Veiled Resentment

The Victorian era, with its unshakable cadence and resounding confidence, stands as one of the most fascinating testaments to England’s cultural, political, and intellectual dominance. It was a time when the empire at its zenith imposed itself as the moral arbiter of the world, bequeathing to posterity a framework of absolute certainties. Victorian literature, with its strong moral conclusions, offered a universe governed by English rationality and dominion. The narrative was not merely national but cosmic—suggesting that the Englishman, through mastery of science, governance, and art, was the natural custodian of civilization itself. Yet, beneath this crystalline cadence lay an unsustainable model, one that would crack under the seismic shifts of the 20th century.

The strategic bequest of the Victorian age to the 20th century is therefore twofold: a profound anxiety of influence, as the empire’s certainties crumbled, and an escape into fantasy, which allowed England to retain a form of cultural power even as its material supremacy diminished. These bequests are intimately tied to the shifting narratives of English identity and the broader narrative of decline that haunted the post-Victorian imagination.

Fig. 23 The Next Time Your Horse is Behaving Well, Sell it. The numbers in private equity don’t add up because its very much like a betting in a horse race. Too many entrants and exits for anyone to have a reliable dataset with which to estimate odds for any horse-jokey vs. the others for quinella, trifecta, superfecta. The eternal recurrence of the same, as Nietzsche framed it, unfolds a cosmos devoid of beginning or end, an architecture where every output node circles back as input to an identical iteration, endlessly. In such a framework, the demand for moral purpose dissolves into absurdity. The cosmos, infinite in time and space, operates beyond binaries of good and evil, refusing to submit its vastness to human conceits of narrative closure. Yet Goethe’s defiance of moral demands, while celebrating the autonomy of the artist, rings hollow when confronted with the persistent itch for a conclusion, as Anthony Capella’s narrator discovers. To demand purpose from art, perhaps, is not to ruin it, but to humanize it, to tether infinite loops of meaning to a finite self yearning for understanding. In rejecting moral purpose, we may resist simplifying complexity, but we also risk severing art from its audience—an audience that, like Capella’s Victorian memoirist, craves resolution, even if only to satisfy itself. And so, while Nietzsche’s cosmos tumbles through its eternal recurrence, it must tolerate those who insist on finding lessons, a phenomenon less a contradiction than an inevitable consequence of human architecture mirroring the infinite. What have we learned? Perhaps only that the output of one iteration can be both conclusion and renewal, endlessly oscillating between the finite and the infinite.

The anxiety of influence manifests most poignantly in the transition from the Victorian novel to modernist ambiguity. Victorian literature often concluded with a moral flourish, ensuring that chaos was reined in and order restored. Dickens and Eliot, even when exploring the darker recesses of the human condition, arrived at conclusions that reassured readers of a moral compass. By contrast, the 20th century’s seminal works—such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—embraced ambiguity and fragmentation. This was not simply a stylistic shift; it was a cultural reckoning. The certainties that had once underpinned English identity—empire, industry, and divine order—had given way to doubt, dislocation, and, ultimately, the specter of decline.

This reckoning is nowhere clearer than in the shadow of World War II, where Britain’s inability to defend itself without the intervention of external powers shattered the Victorian illusion of invincibility. Churchill’s rhetoric, though magnificent, could not mask the reality that England was no longer the center of the world. In the realm of art, this transition is captured beautifully in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The film begins with a death—Lawrence’s—and from there unravels the ambiguity of his life, his role in the empire’s machinations, and the moral compromises of colonialism. The narrative refuses resolution, embodying the uncertainty that the Victorian age had sought to repress.

Parallel to this anxiety, however, is the rise of English fantasy as a cultural refuge. Victorian fantasy, through figures like Lewis Carroll, was whimsical and insular, reflecting an age confident enough to indulge in the absurd. But post-Victorian fantasy transformed into something more potent: a tool of cultural resilience. The emergence of James Bond, a character who embodies English sophistication, ingenuity, and ruthlessness, represents England’s ability to project influence even in a world where its actual power had diminished. Bond operates in a fantasy realm where the Cold War’s geopolitical realities are bent to accommodate an idealized English heroism. Similarly, Modesty Blaise offers a playful yet sharp inversion of traditional English gender norms, her escapades reflecting a world where Englishness could be reinvented through spectacle rather than substance.

What these fantasies reveal is that, in the absence of material dominance, England turned to the dominion of the imagination. The rise of film as the preeminent cultural medium allowed England to perpetuate a mythic version of itself, even as its empire dissolved. Bond, in particular, became the agent of this myth, embodying a strategic bequest not to the English people alone but to the global imagination.

