Power As Alchemy

Power, in Jiang’s first Secret History lecture, is alchemy.

The word does not mean secret chemistry. It means the social capacity to make an abstraction act like a physical force. A receipt becomes money. A number becomes scarcity. A person learns to imagine himself as an individual outside family and community. A child learns that the nation-state is a mother who can demand love, service, and death. The trick is not that these objects are simply fake. The trick is that people live, work, fear, obey, and sacrifice as if the objects were natural.

Jiang gives the formula at the end of the August 2025 lecture: power is the capacity to turn nothing into everything. That sentence sits on top of the whole course method. Earlier in the same lecture, he begins from Kant: reality is what we imagine it to be. The political question is therefore not only who has weapons, money, offices, or votes. It is who has trained imagination so thoroughly that invented forms become the world everyone must navigate.

Power becomes alchemy when it trains imagination until an invented abstraction such as money, the individual, or the nation-state acts like unavoidable reality and organizes labor, desire, fear, and obedience.

This page keeps the mechanism narrow. The wider lens already has pages on stories, poetry, attention capture, school, bureaucracy, and the cave. Power-as-alchemy names the upstream conversion: how a non-obvious concept becomes the operating reality inside which those other machines can work.

The Method: Imagination Is The Battlefield

Secret History #1 does not begin with a historical event. It begins with epistemology because Jiang wants the students to see that perception is already political.

Kant supplies the first move. Human beings do not access the thing-in-itself directly; they process reality through perception, time, space, and imagination. Jiang turns that into a course method: if imagination participates in reality, then history is not only a record of events. It is also a record of how powerful people installed models of reality in the minds of others.

That is why the lecture moves immediately from Kant to school history. Jiang tells the students that the history they learned is a system implanted into their brains by powerful people. The sentence is deliberately aggressive. It does not mean every textbook fact is false. It means the official arrangement of facts has already decided what kind of world the student can imagine.

Alchemy is possible because human beings cannot live outside imagination. If no one had imagination, invented objects would remain inert. If imagination were private and weak, power could command bodies but not build worlds. Jiang’s harsher claim is that power works best when the captive supplies the reality-making force. The alchemist does not create the gold alone. He teaches everyone else to see gold.

Money: A Number That Commands Work

Money is Jiang’s first example because it looks material and practical. A person who dismisses myth, religion, poetry, or national identity may still treat money as hard reality.

The lecture begins with banking. A receipt or contract can circulate as if it were gold. Lending multiplies claims beyond the original metal. Central banking then becomes the modern version of the system. Jiang’s conclusion is blunt: central banking is based on power because it can turn nothing, money, the contract, into everything.

The important step is not only money creation. It is scarcity creation. Students keep answering that poverty exists because money is scarce. Jiang treats that reflex as the evidence of successful alchemy: power has brainwashed people into thinking money is scarce. A number that can be expanded must still feel scarce enough to command labor.

Poverty then becomes part of the spell. Jiang says powerful people do not want everyone to have money because then no one would work. Money is made valuable by artificial misery. Parents can tell children to study hard or become poor because poverty is visible. Fear gives the abstraction weight.

Scarcity disciplines labor when money, poverty, crises, or war make an expandable abstraction feel limited enough that people work, compete, and fear falling out of the system.

This is why Jiang connects money to war. The ordinary answer is that wars happen over scarce resources. Jiang reverses it: war destroys wealth so money can keep feeling valuable. The claim is intentionally severe and should stay attributed to the lecture. Its lens value is diagnostic: a system may need visible loss, crisis, or ruin to refresh belief in its own units of value.

The December 2024 Godhead lecture gives the same money mechanism a sharper theological grammar. Jiang contrasts stories with equations: stories can be entered, personalized, interpreted, and argued with, but the Godhead is an equation with no room for debate. The point is not only church doctrine. A closed formula trains reality differently from a story. Once God can be nothing and everything, everywhere and nowhere, the next step is that symbols become reality.

Money then stops looking like a convenient sign for wealth and becomes the cleanest proof of alchemy. Paper can be printed, trust has no obvious foundation, and yet people still treat it as wealth because money is nothing and everything, and the symbol has become reality. The same source extends the conversion to science and the nation-state: capitalism, science, and the nation-state become three underlying ideas of the reality we live in today because representations no longer merely point at the world. They can become the world people obey.

Power makes symbols real when a non-debatable formula or representation stops functioning as a pointer and becomes the world people trust, work inside, and obey.

This is still power-as-alchemy, not a separate doctrine-of-the-Godhead page. Reason as replacement religion owns the later secular substitution of reason, debate, progress, economics, science, and technocracy into religion’s old work. The Dead World And The Cave owns the material-only ontology that makes spiritual reality unthinkable. Nation As God-Machine owns the population, war, and sacrificial machinery after the national symbol has become a sacred actor. Here the question is narrower and earlier: what conversion lets a symbol command reality at all?

The Individual: Isolation As Control

The second alchemical object is the modern individual.

Jiang is not denying that persons exist. He is denying that the self-evident modern unit of society has always been the detached individual. In most of his historical comparison, family, village, kinship, city, religion, and community are more intuitive units of life. He says directly that the concept of the individual did not exist before in the same way.

The individual becomes useful to power when responsibility is privatized. Jiang contrasts two worldviews. In the older polytheistic world, gods, fate, pride, community, and cosmic forces explain suffering and success. In the modern scientific-psychological world, problems move inside the person: genes, synapses, memories, trauma, therapy, treatment, self-management. Jiang says power prefers the second worldview because individual responsibility creates more control and harder work.

