ERITIS SICUT DEUS: The Metaphysical Engine of Civilisational Collapse

Part I: Self-Apotheosis and the Lindy Shield

Civilisational collapse is not a series of unfortunate policy mistakes.

When a proud, wealthy society begins rotting from the inside out (when its currency turns to wallpaper, its borders dissolve, its courts punish the victim, and its streets are handed over to tribal mobs), the commentariat always reaches for a spreadsheet. Free-market economists blame tax rates or central bank liquidity. Sociologists blame demographic curves. Conservative politicians blame a lack of civic education or a left-wing bias at the ABC.

Rubbish. They are staring at the exhaust pipe and calling it the engine.

When an entire civilisation commits slow-motion suicide across every institution at the exact same time, you are not looking at a fiscal miscalculation. You are witnessing a repeating metaphysical catastrophe. It occurs whenever human beings attempt self-apotheosis: the moment a culture declares moral autonomy, builds a technocratic apparatus to suspend reality, and attempts to usurp the throne of the Creator (eritis sicut Deus).

Wait. Before the secular rationalists in the back row roll their eyes and mutter that Dennis has put down his consumer behaviour textbooks to become a Sunday morning revivalist, hold your horses.

This argument does not require you to hold a single ounce of personal religious piety. You do not need to believe in six-day creation, angels on clouds, or theological dogma to see the teeth of this trap. My anchor here is the Lindy Effect.

As Nassim Taleb popularised (and as every practical builder since the Bronze Age has known in his bones), the future life expectancy of any non-perishable idea or technology is proportional to its current age. A corporate management fad published in the Harvard Business Review last Tuesday has a life expectancy of about six months. A set of texts that has survived three thousand years of empires rising, rotting, and burning to the ground is not a collection of quaint bedtime stories. It is a hardened, stress-tested manual of empirical systems biology and human psychology.

Read the Scriptures with a practitioner’s eye, and you realise they are the oldest laboratory notes on human organisation in existence. They record what happens when the human animal tries to hack its own operating system. When we ignore battle-worn warnings that have survived thirty centuries of brutal selection pressure, we are marching into the buzzsaw at our own grave peril.

Open the manual at the very beginning: the prototype in Genesis 3.

Look at the mechanics of the pitch in the Garden. The serpent does not tempt Eve with a tax cut, a faster horse, or a bigger mud hut. He goes straight for the ontological jugular: "Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum" (You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil).

In the ancient Hebrew idiom, "knowing good and evil" does not mean acquiring information. It means seizing the sovereign jurisdiction to define Good, Evil, Truth, and Reality independent of the Creator. It is mankind looking at the fixed architecture of the universe and saying: We will decide what a man is. We will decide what a woman is. We will decide what constitutes justice, value, and truth. We are our own lawgivers.

And what is the immediate, mathematical consequence of that usurpation?

Banishment from Paradise. The moment creation severs itself from its transcendent source and declares moral autonomy, the system drops into high friction. Sweat, thistles, painful toil, and eventual physical decay are not arbitrary lightning bolts thrown by a petulant deity. They are the inevitable thermodynamic result of trying to run a finite biological machine as if it were the self-sustaining Creator of the cosmos.

Part II: The Scriptural Palette of Human Hubris

Once you spot the eritis sicut Deus virus in Genesis 3, you see it replicating across every single domain of human organisation. Whenever men gather in cities, treasuries, or parliaments, the urge to play God resurfaces under a new coat of paint. Look at the diagnostic palette laid out across the biblical record:

1. Technocratic and Administrative Hubris: The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11)

We touched on this in our earlier dissection of the Nanny State, and it remains the foundational blueprint of bureaucratic tyranny. The settlers on the plain of Shinar invent a clever new technology: kiln-baked bricks and asphalt bitumen instead of rough fieldstones. Intoxicated by their own engineering, they immediately form a centralized collective: "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad".

Notice the twin engines of Babel: technological arrogance and total safetyism. They want to build a hermetically sealed administrative mega-structure that eliminates human vulnerability, risk, and dispersion without requiring moral repentance.

