After Such Knowledge

The thing I always cared about more than anything else: culture is not sacred because it is beautiful, or symbolic, or identity‑forming — it is sacred because of what it does. I  treat culture almost like an engineering system: a living, evolving apparatus whose legitimacy comes from its outputs, not its sentiments. Culture as an Adaptation Whose Meaning Lies in Its Consequences 1. Culture is an adaptation only insofar as it works. For me, culture is not primarily: - a worldview   - a set of values   - a symbolic order   - a shared identity   Those are inputs or expressions. The adaptation is judged by its effects on survival, flourishing, and ecological fit. In my evolutionary framing, culture is the third layer — the behavioral layer — and its worth is measured by: - whether it increases cooperation   - whether it stabilizes group life   - whether it improves the transformation of resources into “good and useful things”...

“Life isn’t fair” is a description. “Life is evil” is a moral judgment. Western civilization—especially in its classical, Christian, and Enlightenment strands—has spent centuries trying to keep those two categories from collapsing into each other. And the fact that it tries to keep them separate is one of its most distinctive intellectual moves. Let's lay out the architecture so we can see the joints. 1. “Life isn’t fair” = a tragic observation. Across most civilizations, the recognition that the world is structurally unfair is simply a fact of experience: - storms hit the innocent   - children die   - talent goes unrewarded   - the wicked prosper  This is the tragic sense of life—the recognition that the cosmos is not arranged around human moral expectations. It’s not malevolent; it’s indifferent. In Greek terms: moira (fate) is not “evil,” it’s simply the grain of the universe. 2. “Evil” in Western thought = a moral category. Western civilization—esp...

In a pre‑violent civil conflict, could a charismatic, polarizing figure be used by one elite faction as a “torpedo” to sabotage another faction’s long‑term project? And the answer, in structural—not personal—terms is: Absolutely. That is one of the classic moves in elite factional conflict. Let me lay it out in a way that fits my “Second American / Third English” civil‑war‑on‑these‑shores frame and Oglesby’s Yankee–Cowboy dialectic. Oglesby’s model is about elite factions using outsiders as weapons against each other. Yankees: finance, managerial elites, institutionalists. Cowboys: extractive, frontier, energy, Sunbelt, security‑state adjacent. In his telling, neither side fights directly. They launch proxies—politicians, movements, scandals, investigations, media storms—at each other. That’s very close to the gangster‑slang “torpedo”:   a human projectile fired at a rival’s structure. A political torpedo is someone who: - is high‑impact,   - unpredictable, ...

And I thought I was alarmist. "Metaphysical evil" being what it is, moralistic religion-verging rhetoric from street-corner preachers is part of the scenery. Now that Jiang has erupted into social media, he has been swept up into the madness. I'm not sure myself whether he's a Chinese asset or on the lam from the CCP. I do feel like I'm being replaced. I only wish he'd get into prescriptions like how to reconstitute civilization by investing part of the social surplus in things like clean energy. Like China is doing, or putting on a damn good show. I'm curtailing the urge to cuss out the voting public to retreat to my intellectual pulpit using the high sun of scorn and derision. It's how I stay sane. Summary: Per Professor Jiang, the problem isn’t whether a state “guides” the economy. Every state guides something. The issue is what it guides, who it empowers, and how fast the whole contraption melts down when the wrong people get their hands on the con...

Got blocked on Xitter for citing Veblen. Should've cited Steve Hall's theory of moral distortion. Veblen never said that working for an institution makes a person a sociopath. My bad. But he did argue something more subtle, and frankly more interesting: institutions can deform character, pushing ordinary people toward trained incapacity, moral numbness, and predatory habits that mimic sociopathic traits without requiring any underlying pathology. Nothing in the sources suggests he used or implied the clinical term “sociopath.”  What Veblen actually argued about institutions and character, 1. Institutions shape habits of thought. Veblen’s evolutionary institutionalism holds that institutions are not neutral—they mold perception, judgment, and behavior. Institutions create “habits of thought” that become second nature. These habits can be maladaptive, rigid, or anti-social in modern contexts. This is the core of his concept of trained incapacity: people become so shaped by instit...

Americans have been lulled and gulled for a generation, and the extroverts wasted their gift on self-seeking instead of resisting. 1979 was a little shabby, worn out, comfy-looking. That’s exactly the texture of a civilization in late‑maintenance mode: threadbare but familiar, patched but still serviceable, a world that hasn’t yet admitted to itself that the seams are giving way. It’s the aesthetic of a society living off the residual warmth of an earlier fire. And then—almost overnight—the tone flips.   The volume goes up.   The colors get louder.   The confidence becomes performative rather than grounded. That’s the tell. When a system shifts from quiet exhaustion to brash insistence, it’s usually not a renaissance but a compensation reflex. The Second Gilded Age has that exact timbre: a kind of brass‑band bravado masking the fact that the underlying institutions are hollowing out. It’s the difference between a house that’s genuinely well-built and one th...