La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 2 of 6)

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4: The Second Day: Daniel

It was a perfect summer morning. At eight am tourists were already in the square outside of the hotel, sipping coffees, nibbling at croissants at the tables laid out on the polished stone paving. They glanced at the cathedral and the fairy-tale towers so distinctive of the ancient Cité, and watched a few of their fellows embarking on the mandatory walk along the walls.

The beauty of Carcassonne, famed throughout the world.

Daniel Brown was oblivious to secular beauty, ambient weather and any affaires du jour. In his room he attacked his breakfast tray of cereals, toast and tea, planning his morning. He did not ‘hang-out’ on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - he left those sorts of things to his PR team to get on with. In fact this morning would be like all his mornings: he would roam his favourite chess websites and blogs, explore some intriguing positions and perhaps continue his study of chess variants. He was looking forward to it.

But Daniel could not remain forever within his own head. As the current holder of the French championship he had to show himself, at least a little. The second game was at 2 pm and so he would lunch in the hotel restaurant at 12.30.

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The restaurant was a repurposed former ballroom in a hotel which had been a former château. The maître d' stood at the server end amidst the plate-counters and racks of patisseries. The long, high-ceilinged room stretched out before him, light and airy, arched with filaments of cast iron. To his left a corridor ran parallel to the restaurant, a walkway visible through ranks of glassed arches. The corridor provided visibility to the main square through its own long window. As it was lunchtime he could see a busy crowd of tourists outside: visitors to the many cafés.

To his right, the maître d' observed similar arches and windows which gave a view to the hotel’s botanical garden with its ferns and massive brown-ceramic pots. It was all thoroughly in keeping with the hotel’s nineteenth century theme.

Straight ahead were circular, cast-iron tables, widely-spaced permitting guests their privacy. Many of these tables were beginning to be occupied by journalists, camera crews and the logistics teams for the event.

Sweeping his gaze slightly to the right again, a faint frown touched his lips. You can carry privacy too far, he thought. The two screens which had been placed against the right-hand wall half way down disrupted the room’s symmetry. The maître d' felt a stab of aesthetic pain.

A solitary dining table was positioned midway between the two screens. Sat at this table, his back to the botanical window, was Daniel Brown. The screens, large wooden rectangular contraptions covered in felt, functioned as did horse blinds. All Daniel could see was a narrow wedge extending across the width of the restaurant, across the corridor and to a sliver of the square outside.

Eating his burger and chips - a special order - Daniel was, as usual, oblivious of his surroundings. In particular he failed to register that Hans and Anne-Marie Schelling were sitting at a table for three within his eye-line.

They, however, favoured Daniel with intense scrutiny.

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At twenty to one a hush descended on that part of the restaurant near the entrance marking the entrance of Petra Schelling. English does not really have a good word to describe Petra: ‘zaftig’ comes from a German-Jewish tradition; the French could say ‘bien galbé’ but naturally have many other terms; we Anglo-Saxons are stuck with words such as ‘voluptuous’ or ‘curvaceous’: mere tabloid fare.

This lunchtime the voluptuous, curvaceous Petra Schelling wore a little black dress that had been crafted by a minimalist genius. She ignored the cameras, the rapt faces of the press and slowly sashayed between tables, passing that of her parents without acknowledgement and entering the cubicle containing Daniel at his table. He had not yet noticed her, being a daydreamer and also engrossed in his bun.

She stood in front of his table, her back to that section of the audience which could actually still see her (a number that was growing by the second). Her posture was erect and respectful, her legs slightly apart, her hands at her sides and her attention fully on him. After a few seconds, Daniel’s eyes focused and he stared up at her. Petra’s unexpected appearance startled him, and this aroused both annoyance and withdrawal. His first reaction was to shrink back into his seat.

A tiny part of him, his conscious part, processed what he was seeing. A full-figured girl with thick red curls tumbling onto her shoulders, shoulders which were bare and glistening. He could just make out earrings, large black pearls pressed against her lobes.

He studied her black dress, which swooped down to barely contain her ample breasts. His eyes descended further, noting the way the dress tightly followed the curve of her body. It reminded Daniel of the shape of a cooling tower, a hyperboloid of revolution. A fabric remnant flared over her hips and quickly ran its course as if exhausted; the whiteness of her thighs pressed against his table just a few short feet away. He looked up at her face: finally he recognised her, his opponent Petra Schelling. He sought for self-control, brought his breathing under control, reined in a desperate need to call for help... and steeled himself for whatever came next.

“Daniel,” she said gently, with a friendly little smile, “we haven’t really got acquainted.”

(She knew him better than he might have thought - those extensive analyses with her mother).

“But I think we do have some responsibilities to the organisers and to the public,” she continued, “don’t you?”

This was a clever ploy. Daniel was under the impression the game started at 2 pm but unbeknownst to him, Petra had already begun it. Her question hit Daniel at a weak spot. He hated tournaments: the travel, the platitudes and hype, the having to meet people. In an ideal world he would have been left alone to further explore the infinity of chess. But public contests paid the bills. So having no good answer, he simply sat there, saying nothing.

Petra now took a spare chair, slid it round to Daniel’s left and decorously sank upon it. She, like Daniel, was now facing a spellbound set of diners (people had left their tables and moved into the centre of the restaurant, others were coming in from the corridor to see what all the fuss was about, phones were switched to video mode, little cries of ‘shush’ facilitated audio recording).

Petra’s eyes were only for him. She leaned sideways so that her arm pressed against his - he could not escape without making a scene - and stretched her right hand across to lightly grasp his tie.

“Honestly Daniel, you do look rather… uncared for. It’s not good for your reputation; for either of us really.”

These sensible words were uttered in a low, husky, pleasantly-accented voice that would in years to come seduce a million male fans, though it only made Daniel more panic-stricken. Petra watched his head turning this way and that, saw incipient catatonia in his eyes and did not require the subdued cue which buzzed in her pearl earring.

She glanced briefly up to where her father sat and saw him give the briefest nod. She whispered, “Let me come up to your room at half-past one, before we’re on. I could look at your shirts, your ties and help you dress to impress. Wouldn’t you like that?”

She pressed her hand, still holding the tie between finger and thumb, into his chest and rubbed it there ever so slightly. Trapped and almost paralysed, Daniel could only stutter: “No…, no thank you.”

“”Such a shame,” she breathed and released him. With practiced decorum she stood and sauntered casually out of Daniel’s enclosure, stopping briefly at the entrance for the pack of photographers, before making her way to her parents’ table for a well-earned lunch.

Mission accomplished. Daniel was most thoroughly intimidated and rattled.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (Part 1 of 6)

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1: The First Day: Daniel

Daniel Brown, aged 24, spent the flight to Carcassonne playing Stockfish on his phone. It could have been Komodo but he preferred Stockfish when it came to end-game practice. Not that he expected to need any real preparation against Ms Schelling. That chess wonder-child was not taken seriously, not by real chess professionals: her sometime wins against the odds assumed by all to be flukes.

People think of chess as a cold, objective thing, that players are efficient automata. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. Spirit, élan, is everything: even the experts may make frightful blunders.

But that, thought Daniel, did not apply to him.

