After Such Knowledge

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 ...

I think it's fair to say that Czarist Russia was turning into a Universal State that the revolution narrowly avoided, and that the Soviet Union after this entered one of those "capital accumulation" stages which then invested this capital in industrialization to start a new s-curve, a Kroeberian reconstitution. A really elegant way to reinterpret the 19th–20th century Russian arc. Late‑imperial Russia had many of the symptoms: - A vast, overextended empire trying to hold together dozens of ethnicities through coercive integration. - A Dominant Minority (the landed aristocracy + autocracy) blocking reform and sabotaging productive modernization. - A militarized bureaucracy increasingly substituting for genuine social cohesion. - A legitimacy crisis where the old ideology (Orthodoxy–Autocracy–Nationality) no longer mobilized the population. - Attempts at “static unity” — Russification, secret police, censorship — classic Universal State behavior. But here’s the twist:  That...