To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

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To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

The Doomed Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli Campaign was an effort by Allied powers to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I. The plan was to open up the Dardanelles Strait in modern-day Türkiye. If it had succeeded, the Campaign would have exposed the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to naval bombardment.

Instead, the Gallipoli Campaign became a famous disaster. It’s a warning from history about what could happen if the United States attempts to invade Iranian territory in or around the Strait of Hormuz.

The Allies launched an amphibious assault in April of 1915, and successfully established multiple beachhead positions. But they were sitting ducks thereafter, and subjected to constant fire from Ottoman positions. By January of the next year, half a million casualties had piled up on both sides of the lines. The Allies were forced to withdraw.

The Turkish commander at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, rose to prominence as a result of the battle, and became the founder and first president of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923. On the British side, Winston Churchill was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty. It took a considerable period of time for his career to recover from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

For the newly formed countries of Australia and New Zealand, Gallipoli became a tragic first chapter in the stories of those countries’ national identities. Hopefully, the events at Gallipoli will continue to resonate through history as warning to the United States. Attempting to occupy enemy territory is always a costly endeavor reckoned in human lives—but trying to hold isolated territories like beaches or islands is even more expensive in that grim currency.

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To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

The Great Schism of 1054

On a recent trip to Serbia, a country where the predominant religion is Orthodox Christianity, I was amused to be reminded that—from the Orthodox perspective—Protestantism is still considered Catholicism.

Coming from New England, which was colonized by English Protestants, this perspective was instructive. While we place great importance on the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, Orthodox Christians are still thinking in terms of the Great Schism of 1054.

Publicly, the Great Schism of 1054 stems from profound theological differences between the Greek and Latin versions of the Christian faith. But like the current conflict in Iran, a struggle for power among elites was the real culprit. Prior to 1054, the Christian Church was governed by 5 Patriarchs seated in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. The Roman Patriarch, the Pope, decided to consolidate power over the other Patriarchates.

Later that century in 1095, the Crusades were advertised as a conflict with Islam when Pope Urban II announced them. But in reality, Catholic knights laid siege to the Christian cities of Constantinople and Antioch, in addition to sacking Jerusalem. These battles illustrate the fact that the Crusades are better understood as a conflict between Christian factions.

The actual history of Christianity during the Middle Ages reveals how the Greek Church was attacked by its Latin cousins. It’s no wonder that subsequent divisions among Latin Christians are of little consequence to those who still cherish the Greek version of the Church.

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To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason.

Belgrade Fortress

The Danube is Europe’s second-longest river. It flows eastward from Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, passing through 10 countries and four capital cities, including Vienna and Budapest. At its confluence with the Sava River, the Danube also flows through the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Kalemegdan Fortress stands on a hill overlooking this confluence. For much of its history, this fort WAS the city of Belgrade. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the city expanded meaningfully beyond the walls that protected it from a dozen centuries of sieges and invasions.

Belgrade Fortress began as the Roman settlement of Singidunum in 86 AD. The Roman Empire broke in half during its death throes, and the most famous of the Eastern Roman Emperors—Justinian—was a locally-born. He rebuilt the city after it was sacked by Attila the Hun in 441 AD. According to one legend, Attila would be buried in or around the Fortress after his sudden death a decade later.

After the lights of Rome blinked out and it withdrew from its borders, the site was settled by Slavic peoples in the 6th century AD. Belgrade went on to become the capital city of the Medieval Serbian Kingdom until its conquest by Ottoman Turks in the 14th century.

Between 1521 and 1867, Belgrade was dominated by foreign powers. The Turkish Sultan and the Austrian Habsburgs took turns laying to siege to Belgrade fortress and then defending it from the other.

After a brief interlude during which another Serbian Kingdom was founded in 1867, the Austrians again conquered the city during the first World War. Once the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of that war, Belgrade became the capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. But during World War II, Belgrade was again conquered by the Nazis. Post-liberation, the city was restored as the capital of the Communist state of Yugoslavia.