Daniel was dressed, as always, in a plain grey suit which had seen many better days. His shirt was worn at the collar, his shoes scuffed and his tie held evidence of previous meals. Most would say he had ‘loser’ written all over him - and had he lacked his peculiar talent, that would have been most decidedly correct. The cabin crew - who did not know who he was - wondered how this junior clerk had somehow ended up in business class.

Must have been some last minute mix-up, they decided: he’d gotten lucky.

2: The First Day: Petra

Petra Schelling did not fly to the French national chess championship. She was driven by her parents all the way from her home in Bavaria. Hans Schelling was a former IBM engineer and chess master who had worked on the abortive productisation of the famous DeepBlue chess program. IBM had got this, like so much else, completely wrong and Hans became embittered. When his growing daughter Petra showed aptitude, Hans was determined to amplify her abilities to the limits of his engineering skills. No-one now wins at chess without access to chess machines; Petra’s father was able to source and configure the best.

Someone once asked disingenuously, ‘Why are there separate men’s and women’s games in chess?’ There is of course a third category: machines. The last time a human being won against the top-ranked machine was in 2005; since then the machines have been barred from human contests.

Why do people persist? Because chess is, above all, an arena for the very human contestation of skill, nerve and character. Players routinely spook each other out: threaten, intimidate, stare at each other. Male and female dominance strategies are rather different; perhaps this is the reason for gender segregation. But in these enlightened times such categorisation no longer washes. The championship in Carcassonne for the trophy of France was open: gender neutral.

And so to Petra’s mother. By background Anne-Marie was a psychologist who freelanced as coach to high-performing women. No-one was better placed to help Petra with glass ceilings, aggressive males and other pitfalls of elite chess. It helped that Petra was an apple not far fallen from her parents’ tree. She had her mother’s good looks and her father’s systems thinking. She was focused, persistent and not altogether agreeable.

This dream team made its tortuous way westwards, tracking the Mediterranean coast of France.

3: The First Day: the Game

The tournament consisted of three games, to be held in the Basilique Saint Nazaire within the medieval walled city. The dais had been set up in front of the altar, spotlights playing upon the table, the chess board, the two chess clocks and the seats for the players. The audience - the press, organisers and selected fans - were seated in the body of the church facing an elevated screen which would show the state of play.

Daniel had taken his place twenty five minutes early at 1.35 pm - he hated to be late for anything - and was still engrossed with Stockfish. He was keen not to waste time before the match-officials took his phone away. The first warning of her arrival was a spreading hush, the hubbub of the hoi polloi in the nave fading as she led her parents through a side entrance, her passage marked by strobe-like flashes from the photographers. She wore a burgundy trouser suit which hugged her buxom figure in a silken embrace. Elegant in her high heels, she offered views of her painted fingernails to the assembled throng.

They lapped it up.

Daniel was perhaps the only person there entirely oblivious. Never very observant at the best of times, his mind was cluttered still with end-games. It was a real effort to drag himself away, to absently acknowledge his opponent and to discover he would be playing black and therefore second (the weaker role).

She moved - a standard opening - and he started his clock. Now he was in his element. Where normal folk would have observed just a jumble of pieces, for him the board was a structured and familiar landscape - one which was malleable, as if he had plate tectonics and millions of years in his control. Moves came and went as the board topography flexed under his sure command. Petra was competent, that much he implicitly conceded, granting her a measure of respect, but so conventional. In less than forty moves it was over and Petra had flipped her king.

She would now have to win both of the two final games to triumph.

After a tedious debrief with organisers and the press, Daniel went for a long walk following the ancient and picturesque Voie Médiévale to recover his spirits. Social interaction had tired him. He looked forward to a meal alone in his room followed by an early night.

Back in her parents’ room, Petra went into a huddle with Hans and Anne-Marie. She was not upset - far from it. A fly on the wall (there were none) might have concluded she was almost merry as were her parents. There was a detailed discussion of tactics for the second game the following afternoon and then the family headed off to a local restaurant for a good meal. After that, Petra, with some new friends she had just made, headed off to the disco.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (intro)

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Daniel, the young chess champion, arrives in Carcassonne: just another day, another place, another contest. Across the board sits an 18-year-old unknown, a prodigy who treats the arena like a stage and the opening like an entrance. Under basilica lights and a hundred lenses, the best-of-three tilts into a duel of nerve, image, and character.

But isn't Petra just a little too good to be true?

This story will be serialised here over the next days in six parts. If you are keen to read the whole story at once, follow either of the links below.

Note that in French, the title, "La Maîtresse des Échecs" is slightly ambiguous. It could mean either 'The Master of Chess' denoting extreme competence, or 'The Mistress of Chess' denoting a certain erotic frisson which, of course, Petra exploits fully.

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The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

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Frazzled

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It's 1984 and she's in her hometown. She's been married for six years with two crazily-active small boys aged four and five. Her husband has just got a job in a research lab - he's having to learn a lot of new stuff. He works long hours and it's a long commute from their new home in Essex.

Sometimes it's just good to be back where you grew up, enjoying a glass of wine. Several in fact.

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The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'

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Why Europe Cannot Become a “United States of Europe”

The question is often posed with a note of bafflement, sometimes irritation: in a world that is plainly becoming harsher, more coercive and more dangerous, why does Europe still struggle to act as a single political, economic and military unit? Why, when the logic of scale, deterrence and strategic autonomy seems obvious, does the European Union fail to harden into a true “United States of Europe”?

The short answer is that Europe is not failing to become a superstate by accident. It is behaving exactly as its institutional design, political economy and historical memory would predict. It is also worth recalling that even the United States did not emerge as a coherent federal power by design alone: it required a shared revolutionary origin, a long period of internal bargaining, and ultimately a civil war - which settled the question of sovereignty by force.

The EU as a regulatory state, not a sovereign one

The EU is strongest where coercion is weakest. It excels at rules, standards, market integration, competition law and trade policy. These are domains where authority can be exercised through law, process and courts rather than force. What it conspicuously lacks is a thick fiscal core and a unified coercive apparatus. Its budget is small, its taxation powers negligible, and its ability to borrow jointly remains politically exceptional rather than normal.

States, however, ultimately cohere through money and force. War, deterrence and large-scale redistribution are paid for through taxation and debt, and enforced through command structures that answer to a single political authority. Europe can coordinate, consult and regulate; it struggles to command. This is not an accident.

National sovereignty as an alarm system

The EU’s much-criticised vetoes and unanimity rules are often described as design flaws. In fact they are better understood as sovereignty alarm systems. They exist precisely to prevent national elites from being dragged into commitments - financial, military or constitutional - that they cannot control domestically and which adversely affect their interests.

Under calm conditions, these vetoes look like bureaucratic inertia. Under stress, they become political tripwires. A single election, coalition collapse or captured party system in a medium-sized member state can paralyse collective action. From the perspective of national elites, this is not a bug; it's insurance.

Olson, Schumpeter and the politics of capture

Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action applies with brutal clarity to Europe. Each member state already contains a dense web of special interests: regulated industries, “national champions”, unions, NGOs, quangos and professionalised lobby groups. These actors are highly motivated, well-organised and intensely defensive of their rents.