This dual bequest—of anxiety and fantasy—can be traced back to earlier English narratives. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear all wrestle with the strategic bequest motive, exploring the tensions between legacy, power, and uncertainty. Hamlet’s Denmark, much like the Victorian empire, is a decaying structure whose moral certainties have crumbled. Macbeth’s ambition, much like Victorian imperialism, overreaches and collapses under the weight of its own hubris. Lear’s tragedy is explicit in its bequest: the mismanagement of succession results in chaos. Each of these plays foreshadows the Victorian empire’s fate, where the very strategies that ensured dominance would sow the seeds of decline.

Even The Tempest, often read as Shakespeare’s meditation on colonialism, offers an ambiguous bequest. Prospero’s relinquishing of his magical powers reflects the Victorian realization that the tools of dominance—science, empire, and narrative mastery—could not sustain themselves indefinitely. The closing lines, in which Prospero asks for release through applause, resonate with the Victorian cadence giving way to modern uncertainty.

By the 20th century, the bequest of Victorian confidence had been reinterpreted, repurposed, and, ultimately, deconstructed. England’s global hegemony was replaced by an American century, yet the cultural residues of Victorianism persisted in unexpected ways. The ambiguity of Lawrence of Arabia and the fantasy of James Bond are not contradictory legacies but complementary ones, each offering a different strategy for grappling with decline. Where ambiguity allows for introspection and acknowledgment of loss, fantasy offers escape and reinvention.

Thus, the Victorian era bequeathed to the 20th century not only its triumphs but its contradictions, its doubts, and its dreams. It left a cultural inheritance that continues to shape how England sees itself and how the world sees England. The strategic bequest, like the best of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is both legacy and burden, offering lessons that remain as relevant as ever in a world still haunted by the ghosts of empire.

Show code cell source Hide code cell source

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx

# Define the neural network fractal
def define_layers():
    return {
        'World': ['Cosmos-Entropy', 'Planet-Tempered', 'Life-Needs', 'Ecosystem-Costs', 'Generative-Means', 'Cartel-Ends', ], # Polytheism, Olympus, Kingdom
        'Perception': ['Perception-Ledger'], # God, Judgement Day, Key
        'Agency': ['Open-Nomiddleman', 'Closed-Trusted'], # Evil & Good
        'Generative': ['Ratio-Weaponized', 'Competition-Tokenized', 'Odds-Monopolized'], # Dynamics, Compromises
        'Physical': ['Volatile-Revolutionary', 'Unveiled-Resentment',  'Freedom-Dance in Chains', 'Exuberant-Jubilee', 'Stable-Conservative'] # Values
    }

# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
    color_map = {
        'yellow': ['Perception-Ledger'],
        'paleturquoise': ['Cartel-Ends', 'Closed-Trusted', 'Odds-Monopolized', 'Stable-Conservative'],
        'lightgreen': ['Generative-Means', 'Competition-Tokenized', 'Exuberant-Jubilee', 'Freedom-Dance in Chains', 'Unveiled-Resentment'],
        'lightsalmon': [
            'Life-Needs', 'Ecosystem-Costs', 'Open-Nomiddleman', # Ecosystem = Red Queen = Prometheus = Sacrifice
            'Ratio-Weaponized', 'Volatile-Revolutionary'
        ],
    }
    return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}

# Calculate positions for nodes
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
    y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
    return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]

# Create and visualize the neural network graph
def visualize_nn():
    layers = define_layers()
    colors = assign_colors()
    G = nx.DiGraph()
    pos = {}
    node_colors = []

    # Add nodes and assign positions
    for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
        positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
        for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
            G.add_node(node, layer=layer_name)
            pos[node] = position
            node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))  # Default color fallback

    # Add edges (automated for consecutive layers)
    layer_names = list(layers.keys())
    for i in range(len(layer_names) - 1):
        source_layer, target_layer = layer_names[i], layer_names[i + 1]
        for source in layers[source_layer]:
            for target in layers[target_layer]:
                G.add_edge(source, target)

    # Draw the graph
    plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
    nx.draw(
        G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, edge_color='gray',
        node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
    )
    plt.title("Inversion as Transformation", fontsize=15)
    plt.show()

# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()

Fig. 24 Vet Advised When to Sell Horse. Right after an outstanding performance. Because you want to control how its perceived, the narrative backstory, and how its future performance might be imputed. Otherwise, reality manifests with point and interval estimates. This is the subject matter of the opening dialogue in Miller’s Crossing.