In the photograph below, my fiancée stands before the inner keep of the fortress. This complex is now a military museum, with real 20th century tanks and artillery from a variety of countries standing outside for visitors to admire. The fort also contains a museum full of grisly Medieval torture of devices that’s not for the faint-of-heart.

Kalemegdon Fortress is central to the lore of Belgrade and a must-see for anyone visiting the city. From here, the gleaming buildings of Belgrade’s New City district rise above sweeping views of the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers.

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Youth Work Actions in Yugoslavia

The hills surrounding the city of Raška, Serbia used to be almost completely denuded of trees. An old photo of Raska from the 1940s can be seen below. But all that changed in the 1960s, when Serbia was a part of the Communist State of Yugoslavia.

That’s when Youth Work Actions (or “Radne Akcije”) transformed the country. After a brutal occupation by the Nazis, Yugoslavia emerged from the struggle of World War II with a sense of national pride and cohesiveness under Josip Tito. The young people of Yugoslavia banded together as volunteers to rebuild the shattered infrastructure of their country.

They left their mark on the city of Raška by planting trees in and around the city. The efforts of these volunteers radically changed the landscape of the city into what it is today.

In the worst versions of Communism, corrupt bureaucrats use what is supposed to be the collective ownership of the state to enrich and empower themselves. Western propaganda highlights these failures to no end.

But it seems to me that Youth Work Actions that rebuilt Yugoslavia provides us with a counterexample to these horror stories. It illustrates the effectiveness of people working with a common vision of the future. When we work together, there is nothing we can’t accomplish.

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Olympic Gold & Other Bizarre Coincidences

Last week, both the men’s and women’s US ice hockey teams won Olympic gold in Milan. Both teams knocked off their Canadian counterparts in their respective championship games, in overtime, by a score of 2-1.

But these coincidences were only the beginning.

The last time the US men’s hockey won Olympic gold was the famous “miracle on ice” team. In 1980—during some of the darkest days of the cold war—American college kids from Minnesota and Massachusetts managed to eliminate a juggernaut Soviet team.

Just days before the tournament began in Lake Placid, US coach Herb Brooks cut the last player from the roster. Disney’s 2004 film Miracle captured the heartbreaking moment: actor Kurt Russell crosses the name “Jack Hughes” off of a clipboard list of players, before a pair of disembodied hands remove the matching nameplate from above his dressing room locker.

In a bizarre coincidence, the man who scored the overtime game winning goal was also named Jack Hughes, the 24-year-old center from the New Jersey Devils. The Jack Hughes from 1980 played for the Colorado Rockies, who moved to New Jersey and became the Devils after the 1982 season.

Waves of coincidences like these sometimes pile up on each other in constructive interference patterns. Another bone-chilling example is the 1898 book The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility, written by Morgan Robertson. His fictional story anticipated the Titanic disaster that would take place 14 years after publication—in shocking detail.

Robertson’s book is about an ocean liner called the Titan which wrecked on an iceberg in April in the North Atlantic Ocean. Like the Titanic, fatalities were amplified by a lack of sufficient lifeboat capacity. The fictional vessel and the real-life vessel were almost identical in size (882 feet versus 800 feet). The similarities were so eerie that some people credited Robertson with precognition or clairvoyance, which he denied.

Another bizarre coincidence are the Baron Trump novels, written by Ingersoll Lockwood and published in 1889 and 1893. These books raised eyebrows in 2017 for coincidental similarities to the Trump family, including the protagonist’s name, his home at “Castle Trump,” and guidance from a figure known as “Don”.

Strange coincidences like these make us wonder whether we’re truly living in a universe of random entropy, as the current scientific establishment asserts. They make us wonder whether the universe is scripted by some divine author who is lazily reusing plot points. Or maybe events have some kind of frequency or resonance across time that the minds of authors subconsciously pick up on. It could very well be that these bizarre coincidences are merely permutations of probability, but one thing is for sure: they ignite the imagination!

