After Such Knowledge

TECHNICAL AUTHORITY "because it has to be right" — and this is where things get interesting. The Century of Recovery is best understood as a technocratic consolidation era: a period in which a Technical Authority stabilizes a fragmented civilization, rebuilds infrastructure, re‑professionalizes scientific elites, and gradually transitions from emergency centralization to the pluralistic civilization begun by the New Deal. What Ferkiss's Technological Humanism would give us. Call it an International Geophysical Century. (I enjoyed the sci-fi movies inspired by IGY.) A Technical Authority that “calls the shots” during a transitional period. A society emerging from disorder, scarcity, and institutional breakdown. A need for coordinated scientific and engineering expertise to rebuild. A political atmosphere where competence temporarily overrides ideology. A sense that this Authority is not permanent, but a bridge. I don't know if Earth will be saved from Climate Change, ...

Cofnas has stirred up a teapot tempest in academe. Prof Hall told me ideas matter. He IS doing a good job Whitney-Webbing the connections. He taught me about this guy Lacan whose critiques of our systematized seestumz of symobologies bust theirselves open on the Real. Not just university faculties but entire political classes can succumb to action-for-its-own sake, thinly justified by fine verbalizations. The Crusades, for instance. A counterattack on the previous Islamic tide of aggression. Those ignoble knights did show their stuff, gotta admit. Then they turned against each other when the feudalistic s-curve flatlined. It ain't just the Great Unwashed Publix that succumbs to scratching an itch they can't reach. University faculty (what Veblen called the "captains of erudition") get caught up in institutional irrelevancy. Maybe not so irrelevant because it's where the universitie' MAH-nee comes from. The intellectual level of our society can do decent journe...

There's a type of apperceptive mass cultures have, a deep structuring logic that makes a worldview thinkable, verbalizable, and self consistent, a generative structure of thought. Immanuel Kant tried to formalize the one we're using. Plotinus did, too, but it was a fossil compounded of Plato and Aristotle, ergo doomed. ∴ my tears ain't gonna flow for my fellow citizens because they opted to cling tenaciously to their old for-profit reality grid to the point of rapacity. The fact that it's a death grip only now becoming clear, and the Aztec-god grin gives way to the mask of tragedy. By contrast Chinese II's analogue to what Hill and Thornley called a reality grid is a synthesis of Confucian social grammar, Marxist political grammar, market economic grammar (carefully sequestered), and digital governance grammar into a new civilizational operating system. Structurally, China's international fair deals are sovereign loan–based development contracts, not colonial-er...

These parties represent two wings of the same managerial order. Their elite networks differ, but their structural function is identical: to stabilize the existing power system while offering symbolic democratic choice. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is a macrohistorical pattern. Institutions become vested interests, vested interests attract elites, elites shape policy. Foundation-driven finance on one side, resource‑sector on the other, but fragmented. There's the occasional status about getting rid of the Senate altogether. It must be Rexford Tugwell's improved Constitution. Tugwell’s design is a textbook example of a Stage 5 → Stage 6 transition attempt — a managerial re‑founding meant to rescue a civilization whose institutions have ossified. I'd would say it ultimately pushes the system toward Stage 6 (Universal Empire) rather than restoring Stage 3 vitality. (5 is Toynbee's Time of Troubles. Our first gilded age was like this: agrarian discontent, labor unres...

Max Weber had his own kind of institutional seize-up of the gears. He called the process "petrification" or Versteinerung. The iron cage is the result. Or that's how sociologist Talcott Parsons translated it. When the Democrats abandoned the New Deal, this is what their party became. In Weber's variant, it means: rules become rigid procedures become ends in themselves offices become self-protective adaptability collapses the living spirit of an institution dies Rules replace judgment. Procedures replace purpose. His description is more layered, but it amounts to what most people would easily recognize as bureaucratization. But the phenomenon is more widespread than the popular stereotype of rule-following replacing goal-seeking. It's called rationalization. This word is best interpreted as what industry did when it adopted the assembly line. What made me cry myself to sleep was William Irwin Thompson's contention that the same thing had happened to system...