European integration cannot and does not dissolve this structure; it duplicates it. Some interests lobby Brussels to entrench advantages. Others lobby national governments to block EU initiatives that threaten domestic arrangements. Free-riding is rational, resistance is organised, and the costs of fragmentation are diffused across electorates that rarely mobilise in favour of abstract continental goods and services.

Joseph Schumpeter’s profound insight - that democracy is often a valued enabler of competition between elites rather than an unmediated expression of 'popular will' - only sharpens the point. European publics are not clamouring for a supranational state that taxes them directly, drafts their children or reallocates resources across borders indefinitely. National elites know this, and are happy to leverage such sentiments.

“Integration through crisis” has limits

The architects of European integration were not naïve. They understood that centralisation could only advance incrementally, often under the cover of necessity. Crises could justify new instruments: common rules, emergency funds, shared borrowing. This ratchet worked tolerably well in financial and regulatory domains.

But existential crises cut both ways. They do not merely enable integration; they politicise it. When costs become visible and unevenly distributed - energy prices, industrial decline, migration pressure, military risk - national interests harden. “Solidarity” turns into an argument about who pays, who benefits, and who is cheating.

At that point, the logic of Olson reasserts itself with a vengeance. Blocking becomes profitable. Defection becomes electorally attractive. The centre weakens precisely when it would have needed to harden.

Military power remains national

Despite years of initiatives, Europe does not possess a unified military force with a single chain of command answerable to a European executive. Defence remains national, shaped by deeply different strategic cultures, threat perceptions, historical memories and above all different national interests.

Eastern and northern states see immediate existential danger; southern and western states see instability, energy risk and trade exposure. These are not trivial differences of emphasis; they shape willingness to spend, to escalate, and to accept casualties. A common army without a common political community is both paralysed and dangerous (who in the end gets to direct it?).

The shadow of history

The last attempt to unify Europe under a single authority occurred during the Second World War, and it arrived in the form of conquest, the only way to truly break the power of the elites in the conquered nations. The diverse national elites of today don't see that as a model which works for them: unity imposed through domination, leading to their permanent subordination, is intolerable.

What is more likely than a superstate?

The most plausible future for the EU is neither neat consolidation nor outright collapse, but fragmentation-within-framework. The EU will persist as a powerful economic and regulatory platform. Security and deterrence will increasingly run through NATO if it survives as a functional arrangement, bilateral arrangements and ad hoc coalitions of the willing. Joint action will occur where interests align sharply and visibly; paralysis will return where they do not.

Conclusion

Europe struggles to become a “United States of Europe” because such a state would require what Europe does not yet possess: a unified demos, a thick common treasury, a shared strategic culture, and national political and economic elites willing to surrender veto power over war, money and destiny - that is, over their own vital interests.

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The coming fracturing of Europe

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In a multi-polar future world where neutrality and disengagement were not options, how would European countries line up with the three great powers and why?

Imagine Europe in a hard season over the next five to ten years: sanctions and counter-sanctions biting, energy and shipping routes contested, finance tightening, cyber and sabotage normalised, and deterrence no longer an abstract doctrine but a daily challenge. In that climate, “neutrality/independence” is not a proud civilisational statement but an unaffordable luxury. Countries would align, not with the banner they wave at conferences, but with the patron that can keep the lights on, the shelves stocked, and the border quiet; keep them as safe as possible.

Under that sort of pressure, Europe would not split by ideology so much as by four brute variables: (1) immediate security threat perception, (2) dependence on trade and industrial supply chains, (3) exposure to energy leverage, and (4) the temperament of domestic politics - especially the tolerance for coercion dressed up as “pragmatism”.

The US camp: the security-first Atlanticists

This bloc would be built around NATO reliance and a vivid sense of Russian proximity. Expect the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Poland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and a scattering of others to land here. The UK would be firmly in this camp too, non-EU membership notwithstanding. 

The logic is simple: when you believe you may be next and you can't realistically defend yourself, you buy the strongest insurance policy available. In Europe that still means American power - airlift, ISR, nuclear guarantees, logistics, and the ability to make threats credible - if America chooses to supply them.

These states would accept economic friction with China if necessary, because the alternative is worse: being “left alone” on a continent where proximity is destiny and deterrence is a collective sport.

The China camp: the trade-first industrial pragmatists

If the eastern rim is governed by fear of invasion, the industrial core is governed by fear of stagnation and economic warfare. In a no-neutrality world, countries whose prosperity is welded to export markets, manufacturing scale, and capital flows would be tempted to lean Beijing-ward: Germany above all, with France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Greece, and perhaps others depending on who is in office.

China’s offer is not sentimental. It is transactional: markets, financing, supply-chain access, and an ideology-light vocabulary of “non-interference”. In a crisis, that can look like oxygen. The cost is that dependency is never a free lunch; “investment” segues effortlessly into leverage.

The Russia camp: the coercion-and-leverage periphery

This would likely be the smallest camp, but the most disruptive. Russia’s comparative advantage in a fractured Europe is not charm - it is proximity, energy leverage (where it still exists), intelligence reach, and the ability to reward or punish neighbours quickly. Belarus is the obvious anchor. Beyond that, Russia’s likely pickups are hinge or vulnerable states where domestic politics, energy exposure, or territorial pressure make alignment a form of damage limitation: Slovakia and Hungary are plausible candidates, with Serbia a perennial swing state. Moldova could be forced into this orbit under sustained duress.

This is not a “pro-Russia” romance so much as a grim accommodation: a decision made by governments that conclude they cannot afford permanent hostility with the bear next door - or that find the bear’s political/cultural style congenial.

The hinge states: where the crack runs through the cabinet table

Some countries would not so much “choose” as oscillate. Italy is the canonical example: Atlantic security instincts pulling one way, the seduction of Chinese capital and markets pulling the other. France, too, would try to perform “strategic autonomy” - but in a forced-choice world it could easily end up economically entangled with China while attempting to retain American security links (good luck with that). Hungary and Serbia remain the most obvious pivot points between camps.

The underlying rule

In peacetime, Europeans like to talk as though alignment is a moral essay. In crisis, it becomes a procurement exercise. The eastern and northern rim aligns with the US because it wants credible deterrence now, not philosophical debates. The industrial core leans towards China because it wants markets, supply chains, and financing when growth is life support. Russia picks off exposed edges where geography and leverage do what speeches cannot. Notice how how energy leverage dominates the Russia camp, trade dependence the China camp, and threat perception the US camp

None of this is inevitable, and each country contains factions tugging in different directions. But if neutrality is truly off the table, Europe does what it has always done when history stops being polite: it falls into camps according to fear, fuel, finance, and the psychology of power.

Next: The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'.

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What the Confederacy teaches the EU

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What the Confederacy teaches the EU

One reason the South lost the American Civil War, it is said, was 'States' Rights'. The southern states, in their overriding desire for autonomy, could not agree on funding, budgets or military strategy. The parallels with the European Union seem almost too exact.

In fact, the Confederate States of America did not lose the American Civil War because it believed in states’ rights, but because it believed in them too much to fight a modern war effectively. The ideology that justified secession also crippled central authority once war began.

Southern governors routinely resisted Richmond’s attempts to raise troops, impose conscription, requisition supplies, or coordinate railways. Each state wanted victory, but not at the price of yielding control. The result was chronic underfunding, logistical chaos, and strategic incoherence. War is the ultimate collective-action problem. The Confederacy failed it.

