After Such Knowledge

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...

Enter Colin Wilson's Outsider. An individual becomes one of Colin Wi son’s Outsiders when their inner life grows so intense, so perceptive, and so dissatisfied with ordinary explanations that everyday reality no longer feels real enough. Call this a case of "excess consciousness." Wilson argues that Outsiders are not maladjusted but over‑adjusted to reality — they see too clearly. Their perceptual and emotional sensitivity exceeds what ordinary life can satisfy. Or even demands. This produces a sense that daily routines are unreal or trivial. This dissatisfaction leaves a hunger for meaning that ordinary culture cannot feed. The victim or sufferer experiences a painful awareness of the gap between what life promises and what it delivers. "Is this it??" Well, it's all your culture has got to offer. This is why Wilson calls the Outsider a person whose consciousness has become painfully awake. Wilson identifies recurring catalysts or psychological triggers that...

Macrohistory says cultures become distinct because each one selectively actualizes only certain parts of the vast range of human potential, and suppresses or underdevelops others. This selective emphasis produces a characteristic personality structure in its members — what he calls the “typical” or “modal” personality of a civilization. The Human Organism as a Field of Potentials begins from the premise that human nature contains far more potential than any one society can use. This includes: 1. Biological potentials — aggression, cooperation, sexuality, curiosity, play 2. Cognitive potentials — abstraction, symbol‑making, technical reasoning, mythic imagination 3. Emotional potentials — empathy, loyalty, fear, pride, shame 4. Social potentials — hierarchy, reciprocity, competition, solidarity A culture cannot actualize all of these simultaneously without contradiction. So it must choose. Culture as a Selective System defines culture as a mechanism for selecting, emphasizing, and o...

Curtis’s argument strongly implies that Americans accepted a kind of bribe, but not a literal payoff. He frames it as a psychological and political bargain: consumer pleasure in exchange for political disengagement. Curtis’s thesis in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧 is that elites — corporate and political — used Freudian-derived PR techniques (via Edward Bernays) to redirect public energy away from collective political action and toward private consumption. The bribe is metaphorical. Consumer goods and lifestyle fantasies were offered as compensation for giving up deeper forms of democratic participation. Engineered desire replaced civic agency. Americans were encouraged to see themselves primarily as consumers, not citizens. This is supported by Curtis’s depiction of the 1920s shift from needs-based consumption to desires-based consumption, driven by Bernays’s techniques He argues that this shift helped stabilize society by channeling potentially disruptive mass impulse...

BlackRock doesn't need USia as a hegemon anymore. Besides, any attempt to regulate it would've caused it to pivot away and operate somewhere else. It's attracted to BRICS, but this multi-civ bloc is no longer a pushover.

This subject is driving me crazy because it's so multifaceted. Hudson obsesses about rent. So does Varoufakis, but he's going after Bezos who gets his cut from every transaction you make despite the fact that he never produced any of the goods you're buying from him. This is rent, too. The extraction of wealth without creating it. Hudson emphasizes Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate which dominates domestic policy. Hall fusses about the dictatorship of the bond vigilantes who prevent governments from providing services. Now water has been privatized and sewage is floating in the Thames. Finance loves to cut corners. Keen technocratically models how private debt accumulation leads to instability and collapse. The holistic phrase none of them use is how finance is in control of the economy as a whole, getting you every which way. This is the problem of overspecialization: each sector of economic activity behaves as if it were the whole economy. Let one sector dominate and it...