The Twin Nightmares of McCarthy and Song

I recently happened upon a couple of books, evil books, which together paint a dark alluring portrait of the past, present and future of money, America, China and the cruelty of war. This post is intended as a brief introduction to these books and how they capture the imagination; they are not fresh in my mind, and there's so much more to be said about these books, but I hope to inspire someone to read them (or maybe don't read them because they're fucked). They linger in my mind like primordial nightmares or irresistible truths. Minor spoilers.

Why do I love these evil books? I don't know but they really do capture my imagination. I'm not (very) crazy, but I'm drawn to certain dark art: the mystery, the subversion of the Christian ideal of a loving creator god, and the allure of explaining the evils of money and power in a way that traditional monetary theory struggles to.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The proof of murder consensus layer

Blood Meridian is a Western novel about a kid who survives a life of violence and serves as a mercenary in a ruthless gang of scalp hunters. The prose is littered with visceral and realistic violence and depravity alongside myriad historical, religious and literary allusions and grandiose poetic descriptions of the biosphere, landscape and wider cosmos (therein we find McCarthy's God). It reads like a Satanic Bible: a mythical treatise on the origins of evil.

The crown jewel in this crown of thorns is the character Judge Holden on whom every critic and reader primarily fixates. He is McCarthy's Moloc, Satan, Ahab, Crowley, Sade, Mars, Hitler, Wotan. The demiurge of war. He is the colonial warlord of America: a naked pedophile the size and shape of the globe.

The Judge wields three layers of power: money, violence and information. The former two are secondary and dispensable manifestations whereas the latter is the primary object of his material ambition. Not wen lambo :( 'The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in a zoo.'
His insane antics in pursuit of this perverted ambition are a ubiquitous and overbearing mystery in McCarthy's otherwise primordial hell. This is the vehicle by which McCarthy presents an economic narrative which explains the exploits of the US empire and the history of war. Its shocking, its tragic, its unchristian, but its worth hearing. I won't go into detail about my interpretation of these exploits because you'd be better off to read them for yourself... they're fucking insane but more compelling than any other theory I've read on such matters.

The most uncanny fact about Blood Meridian is that it seems to contain a direct allusion to the tether stablecoin and its role in the history of bitcoin; it was published in 1985.

Hospital by Han Song
The proof of sickness consensus layer

Hospital is a scifi dystopia by Chinese CCP propagandist Han Song. It follows a Chinese government worker who is forcibly inducted into a totalitarian death cult: the Hospital. The prose is schizophrenic, fantastic nonsense invented by the suffering and relentlessly brainwashed narrator. It follows the same themes as Blood Meridian, reimagined in the context of a manmade medical Cthulhu. Hospital is a descent into madness reflecting the dark depths of humanity under the influence of the total control of the Hospital.

The Hospital is Song's Judge Holden, and his New World Order.

But Holden is an open book compared to the Hospital. Its antics are unknowable and are said to transcend the limits of physical reality. Song reveals his economic theory through the narrator's prescribed delusions, freely appropriating the language of communism, science, medicine and religion. The core of this theory is that disease is the root of all value, because without disease there could be no treatment. This is the Judge's punishing world order extrapolated to the scale and efficiency of space age technocracy... and its ten times as insane.

The most uncanny fact about Hospital is that it overtly alludes to the covid scam; it was published in 2016.