Showing posts with label Tarnas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tarnas. Show all posts

Right hemisphere / Left hemisphere




Left hemisphere                 -                      Right hemisphere
Centre                                -                      Periphery
Narrow                               -                      Broad
Short term                          -                      Long term
Abstract                              -                      Concrete
Certain                                -                      Uncertain
Strong                                 -                      Weak
Closed                                 -                      Open
Quick                                  -                      Slow
Known                                -                      Unknown




Centre / Periphery


If it is the right hemisphere that is vigilant for whatever it is that exists 'out there', it alone can bring us something other than what we already know.

The left hemisphere deals with what it knows, and therefore prioritises the expected - its process is predictive. It positively prefers what it knows. This makes it more efficient where things are predictable, but less efficient than the right wherever the initial assumptions have to be revised [...]

[...] the right hemisphere presents an array of possible solutions, which remain live while alternatives are explored. The left hemisphere, by contrast, takes the single solution that seems best to fit what it already knows and latches onto it.

[There is] a tendency for the left hemisphere to deny discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is actively watching for discrepancies, more like a devil's advocate.

[...] the right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come [...] 

The more flexible style of the right hemisphere is evidenced not just in its own preferences, but also at the 'meta' level, in the fact that it can also use the left hemisphere's preferred style, whereas the left hemisphere cannot use the right hemisphere's.

The range of the right hemisphere is further increased by the fact that it has a longer working memory, and so is able both to access more information and hold it together at any one time for longer [...]

This broader field of attention, open to whatever may be, and coupled with greater integration over time and space, is what makes possible the recognition of broad or complex patterns, the perception of the 'thing as a whole', seeing the wood for the trees.

In short the left hemisphere takes a local short-term view, whereas the right hemisphere sees the bigger picture.


Abstract / concrete


The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context.

Abstraction is necessary if the left hemisphere is to re-present the world [...] The right hemisphere presents individual, unique instances of things and individual, familiar, objects, whereas the left hemisphere re-presents categories of things, and generic, non-specific objects.

It is with the right hemisphere that we distinguish individuals of all kinds, places as well as faces. In fact it is precisely its capacity for holistic processing that enables the right hemisphere to recognise individuals. Individuals are, after all, Gestalt wholes: that face, that voice, that gait, that sheer 'quiddity' of the person or thing, defying analysis into parts.

The right hemisphere deals preferentially with actually existing things, as they are encountered in the real world. Because its language roots things in the context of the world, it is concerned with the relations between things.


Solid / liquid


If one had to encapsulate the principal difference in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this.

The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotive language and abstraction yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature but ultimately lifeless.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, yelled a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known — and to this world it exists in a relationship of care.

The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. 

It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really ‘break out’ to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own re-presentations only.

Where the thing itself is ‘present’ to the right hemisphere, it is only ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere's consciousness is of itself.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 40-1, 43, 50-1, 174-5




Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

However, if you zap people’s left hemispheres, they become more realistic - they can draw better and with more verisimilitude. Their minds become better at seeing the objects themselves, cleared of theories, narratives, and prejudice.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 66




The new psychological constitution of the modern character had been developing since the high Middle Ages, had conspicuously emerged in the Renaissance, was sharply clarified and empowered by the Scientific Revolution, then extended and solidified in the course of the Enlightenment. 

By the nineteenth century, in the wake of the democratic and industrial revolutions, it had achieved mature form. 

The direction and quality of that character reflected a gradual but finally radical shift of psychological allegiance from God to man, from dependence to independence, from otherworldliness to this world, from the transcendent to the empirical, from myth and belief to reason and fact, from universals to particulars, from a supernaturally determined static cosmos to a naturally determined evolving cosmos, and from a fallen humanity to an advancing one.

[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 319




After Hume, the implicative relationship between premises and conclusion thus became what counts as explanation tout court. Deductive reasoning […] came to be seen as the only legitimate form of rational thought. 

