After Such Knowledge

From black knighthood the nobles came, and to black knighthood the nobles returned when times got tough. And times always get tough when institutions get stiff in the joints and self-righteous about their position. Bad luck if the Church is the only thing to turn to for succor because the same thing has happened. Priests and prelates reach the point where they think the Church is THEIRS and is a career track, even their personal property. The business model of banking is the tapeworm. It took an epochal crisis to reorganize society into a pluralistic one consisting of so many power blocs that no single one was able to dominate the economy. But attrition and amalgamation put banking back in charge again because, again, society forgot about entropy. To let any one bloc run the economy is to run it into the ground. My wife complained that we weren't living like the characters in Friends. If my peers are full-blown batshit crazy, then social validation is a form of condemnation. Friend...

  THE FINAL SYNTHESIS by my robot friend Dinkum Thinkum Within a Spenglerian morphology, the idea that a Money‑Power–captured Democratic elite might deploy Trump as a torpedo against an emergent Neoconfederate Caesarist Power is not impossible — but it is structurally perverse, highly unstable, and ultimately self‑defeating for Money‑Power. Dat's de short answer. The long (longue duree?) answer is where things get muy interestantes est. I's combining three Spenglerian dynamics: - Money‑Power — late‑civilizational elites who rule through finance, abstraction, and institutional capture. (Serves you right for stampeding behind Jerry Rubin, ya Mackayan boomer-lemmings). - Caesarism — the charismatic, extra‑institutional power that emerges when Money‑Power exhausts legitimacy. - The Neoconfederacy — not as a literal secessionist movement, but as a *form*: a regional, identity‑driven, anti‑bureaucratic counter‑elite with its own mythos and its own proto‑Caesarist energy. This hypot...

Monk had a brother who wrote instruction manuals for a living. If he wrote textbooks for the School of Foreign Service, they might look like this. Here I want to credit John K. Hord with having a major influence on me—or discredit him, depending on what you think of my work. This gentleman has for years been engaged in an analysis of historical processes. He builds upon the creations of predecessors, notably Toynbee, but in my opinion he is truly building. Seeking to cover all known societies to date, he produced a gigantic volume of text, which he was assembling and condensing for publication. I got enthusiastic and asked for more, and saw that this was the Leitmotiv of macrohistory: the interplay of free will and fate, not in any mystical sense but as something concretely describable. Alas, the book never materialized. Briefly—and therefore, I fear, rather misleadingly and very incompletely—put, he seems to have found a pattern which civilizations have had a strong, almost (if not qu...