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The Tragedy of the Commons

An ecologist named Garrett Hardin published a 1968 essay in Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The term was coined by William Forster Lloyd in 1833, but Hardin’s piece cemented the term in the modern lexicon.

He described the mechanism by which few of us treat rental cars with the same care that we treat our own personal vehicles. Since no one person owns it, everyone exploits it maximally. Hardin’s was an argument in favor of private property rights: his suggestion was that common property is always doomed to fail in this way.

But in 2009, Eleanor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for proving Hardin wrong. Her book Governing the Commons laid out a game-theory approach for common resources and an empirical look at actually existing commons that work. She proved that property held in common can be a workable model.

The “Tragedy of the Commons” is often taught as an objective economic principle. Hardin’s work remains burned into the public consciousness, while Ostrom’s work is largely unknown. But its 1833 origins and 1968 popularization were heavily influenced by specific political and class interests.

In 18th and 19th century England, there was a concerted effort by the wealthy to enclose common spaces and claim them as private property. The original pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd was a justification for this.

But traditional English commons were not “open-access” free-for-alls. They were actually managed by complex local rules that strictly limited how many animals each tenant could graze. These systems often endured for centuries without the collapse prophesied by Lloyd. Meanwhile back in reality, wealthy landowners often deliberately overgrazed common land to diminish its value to poor neighbors, making it easier to privatize.

For Garrett Hardin’s part, he eventually came to recognize the mistake he made in 1968. He admitted that he should have called it the “Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons.” This story stands as a stark reminder that our received economic wisdom can be tainted by class interests.

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FAA Closes Airspace Over El Paso

A shocking incident took place in Texas, this week when the FAA announced a shutdown of the airspace over the El Paso airport for a full ten days. The restriction was far more draconian even than those put in place in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. The ban included med-evac ambulances, and prohibited aircraft from flying below 18,000 feet.

But after only a few hours, the FAA lifted the restrictions abruptly.

Initially, the stated reason for the ban was cartel drones. However, cartel drones by the hundreds are a constant presence along the US border with Mexico, where the city of El Paso is located.

It was later clarified that the shutdown stemmed from a disagreement between the FAA and the Pentagon on how to handle an experimental laser or directed-energy weapon that was reportedly deployed against cartel drones in the middle of the night. But official reports later indicated that the target turned out to be a common party balloon.

With the official narrative lacking much in the way of coherence—keeping with a recent pattern—the internet began to speculate that this strange story might be a cover-up for UAP activity. Internet speculation was further fueled by the nearby presence of NASA’s White Sands Test Facility, a hotbed of UAP sightings going back to the 1960s, and by multiple UAP sightings before and after the FAA shutdown.

With bizarre drone sightings becoming more and more common, and the explanations of officials become less and less credible, it feels as though we are building up to some kind of a breaking point. In all times and places, ruling classes endorse conceptions of reality that are economically convenient to them.

But when the economic systems break down, the representations of the ruling class tend to break down along with them. The insistence of the Catholic Church upon a geo-centric model of the solar system during the late Middle Ages is a prime case in point. The transition from Feudalism to Capitalism featured a paradigmatic shift to a helio-centric model of the solar system.

We should expect the eventual breakdown of Capitalism to feature another paradigmatic shift of similar magnitude. With wild stories about UAPs and Jeffrey Epstein circulating freely, it feels like we are once again becoming untethered from reality.

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Mystery Schools

The notorious Pythagorean Theorem every child learns about in school wasn’t actually invented by Pythagoras. That Greek philosopher spent most of his life traveling, and would have been exposed to the concept at far-flung ports-of-call in Egypt, India, and Babylon.

The Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 is located at Columbia University and dates back 3,800 years. It lists 15 rows of Pythagorean triples, proving that the Babylonians understood his theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras was born on the Greek Isle of Samos around 570 BC.

After traveling for some 30 years, Pythagoras finally settled down in the Greek colonies that were thriving in Italy during his time. There, he set up a school and began imparting to eager students the wisdom he’d picked up on his extensive travels.

