I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even know about the Nigeria Middle Belt conflict. But I'm seeing all 'religious' conflicts as a cover. You lay out the formula very clearly, Ope.
I expand on our earlier conversation about bloodlines vs systems in my latest: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/coins-over-kings. I quote from The Forest Doesn't Kill You and then your observation about Bretton Woods (before the war was even over!) and the CFA franc. While researching these, I found the cosmetic language changes to confirm your theory:
"They also set up the CFA franc, which first stood for Colonies françaises d'Afrique ("French colonies of Africa"); then for Communauté française d'Afrique ("French Community of Africa") … Since independence, CFA is taken to mean Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community)"
And you may find this quote amusing, in a gallows humor kind of way:
"The CFA franc was created on 26 December 1945, along with the CFP franc. The reason for their creation was the weakness of the French franc immediately after World War II. When France ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement in December 1945, the French franc was devalued in order to set a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar. New currencies were created in the French colonies to spare them the strong devaluation, thereby making it easier for them to import goods from France (and simultaneously making it harder for them to export goods to France). French officials presented the decision as an act of generosity. René Pleven, the French Minister of Finance, was quoted as saying: 'In a show of her generosity and selflessness, metropolitan France, wishing not to impose on her far-away daughters the consequences of her own poverty, is setting different exchange rates for their currency.'" Currently .0014 Swiss franc.
The Pleven quote is the whole essay in one sentence. "In a show of generosity", about a mechanism designed to make French colonies cheaper to extract from and harder to export out of. The costume change you tracked is perfect: Colonies to Communauté to Financière. Same architecture, progressively more neutral branding. They didn't even change the acronym. That's confidence.
The Bretton Woods timing is what I keep returning to. December 1945, the war ended in September. The international monetary order and the colonial extraction infrastructure were designed in the same legislative session, by some of the same people, before the rubble was cold. That's not coincidence of timing. That's coordination of intent.
On bloodlines vs systems: I think the religious conflict framing in the Middle Belt is actually the bloodlines argument operating in real time. Attribute the violence to identity (Muslim Fulani, Christian farmer) and you've made it a bloodlines story: ancient hatreds, intractable, nobody's specific fault. The systems story requires naming Governor Sule, Section 28(2)(c), Avatar New Energy, and a case number. Much harder to sustain a military intervention or an IMF programme on that framing. The vagueness is load-bearing.
Will be reading Coins Over Kings. Thank you, Tereza
First, let me express what a deep pleasure these conversations are with you, Ope. There is such a crisp clarity to our discussion that brings the points we're debating into focus. A disagreement with you is better than a thousand people nodding along, because we're both looking at the same reality. Thank you!
I am, of course, a systems gal. The blurb on my book states that I have one dogma: People are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems and stories are to blame. My first book was all about the economic system. But the one I'm writing now is about the story of superiority that underlies economics, politics, law, science, militarism, family, class, gender, all religions, and even the languages themselves. We can't talk our way out of this box because the words themselves are the box.
'A show of generosity,' as you say, is the story of superiority in a nutshell. Where I draw hope is that people fell for that rhetoric at the end of the world wars. I think that even the average person would now hear that and roll their eyes. I was just reading this: https://oliverboydbarrett.substack.com/p/europes-us-bye-bye. That assumed 'white man's burden' of moral superiority went the way of drawing room cigars, not that behavior has caught up.
"The international monetary order and the colonial extraction infrastructure were designed in the same legislative session, by some of the same people, before the rubble was cold." I use that same language in my chapter on Libya about the new central bank that had been set up before Qaddaffi's body was chilled in the walk-in fridge.
I don't think people are inherently good. I think that framing is a luxury of safety. When you have not been in a room where someone is deciding whether your suffering is worth something to them, and deciding no, the inherent goodness thesis is available to you. I have been in rooms like that. Nigeria/Global South has a way of running that experiment on you repeatedly.
I've watched people do unspeakable things to other people not because a system told them to, not because a story of superiority licensed it, but because they wanted what the other person had and calculated they could take it. Pure incentive, zero ideology. I have an essay about a specific, difficult and painful experience I am yet to publish (maybe its time).
