After Such Knowledge

Got Sagan on my mind. It’s not widely documented online. It comes from one of William Irwin Thompson’s spoken stories—something he told in lectures and seminars rather than in his published books. Thompson often used H.G. Wells’s idea of a “Freemasonry of Science”—a transnational ethical brotherhood of scientists—to illustrate moments when scientific elites almost acted as a planetary moral order. The episode is his claim that Werner Heisenberg briefly considered organizing a kind of secret international scientific compact during the early atomic era. Thompson said that Heisenberg, horrified by the implications of nuclear chain reactions, contemplated whether scientists across nations might quietly agree not to pursue the bomb—essentially a real-world version of Wells’s imagined “Freemasonry of Science.” The idea was that scientists, not governments, understood the danger first. They might form a moral fraternity transcending national loyalties. They could collectively refuse to weapon...

Thorstein Veblen, who invented Institutional Analysis on his personal quest for the origin of evil, would have called Larry Fink a predator and compare him to one of the Bronze Age invaders who supported himself by plunder and raiding the villages of sedentary farmers who are the real creators of wealth, defined as whatever meets human needs, the good and useful things and the artisan's tools that make them. Veblen came from what I call the "real original Populists", settlers in the Midwest bringing agrarian traditions dating back to the cooperative communitarian ethic that somehow survived from the Neolithic. It was perverted by the time George Wallace got ahold of it. I call Fink a parasite. A taker instead of a maker. Like the Bronze Age invader who conquered an agrarian society, he sets himself up like a lord demanding tribute in exchange for protection from other raiders. (The Kirghiz steppes were a crappy place to live until the plow was invented.) Finance can start...

Tired of this Wolff guy, but I can't diss Hall so easy. It's microhistory. His specific date of 2400 BCE is too neat and sharp and unsupported. What IS supported is the macrohistorical pattern: private creditors and public issuers have been in structural tension since the earliest recorded economies. JC is in the Temple. 2400 BCE is an interpretive claim, a rhetorical flourish instead of a documented event. Even so, the presence of private bankers and credit systems are documented. So is the struggle between moneylenders and public currency-issuers all the way back into the Bronze Age. Call the former "private credit actors". The Bronze Age is called the Archaic Age. Fast forward past 1200 BCE, the start of the Iron Age, to the Classical period (5th–4th century BCE), when private bankers were financing commercial ventures, managing risk, and lending capital. Archaeology suggests similar market structures existed centuries earlier in the Aegean Bronze Age. This matches...

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...