After Such Knowledge

 About that Technocracy map... I submit that we already live in one. When doing "my own research" (oy jeez) I found this very small compact book by a woman whose name I can't remember. Printed during the Depression, it listed and described alternative economic systems much in the news. Fascism's advertised theory was in it. So was Communism. These were fresh back then. Technocracy was in there. I think Social Credit was too. Not the Chicom arm-twisting but something dreamed up by an engineer named Douglas. When I started becoming interested in the Progressive political movements of the North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin arc, there was a sense these folks had created their politics from their interaction between a harsh environment and the plundering robber barons who made their existence infinitely worse than it had to be.  These political movements owed their philosophical ideas to a lot of things but their curiosity was directed by their real economic dilemmas.  The...

I assure you that I prefer cynicism to Leader-worship (unless it's a Progressive). Neither side is right and neither side is telling the whole truth, both sides are manipulating the public and have for decades. It's building up to a second civil war and the GOP (the Neoconfederacy's party after the Southern Strategy) lost control. Neoliberalism was how the Eastern Establishment controlled us using methods described in the Century of the Self. The GOP side is just plain nasty exploiting the lurid fantasies of the p'tit-boos since the John Birch Society, a social class that no rational society ought to produce. It's a basic rule of social processes that power begins as service and ends as abuse. When this affects the rate of growth cults of unreason proliferate. Vested interests will defend their dominant positions by exploiting these. Why make up any of their own? Bob Welch did, but he was only reviving one from 1810. Crowds go mad when denied emotional and psycholog...

  The Broken Economic Order How to Rewire the International System in the Age of Trump Mariana Mazzucato March/April 2025 Published on February 25, 2025 In many ways, Donald Trump’s election to a second term as U.S. president is a story of economic dissatisfaction. For the first time in decades, the Democratic candidate received more support from the richest Americans than from the poorest. In 2020, most voters from households earning less than $50,000 a year opted for the Democrat, Joe Biden; in 2024, they favored the Republican, Trump. Those making more than $100,000 a year, meanwhile, were more likely to vote for Kamala Harris than for Trump. Declining support for the Democratic Party among working-class voters reflects a deep disenchantment with an economic system that, under administrations led by presidents of both parties, has concentrated wealth at the very top, enabled the growth of the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy, trapped people in cycles of...

I thought it was p'tit-boos, the cornered rats of capitalism who go ballistic when society's s-curve plateaus. I'm sticking with it. The concept of "ressentiment" was first described by Friedrich Nietzsche. He introduced and elaborated on the term in his book 𝘖𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘴 (1887). Later, Max Scheler also explored the concept in his 1912 book titled 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵. The life of Max Scheler was a continuous struggle for truth under constant pressure from the stress of his private life on one side and the chaos of German public life on the other. Located closer to the West's region of origin, Germany was a focal point for the culmination of the latest Toynbeean Time of Troubles that the New Deal has not completely resolved today. From the beginning, Scheler rejected intellectual relativism as well as the crude materialist positivism of science, preferring a view that insisted there must be an absolute truth somewhere, a...

The human race is not really a success. Our species became extinct millions of years ago - in nature. It survives today as a living form only because it was extruded from nature into culture. This is a very different context. It means that the ancestor of Homo sapiens who was divergent from the basic stock, and all that creature's descendants down to the point where they became clearly shielded from nature by culture, became extinct in nature because they were failures in nature. The human race survived only because it was able to leave the natural environment and enter a cultural environment that the race made for itself. The main function of the cultural environment was to provide a setting in which the genus Homo could survive as a living form outside nature. In this process culture acted as a buffer between the genus Homo, as an animal, and nature, shielding Homo from nature. In this sense, both the human race and culture are non-natural. Students of human origins persist in fo...

Mohammed's "umma" was accepted...in words, explicit conceptual schemes, and ideology as the right vehicle of loyalty and allegiance. But it didn't become the vehicle of such devotion on the neurological and endocrinological levels. Only the kinship group "deserved" that. Which is why Afghanistan, at one extreme, is the graveyard of empires. In the European dark age (~970) a major part of human relationships were customary, personal, face-to-face, and many of the controls for human activities were internalized within the endocrine and nervous systems. They were not external controls like prices, traffic signals, or legislation). The internal controls were due to socialization in the family and neighborhood, including behavior patterns and religion. There was a subtle component in the divergence between the fates of Rome in the west and Rome in the east. This rested on the ancient difference between Greek rationalism and Latin pragmatism. You can see it in the...

No sooner did I start attending church again than a schism occurred. I can't take the credit for this. I can view it as a historical dynamic, however. The UMC is itself an offshoot of the Anglican church, as was Puritanism. These two denominations are diametrically opposed. Sometimes the spirit that moves congregations is Clio, not Sophia. The Puritans were Grim Pills with fascist tendencies; the Methodists eventually started the anti-slavery movement in England, which also put them at odds with the Cavaliers who had transplanted this peculiar institution to North America. My first acquaintance with cliodynamics was when I read a critique of this discipline when it asserted that slavery made economic sense. The discipline of cliodynamics was proposed by Peter Turchin in 2003. Cliodynamics is a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes, and the construction and analysis o...