Explaining an event came to be identified with predicting it […] 

Explanations in terms of lawful regularities subsequently replaced ontological pronouncements about causal processes. The ability to explain by deducing would be taken as the feature that not only distinguishes the hard natural sciences from the soft human sciences but also (since strict laws are apparently not forthcoming in the latter) discredits them. 

The upshot? The ancient concept of practical wisdom slowly disappeared from mainstream - and academic - philosophy, as freshmen students note to their dismay.

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p. 49




Schore discovered that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a dominant role in the formation of attachment relationships and that its maturation is at significant risk in conditions of suboptimal infant-care practices.

[Sharna Olfman]
'Reclaiming Humanity at the Dawn of Posthumanism: Conversation with Darcia Narvaez'




In Australia the Aboriginal peoples speak of The Dreaming, a reality in which the Ancestors walked on the land and special resting points created certain features. Some Ancestors turned into rocks. But this does not mean that the Ancestor stopped being and metamorphosed into an inanimate rock.

Rather, the Ancestor still exists, for Dream Time is different from our linear arrow of time, in which the past is gone forever. Dream Time coexists and interpenetrates the here and now - the Ancestor and the rock enfold one another.

Rather than being an example of "illogical thinking," the idea that rocks can teach and act as parents is a direct experience within Indigenous reality. Instead of speaking of people having access to "alternative" or "nonnormal" realities, it is probably more accurate to simply say that Indigenous people live their lives in a wider reality.

Pam Colorado said to me, "You know, David, we all have weak minds." Her perception of Westerners was that their minds are hard, logical, and forceful; and that they confine themselves to what they consider to be the practical, concrete reality.

It is difficult to shake such a mind and move it from its predetermined path, for it immediately rejects all experience that appears out of the ordinary. Only under conditions of extreme stress may such a person begin to see beyond the limits of "daily reality."

For Pam Colorado, however, the Native mind needs to be weak, for it does not erect barriers to an extended reality.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.287-8



Related posts:

The Middle Path





Thesis                     Synthesis                Antithesis
Birth                           Life                       Death
Being                       Becoming                Nothing
Apollo                     Hermes                   Dionysus
Centripetal               Static                    Centrifugal
Active                     Neutral                   Passive
Positive                  Ambivalent              Negative
Left                           Centre                    Right
Upper                       Middle                   Lower
Manic                      Normal                   Depressive
Excessive                 Balanced                Deficient
Hot                          Warm                      Cold
Acid                        Neutral                    Alkali
Red                           Purple                    Blue
White                         Gray                      Black





1 + 2 = 3






[...] every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the "third." In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored.

It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight “yes” nor a straight “no.”

[C. G. Jung]
'A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity' (CW 11)
and, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9), par. 285







In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up").

The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

Sublation can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic. The two concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming. Similarly, determinateness, or quality, and magnitude, or quantity, are each both preserved and sublated in the concept measure.

'Aufheben'


A thought is affirmed which on reflection proves itself unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradictory, which propels the affirmation of its negation, the antithesis, which also on reflection proves inadequate, and so is again negated.

In classical logic, this double negation ("A is not non-A") would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this.

It has "overcome and preserved" (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.

[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
Hegel for Beginners




Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. 

In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. Each phase of being contains within itself a self-contradiction, and it is this that serves as the motor of its movement to a higher and more complete phase. 

Through a continuing dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in the process of completing itself. Whereas for most of the history of Western philosophy from Aristotle onward, the defining essence of opposites was that they were logically contradictory and mutually exclusive, for Hegel all opposites are logically necessary and mutually implicated elements in a larger truth. 

Truth is thus radically paradoxical.

[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 379




Since "one" and "two" were considered by ancient mathematical philosophers to be the parents of numbers, then their firstborn, "three," the Greek Triad, is the first and eldest number. 

The birth of the number 3 and triangle enables opposites to balance and transcend to a new wholeness they couldn't achieve by themselves.  

