The invisible bond between writer and reader; China is our future; Marxist materialism

Why writers write and what reading really is

Last Monday was the first tolerable morning of the tropical Hungarian summer, so I headed out to my favourite park to enjoy the shade and catch up on some reading. My chosen title, which I just picked from the shelf randomly, was W. Somerset Maugham’s On a Chinese Screen. It is a collection of short character sketches during his trip in China, up the Yangtze river, nearly a century ago.

Maugham has a knack for taking you to a time and place that is long gone and bringing it alive in a vivid and arresting fashion. In fact, I find, that reading authors who are good at this is the closest thing to time travel.

Some of his observations really struck a chord with me and put me in mind of the enormous changes China and the whole world, really, has undergone, in less than a century, a rate of change that is unprecedented in the whole of human history. Change is really accelerating, perhaps even exponentially and we are increasingly unable to adapt, our brains wired for earlier, gentler, slower times, where we could take our time to think, read, ponder, write, read again and come to mature conclusions about the world and where it’s headed, without the information overload of the modern age.

During his journey up the Yangtze, Maugham had to consign himself to just three books, as carrying more with him would have been impractical, given that he often walked considerable distances with all he could carry on his person. He mentions how much travellers really cherished their books at the time, often dreading the time they would come to an end and savouring every written word as something that could keep their minds occupied and inspire them.

This was a time when writers were the rock stars, movie stars, film directors and influencers of their time, all rolled into one. Maugham casually mentions, that the easiest way to earn good money was to become a writer. Publishers and publications were lining up to sign up writers and demand for their work was insatiable. He mentions a rather unremarkable writer, who was signed up for 24 articles by an English-language newspaper in China, where he was to recount his pioneering travel experiences in China, a task to which he proved to be singularly unsuited, providing little more than a boring and dry catalogue of his many adventures. Nevertheless, he was paid handsomely and lived off the proceeds for quite some time.

Of course, back then, there was little else to do. If you wanted some entertainment, you could talk to your fellow man, but given that most people didn’t move around much and were generally exposed to the same people day in, day out, that quickly lost its lustre. There were of course many parties and social events, especially for the rich, with all sorts of diversions, one could attend concerts and plays as well, but by and large, the main pastime of the educated classes was reading.

Now, some people still read, even today, but let’s face it, their numbers are shrinking every year and reading is seriously out of vogue these days. That is actually a huge pity, as the process of writing itself and the way it conveys ideas, emotions and thoughts is a unique way of connecting two people.

I’m old enough to remember a time before the internet. We wrote letters to each other, by hand. Phone calls were done on land lines and were expensive, usually left for important and special occasions or emergencies, especially when it came to calling people abroad. Television and Video was of course already a thing, but by and large, all of us read, and a lot too. As a primary schooler, I would go to the school library every monday, borrow three books, which was the maximum allowed to each student, read all of them in a week, then return them the next week to borrow three more. I was particularly fond of Jules Verne novels, historical novels, adventures and so forth.

In my youth, I did toy with the thought, that one day I should become a writer, but the realities of today, in terms of how the publishing industry operates, quickly put that thought to rest. It is rather wonderful actually, that we now have various platforms, like Substack, on which people can freely publish and find an audience, though other than already established authors and journalists, few make a living off it.

But, I digress. Maugham’s astute observations about China came to me rather fortuitously, it is a country that we should pay more attention to, given current events. I was struck by the below passage from his book:

Keep in mind, this was written just a couple of decades before the rise of Mao. The conditions for revolution were already ripe, with the destruction of traditional civilisation, including social mores and religion, engendered by the pernicious influence of the West. It is not perhaps a well-known fact, but socialist revolutions all over the world were fomented by students who were indoctrinated abroad, in Western universities. If we look at the passage above, don’t we recognise the intellectual scene in the West today? We can see, that the very same processes that doomed China to revolution, the upending of the social and moral order, famine and genocide, are now occurring in the very countries that exported this pernicious ideology to less developed countries in the past. The root of all of this is Marxist materialism, a commonly accepted feature of which is this:

Marxist materialism rejects idealism, which posits that ideas, consciousness, or spiritual factors are the primary determinants of reality. Instead, it argues that material conditions and economic factors are fundamental, and ideas arise as a reflection of these conditions.