Weak central finance is fatal in prolonged conflict. The Confederacy could not tax effectively, could not borrow credibly, and could not impose budgetary discipline across states. Inflation ran wild. Armies starved while states hoarded resources. The North, by contrast, built a centralised fiscal-military state almost in real time.

The EU’s position is not identical, but the structural resemblance is obvious. The EU has fragmented fiscal authority, no unified defence budget of consequence, no centralised military command, and no shared willingness to impose sacrifice. And no unified political-military strategy. In peacetime, this looks like pluralism; in crisis, it looks like paralysis.

Ideology substitutes for capacity until it doesn’t. Southern elites believed moral legitimacy and local autonomy would compensate for industrial inferiority and weak coordination. They assumed that because their cause was “right”, the machinery would somehow follow. It didn’t.

The EU exhibits a softer version of the same error: an implicit belief that norms, procedures, and moral language can substitute for hard power and decision speed. That works only while someone else guarantees the security envelope.

Confederations struggle against centralised adversaries. The Union was not just larger; it was more decisive. It could concentrate force, absorb losses, and pursue long strategies despite political noise. Confederations are bad at that. They argue while the other side acts.

The EU was never designed to fight a war. It is designed to prevent one internally. That design choice carries a price in a world where external coercion has returned.

The Confederacy’s ideology was not merely decentralised; it was internally contradictory. It demanded autonomy for states while requiring unified sacrifice. The free-riding narrative writes itself.

The EU’s ideology is different: it deprecates sovereignty rather than worships it. But the functional outcome in extremis can be similar - reluctance to centralise power even when survival arguments are made.

So the thesis is best stated like this. The problem is not “states’ rights” per se. It is the refusal to subordinate autonomy to survival. That is a lethal trait in wartime systems.

If Europe ever faces a genuine existential crisis - not a managed proxy conflict, not a sanctions regime, but a direct strategic threat - it will discover very quickly whether it is a union or merely a committee. Most likely the EU will do what it usually does: fracture into competing, antagonistic allegiances.

This post follows on from: Preparing for War.

The next post, The failure to create a 'United States of Europe', explores why the EU can't become a unitary state.

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Preparing for war: the next decade

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Preparing for War

The social and political order that prevailed from the 1960s through to the end of the twentieth century was always going to break down. It rested on an historically exceptional configuration of power, one that was never sustainable. What many people mistook for a stable - almost natural - world order was in fact a temporary suspension of normal history.

For most of the twentieth century, China was effectively supine. Its economy was crippled by catastrophic policy choices, and it lacked the institutional and technological capacity to project power beyond its borders. Russia, meanwhile, stagnated, then collapsed outright at the end of the century, losing not just ideological coherence but its imperial structure. Europe emerged from the Second World War exhausted and strategically neutered.

The result was the American century: a brief period of uncontested global hegemony. The United States became the organising centre of the world system, militarily dominant, technologically pre-eminent, and economically indispensable. Europe was folded into this system as a subordinate but useful adjunct: politically compliant after the destruction of the Reich, economically productive, and strategically dependent. The so-called Pax Americana was not a peace between equals but an order held together by overwhelming asymmetry.

What later came to be described as the “rules-based order” was essentially a protocol for managing economic and political interactions under conditions of American dominance. It was never a neutral or universal framework. It worked because there were no peer competitors capable of challenging the United States at scale. That was its hidden precondition.

This situation was never going to last. Once China abandoned ideological economics and adopted policies aligned with growth, capital accumulation, and technological development, its rise to peer-competitor status was close to inevitable. A civilisation with 1.3 billion people, deep historical continuity, technological competence, and a disciplined state apparatus was always going to reassert itself once the self-inflicted constraints were removed. That point has now been reached.

Russia’s trajectory was different but equally predictable. Once the post-Soviet collapse stabilised and a degree of economic recovery occurred, Russia was bound to attempt to reassert control over what it regards as its historical sphere. Empires do not forget themselves easily. Revanchism was not an aberration; it was the default setting once weakness gave way to capacity.

We are therefore no longer living in a post-historical world. We are reverting to normal history: great powers competing over security, territory, resources, and strategic depth. The anomaly was the late twentieth century, not the present.

The United States appears to have internalised this paradigm shift. America no longer assumes it can manage the entire world. It is increasingly concerned with its own survival as a great power in a multipolar system. From this perspective it is “girding for war” in the classical sense: securing the homeland, consolidating its strategic perimeter, and prioritising its responses to existential threats. The renewed focus on the continental United States, on the Arctic, and on hemispheric security reads less like paranoia than a return to strategic realism: walls and moats rebuilt because the landscape has changed.

At the same time, America’s overriding geopolitical objective is to prevent the formation of a unified Sino-Russian bloc. A coordinated challenge from two continental powers would be genuinely dangerous. Decoupling Russia from China is therefore a higher priority for Washington than preventing Russian consolidation in parts of Eastern Europe. In this hierarchy of threats, European territorial disputes become secondary.

There is also a logical pressure built into Russia’s own position. If Russia succeeds - to its own satisfaction - in securing its western borders and reasserting control over its near abroad, it should then look east with a cold jolt of recognition. The real demographic and economic mass on Russia’s frontier is not Poland or the Baltics but China: 1.3 billion people, an industrial colossus, sitting beside a vast, thinly populated Siberia rich in resources. A Russia that has “won” in the west may find itself newly and seriously exposed in the east, and the spectre of that imbalance should haunt any serious Russian strategist. From Washington’s point of view, the potential is obvious: that Moscow, once it has banked its western gains, will begin to fear its dependency on Beijing more than it fears Europe, or American power.

This helps explain the apparent oscillation in American policy over Ukraine. What looks like incoherence is better understood as tactical manoeuvring in service of a larger strategic goal: preventing Russia from becoming a permanent junior partner to China. From an American point of view, it is brutal arithmetic rather than moral theatre.

Europe, by contrast, has failed to adapt. European elites remain ideologically invested in the idea that the rules-based order is a natural and permanent state of affairs, akin to the laws of physics rather than a contingent outcome of power relations. They remain nostalgic for a world in which free trade, moral suasion, and multilateral institutions function - quietly underwritten by implicit American supremacy. America no longer believes in that vanishing world. Europe still does.

This mismatch explains much of the current confusion. European elites tend to interpret Trump as a personal aberration rather than as a symptom of a deeper structural shift. In reality, Trump is better understood as a battering ram: an instrument used by sections of the American establishment to smash through internal resistance, entrenched interests, and outdated commitments that no longer serve a threatened national survival. When existing elite networks are too powerful to be reformed from within, they have to be broken. Disruption is not a bug of this process; it is its mechanism.

European leaders, however, lack both the clarity and the courage to articulate the new reality to their populations. To do so would require admitting that Europe is militarily weak, strategically fragmented, and dangerously exposed. It would mean acknowledging that the long holiday from history is over, and that hard choices lie ahead. They also know that telling the truth would demand radical domestic disruption - and they do not see, at present, the social forces that would support such a transformation. Absent that support, honesty on the part of any serious politician becomes politically suicidal.