A third leg makes a tripod stable, and a third strand of hair allows a braid to knot as one whole, just as neutral judges balance opposing parties, neutrons balance atoms, and the Supreme Court plays the role of the balancing, transcendent third force between the Executive and Legislative branches. The triangle is the strongest and most stable of shapes and so appears in the constructions of humans and nature.  

Speak aloud the word "three" in English [...] and you'll hear its relation to words like "through" and "threshold" and the prefix trans ("across," "penetrate"). The leap to "three," as its linguistic root tells us, takes us over a threshold and through past polarized limits of the Dyad.

[Michael S. Schneider]
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, p. 39
and 'Number and Shapes: The Timeless Alphabet of Art and Life'






Homeostasis is the property of a system in which a variable (for example, the concentration of a substance in solution, or its temperature) is actively regulated to remain very nearly constant.

'Homeostasis'





Maimonides [taught] that an intelligent person should live a life based on reality, on what is true and false, while the average person who lacks the ability to do so should live according to “necessary truths,” morality.

Maimonides makes it clear in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:4 and 5, that the moral “middle path” is the “necessary truth,” the guidance given to the general public who are not capable of evaluating every occurrence in their lives and making decisions each time how they should act based on reason, on what is true and false.

[He] introduces the concept of the “golden mean” and advises people to live a life in which they behave according to a middle path between two extremes.

For example, people should not be overly stingy nor should they be spendthrifts; they should not laugh excessively nor be sad and dispirited. He calls this derekh hachakhamim, “the path of the wise.”

[On the other hand] the ideal path, the method for the intellectual, is “the virtuous way,” the carefully considered rational behavior beyond the middle path, when reason dictates the need for such behavior.

An individual who is very careful about himself deviates somewhat from the mean to either side, and is called 'virtuous'. For example, the individual who distances himself from pride and turns to the other extreme and becomes very humble – this is the virtuous quality. If he only moves toward the middle and is humble, [whilst this is] not the best behavior, it is still considered wise behavior, [thus the individual] is called 'wise.' 

The virtuous people of old would arrange their behaviors away from the middle path toward the two extremes. There were times when the behavior would veer toward one extreme, while there were times when the behavior would veer toward the other. This is behavior that is beyond the legal requirement. We are required to take the middle paths.

Both the essential truth of morality and the real truth advocate proper conduct. However, the essential truth focuses only on what the average person is capable of doing, morality. The difference between the two can be seen in the example presented by Maimonides in his Hilkhot De’ot.

The average person following morality is advised to follow the middle path for it is easier than having to analyze every situation independently, while intellectuals, who are capable of using reason and considering the “true” results of their behavior, are told to deviate when advisable from the middle path.

[Israel Drazin]
'An Intelligent Person is not Moral' (minor adjustments have been made to the original text)




I feel I’ve been very fortunate in life and I think I have about the most even temperament of anyone I know.

I literally don’t have unhappy days. I’ve always felt pretty happy. I suspect my peak happiness is well below that of most people. When I see people very, very happy it’s quite strange to me - I feel I’ve never felt this. The same when people are depressed.

I think my range is compressed.

[Tyler Cowen]
'Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | The Tim Ferriss Show'





Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger, or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Strauss is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them.

But expressing is not any more admirable than repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them.

Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die.

[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 56




[...] living beauty spreads her golden shimmer only when soaring above a reality full of misery, pain, and squalor [...] all experience goes to show that beauty needs her opposite as a condition of her existence.

"Whenever we turn our gaze in the the ancient world, we find taste and freedom mutually avoiding each other, and Beauty establishing her sway only on the ruins of heroic virtues.

If then we keep solely to what experience has taught us hitherto about the influence of Beauty, we cannot certainly be much encouraged in the development of feelings which are so dangerous to the true culture of mankind; and we should rather dispense with the melting power of Beauty, even at the risk of coarseness and austerity, than see ourselves, for all the advantages of refinement, consigned to her enervating influence."