We can easily recognise that over the past century or so, Marxist materialism has become the commonly accepted philosophical, moral and economic framework by which our societies are governed, with the possible exception of the Islamic world, though I would argue, that is also skin-deep. I have long observed that most people who claim to be religious today are great hypocrites, giving lip service to the teachings of their faith, whilst living materialist lives. A few exceptions exist, like the Amish or Mennonites in the US and various monastic communities around the world. Tibet certainly used to be the the antithesis of Marxist materialism, a state that was built primarily on spiritual principles, but Chinese Communists put an end to that. The Tibetan government in exile, located in the “Little Tibet” region of India, in Dharamsala, maintains some of those ideals, but they are merely guests in another state, India, which was thoroughly built on the ideas of Fabian Socialism from Britain, though many of its institutions are colonial holdovers, especially when it comes to red tape. The so-called “licence Raj”, which makes running any sort of country-wide business a very expensive and difficult proposition is a good example of this.

Vatican city isn’t really a country, since it has no people of its own, who reproduce and form a nation. The Monastic State of Mount Athos in Northern Greece is similarly constrained by the fact, that it only allows men to step foot on its territory. Outside of these few rare examples, we live in a “material world” as the singer Madonna famously put it in the eighties. That song may as well have become the anthem of the modern world as it highlights our spiritual predicament very succinctly. Perhaps it is no coincidence, that it came out in 1984, the year Orwell’s most famous novel was set in.

China is the world’s least religious country. Almost nobody there believes in the spiritual, transcendent or numinous, apart from some lingering folk beliefs mostly to do with ancestor worship and traditional medicine. It is the epitome of Marxist materialism, a society purely governed by scientific principles, as the Soviet Union was before it, which is why its is seen as “our” collective future, by the ubiquitous left-wing establishment in media, academia, science and culture. Observe China today, if you want to know what future the Marxist materialists have envisioned for us. It is treated as a laboratory for their vision of the future and they do not care how much suffering this causes to the Chinese people themselves, who, despite rapid economic growth until the pandemic, reshoring and the bursting of the largest property bubble in history derailed everything, now generally live in profound economic and spiritual depravation.

The suffering in China presently is immense. Tales of university graduates starving to death in their apartments, tens of millions living in profound despair as the economy continues to deteriorate are increasingly common. Since the Communist Party had only one thing to offer, material well-being, their very raison d’etre is now coming undone. Social unrest is now occurring there on a regular basis, though both the Chinese and Western media are suppressing news of it, since it doesn’t fit their narrative.

Living in a post-communist country, I am particularly sensitive to signs of Marxist materialist rot, especially when it comes to the soul. Hungary was never as bad as China or Cambodia, but the destruction of traditional culture and the religious traditions that enabled it did take place. There are many signs of this, from the loss of quality in traditional products that the country was once famous for, to the general cynicism and bitterness of a large portion of the population, something you don’t see in Poland by the way, which did a much better job of resisting the onslaught of Marxist materialism, which latterly has given way to U.S.-style consumer culture. Every time I read or hear about China’s immense social and let’s face it, spiritual problems, I recognise that the same trends did occur in Hungary during communist times and the current conservative government has been fighting a rear-guard action against it, to reverse at least some of the damage done during four decades of left-wing tyranny.

