After Such Knowledge

When Usury Became Legal Under Paul Volcker, the Imperium Terminans Civilizationem Slouched Toward Bethlehem, Etc. True it is, interest‑bearing finance is a driver of the crisis, but it is not right that it is the root. Usury is one strand in a larger, interlocking failure of the modern economic order. The evidence we have — historical, religious, and economic — supports that high‑interest debt can destabilize societies, but it does not support the idea that interest alone explains our present breakdown. What monocausality does capture is the moral and thermodynamic dimension: debt claims that grow faster than the real economy eventually detach from productive reality. That’s where the “prophet‑engineer” voice is strongest. Across traditions and analyses, usury is consistently associated with several destabilizing effects: - Debt traps and immiseration — High‑interest lending creates cycles where borrowers cannot escape compounding obligations, reducing consumption and mobility.  - ...

  How seriously should you take the theory about Freemasons, Jesuits, and “Sabbatean Frankists” being behind the chaos? You can take the underlying anxieties and structural questions seriously, but you should not take the literal claim that Freemasons, Jesuits, or “Sabbatean Frankists” are orchestrating global chaos as a coordinated cabal. That part collapses under historical scrutiny, organizational reality, and the way complex systems actually fail. What is worth taking seriously is the pattern that such theories are trying to name: the sense that institutions are decaying, elites are unaccountable, and historical forces feel choreographed even when no one is in control. The danger is mistaking systemic failure modes for secret puppeteers. Why doesn’t the literal conspiracy framework hold? These groups—Freemasons, Jesuits, Frankists—have long been used as symbolic placeholders for anxieties about hidden power. But several structural problems appear when treated as real-world comm...

The "Oh-Be-a-Fine-Girl" network doesn't need a currency the same way states or populations do. If the US$ is displaced, let's assume that the OBAFG aka Lords of the Exchange (Albanese's "Orgy of Power") will simply migrate to whatever infrastructure of settlement, clearance, and asset valuation best preserves their mobility and control. To make this concrete, let's break their logic into its moving parts. What do "money" mean, hardly-neither? This emergent power shouldn't be treated as a national bloc but as a transnational asset‑owning class whose power comes from control over flows—capital, logistics, data, and political compliance. In this worldview money is not a sovereign currency but a platform for moving and multiplying capital. The Lords' priority is frictionless convertibility, not loyalty to any unit of account. A currency is just a temporary operating system for global finance. Frame the decline of the U.S. not as a crisi...

  Steve Hall’s transcendental materialism captures something essential about the human condition: tragic anthropology, symbolic architectures, damaged subjectivity, and the search for a framework that neither romanticizes nor despairs. Hall’s system is unusually well‑tuned to those tensions. Hall’s position begins with a simple but powerful move: human beings are symbolic-material creatures whose subjectivity is shaped by real structures they cannot perceive directly. The “transcendental” part is not mystical; it’s the structural conditions that generate experience, desire, and meaning. Three pillars define it (everything is coming in 3s): - Material causation — political economy, technological systems, and institutional arrangements shape the field of possible actions and desires. - Symbolic mediation — humans do not encounter the world directly; they encounter it through narratives, myths, fantasies, and cultural forms. - Tragic anthropology — humans are neither blank slates nor ...