The mathematics for which Pythagoras is principally known today was a foundation upon which his mystical ideas rested. These ideas were reserved for his top students, because Pythagoras structured his institution as a “mystery school”.

Mystery schools are hierarchical organizations where secret knowledge is withheld from new initiates until they rise to a certain level in the hierarchy. The Freemasons are a modern case-in-point.

Two centuries after his death, the mystery school run by Pythagoras went to on have a major impact on the most famous Greek philosopher, Plato. Modern music theory is also derived from Pythagoras’ teachings. But his most famous idea of all—that there is a soul that survives the death of the body—came from the inner sanctum of the Pythagorean mystery school.

For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradition is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while they lived in the Pythagorean community. They were not to eat flesh, or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water was recommended—a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the transmigration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939, page 238

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Trump Waves the White Flag on Immigration

The big news out of America this week was that the Trump administration is drawing down immigration enforcement in Minnesota and Maine. The move comes on the heels of a second brutal killing by federal agents. Though it may seem like Trump is waving the white flag, the president already gave up on mass deportations last summer.

All the way back in May 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump announced a pause in deportation efforts at farms, hotels and restaurants.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump said.

The reason for the announcement is obvious. The major political donors who own these types of businesses profit immensely from undocumented workers, because they’re unprotected by American labor laws and are therefore vastly cheaper than American workers to employ. Whereas legal workers might expect to receive minimum wage and contributions to their Social Security accounts, for example, illegal immigrants have no standing to demand such considerations.

Any serious effort to deport millions of undocumented workers would involve cracking down on the employers who hire them in massive numbers. But the conspicuous absence of any such effort reveals that Federal agents in Minnesota and Maine are actually about something else entirely.

One might also expect serious immigration enforcement to start in Southern states with much higher concentrations of undocumented immigrants. Not northern states with much smaller populations of them. What sets Minnesota and Maine apart is the presence of Donald Trump’s political enemies.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ran for vice president against Trump in 2024, and has been an outspoken critic of the administration ever since. In 2025, Maine Governor Janet Mills similarly found herself in a public feud with Trump. The targeting of these governors’ states for so-called immigration enforcement is certainly no accident.

The presence of masked Federal agents on streets of relatively small northern cities is better understood as political theater, and not a serious attempt to address the problem of undocumented immigration. That ship already sailed last year.

Völkerwanderung

Attila the Hun arrived in Europe in the 5th century AD. His armies displaced the Gothic tribes who had migrated south from Scandinavia and challenged the Roman Empire at its northern borders.

Legendary podcaster Dan Carlin once compared the ripple effects to the classic executive desk toy, where 4 small metal balls ricochet off one another. The Visigoths retreated west from the Hunnic invasion and displaced the Vandals. The Vandals, in turn, were driven south into Spain and ultimately into North Africa. The southernmost region of Spain, Andalusia, still retains their name to this day.

Mass migrations like these are typical of human history. The German term for them is Völkerwanderung, or “wandering of the people”. Here’s a partial list:

1. The Indo-European migrations (c. 3000–1500 BCE)
2. The Late Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1200 BCE)
3. The Slavic Migrations (6th–7th centuries)
4. The Arab-Islamic Expansions (7th–8th centuries)
5. The Turkic Migrations into the Middle East and Anatolia (11th–13th centuries)
6. The Mongol Invasions (12th–13th centuries)
7. The European Colonization of the Americas (16th–17th centuries)

Notice that this list of major migrations peters out in the 17th century. That’s because the Protestant Reformation culminated in the Thirty Years’ War between 1619 and 1648. The Treaty of Westphalia ended that brutal conflict, and established a system of international borders designed to limit the Pope’s political influence.

Our modern conception of the nation-state is less than 400 years old. Before that, city-states were much more common. Only since 1648 has the entire world (except Antarctica) been carved up into sovereign nations, with each square foot of land claimed by some nation or another.

Given the recency and transience of the nation-state, it’s fair to question whether these modern political forms ultimately have the power to prevent the mass migrations of people that have characterized all of human history. We are, after all, descended from nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers.