Here's my position: systems amplify what's already in people. A good system can constrain the worst. A bad system gives the worst of us infrastructure, but the raw material: the capacity for cruelty, the willingness to harm for marginal gain, that doesn't require a system to install it. It's already there. The system just decides who gets to act on it without consequence and conscience.
There's a case I think about: Louisa Vesterager Jespersen of Denmark and Maren Ueland of Norway, two Scandinavian women murdered in Morocco in 2018. This story haunts me because the “inherent goodness” thesis, taken as a practical security doctrine, can get you killed. In Nigeria we learn early that optimism without threat assessment is not virtue. It's exposure.
The Libya/Gaddafi parallel lands hard, by the way. Central bank before the body was cold, that's the receipts version of what you're building.
We're now talking about the most important topic there is, on which everything else depends. I hope we can stay with it for a moment.
We've been taught two choices: by science, that there is no meaning to life, and by religion, that the meaning of life is sacrifice. They're both belief systems. When you take the perceptions of your senses and say that's reality, it's no different than a belief in a sky father god who punishes sinners. What you believe is whatever you refuse to raise to question. It's your experiment to run in your life and must be chosen consciously, not just taken for granted. Own your dogma or it will own you.
Inherent goodness means born with an equal capacity to make good moral choices. If the person doing unspeakable things was born into your exact genetics and circumstances, would they still do unspeakable things? If you were born in their exact circumstances, would you somehow rise above that and not do those things? Is there an essence of you that follows from body to body (Christians would call this a soul) that's superior no matter where you're dropped?
That's never made sense to me. If there is meaning to life, then we're each dropped into the circumstances we have the best chance of figuring out. If there's not, it's random. I can't claim to be better than you unless God is unfair. If there is no God or God is fair, then I'm no better or worse than anyone else. All religions are based on an unfair God.
But let's say there's a society in which women own their bodies. A man who commits unspeakable acts will never have sex again--and possibly, not be capable of it. That's not the world we're living in, but it could be.
The people I've watched do harm were not operating at the margin of survival where the choice collapses. Some were comfortable. Some were powerful. The unspeakable thing (both women and men) was not their only option, it was their preferred one. Circumstances can explain a bit. They don't explain everything. At some point the individual still chooses, and I can't philosophise that away without insulting the people who were in identical circumstances and chose differently.
The world is being run by pyromaniac child-rapist psychopaths. They're not at the margin of survival. There's not enough money in the world that would entice me to trade places with one of them.
To say that some people are born morally superior to others and would make better choices no matter their circumstances is to accept a colonial mentality. It's exactly why the dead Christians matter and killing Muslims is 'fast, vicious and sweet' ... and entirely moral, of course. The Christians were killed for no reason whatsoever, no back story or explanation needed. When Christians kill, there's always a good reason. But we don't even ask why the Christians were killed. They were killed by bad people, who just do that sort of thing. Africans. Muslims.
The 'free will' argument says there's something that's you apart from the body and mind and circumstances you're born into. I agree with that. But I think that separate self, the true self, is always tending to the good. The people who chose differently responded to that true self. The ones who didn't, weren't able to, yet.
For many years, ending torture was my biggest issue. I had a banner above my front door saying "Torture is wrong." If I didn't have to live through it, I thought I needed to use my luxury of safety, as you say, and know about it. Yes, my first hand experience is thankfully absent. But I'm not coming from a place that's naive.
The logical end-point of moral superiority is that we need to elect the better people because they're born to rule. Without good people making and enforcing the laws, bad people will prevail.
Systems can be designed that don't enable bad behavior. It doesn't require first dividing people into good and bad.
We never hear of these diabolicle happenings. Just of kidnaps, killings on supposed religous grounds, and, of course, those conning internet men who rob guillible people in other countries. Of course, the population is, I believe, the largest in Africa, with only a teeny % doing these things. We live on a human farm, controlled, moved to different pens, culled.
"Human farm" is the right frame. The architecture isn't hidden, it's narrated over, and it doesnt need the 220million Nigerians. Just a governor with a signature, a foreign company with capital, and a law from 1978. The farm doesn't need the cattle to cooperate. It needs the gate.
Thank you for this. I've been completely ignorant about Nigeria, but I'm learning now.