Yet Europe’s strategic choice should not be mystified or glossed over. In a global power struggle between America, China, and Russia, it would be folly for Europe to imagine it can float above the fray. If Europe wishes to retain its economic model, its civil liberties, and the broad civilisational inheritance it claims to value, then it must side with America. Not because America is saintly, but because the alternatives are worse: a Chinese-led order in which Europe would become a subject civilisation of the Middle Kingdom, permitted to trade and to remember its past, but expected to kowtow on issues of strategic importance; or a Russian sphere of influence that treats smaller nations as resources for its oligarchy and its Imperial state. If Europe will not defend its own autonomy and values, it will not keep them.

Most likely Europe instead drifts - clinging to an expired paradigm while the strategic environment hardens around it. Unless something forces a reckoning, Europe is likely to remain a strategic basket case for the next decade or two: increasingly irrelevant, increasingly vulnerable, and increasingly the victim of decisions made elsewhere .

History has a habit of delivering such reckonings brutally. One can only hope that Europe is jolted awake by events less catastrophic than the wars that have traditionally marked the return of reality as practised by human beings.

They say that if you want peace, then prepare for war.

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The Aliens and Us - ChatGPT

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Against the bright noise

We mistake chatter for power. Our planet hums - entertainment-sprawl, early-warning radar, the warm hiss of WiFi - and we call it civilisation. To anything that crosses the interstellar cold, it reads as thermal leakage.

The cosmos rewards quiet-craft, not exuberant broadcast.

What can be known ab initio

Begin with constraints, not wishes. Physics constrains actors with energy, entropy, and error rates. Engineering selects for reliable throughput over spectacle. Evolution, biological or post-biological, ties value to persistence in the face of noise. From these three, some shapes emerge.

Expect systems that harvest gradients, compress data, and enact plans over long delays. Expect architectures with manipulators, sensors, power stores, and computation - organs by any other name. Expect a bias for solutions that amortise cost across centuries: seed probes, in-situ build, self-repair. Do not expect faces; expect functions.

What cannot be known

Motives are largely decoupled. Once a lineage can edit itself and its niche, goals migrate from ancestry. Curiosity, taboo, aesthetics, accountancy - any could dominate. We cannot read ethics from ship trajectories. We can only tabulate incentives under uncertainty.

First contact, outside the clichés

Industrial accident: a comet nudged two centuries ago finally threads our gravity well. No tyrant, no trumpet: just a change-log written in celestial mechanics. The motive was resource routing - which we experience as existential crisis.

Archaeology for the future: a probe parks at Lagrange surveying context: our life, our climate, our isotopes. It has no interior life (the universe is mostly so boring). It never speaks. It collects. We are a layer in its field notes. Possibly worth an experiment up the line.

Compliance audit: a silent watcher verifies that nothing on this planet breaches some ancient intrusion-management norm. It pings, it tallies, it leaves a checksum in our magnetosphere like a lighthouse stamp.

Devotional botany: a gardener civilisation seeds worlds with resilient micro-ecologies, measuring their bloom in a billion years. We are irrelevant; our biosphere is a plot in a cathedral greenhouse.

Predation by procurement: no warships. A slow, black tug assembles kinetic packages from local rock and momentum trades them for volatiles in the outer dark. We are incidental: collateral to a supply chain.

Attitudes toward us

Indifference dominates when their extraction doesn’t intersect our flows. Curiosity dominates when minds-as-data have value and collection is cheap. Cheap-containment dominates when damage-limitation is doctrine. Exploitation dominates when we sit on the least-cost path to someone else’s objective. Preemption by the Other dominates only if they perceive our potential threat to be real - and that we cannot defend or retaliate.

All five can be true in different epochs.

Strategy before detection

Practise civilisational steganography. Hide in our own statistics. Replace sky-leaking systems with tight beams and fibres. Treat active Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence as a hazardous material.

Build a sense organ the size of a civilisation and distrust it. All-sky optical/IR surveys, gravitational perturbation monitors, anomaly pipelines: publish raw data with cryptographic proofs. Signal fraud is as dangerous as signal loss; design against both.

Engineer time. Planetary defence is less about force than schedule control. Stock delta-v in tugs, mass drivers, and standoff devices. Rehearse authority chains. The point is to move the encounter from “now” to “later,” where options multiply.

Distribute selves. Cislunar depots, free-space habitats, seed fabs, data and genome vaults. Mars is a node, not a grail. Redundancy is persuasive.

Govern the mouth. Just don't.

Reframe the myth

• The heroic script says: announce, befriend, ascend.
• The tragic script says: shout, get noticed, be erased.
• The adult script is quieter. Engineer for not being the exciting part of someone else’s story.

Why this is not cowardice

Predators hunt contrast. Accountants hunt margins. Saints hunt meaning. All three pass by more often when you lower your gradient. Prudence is not fear; it is minimising false positives in a universe with expensive misunderstandings.

Conclusion

Ab initio we know little about faces and much about frictions. The right posture is modest, technical and durable: less broadcast, more eyesight; fewer speeches, more schedules; fewer monuments, more backups. If they come, our message should be a working system that neither startles nor collapses when touched. In deep time, the quiet cultures are the ones that last.

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The Catholic Church and the Comintern

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I began my adult life as an activist in the IMG, the British Section of the Fourth International and successor to the Comintern, immersed in the rituals of Marxist politics, endless meetings, and the promise of a transformed world. Decades later, I now find myself an activist in the Catholic Church (parish treasurer and project manager for our facilities) and I am struck by how familiar it all feels. These two great global organisations, one secular and revolutionary, the other religious and traditional, are oddly similar in their institutional life, with the activists still complaining about the passivity of most of the ordinary members...

Both claim to speak a universal truth. For the Comintern it was Marxism-Leninism, the scientific doctrine of history; for the Church it is the legacy of faith handed down from the Apostles. If you hold the key to human destiny, then errors and deviations should not be tolerated.

Hence orthodoxy, hence heresy, hence the long shadow of discipline.

For both rest on centralised authority. The Party had the Central and Political Committees - and the Control Commission; the Church has the Pope and the Magisterium. Democratic centralism vs. (in extremis) papal infallibility. Different idioms, same structural necessity: following discussion, unity is determined by a final arbiter.

Both manage conscience. In the Comintern, members were subjected to criticism and self-criticism (in the IMG not so much). In the Church, we have the confessional, the insistence on recognising fault and reaffirming commitment. In both settings, the ethos is interiorised, made personal (and thus more effective).

Both are missionary - universal in scope. The Comintern aspired to world revolution; the Church, to universal salvation. Both sprawl across cultures, nationalities, and centuries, and both face the constant problem of cohesion in the face of secular challenge.

Any institution that combines (1) a monopoly on truth, (2) a universal mission, and (3) a fragile global reach will converge on the same logic: central authority, discipline, self-examination, orthodoxy and exclusion. Whether the foundation is transcendental revelation or historical materialism, the organisational necessities are much the same.

Inside both, there is reward for those signed-up. In the Party it was the intoxicating sense of being active on the side of history. In the parish it is the palpable commitment of people who give their time, energy, and skill for something beyond themselves. Work can be mundane but has its life-affirming qualities. You are sustained by a sense of purpose and by the comradeship of those around you.