[...] under no circumstances can the initial value of the higher form of energy be attained by the lower forms as well or be resumed by the superior function: an equilization at some intermediate level must inevitably result. For every individual who identifies with his one differentiated function, this entails a descent to a lower value as compared with the initial value.

This conclusion is unavoidable. All education that aspires to the unity and harmony of man's nature has to reckon with this fact.

[C. G. Jung, also Friedrich Schiller (in quotations)]
Psychological Types, p. 84-6





If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to perfection that make existence intolerable.

Capacity for compromise is not a characteristic of the insane.

The mature human being is neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass is muddy, but is not mud.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Human Nature, p. 138




Iphigenia sees her role in life as that of “making men mild.” 

She is always encouraging people to calm down and be merciful. She is committed to love, but a love marked not by wild passion, but by understanding, sympathy and a desire for harmony [...]

Goethe's first audiences, brought up on Romanticism, were slow to get the message. Was Goethe turning his back on Romantic love? Where was all the passion? They described the story of Iphigenia as like “watching grey mist.”

Goethe, now in middle-age, was undaunted. He’d had enough of Werther and expressed his own view emphatically – “Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.” 

But he encountered an elemental cultural problem: Romanticism feels more exciting. Goethe pinpointed one of the central problems of culture: how to make things that are good for us compete successfully for attention with the thrilling passionate stuff?

 




Taoists believe that a meaningful life, the optimally meaningful life, is to be found on the border between chaos and order. 

And I would say that your nervous system tells you exactly when you are there and it’s a kind of place and you can tell when you’re there because you’re secure enough to be confident, but not so secure that you’re bored and you’re interested enough to be awake but not so interested that you’re terrified. 

And when you’re in a state like that, you find things interesting and meaningful, time slips by you and you’re no longer self-conscious.

[Jordan Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'





The thing is, when I'm balanced I'm not here, and I don't like not being here. I like to feel myself rubbing against things.





In the revisional concept of psychoanalysis in his first book, Perls called Friedlaender's polar philosophy "differential thinking" and considered it to be a "mental precision tool", since it can find the point of "predifference", as he also refers to creative indifference, as well as the zero-point, the center from which balancing equilibrium is possible and

"we could find a point from which the observer could gain the most comprehensive and undistorted view [...]

By remaining alert in the centre, we can acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence and completing an incomplete half. By avoiding a one-sided outlook we gain a much deeper insight into the structure and function of the organism"

The center is a "magical" word for Friedlaender; likewise, for Perls, "to center one's existence", or centering, is the most basic goal of therapy, because we "acquire a creative ability of seeing both sides of an occurence" [...]

[Ludwig Frambach, quoting Fritz Perls]
Creative License: The Art of Gestalt Therapy, p. 121




Friedlaender's “creative indifference" [...] became for Fritz Perls the “fertile void” [...] the usual meaning-making process of polar differentiation is set aside in a state of pure being, through a deliberate act of polar indifferentiation. The closer we come to simply being, the more we open a space in which fresh possibilities can arise.

The fertile void or place of creative indifference is the ground. The goal of Gestalt process is to “lead increasingly from the one-sided fixation [on] that which is in the foreground to the ground, from the periphery to the middle and center, by way of integrating rigid dualities into flexible polarities” 

Poles such as rage and gentleness "should not be isolated from each other as mutually exclusive contradictions, but should be experienced as a unit of opposites" [...]

It is possible to achieve this perspective by being "flexibly centered in [one's own] indifferent center." In this way, one can react freely and appropriately, either angrily or with gentleness, to the demands of the situation from a totality of experience.

Friedlaender’s goal, as Perls saw it, was the achievement of this lovely neutrality in which one no longer feels pulled toward one extreme or the other and is no longer the prisoner of one way of seeing the world, which inevitably blinds one to other possibilities.

[Herb Stevenson, quoting Ludwig Frambach]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'





Self

As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man.

Just as conscious as well as unconscious phenomena are to be met with in practice, the self as psychic totality also has a conscious as well as an unconscious aspect.