The sharpest consequence is political. If the source of misery is inside the isolated individual, collective action becomes difficult. Jiang says the modern system is designed so that people become incapable of collective action because they locate problems inside themselves rather than society. Expert authority then enters the vacuum. Distress becomes a case, treatment, or dependency rather than a shared world to be contested.

Power privatizes distress when a person is taught to treat misery as an individual defect, disorder, or self-management problem rather than as a shared condition that could support collective action.

The 2025 Freud and modernism lecture gives the mechanism a more concrete memory form. Jiang’s source trail is deliberately attributed and severe: early Freud hears women who say they were abused, while later Freud’s theory makes the father innocent and turns the daughter’s memory into sexual fantasy, pathology, attention-seeking, or resistance to interpretation. The power question is not only therapeutic. It is institutional: the father pays the bill, so the theory that protects fathers also protects Freud’s livelihood. Once direct memory threatens a patron, dream interpretation can soften the ground; in Jiang’s harsh wording, psychoanalysis becomes a way to implant memories and gaslight the patient into the theory that protects power.

Power privatizes memory when testimony about injury or social reality is rerouted into fantasy, pathology, expert interpretation, or inner defect, so the threatening claim no longer organizes shared action against the patron, father, institution, or system.

This is one of Jiang’s recurring attacks on modernity: not that every older world was humane, but that the modern world can call isolation freedom. A person may be told he controls his fate while the field of possible action has been narrowed to work harder, consume more treatment, and compete alone. The 2025 lecture names the political end of that inward turn through modern art and Bakunin: if the self is the source of everything, people cannot act collectively, and freedom without other free people becomes nothingness and slavery. That belongs here only when the isolated self is functioning as alchemy; social media self-display belongs primarily to attention capture or mass society unless the source is showing this deeper conversion.

The Nation-State: False Memory With Sacrificial Power

School supplies the third object: the nation-state.

In the same lecture, Jiang asks why school exists. Students answer learning, degrees, graduation, knowledge, and power. He accepts the student who says brainwashing. The school page carries that mechanism more fully, but the power-as-alchemy point is specific: school makes an invented collective feel like a natural person.

Jiang says schools teach children to believe that the nation-state is a person one must love and serve. Language, history, and geography do not merely inform the child. They install a memory. People who would once have understood themselves through locality, kinship, or city are taught that they are the same as strangers they will never know. The country becomes Mother China, the United States, France, or another imagined person with emotional claims.

The phrase “false memory” is not decorative. Jiang says history is the false memory of the nation-state. That memory has consequences. If the nation-state exists as a beloved person, then obedience can be moralized. The state can ask for work, service, war, and death not as naked coercion but as love. Jiang states the endpoint: the nation-state was created to make people obedient to authority.

Power installs national memory when school, language, history, and geography make a nation-state feel like a beloved person whose imagined past can demand obedience, service, sacrifice, and death.

This is where alchemy touches the war and story pages. A state does not only need an army. It needs the inner conversion by which a stranger’s death becomes “our” sacrifice, a border becomes a sacred body, and obedience feels like love.

Monotheism And Modern Abstraction

Jiang’s genealogy is provocative: money, the individual, and the nation-state come from monotheism.

At the close of the first lecture he says these three concepts are beyond ordinary human experience. A person trying to derive them from first principles would not arrive there easily. They require a revolution in thought: monotheism turns nothing into everything and gives modernity its core abstractions.

The next Secret History sources make the genealogy more legible. In the Birth of Evil lecture, monotheism creates truth, evil, and the individual: loyalty to the one true God lets the individual step outside family and community. In the Bible-as-imperial-script lecture, empire uses return, temple, purity, and text to create a loyal political-religious identity. The Bible can become a script for geopolitical ambition.

The point is not that monotheism is only a trick. In Jiang’s corpus it can also create conscience, prophetic revolt, free will, and a divine spark dangerous to empire. That ambivalence matters. The same abstraction that frees a person from local custom can also make the person legible to a larger machine. One God can authorize conscience against the city, or purify a people for imperial strategy. Alchemy is powerful because it can liberate and bind through the same conversion.

Diagnostics

Use this lens when an object feels too obvious to be political.

Ask what had to be imagined first. If the object is money, individual responsibility, nationality, race, credential, market, office, brand, diagnosis, law, or sacred text, ask what training makes it feel natural.

Ask what the abstraction commands. Does it make people work, compete, obey, confess, pay, sacrifice, isolate themselves, seek expert permission, or punish dissenters?

Ask what visible suffering refreshes belief. Poverty, crisis, humiliation, enemies, disorder, and war may function as evidence that the abstraction is real and necessary.

Ask who benefits if the abstraction feels scarce, sacred, personal, or inevitable. The beneficiary may be a state, bank, school, bureaucracy, empire, profession, or platform.

Ask whether the abstraction still serves life. Jiang’s exit is not “nothing is real.” It is that if human imagination accidentally built a miserable system, imagination can also create a new system for eudaimonia. Alchemy can enslave because imagination is real. It can also liberate for the same reason.

How Stories Control Reality - for the narrative and rhetorical machinery by which shared worlds become inhabitable.
Attention Capture As Capital Extraction - for the later energy theory of capital, anxiety, money, and captured focus.
Education As A Soul Game - for school as separation, authority transfer, and formation of the person.
The Dead World And The Cave - for imagination as the power that can either make the prison real or make escape possible.
Free Will As Cosmic Burden - for Jiang’s harder claim that people remain responsible for the worlds they help animate.

Power As Alchemy

Power As Alchemy

The Method: Imagination Is The Battlefield

Money: A Number That Commands Work

The Individual: Isolation As Control

The Nation-State: False Memory With Sacrificial Power

Monotheism And Modern Abstraction

Diagnostics

Related Concepts