We don’t count the influx of immigrants into America between 1850 and 1950 as a migration similar to the invasion of Europe by Attila. But that’s just what it was. It transformed America just as Europe was transformed by the arrival of the Huns.

The immigration crisis consuming American politics today is simply too massive a historical force to be long impeded by the crude apparatus of the nation-state. The sooner the public stops being taken in by political theater concerning the natural movement of peoples, the sooner we can adopt policy measures that actually align with the reality of human history.

The Price of Gold

In financial markets this week, the price of gold and silver retreated abruptly from all-time heights. The catalyst was Trump’s nomination of longtime Fed critic Kevin Warsh to replace Jerome Powell as chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve in mid-May. A glance at the price of gold over the past 5 years, however, reveals the recent drop to be a minor blip on a dizzying upward trajectory.

The price of gold, as reckoned in U.S. dollars, has been spiraling upward because the U.S. Treasury routinely spends more dollars than it has collected in tax revenue. It holds bond auctions to raise the extra cash it needs to keep the government running.

The demand for U.S. Treasury bonds is augmented by the fact that the U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency, and by the fact that the U.S. Federal Reserve will swoop in and purchase bonds from jittery investors if demanded yields rise too high. The Fed typically purchases bonds on the secondary market, with money conjured into existence on a computer.

But the U.S. Treasury has overspent so badly—and the Fed backstopped bond markets so much—that many investors and foreign governments are opting to draw down their U.S. Treasury holdings; most notably China.

But after American authorities seized Russian exchange assets after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, major countries like China have dramatically slowed down their purchases of bonds at U.S. Treasury auctions. They’ve been purchasing gold instead.

Doubts have begun to fester as to the status of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. Furthermore, the Fed has printed vast quantities of dollars to backstop bond markets. Both of these factors are eroding demand for the U.S. dollars, just as demand for gold is spiking for related reasons. The result has been a parabolic rise in the number of U.S. dollars needed to buy identical amounts of gold.

Many of the great empires of history have collapsed under similar conditions of currency debasement. The Roman Empire, Han Dynasty China, the Byzantine Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the Ottoman Empire are all salient examples. The recent run-up in gold prices relative to the U.S. dollars matches a terrifying historical pattern.

Those of us who’ve been enjoying American football this season have been carpet-bombed with commercials for Skyrizi, a medication aimed at treating horrific disorders of the lower intestine like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. The proliferation of ads for these and similar products is a sad testament to the state of American backside.

Comedian Robbie “The Fire” Bernstein joked in 2024 that no one can trust a fart anymore because the US food supply is poisoned. Anyone who’s been to Europe will have noticed the difference: many with celiac disease find that they can still enjoy the bread over there.

In another ominous sign, the WSJ reported this week that colorectal cancer is now the top cause of cancer death in people under 50. The article notes that overconsumption of alcohol and processed meat—and a dearth of fresh fruit and vegetables—are causes being investigated by researchers.

Unsurprisingly, the Journal neglects to implicate the ownership structure of food production and distribution companies in the uptick. Because we permit the buying and selling of these companies on so-called “free” markets, owners tend to purchase them with an eye toward return-on-investment.

That constant need to increase profits every quarter means they’re constantly seeking to renegotiate, in their favor, the exchange of value for money they make with customers. They’re financially incentivized to enhance profits by diminishing the value of the products they offer.

That’s why loaves of bread now include many chemical preservatives whose names are unpronounceable. These preservatives are not nutritious, but they do increase shelf-stability and cut down on spoiled inventory. Where perhaps they once converged, the profit motive and societal good now stand in direct opposition.

Regarding the colonoscopies now needed by younger people, a comment on the WSJ article notes, “In the last 15 years, the insurance coverage has gotten SO much worse for this kind of screening. I never even got a bill 15 years ago, even with my lousy company plan. Now I get bills for thousands of dollars and have to fight for months to get them reduced or covered.”