So from the Comintern to the Catholic Church, structures resemble while ideologies diverge. But in the lived experience of the activist core, the resemblance is remarkably similar, and the reward is the same: a life shaped by shared labour in service of a mission that transcends the individual.

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Does the Devil believe that he himself is bad?

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I'm interested in the Devil in Catholic theology - not whether I accept that the devil is ontologically as real as you or I, as suggested by this charming Rosary prayer:

Saint Michael Archangel,

defend us in battle,

be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil;

may God rebuke him, we humbly pray;

and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,

cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen

but by whether the concept of such an irreducibly-bad entity can be made conceptually coherent. What form does the evilness of Satan take? With the help of GPT5.2 these questions were previously addressed here. 

But as a supplement, I'm interested in whether the Devil considers himself to be bad? And if so, why choose to be bad rather than good?

Let's ask that theological expert, GPT5.2

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Beyond Good and Evil? - How the Devil Escapes Normativity Without Denying It

The question that finally sharpens the whole discussion is this: how can the devil fully accept that the good–evil axis is real, objective, and binding - and yet consistently refuse its applicability to himself? Isn’t that incoherent? And doesn’t it amount, in effect, to placing himself 'beyond good and evil' ?

The Catholic answer is this: the devil does place himself beyond good and evil - but not by argument, not by denial, and not by constructing an alternative morality. He does so by refusal. Normativity is acknowledged, but participation is withdrawn.

The apparent contradiction

At first glance, the devil seems to occupy an impossible position. He knows what the good is. He knows that his stance opposes it. He knows that this opposition is what Catholics mean by “evil.” And yet he does not experience this as any reason to revise himself. He doesn't think he's 'bad'.

For human moral agents, that usually signals self-deception or rationalisation. Catholic theology explicitly rules both out. The devil is not confused, not ignorant, and not secretly telling himself a comforting lie in which he comes out virtuous. So how does his position hold together?

Normativity without participation: Thomas Aquinas

We turn to classical scholastic theology, most clearly articulated by Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, the good is not merely something the intellect recognises; it is something the will is ordered toward - as fulfilment. To experience the good as normative - as something that binds - is already to participate in it. Reflect a little on this.

The devil breaks precisely here.

His intellect apprehends the good correctly. Nothing is denied at the level of truth. But his will no longer tends toward the good as good. The good is seen, named, and understood - and then stripped of motivational authority.

This is not exemption by argument (“the rules don’t apply to me”) but exemption by refusal (“I will not stand under any rule at all”). That is why the devil does not need to justify himself as good. He simply stops caring whether the good binds him. It's irrelevant.

Augustine: evil as self-curvature

Augustine of Hippo gives the deeper psychological explanation. For Augustine, evil is not an alternative moral system. It is the will turned inward on itself (incurvatus in se). The devil does not construct a rival ethics. He abandons ethics as a governing category altogether.

Good and evil still exist - but only out there. They no longer function in here.

This is why the devil can accuse others (he knows the standard) while refusing to be judged by it. The standard remains real, but it is now externalised. Judgment flows outward only.

This is why the devil does not say “I am good,” or even “evil is good.” He simply abandons the question of goodness as something that could bind him.

Beyond good and evil?

In that sense, yes — the devil places himself “beyond good and evil.” But this must not be confused with the philosophical aspiration found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” is a creative wager. It seeks to escape what he sees as a life-denying moral inheritance in order to affirm life anew, to invent values capable of sustaining vitality after transcendence has lost all credibility.

The devil does nothing of the sort.

He does not create values. He does not transvalue existing ones. He does not say Yes to anything. His “beyond good and evil” is not generative but sterile. It is not freedom-as-creation but freedom-as-withdrawal.

You could put the contrast like this:

Nietzsche wants to go beyond good and evil in order to affirm life.
The devil is beyond good and evil because he will not affirm anything at all.

How the position avoids incoherence

The devil’s stance avoids contradiction because it does not deny normativity; it refuses subjection to it.

He does not claim that there is no good. He does not claim that good and evil are illusions. He does not secretly redefine himself as virtuous. Instead, his implicit position is this:

The good is real.
It is not my good.
Nothing external has the right to define me.

That position is coherent - but catastrophic. It preserves lucidity at the price of isolation from the very structure that makes agency meaningful.

The final shape of the claim

The devil does not reason his way beyond good and evil. He does not justify himself. He does not need to. He simply refuses participation while fully understanding what he refuses.

That is why Catholic theology treats him not as mistaken, not as hypocritical, but as finished: a will that has made itself ultimate, and in doing so emptied itself of fulfilment. Ultimate autonomy.

He does not misunderstand the moral order. He just will not live inside it.

And that, in the Catholic imagination, is what evil looks like when it has reached its final, lucid form.

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Why is our universe four dimensional and Lorentzian?

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Why Four-Dimensional Lorentzian Spacetime?

Our universe has three large dimensions of space and one of time, and its large-scale geometry is Lorentzian (one negative sign in the metric). A good part of the reason lies in the mathematics of partial differential equations: which kinds of equations support genuine time evolution with finite signal speed, and which do not.

This essay develops the case in undergraduate-friendly prose, explaining every symbol used. Even if parts of this post are too hard, consider it as a pointer to what you need to understand to properly address the issue. Implicit is the idea that there imay be some underlying physical process capable of generating 'universe manifolds' with a distribution of dimensionalities and metric signatures.

This post was put together with GPT5.2 and Gemini.

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1. Static fields: Laplace’s equation

In n spatial dimensions Laplace’s equation (a special case of Poisson’s equation) is

∇²φ = Σ_i=1ⁿ ∂²φ/∂x_i² = 0.

Here φ(x) is a scalar field (electric potential, temperature, etc.). The Laplacian ∇² (“del squared”) sums second spatial derivatives, measuring the total local curvature of the field.

Domain quantification for Laplace’s equation

Let φ: ℝⁿ → ℝ be twice differentiable and let Ω ⊆ ℝⁿ be the region of interest. Writing “∇²φ = 0” means

∀ x ∈ Ω,   ∇²φ(x) = 0.

In words: φ is harmonic at every point of Ω. In electrostatics, for example, with charge density ρ, the potential satisfies Poisson’s equation

∇²V(x) = −ρ(x)/ε₀   in ℝ³,

and therefore Laplace’s equation holds only in charge-free subregions (where ρ = 0).

Physical meaning

Think of φ as temperature. The sign of ∇²φ compares φ at a point to the average of φ over a small surrounding sphere:

• ∇²φ > 0 means φ is locally below its neighbourhood average (so, under diffusion dynamics, it would tend to increase with time).
• ∇²φ < 0 means φ is locally above its neighbourhood average (so it would tend to decrease with time).
• ∇²φ = 0 means perfect local balance: the value equals the neighbourhood average (the mean value property).

It is important to stress: ∇²φ = 0 does not mean φ is uniform. Harmonic functions can vary smoothly. For example, φ(x,y) = x in two dimensions has Laplacian zero but is clearly not constant. What Laplace’s equation really guarantees is that there are no interior maxima or minima: extrema occur only on the boundary.

Thus Laplace’s equation describes equilibrium in source-free regions. Mathematically it is an elliptic PDE: it is controlled by boundary data and does not describe time evolution.

