After Such Knowledge

Hey, hombre, instead of focusing on issues, let's focus on how to vote against the very existence of economic power blocs. First, an updated edition on the Anatomy of the U.S. If phrenology is popular again, my "bump" has been nagging me to periodize recent American history. Special emphasis: when oil ceased to be a sovereign industrial power bloc and became structurally subordinate to global finance. Strike "sovereign" - that word has become too popular since the Tarot-tossing Precarians have made compact with the Morrigan. What they're working on is their personal autonomy. Corporations have autonomy. They are also too freaking sovereign. America lacks sovereignty when it comes to granting and REVOKING corporate charters. Ditto the creation of money and credit. Citizens against Civics hate thinking about these. So does Bing. Confusion reigns, at any rate, between legal subordination and structured finance tranching v. geopolitcal-economic subordination. Th...

I've run into one of the strangest asymmetries in my mentor’s afterlife: the man gave us one of the cleanest, most portable diagnostic tools for understanding civilizational decay—"institutional entropy"—and yet the people who invoke his name most loudly tend to be the very types he distrusted, the goldbugs and the p’tit-boos who want a moral fable about “sound money” rather than a structural analysis of how societies ossify. These two, like revolting peasants, are the poster children for institutions that devolve from serviceable to disserviceable, except to themselves. These take on lives of their own, and become self-serving and self-protecting at the expanse of the larger society. Why didn't "institutional entropy" become mainstream? It’s too structural for a culture addicted to agency. My mentor's mechanism is elegant because it’s impersonal. It says: - A social group invents an organizational tool to solve a real problem.   - The tool succeeds.   -...

In 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧, Curtis explicitly argues that Bernays’ techniques were adopted by governments and corporations to manage, pacify, and steer the public in mass democracies, making them more predictable and easier to govern. He does not frame it as a single conspiratorial “purpose,” but as a systemic shift in how power relates to the public. On the subject of conspiracy, I'm more aligned with SDS founder Carl Oglesby: "of course they will; why wouldn't they?" Curtis opens the series by saying it is about “how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” He shows Bernays pioneering techniques that shape desires, engineer consent, and redirect unconscious impulses toward consumption and political compliance. He argues that these methods were embraced because they made populations more governable by channeling their irrational drives into consumerism rather than political actio...

In every historical case we can actually observe, the builders of Universal States enrich themselves, but the mode of enrichment depends on the structure of the state they are creating. Some enrich themselves through direct extraction, others through privileged access to rents, and others through control of allocation rather than personal wealth. The pattern is consistent across empires, dynasties, and modern technocratic blocs. Here is a clear, structured breakdown that fits Toynbee’s model and maps cleanly onto the modern Universal State dynamics. 🏛️ How Universal-State Architects Enrich Themselves (across ancient empires, early modern states, and contemporary platform–finance–security hybrids) 1. They enrich themselves through control of allocation, not just personal wealth. In Universal States, the decisive power is not merely owning wealth but deciding who gets what. In Qing China, the Eight Banner elite enjoyed hereditary stipends and privileged access to state-controlled resour...

Isn't Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system" just the latest variant of a Universal Empire? Not quite — and the distinction is pre'-damn-near illuminating once you tease apart what Wallerstein is describing and what Toynbee means by a Universal Empire. There's a rhyme, but they’re not the same creature. In fact, the gap between them is where the modern world hides its deepest structural weirdness. 1. A Universal Empire is a political unification. Toynbee’s Universal Empire is a single sovereign authority that forcibly knits together a civilization after its creative energies have died out. Its traits are unmistakable: - one imperial center   - one administrative shell   - one military monopoly   - coercive unity   - cultural mummification   Rome, Qin-Han, the Caliphate, the Mauryas — these are Universal Empires. They are states. A Universal Empire is a political solution to civilizational breakdown. 2. Wallerstein’s world-system is not a ...