Empirically, the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the "supraordinate personality", such as king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc.

When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary [...]

Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united. Since such a concept is irrepresentable - tertium non datur - it is transcendental on this account also.

[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 460




Equilibration

This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.

When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e. a state of cognitive (i.e. mental) balance. 

However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

[Saul McLeod]
'Jean Piaget'


Assimilate - will fit into existing order - no change - dominate (change other)
Accommodate - will not fit into existing order - change - capitulate (change self)



Popper envisioned science as progressing by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories that can account for the phenomena that falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power. 

For example, Aristotelian mechanics explained observations of everyday situations, but were falsified by Galileo's experiments, and were replaced by Newtonian mechanics, which accounted for the phenomena noted by Galileo (and others). Newtonian mechanics' reach included the observed motion of the planets and the mechanics of gases. The Youngian wave theory of light (i.e., waves carried by the luminiferous aether) replaced Newton's (and many of the Classical Greeks') particles of light but in turn was falsified by the Michelson-Morley experiment and was superseded by Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's special relativity, which did account for the newly observed phenomena.

At each stage, experimental observation made a theory untenable (i.e., falsified it) and a new theory was found that had greater explanatory power (i.e., could account for the previously unexplained phenomena), and as a result, provided greater opportunity for its own falsification.

'Falsifiability'




Unqualified freedom, like unqualified tolerance, is not only self-destructive but bound to produce its opposite - for if all restraints were removed there would be nothing whatever to stop the strong enslaving the weak (or meek).

So complete freedom would bring about the end of freedom, and therefore proponents of complete freedom are in actuality, whatever their intentions, enemies of freedom.

[...] the maximum possible tolerance or freedom is an optimum, not an absolute, for it has to be restricted if it is to exist at all. 

The government intervention which alone can guarantee it is a dangerous weapon: without it, or with too little, freedom dies; but with too much of it freedom dies also. We are brought back to the inescapability of control [...] the maximum freedom is a qualified one [...]

[...] the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

[Brian Magee]
Popper, p. 80-2




[Derrida's] essay on Levinas [...] takes an epigraph from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.

'Hebraism and Hellenism - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, although it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them' [...]

It is the desire to reconcile oppositions and differences through a movement of thought that would finally reduce them to aspects of a single, comprehensive vision.

[...] Derrida's epigraph from Arnold carries a considerable weight of implied ideology.

It stands for that power of logocentric thinking to absorb all differences into itself by viewing them as mere stages or signposts on the way to some grand conceptual synthesis.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 230-1




There is no 2D slice of a 3D object that gives a real sense of what it is. Neither is any 2D negotiation of slices going to yield something in 3D.

[A] cylinder is not somewhere between the two reductionistic views: 50% circle, 50% rectangle… It is 100% of both descriptions…which are only mutually exclusive and paradoxical if they are trying to be reconciled in the same plane, which is the essential mistake.

In the higher dimensional reality the object actually lives in, the simultaneous full truth of both partial descriptions is obvious and non-paradoxical…as is the seamless way they fit together as parts of a congruent whole.

The key insight is recognizing these differing perspectives as orthogonal to each other rather than opposite ends of a gradient spectrum. The gradient view leads to a middle path that in this case is the rounded rectangle (or a continual maddening flip flop between circle and rectangle) … completely failing to recognize the simultaneous fullness of each truth and the irreconcilability of them within the same level of dimensionality/ complexity.

The recognition of orthogonality…gives us the cylinder, recognizes both lower dimensional perspectives as 100% true from their limited vantage point, and forces the recognition that a congruent picture is possible but requires a fundamentally more complex kind of perspective.