Look around Sydney, London, or Paris in 2026. Our modern Nanny State is Babel rebuilt with central bank credit, algorithmic surveillance, and ten thousand pages of Work Health and Safety compliance. Every time a bloodless technocrat promises "Zero Harm," "Net Zero," or cradle-to-grave insulation from every economic shock and hurt feeling, you are looking at a bricklayer smearing bitumen on the plains of Shinar.

2. Imperial and Political Self-Deification: The Babylon Archetype (Isaiah 14:12-15)

Move from the bureaucrats to the rulers. In Isaiah 14, the prophet dissects the King of Babylon, the archetype of absolute political power. Listen to the internal monologue of the state when it slips its leash: "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God... I will make myself like the Most High."

Politics is supposed to be a janitor's job. It is about keeping the streets swept, the borders guarded, and the crooks in chains. Yet political power has an incurable appetite for total sovereignty. It wants to reach inside your skull, dictate what your children believe, and claim absolute moral authority over the conscience. And as Isaiah records, the consequence is always the same: the state that claims the throne of the Most High is dragged down to Sheol, the pit of corpses, triggering its own violent ruin.

3. Commercial and Materialist Apotheosis: The Prince of Tyre (Ezekiel 28:2-9)

Now look at the trap waiting for the capitalists and the technocrats. Tyre was the Silicon Valley and the Wall Street of the ancient Mediterranean rolled into one: a maritime trading powerhouse choking on gold, merchant ships, and technical brilliance.

What did the Prince of Tyre conclude when he looked at his balance sheet? "I am a god; I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas."

We see this exact pathology in Davos and Silicon Valley today. When a commercial elite becomes drunk on global supply chains, algorithmic trading, and material abundance, they start believing their wealth grants them divine immunity from moral, biological, and economic laws. Ezekiel’s rejoinder is as cold as a butcher’s hook: "Yet you are but a man, and no god... Will you still say, 'I am a god,' in the presence of those who slay you?" Commercial sophistication cannot buy off reality when the barbarian kicks down the city gates.

4. The Degeneration of the Self-Proclaimed God: Nebuchadnezzar’s Madness (Daniel 4)

Watch what happens to the human mind when the delusion of divinity takes hold. King Nebuchadnezzar walks on the roof of his royal palace, gazes out over the hanging gardens and massive walls, and boasts: "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?"

Within the hour, his reason snaps. He is driven from among men, eating grass like an ox, his hair growing like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws.

Did you get that? That is one of the sharpest psychological insights in all of literature. When man attempts to elevate himself to God, he does not become divine; he becomes a beast. When a culture throws off transcendent moral law in the name of "liberation" and self-creation, it does not ascend into a higher plane of enlightened consciousness. It degenerates straight into the dirt of primitive, animalistic reflexes, tribal savagery, and rutting appetite.

5. The Fragility of Political Deification: Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:21-23)

Finally, look at the sheer fragility of the idol. In Acts 12, King Herod puts on his royal robes of woven silver, takes his seat on the rostrum, and delivers an oration to a desperate crowd begging for food supplies from the royal granaries. The sycophantic crowd screams back: "The voice of a god, and not of a man!"

Herod drinks it in. He does not give glory to God; he accepts the liturgy of state worship. Immediately, he is struck down and eaten by worms from the inside out. Political institutions that posture as divine saviours always look invincible in the morning sun, glittering in silver regulation. Inside, the parasites are already hollowing out the carcass.

Part III: The Modern Fall — Deconstructing Truth and Elevating Caesar

For roughly fifteen hundred years, Western civilisation had a structural governor that kept this hubris in check.

Most importantly, the Christian chassis bolted one non-negotiable truth to the floor of every parliament and marketplace: Man is fallen.

Because human beings are crooked timber (flawed, finite, and prone to self-deception), no king, no parliament, no corporate cartel, and no mob can ever be trusted with absolute power. You knew life involved tragedy, and you relied on God for grace, your family for survival, and your local parish or guild for mutual aid.