It is a Sisyphean task, as socialism’s replacement, a market economy based on consumerism, has taken over in the post-communist world, including in China, and it is just another child, or even a culmination of the principles of Marxist materialism. Asia, particularly greater China, has developed an ultra-consumerist society, where all human value is derived from material possessions. In Singapore, this is called the 5C-s, Cash, Car, Credit Card, Condo and Country Club membership, but every country in the region has its own equivalent. In China, the one-child policy, selective abortions, restrictions on investment, low interest rate policies and so on, have caused generations of wealth to disappear since the 2022 Evergrande collapse burst the property price bubble there. China is currently experiencing its own version of the Great Depression that ravaged the U.S. and large parts of the world in the 1930s, with a similar deflationary depression of constantly shrinking consumer demand and a collapse in asset values. Foreign companies are withdrawing their investments, in what is called reshoring and moving factories back home or to the likes of India and Vietnam. Domestic companies are failing at an alarming rate and an increasing number are insolvent, due to significant malinvestment during the heady days of the economic boom, that ended with the 2020 pandemic.

China has no social safety net and family networks have been ravaged by Maoism. Though in some cases, familial networks still exist, many internal migrants find themselves completely alone and desperate in big cities, where jobs are scarce and wages are collapsing. In some cases, companies have even asked employees to retroactively return wages that have already been paid, as they simply can’t afford to pay their employees and stay solvent at the same time.

It has been a peculiar feature of Chinese civilisation, latterly exacerbated by Marxism and its latest consumerist offshoot, that there was always little regard for the suffering of the poor there. They simply lack the charitable networks and social safety nets, that proliferate in Christian and Islamic nations. It is every man for himself in China and tales of despair increasingly proliferate all over the Chinese internet, with stories that would be familiar to those that lived through the Great Depression. The CCP is notorious for falsifying economic data, especially GDP and unemployment numbers, so the Western Media, always covering for Left-Wing tyranny, barely mentions it, but Chinese dissidents have been sounding the alarm for years now.

Due to the hyper-materialism of modern Chinese culture (which the West, particularly the US is adopting too), family formation has become near impossible. Tens of millions of so-called leftover women, those traditionally deemed too old to marry, have ever-increasing demands for what any prospective suitor should bring to the table, in a similar vein to the 5C-s of Singapore, with an added requirement for a bride price, which can also run from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Very few men can meet those requirements, so most women, and men, stay single for life. Some Chinese men have taken to “importing” foreign brides from the likes of Vietnam and the Philippines, a phenomenon I also witnessed in Singapore, where there are entire agencies dedicated to pairing up less well-off local men with prospective brides from poorer countries. I’ve actually seen one of these agencies in action with my own eyes, in Singapore’s little Thailand, the Golden Mile Complex on beach road, which has regular line-ups of rural Vietnamese ladies, that Singaporean bachelors can choose from. Here’s an example of one, which even has a facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/p/B-G-Vietnamese-Bride-Marriage-Agency-100023989404574/

Such agencies proliferate all over East and Southeast Asia. China even has marriage markets in every city, where prospective brides and grooms, often prodded by their parents, can try to find a suitable match.

Whatever one may think of such efforts to mitigate the failures of the dating and marriage market in Asia, but in gender-lopsided China in particular, it’s not working. Major East Asian cities now have fertility rates of 0.55 or less, which is a quarter of replacement levels. This means, that every successive generation will be a quarter of the size of the preceding one, leading to the extinction of entire nations in only a few generations.

Young people all over Asia, not just in China, are increasingly finding, that their lives have no meaning. There is no prospect of them ever getting married and having children, for the reasons I outlined above, in very rough terms. Many of them have no prospect of fulfilling careers either, as many are long-term unemployed or stuck in low-skill jobs in the gig economy, despite graduating from prestigious universities. Suicide rates are rising and many are living quiet lives of despair in complete isolation, with no friends, no family, not even pets to emotionally connect to.

What we are witnessing in East Asia is merely a preview of coming attractions and a foretaste of what we can expect in the West, in the coming decades. We are already well underway in becoming just like them, a huge crisis of Marxist materialism. A society based on materialistic principles has no future, because its narcissism is self-destructive and suicidal.

