After Such Knowledge

The City of London is the oldest continuous political corporation in the Western world. Its sovereignty is damn peculiar. It predates the English nation‑state, the Norman monarchy, and the modern conception of sovereignty. Its earliest functions were those of a merchant commune—a self‑governing association of traders who secured: - rights of passage   - rights of market   - rights of adjudication   These were not granted by the Crown; they were recognized by it. The City’s autonomy was therefore not a concession but a survival. In Hall's terms, this is civilization's tapeworm, contending with the body politic for the status of currency-issuer. In institutional terms, the City began as an instrumentality for regulating commerce in a pre‑national environment. Its purpose was clear: to facilitate the exchange of goods and the protection of merchants. But unlike most instrumentalities of the medieval period, the City did not institutionalize into rigidity. It p...

The ecological and interlocked civilizational crisis is not primarily technological but historical and cultural, rooted in the long development of Western attitudes toward nature and human relations. His causal structure falls into three connected domains. First is our historical attitudes toward nature, especially the dualistic view separating humanity from nature. This led to the belief that nature exists to be mastered, dominated, or exploited. This in turn led to the rise of instrumental rationality—valuing efficiency and control over ecological balance. The crisis must be understood through the history of how our present attitudes toward nature and our fellows came into existence. The way that technology is applied outpaces ecological knowledge, creating effects we cannot predict. Our science encourages linear thinking in a nonlinear ecological world. DDT is a good example. On the institutional scale there are several factors. Economic systems that reward short‑term gains over lon...

  Groups and organizations forget their original purposes; means become ends; plebs revolt. This is the basic problem societies fail to solve. Now we're stuck with a messianic religion that can tear the country in half. What I fail to understand is how the preceding Mammonism didn't set off alarms. Too close to the American heart, I reckon. Now THERE was a cult! Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon — or so it seemed to me in high school. Arnold Toynbee has pretty much fallen down the memory hole, but in the mid-20th century his reputation was considerable. I'm sure I learned his name from Clarke, who mentions him fairly often, in one story even naming a spaceship Arnold Toynbee. Oddly, Clarke never much worked the future-history street corner. I don't know if Asimov ever mentions Toynbee, but A Study of History is the perfect companion piece for the Foundation Trilogy. Like Spengler, Toynbee was big on the grand cycles of history, the rise and...

  Mackinder's Heartland (which is still a real thing) is being surrounded and sabotaged. This piece claims that Washington is engineering it successfully except the China–Iran–Türkiye axis, leaving Beijing with only one viable land route to Europe. Here's the list: the Northern Corridor (Russia) is dead due to sanctions and Europe's Russophobia. The Middle Corridor (Caucasus) has been destabilized by U.S./NATO influence in Armenia, Azerbaijan–Iran tensions, and Turkish opportunism.  The Caspian / Black Sea routes have been undermine likewise by U.S. pressure, instability, and China abandoning the Georgian deep‑water port. The North–South Corridor (Russia–Iran–India) is collapsing because India is drifting into the U.S.–Israel orbit. The Arctic / Baltic routes are militarized and increasingly blocked by NATO. The Maritime routes are disrupted by U.S. naval actions and the “Malacca toll booth” threat. These are the core claims. The article concludes that Iran is now the indis...

The Time of Troubles follows a period of flourishing when growth declines, class struggles intensify, and there's a surge of acting-out. This is because restrictive policies replace more functional processes like innovation and surplus reinvestment as organizations harden into rigid institutions protecting elite privileges at the expense of adaptability. Our present crisis dates back to around 1890 when what I call good honest prosperous growth stalled in the West. Thne our country made up a Big Excuse (who really sank the Maine in Havana Harbor anyhow?) Reversed growth rates "remedied" by so-called "policies of protection" for vested interests has struck the West before, favoring consumers first (~1400), traders (~1750), then producers (~1930). These policies bureaucratize society, stifling inventiveness and punishing change, which fragments the core (elite centers) from the periphery. So while we were shooting up Cuba, conditions closer to the center were buil...

The secondary market emerges the moment a security has been issued once and becomes transferable — but historically, this separation crystallized in the early 17th century with the Dutch and English joint‑stock companies. When a market for resale peels away from the market for issuance is one of those deep structural thresholds in capitalism. The structural moment: 1602–1698   The secondary market becomes a distinct institution only when shares become alienable, durable, and widely held enough to circulate independently of the issuing company. That happens in three linked steps: 1. 1602 – The Dutch East India Company (VOC) creates permanent, transferable shares. Before this, “shares” in merchant ventures were typically tied to a single voyage and liquidated afterward. There was no need for a resale market. The VOC’s innovation:   - permanent capital (no liquidation after each voyage); - transferable shares recorded in a ledger; - a large, dispersed investor base. Thi...