Here, again, the profit motive undermines societal good. Health insurance companies must also find ways to increase their profits every quarter, all while performing no surgeries themselves or prescribing any drugs.

There’s a limit to how much wealth Americans can afford to have extracted from them, without the provision of any actual value in return. That limitation is colliding with the eternal capitalist quest to increase quarterly profits, such that even WSJ subscribers are sitting up and taking notice.

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RIP Scott Adams

Scott Adams, the Dilbert artist, died this week of prostate cancer. Back in the 90s, his cartoons were ubiquitous for their lambast of corporate cubicle culture. More recently, Adams was noted for predicting the 2016 election of Donald Trump in August of 2015. That was shortly after the first Republican primary debate, at a time when no o…

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From Republic to Empire

The US Senate advanced a motion this week to block President Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela without congressional approval. The Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war. Incredibly, it has not done so since 1941. Every military action the US has undertaken since then has been justifie…

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Welcome to the Subrosa Club!

With System Failure now surpassing 500 total subscribers, a handful of you have taken the plunge and become paid subscribers. I don’t have the words to express how encouraging that’s been. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart!

The Subrosa Club is my attempt to give a little something back. I’ll use this space to apply the System Failure suite of ideas to current events, and to share some of my personal life. It’s my hope that some of you will also share more of yourselves in the weekly comment sections.

In the hopes of coaxing more of you into becoming paid subscribers, I’ll keep the Subrosa Club open to all subscribers during the first week of each month. This inaugural edition is the first such preview. I hope you enjoy it!

The System Failure Logo

In September 2021, on the Greek island of Santorini, my beautiful fiancé assisted me in developing the System Failure publication logo. On her insistence, I abandoned my ill-advised plan to use a jarring red fist raised in protest.

The symbol we chose instead was a hexagon. The hexagon is a flattened, 2-dimensional version of a 3-dimensional cube. The cube—or hexahedron—is one of the five “Platonic Solids” named after the notorious Greek philosopher who was obsessed with him.

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato compared the reality we experience with our senses to shadows flickering on a cave wall. His use of shadows in the allegory is telling. Shadows are flattened, 2-dimensional projections of a 3-dimensional world. Plato’s notion was that our illusory universe is actually a lower-dimensional projection from a higher-dimensional reality he called “The Realm of Ideals.”

The hexagonal System Failure logo can be viewed simultaneously as a 2-d hexagon or a 3-d cube. It symbolizes the transcendence of dimensionality that occupied the mind of Plato. The dollar sign is meant to evoke the eternal class war that consumed Athens back in his day, and still affects how ruling class authorities represent reality itself to the working classes.

In the centuries after Plato’s death, the idea of a hidden realm of perfection went on to inform the Christian conceptions of heaven and earth. St. Augustine of Hippo was a Neoplatonist prior to his conversion, and he imported Platonic ideas into Christianity with his suggestion that escape from our flawed world—and ascension into a realm of perfection—was to be achieved through moral acts.

Augustine’s interpretation of Christianity was adopted by the Roman government as the state religion of a dying Empire. Accordingly, it’s the one we’ve been bequeathed by history. But other conceptions of the Platonic ascent carried on in heretical traditions such as Gnosticism and alchemy.

Some of these underground schools of thought were revived during the Renaissance. In his 1596 work Mysterium Cosmographicum, German astronomer Johannes Kepler attempted to map the orbits of the planets to the five Platonic Solids. He assigned the cube to Saturn because it was the outermost planet known at the time. He associated the stability of the cube with his perception of Saturn’s slow, heavy nature.

Black cubes are worshipped in major world religions like Judaism and Islam. In Renaissance occultism, they were associated with Saturn by influential figures like Kepler and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. That’s why NASA scientists were astonished in 1981 after the Voyager II flyby revealed a massive black hexagon covering Saturn’s north pole.

This mystical history of the hexagon made it a perfect choice for the System Failure logo. Each week when I click that “publish” button to send out your newsletter, I’m grateful for the suggestion of my wonderful fiancé. Thank you, Tracy!