People sometimes ask me for writing and publishing advice. My main advice would be to find something else to do. This is a terrible way to make a living. The average book sells less than 500 copies, and authors typically make 10% of the price of each book sold, so…

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish…in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess’. HG Wells, Anticipations (1901) NB: the following contains very distressing information. The flipside of the ego-inflation dream of the ubermensch is…

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. In 1879, in Breslau, a group of idealistic young Germans gathered round an oak tree at midnight to swear an oath. They swore to do everything they could to return…

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project. It feels taboo to read Mein Kampf. It is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’, in Karl Ove Knausgard’s phrase. You download it and think, ‘I must be on some FBI list now’. Nazism still inspires hate-crimes and murders, like the Buffalo…

In previous chapters of the spiritual eugenics project we have ambled down relatively unpopulated lanes of historical research. Now, we emerge onto a daunting autobahn: Nazism. No topic has been more pored over by historians. And there are no more awful events in human history than the Nazis’ programme of…

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus told his students that the wise man “keeps guard against himself as his own enemy, and one lying in wait for him”. This is a view of human folly shared by the rather younger field of behavioral economics. …

Last month Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson released a TV series called The End of Men, warning that American men were becoming effete, flabby and sterile. Civilization is descending into chaos, the series suggests, but that’s OK, because ‘hard times produce strong men’. …

I’d never heard of starseeds before January 6 2021, when one of them stormed the Capitol building in DC. In the days after, I was researching Jake Angeli, the ‘Qanon shaman’, and discovered he ran something called the ‘Starseed Academy. Like other ‘starseeds’, Jake thinks he is a highly evolved…

Western culture urgently needs to improve its cultural resources to help people make sense of ecstatic experiences. Evidence suggests that more and more people in western culture are having and seeking ecstatic experiences, because of the growing popularity of psychedelics and contemplative practices like meditation and yoga. …