Looking at some of what have often been thought of as existential dualities:

- Loving what is or working to make things better…
- Accepting ourselves as we are unconditionally or aspiring to grow and express more of our full potential…
- Maximizing intentionality or following the flow of life…
- Bettering our individual ego or transcending it…
- Free will or determinism…
- Being in the now or planning for the future…
- Increasing witness consciousness or losing oneself in experience…
- Open mindedness or critical thinking…
- Persistence or surrender…
- Boundaries or allowing…
- Being or becoming…
- Freedom or structure…
- Gratitude or desire…
- Rights or responsibilities…
- Agency or communion…
- Particle or wave descriptions of the quantum…
- The fundamentality of subject or object…

All of these, commonly seen as paradoxes to be embraced or extremes to find a middle path between…are indeed orthogonal and equally fundamental partial truths…to be simultaneously optimized…fully reconciled in a congruent understanding of the higher dimensional (eg, more complex) nature of reality.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality'




[…] in the total accounting the hitherto sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man' has been kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which ought to perish

And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth at the corruption of the European race

Stand all evaluations on their head - that is what they had to do! And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the highest and most successful of the type man', into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that is the fact the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness', 'unsensuality', and 'higher man' were finally fused together into one feeling. 

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 62




In the romantic, the "organic” conception of the state rests on [an] inability to make a normative evaluation.

This conception repudiates the “juridical” as narrow and mechanical, and it searches for the state that is above right and wrong: that is, a point of reference for feelings, which at the same time is a projection of the romantic subject into the domain of the political.

The root of romantic sublimity is the inability to decide, the "higher third” factor they are always talking about, which is not a higher factor but a different third factor: in other words, it is always a way out of the either-or.

[…] the antitheses themselves are not antitheses, but merely occasions […] The antitheses are immediately mediated and reconciled, and an agreement invariably follows.

In the absence of the occasionalistic displacement into the higher, subjective creativity that resolves all antitheses in a harmonious unity, there is no romanticism.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 117, 140, 148




From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:

1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)

2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority)

3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute)

4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.

5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.

6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations.

[…] Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.

The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity.

Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.

That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.

But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves.

Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.

In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this.

When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate.

Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.779-81




[...] we must ask what does the dialectician himself want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want?

It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.

"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed".

This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.

And, conversely, Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence. Moreover the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the dialectician, who dialectises the relationship? It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.9-10



Related posts:-
Centre / Periphery
Lines, Circles and Spirals
Land and Sea 
Balance
Shades of Gray
In-between
Open Wound
Everything and Nothing 
Searching Without/Searching Within 
Frozen in time 
Forget Your Self
Mono / Poly
Accept / Aspire

The Developmental View



All of these memes [developmental stages] has something to contribute.

But what none of the first-tier memes can do, on their own, is fully appreciate the existence of the other memes. Each of the first-tier memes thinks that its worldview is the correct or best perspective. It reacts negatively if challenged; it lashes out, using its own tools, whenever it is threatened.

Blue order is very uncomfortable with both red impulsiveness and orange individualism. Orange individualism thinks blue order is for suckers and green egalitarianism is weak and woo-woo. Green egalitarianism cannot easily abide excellence and value-rankings, big pictures, hierarchies, or anything that appears authoritarian, and thus green reacts strongly to blue, orange, and anything post-green.

All of that begins to change with second-tier thinking. Because second-tier consciousness is fully aware of the interior stages of development - even if it cannot articulate them in a technical fashion - it steps back and grasps the big picture, and thus second-tier thinking appreciates the necessary role that all of the various memes play. Second tier awareness thinks in terms of the overall spiral of existence, and not merely in terms of any one level.

[Upon reaching second-tier thinking one can] vividly grasp the entire spectrum of interior development, and thus see that each level, each meme, each wave is crucially important for the health of the overall Spiral.

[...] without second-tier thinking [...] humanity is destined to remain victims of a global "autoimmune disease," where various memes turn on each other in an attempt to establish supremacy.

This is why many arguments are not really a matter of the better objective evidence, but of the subjective level of those arguing. No amount of orange scientific evidence will convince blue mythic believers; no amount of green bonding will impress orange aggressiveness; no amount of turquoise holism will dislodge green pluralism - unless the individual is ready to develop forward through the dynamic spiral of consciousness unfolding.

