After Such Knowledge

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...

  When Krishnamurti and some of his friends first heard that "Gandhiji has been shot dead!," the first question that one of them asked was: "Was it a Muslim or a Hindu that shot him?" The riots would have been even more extensive and violent if it had been a Muslim so, if it had been a Muslim, would it have been right to withhold that information? We can think of many situations where the truth would be a problem. It's hard to tell why Gandhi's kumbaya failed and Nehru's capital-intensive policy won unless this was due to outside interference by the equally kumbaya Brit upper-class twits' miscalculation about unifying Hindu with Muslim in governance. Both of these ethnic groups only became more suspicious of each other. They ought to have united in their mutual suspicion of the Brits and repelled them. If Clio exists, then her opinion might not advocate non‑violent resistance as a primary engine of historical change, but would she recognize that such...

Monbiot's reading list is pre=approved by moi. I have been following Raworth and Klein for years. They're hip to the evolutionary, historical, time-based entropy in human institutions which many take to last forever, taken for granted as products of natural law. My culture-hero character defined capitalism as profit-seeking in a price structure. He went on to say that fascism is the concluding form of capitalism. The seller will hold a gun to your head and compel you to buy only his product. This is when profit‑seeking detached from real human needs and from the social purpose that once justified it. And he's right to say that he saw a deep psychological deformation in the elites who came to dominate late‑stage financial capitalism when profit became an end in itself. Profit is never about human benefit, only incidentally. Human benefit is not its primary concern. The Quartet that financed Hitler were pseudo-psychotic psychopaths about profit. Any other system that did not ...

What does Dr. Steve Keen think about the moral caliber of Trump supporters? Dr. Steve Keen nowhere directly evaluates the “moral caliber” of Trump supporters. His public commentary, including his Substack and interviews, focuses on structural economic forces that contributed to Trump’s rise (e.g., deindustrialization, the effects of the dollar’s reserve‑currency role, collapse of manufacturing). This includes policy analysis, especially around trade, tariffs, and macroeconomic instability (e.g., his critiques of U.S. trade policy and mainstream economics). In these materials, Keen frames Trump’s political success as a symptom of long‑running economic dysfunction, not as a referendum on the personal virtue or vice of his supporters. Across his work, Keen consistently argues that economic systems create political outcomes, including populist surges. Manufacturing decline and financialization have produced widespread economic insecurity. Voters respond to real deteriorating material condi...

Why, if the oil barons lost this "cold civil war" to the financiers, this struggle continues? The struggle continues because the “war” didn’t end with the subordination of Big Oil. Oil was only one of the old power centers. What's tracking is a long‑cycle realignment of elite blocs, and that realignment didn’t stop just because one faction got folded into another. Big Oil lost—but the system didn’t stabilize. When the oil barons were absorbed into global finance, that didn’t produce equilibrium. It produced a vacuum. Oil’s defeat meant that one of the 20th‑century sovereign blocs disappeared. Its institutional power was redistributed upward into finance, its political machinery (regional patronage networks, regulatory capture, foreign policy leverage) became hollowed out, but finance didn’t become omnipotent. It became overextended. A system where one bloc becomes too dominant tends to generate new challengers, not peace. The real successor challenger wasn’t oil—it was te...

Either Epstein is offering to overthrow Putin or he is helping Putin to collect kompromat. Both can be true, just as NATO expansion and Putin's claim that Ukraine is part of Russian Civilization is true. He can lie after that since lying (like blackmail) is part of the Russian defense mechanism. The Thiel email. Here’s the key thing I'm running into: I'm treating “the Dark Enlightenment” and “the Owners of Financialized Capital” as two clean, mutually exclusive blocs, when in reality they behave more like overlapping Venn diagrams with porous membranes, shared intermediaries, and opportunistic alliances. The Thiel–Epstein connection doesn’t contradict my model. It reveals the structure more clearly. Epstein was not “finance” — he was a broker of access. This is the first place where the contradiction dissolves. Epstein wasn’t a sovereign node of the OCGFC (Bolsen’s term).  He was a connector, a social graph optimizer, a black‑box concierge who: - linked money to science  ...

Damien Walter uses “modernity” in a very particular, almost dramaturgical way. He’s not just talking about “the modern era” in a historical sense; he’s talking about a civilizational operating system—a worldview that shapes how people imagine themselves, their agency, their stories, and their futures. Modernity is a story about the self. For Walter, modernity is fundamentally a narrative regime. It tells people: You are an individual. You are rational.  You can choose your own story. Progress is linear and inevitable. He often frames this as the “modern myth of the heroic individual,” which he believes is both empowering and deeply limiting. It’s the story that underwrites everything from self-help culture to superhero movies. Modernity is a break from tradition. Walter sees modernity as the moment when Western societies fractured the image and disenchanted the world. It replaced myth with science. It replaced tradition with choice. It replaced communal identity with personal ident...