Then, over a two-hundred-year demolition job culminating in the twentieth century, Western intellectuals sawed off the branch we were sitting on. That rebellion took two catastrophic modern forms.

The First Rebellion: The Sin of Postmodernism

Sit outside the Café de Flore in Paris after the Second World War and watch Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida go to work.

Where the old Enlightenment atheists at least pretended to believe in objective physical truth and natural law, the postmodernists went full Genesis 3. They declared that objective TRUTH itself is dead. To Foucault and his academic priesthood, logic, science, biological sex, morals, and language are nothing more than sinister power games invented by dead white men to oppress the marginalised.

In the postmodern classroom, human fallenness was erased and replaced by the Imperial, Sovereign Self. Every individual became a pocket-sized god with the sacred right to invent their own reality, overwrite their own chromosomes, and demand that the rest of society validate their hallucination on pain of cancellation.

Worse, as the young French analyst Brivael Le Pogam has brilliantly documented, when you strip the transcendent backbone out of a Christian society, its leftover virtues go rancid. Christian charity (which was always tethered to truth, repentance, and household discipline) mutated into what Le Pogam calls "suicidal empathy" and a "culture of excuse."

Under the culture of excuse, nobody is ever morally responsible for their actions. If a thug burns down a school or stabs a pensioner, the postmodern sociologist explains that the criminal is actually the victim of systemic structures. Society’s protective antibodies are paralysed. We disarm the police, open the borders, and apologize to the arsonist while he pours petrol on the curtains.

The Second Rebellion: The Sin of Socialism and the Prosthetic God

Here is the supreme psychological irony we exposed in our look at the Nanny State: radical hyper-individualism always ends in totalitarian statism.

When you tell millions of atomised individuals that they are little gods, and then they stub their toe on the brutal reality of life (unequal talent, market cycles, sickness, and mortality), they panic. Having killed God and smashed the intermediate buffers of family, church, and guild, they turn in terror to the only collective entity left standing: Caesar.

Communism and democratic socialism are not economic theories about factory ownership. They are the coercive, state-enforced attempt to build a materialist utopia by fiat. They liquidate individual agency and declare the State to be the supreme arbiter of truth, ethics, and economic value.

Look closely at the modern Welfare-Nanny State, and you will see it operating as a counterfeit Messiah. In Matthew 4, before Christ begins His ministry, the devil takes Him into the wilderness and offers Him three specific shortcuts to win the world. Christ rejects all three. The modern Nanny State has embraced every single one of them as official government policy:

[Private thought: Dostoevsky saw this coming in 1880 with his Grand Inquisitor. Mankind will gladly hand back its freedom to anyone who promises to keep the bread bin full and quiet the terrifying burden of a free conscience. I just didn't think we would trade our birthright for a taxpayer-funded NDIS package and a diversity certificate.]

Part IV: The Operational Mechanics — France as the Canary in the Coal Mine

Do not take my word for this. I am a retail and systems practitioner; I want to see the numbers on the board. What happens to the physical machinery of a nation when it swallows postmodernism, elevates Caesar to God, and runs this experiment for half a century?

Start with the economic X-ray: economist Mark Perry’s "Chart of the Century," tracking US consumer prices from 2000 to 2025 measured in time prices (how many hours of your life you have to work to buy something).

Look at the two halves of that chart:

Everything the prosthetic god touches turns to lead. By pouring price-insensitive borrowed money into care sectors while strangling supply with red tape, the State destroys affordability, locks the poor into permanent dependency, and creates a clamour for even more state intervention.

Now, if you want to see where that feedback loop terminates, look at France.

France is the canary in the Western coal mine. As Brivael Le Pogam (find him on X, he is an interesting young man) lays out in his chilling autopsy of his homeland, France has been running a relentless 45-year socialist feedback loop since François Mitterrand took power in 1981.

Today, French government spending sits past 57 percent of GDP (the highest in the developed world). The national treasury has been turned into the ultimate inverted Tragedy of the Commons. Where a legitimate state exists to stop ten fishermen from stripping a shared bay bare, modern social democracy turns the public purse into an unfenced ocean where every voting bloc, union, and grievance coalition races to loot the last euro before the sovereign debt market snaps shut.