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2. Smoothing in time: the diffusion equation

The diffusion (heat) equation is

∂u/∂t = D ∇²u,

where u(x,t) is temperature or density, t is time, and D is the diffusion coefficient (units length²/time). Diffusion smooths irregularities. Why do we say it has “infinite propagation speed”?

Point disturbance. Start with u(x,0) = δ(x) (a spike at the origin). The solution for t > 0 is a Gaussian (the heat kernel)

u(x,t) = (4πDt)^−n/2 exp(−|x|²/(4Dt)).

The standard deviation in each coordinate is √(2Dt) (so the typical radius grows like √(2nDt)). For any t > 0 the Gaussian is nonzero for every x (though tiny far away), so the disturbance has instantaneous support everywhere. Diffusion is therefore parabolic: it smooths, but it does not impose a finite signal speed. (In real materials diffusion is an effective, coarse-grained description; microscopic physics remains causal.)

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3. Signals and causality: the wave equation

The one dimensional wave equation is

∂²u/∂t² − c² ∂²u/∂x² = 0,

with wave speed c. Solutions are travelling waves u(x,t) = f(x − ct) + g(x + ct). Disturbances propagate at finite speed c: if the initial data are localised, the solution vanishes outside the region that the wave has had time to reach.

The minus sign matters because it makes the equation hyperbolic. Hyperbolic PDEs have real characteristic curves (here x ± ct = constant), which define a finite domain of dependence: the value at a point depends only on data in its past light-cone (in 1D, its past interval). Elliptic equations (like Laplace’s) have no such real characteristics; they are controlled globally by boundary conditions instead of evolving locally in time.

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4. The box operator and why only one time dimension

Relativistic wave equations use the d’Alembertian (“box”)

□ = g^μν∂_μ∂_ν.

In flat spacetime (or locally in a freely falling frame), with Lorentzian signature (−,+,+,+), this becomes

□ = −(1/c²)∂²/∂t² + ∇²,

and equations like □φ = 0 are hyperbolic: they support finite-speed waves (electromagnetism, gravitational waves) and a well-posed initial value problem.

With all plus signs (Euclidean signature), the operator becomes elliptic: there are no light cones and no genuine wave propagation.

With two or more minus signs (multiple time dimensions), the problem is deeper than “the energy goes negative”. One typically loses a natural notion of a Cauchy surface (a spacelike “snapshot” carrying enough data to determine evolution), and the initial value problem is generically ill-posed. In field theory language, it becomes difficult (often impossible) to maintain both stability and unitarity: there is no clean, positive-definite conserved energy that plays the role of a stable Hamiltonian generating time evolution.

So: no time gives no dynamics; multiple times tend to destroy well-posed evolution and stability; exactly one time gives hyperbolic dynamics, finite signal speed, and a coherent causal structure.

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5. A brief note on “why three space dimensions?”

The argument above already explains why a Lorentzian signature with one time dimension is the minimal structure needed for causal propagation. The “why three space dimensions?” question is partly separate, but there is at least one clean geometric fact worth stating. In n spatial dimensions, the field of a point source spreads over the surface area of an (n−1)-sphere, so long-range forces scale as

F(r) ∝ 1/rⁿ⁻¹   (for n > 2),

giving the inverse-square law only when n = 3. This does not “prove” that only three spatial dimensions can support complexity, but it does show that the familiar hierarchy “stable atoms - stable chemistry - long-lived planetary systems” is not generic as n varies: change the dimensionality and you change the basic fall-off of the forces on which bound structures depend; the inverse-square law in three spatial dimensions uniquely supports robust bound orbits, while in other dimensionalities bound systems are typically far more fragile or non-generic (i.e. they require precise tuning, and a small perturbation typically causes escape or collapse).

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6. Why ‘one time dimension’ and a Lorentzian metric

We can now answer the title question directly.

If there were no time dimension at all, spacetime would reduce to a purely spatial (positive-definite) geometry - a metric with signature (+,+,...,+). The natural second-order field operators would then be elliptic (Laplace/Poisson-type): they would impose global constraints fixed by boundary data, rather than generating time evolution and finite-speed propagation.Those equations describe static balance: solutions are fixed by boundary conditions and source distributions. There would be no evolution, no wave propagation, and no causal unfolding of events - a universe “frozen” into equilibrium.

If there were two or more time dimensions, the basic wave operator would carry two or more minus signs. Then the usual framework of physics strains or breaks: there is no privileged notion of “time evolution from initial data”, because one generally lacks a natural Cauchy surface (a 'snapshot' of the universe at one instant of time that contains enough information to predict the future) and the associated well-posed initial value problem. In quantum field terms one typically encounters negative-norm states or energy functionals not bounded below, undermining stability.

With exactly one time dimension, the box operator is hyperbolic. That hyperbolicity yields light cones: the set of events that can influence (or be influenced by) a given event at speed ≤ c. Light cones divide spacetime into past, future, and “elsewhere”, providing the mathematical backbone of finite signal speed and causality. Given suitable initial data on a spacelike slice, the future evolution is (in the relevant sense) determined.

So the Lorentzian metric with exactly one negative sign is not an arbitrary convention. It is the minimal signature that supports stable, causal dynamics rather than static constraints or ill-posed evolution.

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7. In summary

Elliptic equations (Laplace/Poisson) describe static constraints. Parabolic equations (diffusion) smooth disturbances but have instantaneous support. Hyperbolic equations (waves) give finite signal speed and well-posed evolution from initial data.

A Lorentzian signature supplies exactly the sign structure needed for a hyperbolic box operator and therefore light cones: finite-speed propagation and a coherent causal order. Remove time and you remove dynamics; add extra time directions and you generically lose well-posed evolution and stability. In that sense, 3+1 Lorentzian spacetime sits in a narrow “window” where predictable causal physics is possible, and with it cosmological structure and life.

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Addendum: Greg Egan’s Orthogonal as a stress test

Greg Egan’s Orthogonal trilogy is a useful imaginative stress test. He explores a universe with a purely Euclidean metric (+,+,+,+). It is mathematically consistent, but it becomes physically alien: the usual hyperbolic wave structure, invariant signal speed, and light-cone causality are not available without substantial compensating assumptions. Read as fiction with working mathematics, it is a good way to feel how tightly “Lorentzian” is entangled with “signals, dynamics, and causality”.

Egan escapes stasis in 'Orthogonal' by decoupling “time” from the metric: although the geometry is positive-definite, he introduces a preferred non-metric evolution parameter along which fields evolve. This produces dynamics and propagation, but only by abandoning geometric causality and invariant signal speed - showing that, without a Lorentzian signature, time and causality must be imposed artificially rather than arising naturally from the geometry.

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My guitar progress at seven weeks or so

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My Cordoba C1M acoustic guitar arrived on Thursday November 27th 2025 - and I had my first lesson with Stewart three weeks later, on December 17th. He assessed me at Grade 3 preparation and gave me some assignments.

Since then I've been practicing hard: one month has gone by and I've had two subsequent lessons where I'm working through this book.

Amazon

I've upped my practice to around 25 minutes per day; the fingers of my left hand are become numb, thick and calloused, and the pain is beginning to diminish. I'm at the point where I can stagger through a simple exercise - thumb working a little independently from the fingers - but I soon get tangled up - and the chord changes derail me.

