After Such Knowledge

All I can say is that if this is what they are calling MMT, it is certainly something that would have made old Peter Cooper happy. I was not offended by being identified as an MMTer, but I prefer greenbacks because I believed money should be issued directly by the productive state itself, at zero interest, for public provisioning, without relying on bank-created credit or bond markets. MMT, in my view, still left too much power in the hands of bankers, bond dealers, and the financial class—the very actors I think have derailed American industrial civilization. MMT could be one of those "half-vast" workarounds England used to specialize in. Noticed (but not named) by a troika of writers (Bagehot-Dicey-Burke) who were as annoyingly taciturn as Anglos in general. It's why the appeasers sneaked around so well. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who described English dynamism like a pressure valve. DEI is the form without the substance, alas. "We can't find the money"...

I think that tiqquers have "too much nephesh." Neither nephesh nor ruach means libido in the modern psychological sense — but nephesh is the closer analogue. In Hebrew anthropology, libidinal energy maps more naturally to nephesh, while ruach corresponds to a different stratum of the psyche. Nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ) — the animating, desiring, appetitive life. But here’s the nuance I will insist on. a distinction between liberal pseudo‑pacification (consumerism, symbolic competition, bureaucratic control), and communitarian pseudo‑pacification (shared ethical systems, ritual cohesion, disciplined subjectivity). Buddhism fits the communitarian type — the kind that produces genuine social cohesion rather than competitive aggression. In fact, pre-modern communitarian systems (like monastic Buddhism or post-Carolingian happy days 850-1050) produce healthier forms of pseudo‑pacification than capitalism does. Buddhism is more functional and stabilizing. Modernity hides its pacification mech...

Much avid and earnest online conversations during Trump's first term about America hitting a singularity: the Low-IQ kind. This appeared to be genetically implausible to me, an oversimplification. I withheld mention of "The Marching Morons" by Cyril Kornbluth. It influenced later works like 𝘐𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺. I avoid dysgenics, focusing instead on this unmoored roving ecological niche called human society with its operating system known as "culture." The idea that 𝘏𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴 underwent a “natural lobotomy” is a powerful metaphor, not a biological fact — but it does indicate real evolutionary trade‑offs in brain structure, cognition, and social behavior. While I would gladly defend to your death my right to say it, I'll go for accurate instead of sensational. The phrase evokes a sense that humans lost something — a cognitive range, an instinctual repertoire, a perceptual bandwidth — in exchange for something else. Evolutionary biology surprisingl...

Toynbee's Universal Empire is not just a stage — it is the terminal morphology of a civilization. Below is the full cycle with the emphasis on how each stage transforms the elite, the institutions, and the social material. α. Composite Amalgamation — the creative explosion. This is the birth of a civilization. A new cultural synthesis appears — often from the fusion of older traditions, conquered peoples, or frontier zones where cultures meet and mix. Key features: 1. New worldview, new techniques, new social forms. 2. High social mobility. 3. Elites are creative minorities (Toynbee’s term). 4. Institutions are flexible, experimental, and instrumental. This is the “heroic age” — the moment when everything is possible. β. Germination→Inception→Takeoff — the slow consolidation. The new cultural pattern spreads and stabilizes. Key features: 1. Institutions begin to form around successful practices. 2. A shared identity emerges. 3. The creative minority becomes a founding elite. 4. P...

Turns out that the European Union has its own set of backward southern states. This has turned out to be an advantage. Culture lag is generally bad, but if you're lagging behind Die Reaktion, you can come out ahead. Recently I had to include both Irelands in this because the Socialist Workers Party is active in both. Once you take Raphael Patai’s Golden-River-Golden-Road Axis seriously as a civilizational fault‑line rather than a literal geopolitical bloc, you end up with a map of discontent that cuts across both Irelands — and also across Spain, Greece, Portugal, and even parts of Italy — in ways that look strangely coherent. The key is that he wasn’t describing a region so much as a structural position in the world‑system: societies caught between an older imperial integration and a newer, often externally imposed, institutional order. When you apply that lens, Ireland (north and south) fits the pattern more than people expect. I won't mention extending this Axis to the Weste...