[Ken Wilber]
A Theory of Everything, p. 11-14



Transcend and Include


An integral synthesis, to be truly integral, must find a way that all of the major worldviews are basically true (even though partial).

It is not that the higher levels are giving more accurate views, and the lower levels are giving falsity, superstition, or primitive nonsense. There must be a sense in which even 'childish' magic and Santa Claus myths are true. For those worldviews are simply the way the world looks at that level, or from that wave, and all of the waves are crucial ingredients of the Kosmos.

At the mythic level, Santa Claus (or Zeus or Apollo or astrology) is a phenomenological reality. It will do no good to say, "Well, we have evolved beyond that stage, and so now we know that Santa Claus is not real," because if that is true - and all stages are shown to be primitive and false in light of further evolution - then we will have to admit that our own views, right now, are also false (because future evolution will move beyond them).

But it is not that there is one level of reality, and those other views are all primitive and incorrect versions of that one level. Each of those views is a correct view of a lower yet fundamentally important level of reality, not an incorrect view of the one real level. The notion of development allows us to recognize nested truths, not primitive superstitions.

[Ken Wilber]
A Theory of Everything, p. 111-12




While Gebser’s major work, The Ever Present Origin (1949), sets out these structures in evolutionary sequence, he did not wish to imply that they are historical developments leading to integral consciousness as the ultimate human achievement.

While he presents his theory as a theory of the evolution of consciousness, he is adamant that he is not doing so within a fantasy of historical “development” or “progress”. Our tendency to think in such terms is an artifact of our dominant mental consciousness, in which our experience of time is linear and quantified.

Rather, reality is unfolding process, and the archaic, magic, mythical, mental and emerging integral structures are all valid ways of apprehending it.

From the point of view of rational-scientific culture, magical and mythical thinking are primitive and inferior forms of thinking which have limited value in the contemporary world.

However, we can argue that it is our capacity for mythical, and even magical, thinking that enables us to find meaning in our lives and gives us a grounding in the concrete world. Magical and mythical consciousness are neither better nor worse than mental-rational consciousness. They are simply older and different.

Re-owning and re-valuing them is a necessary step towards their integration in a new structure.  

The complexity of human behaviour comes out of the interplay of these several “layers” or “levels” of consciousness in whatever we do [...] Most significantly, all of the structures have both “efficient” and “deficient” forms [...] The later, more complex structures of consciousness are not better, or superior or “higher” than the earlier, simpler ones. They are simply later (in evolutionary and developmental terms) and more complex.

[Bernie Neville]
'Out of Our Depth and Treading Water: Reflections on Consciousness, Culture and New Learning Technologies'




I am often asked, why even attempt an integration of the various worldviews? Isn't it enough to simply celebrate the rich diversity of various views and not try to integrate them?

Well, recognizing diversity is certainly a noble endeavour, and I heartily support that pluralism. But if we remain merely at the stage of celebrating diversity, we ultimately are promoting fragmentation, alienation, separation and despair. 

 You go your way, I go mine, we both fly apart - which is often what has happened under the reign of pluralistic relativists, who have left us a postmodern tower of Babel on too many fronts.

It is not enough to recognize the many ways in which we are all different; we need to go further and start recognizing the many ways that we are also similar. Otherwise we simply contribute to heapism, not wholism.

Building on the rich diversity offered by pluralistic relativism, we need to take the next step and weave those many strands into a holonic spiral of unifying connections, an interwoven Kosmos of mutual intermeshing.

We need, in short, to move from pluralistic relativism to universal integralism - we need to keep trying to find the One-in-the-Many that is the form of the Kosmos itself.

[Ken Wilber]
A Theory of Everything, p. 112




Piaget started to understand that it was more important, not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure, but to understand the manner in which knowledge structures transformed.

And that was partly illustrated in his description of stage theory, because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic presuppositions with which the child was structuring the world, into a state where that system failed because it wasn’t sufficiently comprehensive; and then into the development of a new stage that could do everything that the previous stage could, plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn’t.