And what happens when the ordinary citizens try to put the brakes on the technocratic machine? The priesthood simply overrides the ballot box.

In 2005, the French electorate was asked in a national referendum whether to ratify the European Constitution, which handed vast slabs of national sovereignty over to the unelected bureaucratic cathedral in Brussels. The French people voted a resounding Non (55 percent against). What did the political class do? In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy and the Euro-elites simply repackaged the exact same text as the Lisbon Treaty and rammed it through parliament without a public vote.

Babel does not ask permission from the bricklayers.

Why doesn't the electorate revolt and tear the Nanny State down? Because, as we saw when we pulled the wiring out of the wall, the modern electorate is locked together by three ruthless behavioural gears:

Part V: The Inevitable Doom Loop and The Autocratic Reset

Put those gears together and look at the whole board without blinking. You are watching a Great Pincer Collision that no normal democratic election can ever fix.

On the Left Track of the pincer sits the greying, native Western electorate. In France, Britain, and Australia, the median voter is getting older every year. They have paid taxes into the Ponzi scheme their whole lives, and their rational, short-term financial incentive is non-negotiable: Protect my state pension, fund my free hospital bed, and keep my residential property values inflated at all costs. They will crucify any politician who tries to cut public spending.

On the Right Track of the pincer sits the unintegrated minority and welfare-dependent coalition, multiplying in the banlieues and outer suburbs, rationally extracting state subsidies through demographic weight and street warfare, protected from police crackdown by the post-modern "culture of excuse".

And right in the middle of the pincer sits a shrinking, exhausted, overtaxed productive class trying to pay the bill for both tracks while the debt compounds and the physical infrastructure rots.

Every single subgroup in this machine is acting rationally according to its immediate biological, financial, or status incentives. Which means a democratic vote for "less government" is mathematically impossible. You cannot vote your way out of a positive feedback loop when fifty-one percent of the passengers are dining out on the fuel lines.

In General Systems Theory, a runaway system with no internal governor only stops one way: it accelerates until it hits the physical wall of CHAOS.

When the sovereign bond market finally refuses to roll over the debt, when the currency is printed into confetti to pay the Medicare, NDIS, and pension bills, when the hospital queue stretches from eight hours to eight weeks, and when the seven hundred no-go zones in France spill over into every shopping strip on a Tuesday night, the polite "progressive consensus" will evaporate in twenty-four hours.

Remember our Evolutionary Conformists? Their core biological programming is not left-wing philosophy; it is survival through submission to the dominant power. The exact moment the maternal Nanny State can no longer keep the lights on or keep the wolf off the veranda, that same herd will spin on a sixpence and beg for a predator with iron teeth to restore order at any price.

You do not exit a collapsed welfare democracy into a polite Thomas Jefferson reading group. When the Tower of Babel fractures, history exits through an autocratic reset. Looking down the road today, that reset will take one of three shapes (or an unholy marriage of all three):

I take zero pleasure in laying that out. I have children and grandchildren who have to walk down that road after I am gone.

If I could wave a magic wand and convince the Western electorate to read Mark Perry’s chart, repent of the ancient sin of eritis sicut Deus, fire the Nanny, and return to the hard, humble, self-reliant virtues that built our civilisation, I would do it before breakfast.

I cannot. And neither can you. You cannot talk a buffalo stampede out of running over a cliff when every beast in the herd has a completely rational incentive to keep charging right up until its hooves leave the dirt.

So if you are one of the few people standing on the ridge watching the dust cloud rise, stop wasting your breath screaming at the stampede. Stop waiting for a political saviour at the next election.

Build your own ark. Get out of debt. Own real physical assets and master real, calloused-hand skills that an algorithm cannot eat. Anchor your household back to the transcendent bedrock that survived three thousand years of falling empires, tighten your family, and build high-trust local covenants with neighbours who still know the difference between a man and a god.

Because the red bars on the chart are still climbing, the bitumen on the tower is cracking, and the worms are already inside Herod’s robe.