unverified stories about rapes and other crimes of the refugees in order to give credibility to their claim that immigrants pose a threat to our way of life. However, all too often multicultural liberals proceed in a similar way: they pass in silence over actual differences in the “ways of life” between refugees and Europeans since mentioning them may be seen to promote Eurocentrism. Recall the case of Rotherham in the UK where, a decade or so ago, police discovered that a gang of Pakistani youth was systematically raping over a thousand poor white young girls – the data were ignored or downplayed in order not to trigger Islamophobia…

Or recall the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, on a local train in Charlotte (North Carolina) in early September 2025. The video that covered that part of the train shows Iryna get on the light rail at the East West Boulevard station stop and take a seat directly in front of Decarlos Brown, the suspect. At first, nothing seems unusual, other than Brown appearing upset in his seat – nothing that could cause a commotion. Just four minutes later, Brown is seen pulling out what appears to be a pocket knife and suddenly stabs Zarutska deep into her throat multiple times. She collapses as Brown calmly walks to the front of the car, takes off his sweater and wraps his bloodied hand in it before exiting the train. Other passengers were alerted to what happened after seeing a trail of blood and Zarutska collapsed – but (for me, at least) the most depressing fact is that, after the act of killing, there is also no commotion: the (mostly black) passengers sitting nearby do nothing; they just sit and stare embarrassed.6 The murder was, as expected, widely commented and decried by the new Right commentators from Kirk to Trump himself who were mostly playing a racial card: a black convicted criminal killed a white girl... However, instead of providing a serious interpretation, the liberal Left mostly downplayed the event because it didn’t fit the Politically Correct coordinates.

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Was Jackson’s victory over the Second Bank of the United States a triumph for liberty, or did it merely expand federal authority under the guise of constraining it? His legacy is complicated, but there is much we can learn from it.

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