I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even know about the Nigeria Middle Belt conflict. But I'm seeing all 'religious' conflicts as a cover. You lay out the formula very clearly, Ope.
I expand on our earlier conversation about bloodlines vs systems in my latest: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/coins-over-kings. I quote from The Forest Doesn't Kill You and then your observation about Bretton Woods (before the war was even over!) and the CFA franc. While researching these, I found the cosmetic language changes to confirm your theory:
"They also set up the CFA franc, which first stood for Colonies françaises d'Afrique ("French colonies of Africa"); then for Communauté française d'Afrique ("French Community of Africa") … Since independence, CFA is taken to mean Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community)"
And you may find this quote amusing, in a gallows humor kind of way:
"The CFA franc was created on 26 December 1945, along with the CFP franc. The reason for their creation was the weakness of the French franc immediately after World War II. When France ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement in December 1945, the French franc was devalued in order to set a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar. New currencies were created in the French colonies to spare them the strong devaluation, thereby making it easier for them to import goods from France (and simultaneously making it harder for them to export goods to France). French officials presented the decision as an act of generosity. René Pleven, the French Minister of Finance, was quoted as saying: 'In a show of her generosity and selflessness, metropolitan France, wishing not to impose on her far-away daughters the consequences of her own poverty, is setting different exchange rates for their currency.'" Currently .0014 Swiss franc.
The Pleven quote is the whole essay in one sentence. "In a show of generosity", about a mechanism designed to make French colonies cheaper to extract from and harder to export out of. The costume change you tracked is perfect: Colonies to Communauté to Financière. Same architecture, progressively more neutral branding. They didn't even change the acronym. That's confidence.
The Bretton Woods timing is what I keep returning to. December 1945, the war ended in September. The international monetary order and the colonial extraction infrastructure were designed in the same legislative session, by some of the same people, before the rubble was cold. That's not coincidence of timing. That's coordination of intent.
On bloodlines vs systems: I think the religious conflict framing in the Middle Belt is actually the bloodlines argument operating in real time. Attribute the violence to identity (Muslim Fulani, Christian farmer) and you've made it a bloodlines story: ancient hatreds, intractable, nobody's specific fault. The systems story requires naming Governor Sule, Section 28(2)(c), Avatar New Energy, and a case number. Much harder to sustain a military intervention or an IMF programme on that framing. The vagueness is load-bearing.
Will be reading Coins Over Kings. Thank you, Tereza
First, let me express what a deep pleasure these conversations are with you, Ope. There is such a crisp clarity to our discussion that brings the points we're debating into focus. A disagreement with you is better than a thousand people nodding along, because we're both looking at the same reality. Thank you!
I am, of course, a systems gal. The blurb on my book states that I have one dogma: People are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems and stories are to blame. My first book was all about the economic system. But the one I'm writing now is about the story of superiority that underlies economics, politics, law, science, militarism, family, class, gender, all religions, and even the languages themselves. We can't talk our way out of this box because the words themselves are the box.
'A show of generosity,' as you say, is the story of superiority in a nutshell. Where I draw hope is that people fell for that rhetoric at the end of the world wars. I think that even the average person would now hear that and roll their eyes. I was just reading this: https://oliverboydbarrett.substack.com/p/europes-us-bye-bye. That assumed 'white man's burden' of moral superiority went the way of drawing room cigars, not that behavior has caught up.
"The international monetary order and the colonial extraction infrastructure were designed in the same legislative session, by some of the same people, before the rubble was cold." I use that same language in my chapter on Libya about the new central bank that had been set up before Qaddaffi's body was chilled in the walk-in fridge.
to be con't ...
The pleasure is mutual, Tereza. Genuinely.
Permit me to push back on your dogma.
I don't think people are inherently good. I think that framing is a luxury of safety. When you have not been in a room where someone is deciding whether your suffering is worth something to them, and deciding no, the inherent goodness thesis is available to you. I have been in rooms like that. Nigeria/Global South has a way of running that experiment on you repeatedly.
I've watched people do unspeakable things to other people not because a system told them to, not because a story of superiority licensed it, but because they wanted what the other person had and calculated they could take it. Pure incentive, zero ideology. I have an essay about a specific, difficult and painful experience I am yet to publish (maybe its time).
