After Such Knowledge

 The purpose of civilization is to increase the amount of wealth in the world. For the majority, this means more Life. On the 45° slope of an s-curve, the society as a whole gets used to this over the generations, and rising standards of living lead to rising expectations. The same problem can recur if people aren't better off each year than the last or they can't give their children more than they themselves started with. At the same time the society's economy is organized for rising standards and will undergo tensions when this isn't maintained. Doubt and anxiety creep back in. Dyerism ought to offset these feelings of being ephemeral. Or a psychological adjustment to a steady-state economy can be made. If only people could consciously recall their previous lives, then they could experience slowdowns more philosophically without the fear of impending death. Even the symbolic termination of their way of life can put them in a condition of fight-or-flight. This is what ...

 In a footnote in his 𝘔𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘴, Victor Duruy wrote: "*The history of the early stages of the feudal system has long been and still is a subject of controversy and disagreement among scholars." After giving an account of how the dukes and counts emerged as good defenders of early France, ending the era of (further) invasions, as though closing the door behind them after they had used it themselves, Victor Duruy went on to note:  "Later, the masters of these castles were the terror of the country, but they saved it at first, and though feudalism became so oppressive in the latter part of its  existence, it had had its time of legitimacy and usefulness. Power always establishes itself through service and perishes through abuse." This law of human nature has, unlike the physical laws enunciated in a previous video, never changed. Duruy’s relationship with Napoleon III - Napoleon III first noticed Duruy because of his historical scholarship, especially his ...

I'm getting tired of people on Facebook and BlueSky pointing out the absurdities and criminalities of Trump and his cultish supporters. Are you trying to understand this current cult of unreason? To account for its virulence? "Hey, such-and-such is obviously bad, openly evil. The only thing I have to do is point at it and say it out loud: 'This contradicts good sense, rationality, and all moral codes.'" As students of irrationality, you get a failing grade. And you're frozen in place. Pointing a finger is not taking action. There is zero strategizing. Your enemies are crazy because they are human, and like a member of the Bene Gesserit, you simply cannot look there. When feudalism began to fail, and nobles fought endlessly to monopolize the land and the incomes land provided, all these hardships and disorders led to a growth of unreason and acting-out on the slimmest pretexts. It was one of the most typical example to be found in any Time of Troubles. All kind...

Spengler never gives a single tidy definition of China’s “space‑feeling,” but the scholarship makes one thing clear: he treats China as a distinct High Culture with its own primordial intuition of space, and Chinese thinkers in the 1920s–40s engaged with this idea as part of defining an autonomous Chinese cultural identity. Through the power of pure inductive reason, that scholarship, and Spengler’s own morphology, the Chinese space‑feeling can be divined as follows. THE ENCLOSED CULTIVATED GARDEN. Where the West (Faustian) feels space as infinite and directional, Spengler sees China as oriented toward bounded, shaped, humanized space—the world as a garden rather than an endless frontier. This intuition expresses itself in walled cities,  courtyards, terraced landscapes, patterned, ritualized arrangements of space. It is a world that is tended, not conquered. Why does it remind me of Tuscany? Organic rather than geometric. Chinese space is grown, not engineered. It is rhythmic, sea...

Toynbee’s reaction to the creation of Israel was unambiguously negative, and over time it hardened into one of the most controversial positions he ever took.  Across 𝘈 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 and his public lectures, Toynbee argued that: ➀ The Jews were a “fossilized” or “extinct” civilization that had survived only as a religious remnant rather than a living society.    ➁ Zionism, in his view, was an attempt to resurrect a civilization that history had already “closed,” and he described it in explicitly moralizing terms—at one point even calling it “demonic.”    ➂ He equated Israeli actions toward Palestinians in 1948 with Nazi crimes against Jews, a comparison that provoked outrage even among non‑Zionists.    These were not offhand remarks; they were built into his civilizational framework. For Toynbee, a civilization that had completed its historical arc could not legitimately reassert territorial sovereignty. The creation of Israel the...

First, you could negotiate anything. Then you could project an image. I didn't speak up. Not loudly enough. There was money to be made. LOTS OF IT. Good luck catching the giddy horde's attention. Xeroxed 'zines weren't enough, not with shelves of self-help books at B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks. "Negotiation" is already a charged word. Add “anything,” and it starts to sound like a manual for Jedi mind tricks. If you’re sensitive to the ethics of influence—and I am—that can spark a defensive, ironic stance. The rhythm of the title echoes the genre of “You Too Can…” manuals that often oversell simple techniques as universal solutions. Your inner critic hears the pitch before you even open the book. But it's really the intent behind the salesman vibe, which saturated the air. The implication is that there is not enough to go around anymore. Compassion is for saps! A long arc of economic dislocation, humiliation, and institutional abandonment, followed by a ...