Denying the existence of a higher power, a higher purpose for everyone to live for, has long-term consequences for the health of any society. It is no surprise, that the United States, by far the most religious developed nation in the world, also has the highest birth rates and consequently, the best prospects for continued economic growth and prosperity. Although in the short-term, the US is also going through tough economic times, its long-term prospects are better than that of almost any other nation. We can witness some of the same Marxist materialist rot that we see in China and much of the West, coupled with an absolutely insane woke revolution, that is little more than a suicide cult, but the people themselves, especially in the heartland are perhaps a lot more resilient than we give them credit for and have started to fight back. In fact, all over the West, the mood has clearly soured on far-left woke policies as the disastrous consequences are clear for all to see.

My own contention is this:

Man cannot live without God, in one form or another. We may pretend, that we are fine, leading a completely materialist life, devoid of any spirituality or higher meaning, but those of us in this category, a clear majority in most of the West and East Asia, are lying to ourselves. Some form of spirituality is needed to live a fulfilled life, full of meaning and wonder. A godless man is a poor man. Nothing he does or acquires can satisfy the longing in his heart. Nothing can fill the God-shaped hole in his heart. He may engage in ersatz actions to give him temporary relief, usually developing a host of addictions in the process, but he will never be truly happy. You have to be right with God to find that fountain of inner happiness, which is the only thing that can make universal love flow into your heart and fill your whole being.

Which brings me full circle, back to the start of this piece. We writers write for two reasons: It is what connects us to God, in the universal sense, a greater reality from which all ideas and inspirations are drawn. By sharing this connection and the inner dialogue that comes with it, we connect readers to the same greater reality, universal consciousness, if you will, that we have access to. A writer is a priest and a mystic at the same time, at least if he’s any good. A writer doesn’t just put words together in a set order, like a chatbot. Our words are merely representations on a screen, or on paper, by themselves, they have no innate meaning. However, when the reader reads what the writer has written, they connect across time and space. I can read the lamentations of Enheduanna, the first named poet in history, whose works are from nearly 4500 years ago and connect to her on a very personal level, feel the same emotions she did, have the same thoughts she did and see the world from her perspective for a short while. She wrote about her struggles to maintain her position of high priestess amongst the onset of rivals. She also complained about sexual harassment and unwanted advances from the high priest. We can all empathize with her predicament despite the vastness of time that separates us.

When the reader reads what a writer writes, their consciousness becomes one for a brief period. We especially enjoy reading those, that think like us, since it’s that much easier to put ourselves in their shoes and to see the world from their perspective. A good writer takes us on a journey across time and space, into the platonic realm of ideas, where we exist as disembodied consciousness, for the short duration of our understanding and embodying their ideas. Whatever they write about, we are along for the ride and we are with them in spirit, in a way that would be impossible through any other medium, except that of the written word.

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Rod Dreher wrote about his own mystical experience on his substack last week, with this quote, from his upcoming book, Living in Wonder, capturing my attention:

So, a final confession, of a mystical event that has guided the entirety of my career as a writer. It makes me uncomfortable to talk about this, but then, I’m too old to care what people think.

In 1993, at the beginning of my Christian walk, I was praying for a believing friend having an intense spiritual crisis when I had a sudden quasi-apocalyptic vision. I saw a civilizational catastrophe that cast light on the test my stricken friend faced. At the conclusion of this strange fugue state, I heard God’s voice say, “You will lose your reason,” but, the voice continued, cling to Christ and “don’t be afraid, for the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed.”

You will lose your reason. What? And what is this Lion and Root stuff? I figured they must be messianic titles, but as a man new to the faith, I couldn’t be sure. I phoned my friend, told him what had happened, and he thanked God for this sign, which he believed told him what to do. A few minutes later, shaken by what had happened to me—it was the first such episode and, as of this writing, the last—I sat on the couch of my Washington, DC, apartment reading one of the Gospels, which were all fresh to me then.

Though it was the dead of winter outside, and the windows were closed, a puff of air blew softly across my left cheek and seemed—I know this is weird—to pass through my mind. It left the words “Revelation 5:5” there. Startled by this, I turned to that verse and read these words: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’” (my emphasis)

A surge of electricity shot up my spine! I could not have known that verse. This confirmed that the vision I had experienced while praying had not come from the overheated imagination of a new convert but had been real.