Here's my position: systems amplify what's already in people. A good system can constrain the worst. A bad system gives the worst of us infrastructure, but the raw material: the capacity for cruelty, the willingness to harm for marginal gain, that doesn't require a system to install it. It's already there. The system just decides who gets to act on it without consequence and conscience.
There's a case I think about: Louisa Vesterager Jespersen of Denmark and Maren Ueland of Norway, two Scandinavian women murdered in Morocco in 2018. This story haunts me because the “inherent goodness” thesis, taken as a practical security doctrine, can get you killed. In Nigeria we learn early that optimism without threat assessment is not virtue. It's exposure.
The Libya/Gaddafi parallel lands hard, by the way. Central bank before the body was cold, that's the receipts version of what you're building.
We're now talking about the most important topic there is, on which everything else depends. I hope we can stay with it for a moment.
We've been taught two choices: by science, that there is no meaning to life, and by religion, that the meaning of life is sacrifice. They're both belief systems. When you take the perceptions of your senses and say that's reality, it's no different than a belief in a sky father god who punishes sinners. What you believe is whatever you refuse to raise to question. It's your experiment to run in your life and must be chosen consciously, not just taken for granted. Own your dogma or it will own you.
Inherent goodness means born with an equal capacity to make good moral choices. If the person doing unspeakable things was born into your exact genetics and circumstances, would they still do unspeakable things? If you were born in their exact circumstances, would you somehow rise above that and not do those things? Is there an essence of you that follows from body to body (Christians would call this a soul) that's superior no matter where you're dropped?
That's never made sense to me. If there is meaning to life, then we're each dropped into the circumstances we have the best chance of figuring out. If there's not, it's random. I can't claim to be better than you unless God is unfair. If there is no God or God is fair, then I'm no better or worse than anyone else. All religions are based on an unfair God.
But let's say there's a society in which women own their bodies. A man who commits unspeakable acts will never have sex again--and possibly, not be capable of it. That's not the world we're living in, but it could be.
The people I've watched do harm were not operating at the margin of survival where the choice collapses. Some were comfortable. Some were powerful. The unspeakable thing (both women and men) was not their only option, it was their preferred one. Circumstances can explain a bit. They don't explain everything. At some point the individual still chooses, and I can't philosophise that away without insulting the people who were in identical circumstances and chose differently.
The world is being run by pyromaniac child-rapist psychopaths. They're not at the margin of survival. There's not enough money in the world that would entice me to trade places with one of them.
To say that some people are born morally superior to others and would make better choices no matter their circumstances is to accept a colonial mentality. It's exactly why the dead Christians matter and killing Muslims is 'fast, vicious and sweet' ... and entirely moral, of course. The Christians were killed for no reason whatsoever, no back story or explanation needed. When Christians kill, there's always a good reason. But we don't even ask why the Christians were killed. They were killed by bad people, who just do that sort of thing. Africans. Muslims.
The 'free will' argument says there's something that's you apart from the body and mind and circumstances you're born into. I agree with that. But I think that separate self, the true self, is always tending to the good. The people who chose differently responded to that true self. The ones who didn't, weren't able to, yet.
For many years, ending torture was my biggest issue. I had a banner above my front door saying "Torture is wrong." If I didn't have to live through it, I thought I needed to use my luxury of safety, as you say, and know about it. Yes, my first hand experience is thankfully absent. But I'm not coming from a place that's naive.
The logical end-point of moral superiority is that we need to elect the better people because they're born to rule. Without good people making and enforcing the laws, bad people will prevail.
Systems can be designed that don't enable bad behavior. It doesn't require first dividing people into good and bad.
We never hear of these diabolicle happenings. Just of kidnaps, killings on supposed religous grounds, and, of course, those conning internet men who rob guillible people in other countries. Of course, the population is, I believe, the largest in Africa, with only a teeny % doing these things. We live on a human farm, controlled, moved to different pens, culled.
"Human farm" is the right frame. The architecture isn't hidden, it's narrated over, and it doesnt need the 220million Nigerians. Just a governor with a signature, a foreign company with capital, and a law from 1978. The farm doesn't need the cattle to cooperate. It needs the gate.