The Blind Men and the Leviathan
Exploring the Anatomy of State
Picture this: A group of men surround an enormous biomechanical creature of indeterminate size. Belching and pulsating in the dark, it writhes its limbs in incomprehensible movements while growing without end.
The men attempt to describe it by feeling its various parts and calling out what they feel. “I feel humanitarian aid,” one cries out, while another announces, “I think I’ve found job creation.”
Others, still, deny the existence of the Leviathan at all.
Finally, a sighted man with a flashlight enters and shines a light on one hindquarter of the beast, parasitically attached to the framework of American governance. “Guys,” he says, “You are not going to believe this.”
You may have gathered by now that this is a rehashing of the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. Instead of an elephant, the Leviathan in question is the previously inscrutable anatomy of the American Deep State. The man with the flashlight is DOGE. You can just write things.
As blind men, many of us failed to accurately grasp the beast’s true nature and size. It’s far larger than any one man can understand, so it takes significant teamwork to note its countless limbs — some sclerotic, some sinewy — as well as its massive arteries, redundant organs, and gaping maw. We’ve only begun to explore it, and what’s already been discovered is incredible.
Exploring the Anatomy of State
It took until now for neocons to admit the Deep State is even real.
In Fiscal Year 2025, the US is set to spend north of $1 trillion in interest on its national debt of what will soon be $37 trillion. A reasonable question would be, “How the hell did this happen?” How did our Leviathan get so enormously hungry and overgrown that we can no longer afford to feed it?
This is the question the DOGE team has been tasked with answering, and the answers have only begun pouring in. We’re set for shocking revelations of corruption, fraud, and waste to last us at least through this year, and possibly the next several. It’s not just DOGE doing the revealing. What will we discover when the Epstein, JFK, RFK, and MLK files are released? What will we learn from long-classified documents about 9/11 or UFOs? Where do the secrets and corruption end?
Shutting down the US Agency for International Development cut off blood flow to one of Leviathan’s limbs. It was a low-hanging fruit — an easy action item to immediately cut waste and fraud. Minor findings included crumbs in its fat folds like $15 million for condoms for the Taliban, millions for LGBT inclusion in Macedonia (out of hundreds of millions over decades), and $11 million to Vietnam to encourage people to stop burning trash.
NB: As a resident of Vietnam, I can promise you that money did not make an impact.
While it’s entertaining and often baffling to look at the silly and wasteful spending programs that came out of USAID’s $44 billion slush fund, there are far more serious implications and findings.
For starters, the above programs — among many others — are the soft power tools of American foreign policy. Why, specifically, programs like LGBT inclusion and DEI initiatives were favored by USAID are well explained by N.S. Lyons in a recent piece:
The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
The ostensibly noble goal of USAID was originally to spread peace via the power of the American purse. But in the six decades of the organization’s existence, it became in many ways a grift factory with entire nations and classes of bureaucratic hangers-on depending on its beneficence. And that’s the charitable take.
In reality, the slush fund behind USAID became an unaccountable war chest to propagandize the globe and undermine foreign governments at the expense of the American taxpayer while funding programs many would object to. The propaganda was indirect, as in ideologically-driven programs, and it was direct as well, as in directly funding journalists and media outlets. For example, USAID was funding a vast, worldwide propaganda network covering 6,200 journalists, 707 non-state media outlets, and 279 media NGOs over 30 countries.
But that’s far from all. USAID was also:
Spending hundreds of millions to funnel illegal migrants into the US via NGOs
Funding Pfizer (its 2nd largest fund recipient) to the tune of $4 billion in 2024
Funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance
Sponsored online censorship worldwide on a wide variety of hot-button topics
Now, one could argue that a propaganda and agitation apparatus — especially internationally — was valuable during the Cold War. Run as a patronage network, USAID provided an effective soft-power bulwark against Soviet influence. But the Cold War is long behind us, and the US now has ten times the national debt it did in 1991 after the fall of the USSR.