That was more than thirty years ago. I have lived to see specific things foretold in the vision come true. In recent years, as our common culture has gone morally insane, I believe now I understand God’s warning about the loss of reason. He wasn’t talking about me personally; he was talking about humanity. It was only in completing this book that I came to grasp the purpose of that prophecy. In a time of general madness and perhaps coming persecution, our last and best hope is found only through a strong and robustly countercultural faith, one rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and a creed that roars out the good news, and in defiance of the world’s wisdom: that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has already won the victory.

This all ties in with the mysterious process of writing I described above. I immediately recognised Rod’s mystical experience, as I have gone through the same thing on a number of occasions, including the surge of electricity up the spine, which would be very familiar to those practicing any sort of spiritual discipline.

There is a similar passage in Revelation 2:1–7, which ties in with the above quote:

 “To the angel^[a] of the church in Ephesus write:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. ² I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. ³ You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

⁴ Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. ⁵ Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. ⁶ But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

⁷ Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

I am no expert on Christian Mysticism, but from friends who are and have studied it on an academic level, I understand that both passages are referencing the human energetic system, with the tree of life and the seven seals, the seven golden lampstands and the scroll all being metaphors for various parts within the subtle architecture of the human body. Since Sumerian times, the Tree of Life has been a symbol of this, an idea that was taken over by Jewish and Christian mysticism, especially in Kabalah. St Theresa of Avila writes about the seven inner mansions, which is a metaphor in a similar vein.

Looking at it from the Vedantic perspective, we would interpret the below passage as such:

the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.

This clearly looks like a reference to the “root”, called the muladhara in Sanskrit. The Star of David (Star of Vishnu in the Hindu tradition) actually symbolizes the energetic heart, the seat of the soul, located in the sternum, in the middle of the chest, with no relation to the blood-pumping physical organ. The scroll symbolizes the spinal cavity, called Sushumna, the opening of which is the start of a mystical process, called purgation in Christian mysticism, which very generally follows The Threefold Path, with the three stages being purgation, illumination and union.

The seven seals are known as chakras in Sanskrit, but if you look at a cabbalistic tree of life, you can see, that it has seven levels, the seven seals are located at each point of intersection.

Breaking the seven seals leads to Kether, which is symbolised by a crown here, as it is located in the crown of the head (sahasrara in Sanskrit). I will quote my Catholic friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, on the exact process as this is beyond my paygrade:

Purgation generally is the initial awakening, changes in behavior, maybe some difficult non-ordinary symptoms, and of course purgation of spiritual blocks and obstacles. Illumination as you might guess is the stage where changes in perception and spiritual insight start to occur… the subtle spiritual teachings that are woven through the scriptures begin to blaze forth, the Psalms in particular tend to become more important to monastics in this stage, for they are revealed as mystical poetry about the journey. It is the illumined ones in the Gospels that perceive the spiritual truths in Jesus’ parables and teachings, while those who have not received the spirit are unable to perceive them. Jesus makes this clear when asked why he teaches in parables. The stage of union is clearly the later stages of awakening and unfolding, where the line between creator and creation in consciousness starts to blur, and more and more time is spent resting in the infinite Absolute.

Now, this is obviously just one interpretation. The Lion of Judah can have many different meaning and interpretations and I’m not qualified to make determinations in this area. Some regard the Lion of Judah to be the Messiah and that in itself is a pretty big rabbit hole. I’m not here to interpret anyone’s visions or mystical experiences, that’s a task each person must undertake on their own. However, I do recognise the process and the patterns. I myself have had similar visions and received profound messages including one apocalyptic vision that came to me in a dream, but it was incredibly lifelike and lucid, at around the time of my own profound spiritual awakening. I personally never know, if such visions are truly reflections of the future, messages from your higher self or a higher power in general, concerning your own life path and spiritual development, or a bit of both.

This piece is already long enough, so I’ll wrap up for now, would love to hear your thoughts.