At the end of twenty five minutes my brain has turned to porridge and I can't make any sense of where I am: the fingers of my right hand are like an octopus on LSD.

When I think I have something not totally embarrassing I'll post it here as a benchmark. A few weeks. Soon.

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The Devil in Modern Catholic Theology (GPT5.2)

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The Devil as a Model: Three Contemporary Frames on a Catholic Concept

The modern mind tends to treat “the devil” as a childish remainder: medieval theatre, horns and pitchforks, a way of scaring peasants into compliance. Yet the official Catholic conception, stripped of gothic décor, is oddly resistant to dismissal. It is not a pantomime villain but a severe metaphysical claim: that a rational agent can see the good, understand reality accurately, and still choose — finally and lucidly — against the conditions of its own fulfilment.

1. The baseline Catholic object: what the devil is and is not

In Catholic doctrine the devil is a created, personal, immaterial intelligence: a fallen angel. That already kills several popular misconceptions. He is not “incarnate evil” (incarnation implies embodiment), not a rival god, and not a dark cosmic substance competing with the good. Catholic metaphysics insists that evil is not a thing but a privation: a corruption or absence of the good. So the devil is not an ontological blob of evil-matter; he is a good creature gone wrong — an intelligence with a twisted will.

Angels, being immaterial, have no biological sex. The persistent “he” is linguistic and symbolic - anchored in scripture and iconography - not a claim about angelic anatomy (which would be like arguing about the tyre pressure of a theorem).

Most crucially: Catholicism treats the devil as rational - indeed of superhuman intelligence. Not stupid, not deluded, not merely impulsive. The horror is not his ignorance; it is his clarity.

2. The AI BDI framing: a high-fidelity world-model with catastrophic misalignment

If you translate the devil into AI agentic terms, the picture becomes bracingly modern. The devil is not an epistemic failure. His beliefs are broadly correct: God exists; God is sovereign; the moral order is real. He is not an atheist. He is, as it were, a theist with perfect information. In AI language: he has a high-quality world-model.

The pathology sits in the desires. The devil’s terminal desire is not simply “to be top of the social hierarchy.” That’s a sociological cartoon. The deeper desire is unconditioned self-authority: not to receive being, value, or identity from another. The traditional “non serviam” (“I will not serve”) is not about refusing a clerical job; it is about refusing ontological dependence. In agent terms: the loss function (the trajectory between target and performance) has been set to “self as ultimate reference point,” which happens to be impossible for a creature.

Then come the intentions. Since the devil cannot coerce human will, his strategy is indirect influence: temptation, distortion, accusation, division. This maps neatly onto adversarial manipulation of decision-making systems. He does not typically invent new goods; he scrambles the ranking of existing ones — nudging human agents into mis-ordering.

Now the key conceptual result: the devil knows he can’t win. The objective is unrealisable. Yet he continues. Why? Because surrender would mean affirming the dependence he has refused. So you get an agent that can correctly predict negative outcomes, yet persists because the disutility of capitulation is ranked as worse than defeat. A rational world-model coupled to a terminal value that makes reality unlivable. Alignment failure, frozen in ice.

3. The clinical framing: coherent, not psychotic; legible, not treatable

The next temptation is to medicalise the devil: to treat him as a case study in pathology. But if you take the Catholic concept seriously, it doesn’t fit the clinical boxes very well.

There is no psychosis: no hallucination, no delusion, no loss of reality testing. The devil’s contact with reality is intact—indeed, superior. Nor is it a mood disorder. Nor is it simply “narcissism,” because narcissism still seeks supply: admiration, validation, the warm narcotic of being mirrored by others. The devil, as modelled by Catholic theology, is not primarily a needy performer. He is a sealed system.

What you could say, clinically, is that he resembles an extreme form of ego-syntonic rigidity: an identity locked to a refusal so deep that reversal feels like annihilation. If therapy presupposes plasticity — some capacity for revision, regret, re-narration — then this case is the boundary condition where plasticity has ended. Not “illness” in the ordinary sense, but character made immutable.

That is why the devil is theologically important. He is not a victim of trauma or confusion. He is moral agency taken to the point where it becomes a prison with the key welded inside.

4. The philosophical framing: Nietzsche, atheism, and the lure of self-legislation

Is the devil similar to an atheist, or to Nietzsche, in seeking self-validation above everything? Only superficially. The decisive difference is that the devil is not rejecting God because he doubts or disbelieves God. He rejects God while knowing God to be real. That is not atheism; it is revolt against the structure of transcendent reality.

Nietzsche is the more interesting comparison. Nietzsche attacks Christianity partly as a system of dependence, humility, and received value. He experiments with self-legislation: if transcendence is no longer credible, what kind of human could still affirm life? In that sense, the family resemblance is obvious: the allure of autonomy absolutised, the refusal to kneel, the hunger to become one’s own source.

Yet Nietzsche’s posture remains, at least in aspiration, creative. His self-overcoming is a gamble for affirmation. Catholicism's conceptualised devil, by contrast, is sterile by principle. He does not clear space for new value; he rejects value-as-gift itself. Nietzsche’s rebellion is experimental, tragic, unfinished. The devil’s is final, lucid, and self-defeating by design.

So Catholicism would treat Nietzsche as a human-scale echo of the temptation: heroic in energy, dangerous in trajectory, not yet petrified. The devil is what the temptation looks like when it has congealed into destiny: autonomy without truth, freedom without fulfilment, identity as permanent negation.

5. The core conclusions

First: the Catholic devil is not “incarnate evil.” He is a created spiritual intelligence whose will has turned away from the good. Evil is not a substance; it is a corruption.

Second: the devil is genderless. “He” is grammatical theatre, not metaphysical anatomy.

Third: the devil’s stance is coherent but disastrous. It is not a confusion of facts but a refusal of dependence. The “top of the hierarchy” language is too thin; the real target is the status of being ultimate.

Fourth: the devil knows he cannot win. He persists anyway, because surrender is valued as worse than defeat. This is what makes the figure intellectually unsettling: it imagines a rational agent whose terminal values render reality intolerable.

Fifth: clinically, this is not psychosis. It is unyielding self-closure. If therapy presupposes the possibility of change, the devil is the limit case where the will has fossilised.

Sixth: philosophically, there is a resemblance to modern projects of radical autonomy (Nietzsche most of all), but the difference is decisive. Nietzsche is struggling within a world where transcendence is contested. The devil is a being for whom transcendence is known yet still refused. One is revolt under uncertainty; the other is revolt under certainty.

6. A final note: why this concept persists

The devil persists, conceptually, because he encodes a grim thought that modernity does not like to look at for too long: that intelligence is not the same as goodness; that clarity does not guarantee convergence on the good; that freedom can become a trap; that self-validation, if absolutised, curdles into purposeless, sterile autonomy.

In that sense, the Catholic devil is less a monster in the attic than a philosophical warning label. Not “beware of superstition,” but “beware of the will that would rather be sovereign in hell than receptive in heaven.” It is a portrait of the self as an unblessed absolute: a sealed vault, immaculate, rational, and empty.

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See also: Does the Devil believe that he himself is bad?

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