Unfortunately, rather than reap the peace dividend the country had been promised, the American people were forced to continue to pony up funds for increasingly absurd projects. To play at magnanimity when you’re rich is one thing — to do it when you’re staring down the barrel of a sovereign debt death spiral is madness. Are we really supposed to fund every downtrodden person in every corner of the world while our own people need help?
Certainly, there were some valuable programs that’ll get rebooted once they’re rerouted into the State department. But the free lunches couldn’t last forever.
This particular rabbit hole goes very deep, and I don’t want to go down it too much further here because USAID is only one part of Leviathan’s anatomy.
Leviathan Loses Weight
In what’s one of the biggest moves of the last few weeks — and that’s saying a lot — President Trump called for discussions with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to create a trilateral discussion on military spending. The goal? Reduce military spending in each country by half. Watch:
Such a cut — roughly half a trillion dollars — is unprecedented. If there’s any part of Leviathan that’s grown way beyond its intended purpose, it’s the Department of Defense. DOGE has yet to be unleashed on the DoD, but the Pentagon is famously wasteful. The fraud, corruption, and waste unearthed there will make USAID look like chump change. It’s also a way to claw back a US military that’s wildly overextended, and may reduce the odds of a major power conflict.
I’m of the opinion that closing USAID and especially the National Endowment for Democracy was a prerequisite from both Putin and Xi before considering any such talks with Trump. Reforming the DoD will be a monumental task. However, if it can be done while saving money and reducing the risk of global conflict, it’s one of the best possible moves for the country.
To reiterate: US debt is wildly out of control. Military spending has grown steadily for decades even without a sufficient threat to justify it.
You can expect a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth from Congress, defense contractors, and the many parasites the DoD has accrued over the years. But like a diabetic patient, the Leviathan will be forced to lose weight or have limbs amputated entirely.
The DoD is but one part of Leviathan’s anatomy. Health and Human Services has a budget of $1.7 trillion this year. What can be cut there, one wonders? What waste will be found at Housing and Urban Development?
What, too, will be found of the potential audit of Fort Knox and the US gold supply?
The Beating Heart of Leviathan
What we will find, after a thorough examination of Leviathan’s anatomy, is its ever-beating heart. This is the Federal Reserve, from which all money flows. This will likely be one of the last points of attack for DOGE and the new administration, if they make it there at all. Should they manage to even identify the Fed as one of their targets, I’d throw a party.
The reason is straightforward: The US has been a nation ruled by usury for more than a century. Our entire financial system is corrupt from the ground up. A nation that is not in charge of its own monetary supply is not in charge of its own destiny, and will forever be beholden to a system that’s doesn’t have its best interests at heart.
The US will never pay back its debt. It’s impossible. It’s not just a US issue, either — mounting sovereign debt (and private debt, and unfunded liabilities) is a worldwide phenomenon. As I wrote in The Alfred Hitchcock Theory of Debt,
There are three ways out of enormous sovereign debt problems:
Grow your tax revenue enough to pay off the debt and/or decreasing spending, e.g. by growing the economy and reducing government services
Monetize the debt, i.e. devalue the currency to make the debt worth less in real terms
Default on the debt and face sky-high future borrowing costs and penalties as well as the social unrest that goes with them
Getting rid of the Federal Reserve and replacing it with a new monetary system backed by something tangible, like precious metals or commodities, would prevent the US from hurtling off a debt cliff. It’d be essentially an even more radical form of option 3, but radical changes are needed now.
How exactly would such a scenario unfold? God only knows, but it needs to happen. In the short term it will be painful, but there’s little choice. The life cycle of fiat currencies is nearly complete, and worldwide they’re headed to zero. It’s just a math problem. The upside is that sound money will prevent corruption in the future. Cheap fiat money is what’s led our Leviathan to grow so out of control, and it can’t be allowed to continue.
The alternative to this option is ever-increasing inflation, punctuated by sharp cycles of deflation, that will eventually impoverish the vast majority of the country.
The US will have to perform a never-before-done heart transplant surgery on itself if the country is to survive. What’s happened so far with DOGE is simply a warmup to the main event. Got popcorn?
Great article, Sam! 👊🏻