That’s also why Piaget believed that knowledge actually accumulated, because each time there was a transformation the new structure had a wider range of applications than the previous structure, even though it kept all the advantages of the previous structure.

And that’s a good way of conceptualising progress […] if you think about a more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly, then you can certainly map out progress […]

[Jordan Peterson]
2017 Maps of Meaning 7: Images of Story & MetaStory




Third Order Thinking


Early adolescence marks the stage when schools and the broader culture demand of us that we undergo [a] transformation in our consciousness. We are expected to become capable of the cognitive complexity which Kegan calls third order thinking.

[The adolescent] can reason abstractly but cannot disidentify from her own reasoning […] She is capable of holding a coherent set of assumptions about life, a coherent disposition towards ultimate reality, but she is not capable of standing outside of it.

Third order thinking rationalizes a particular consensus view of reality, a particular way of imagining the world which is common to the family, tribe or culture. There is a taken-for-grantedness about the way the world is.

To stand outside this narrative, the adolescent must “leave home”, and experience the isolation and exhilaration of fourth order thinking.


Fourth Order Thinking


The contents of [the adolescent's] mind become the object of her knowledge, and she identifies with her capacity to reflect on them. Her thoughts become something she has, not something she is.

Her thoughts become the thoughts of an autonomous individual who does not depend on the authoritative voices of her culture to give them legitimacy, but can rather look at the evidence, whatever its source, and make successive approximations to the truth.

Not all of us manage to achieve this transformation, or if we do achieve it we tend to slip back into second order or third order consciousness for a good deal of the time. Our demand that students demonstrate this capacity for detached critical reflection may a source of stress for adolescents on the threshold of fourth order thinking. Others simply will not know what we are talking about.


Fifth Order Thinking


Our way of thinking, our way of determining the truth, is relativised as only one out of many ways of constructing reality. We cease to see ourselves and our truths as complete. Our truths are only complete in dialectic with other truths and our selves only exist in our interaction with others.


Summary


As a third order thinker I accept without question the truth as I have absorbed it. As a third order thinker you believe in your truth in the same uncritical way. I am right and you are wrong, and at best we tolerate each other.

As fourth order thinkers we each maintain a critical stance towards our truths, and our concern is to look critically at these truths and all other versions of the truth and decide which one best accords with the evidence.

As fifth order thinkers we regard all truths as partial, and if we find ourselves in dispute we are capable of constructing a truth which resides not only in both your partial truth and my partial truth but also in the tensions and contradictions between them.

In pre-scientific societies third order thinking was perfectly adequate to meet the demands of the environment. Fourth order thinking both enabled and was demanded by the Age of Science. The culture in which we find ourselves at the end of the twentieth century demands that we be capable of dialectical, post-ideological, transpersonal, fifth order thinking.

[Bernie Neville]
'Out of Our Depth and Treading Water: Reflections on Consciousness, Culture and New Learning Technologies'




[...] complex structures - whether intellectual, artistic, social, administrative or whatever - are only to be created and changed by stages, through a critical feedback process of successive adjustments.

The notion that they can be created, or made over, at a stroke, as if from a blueprint, is an illusion which can never be actualized.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 67




['Aufhebung'], often translated as sublation, literally means a ‘lifting up’ of something, and refers to the way in which the earlier stages of an organic process, although superseded by those that come after, are not repudiated by them, even though the later stages are incompatible with the earlier ones.

In this sense the earlier stage is ‘lifted up’ into the subsequent stage both in the sense that it is ‘taken up into’ or ‘subsumed’ into the succeeding stage, and in the sense that it remains present in, but transformed by, a ‘higher’ level of the process.

In a famous passage near the opening of the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel illustrates it by reference to the development of a plant:

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another.

But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 203-4




Hegel further argued that Kant's philosophical revolution did not establish the final limits or necessary foundations of human knowlede but rather was one of a long sequence of such conceptual revolutions to which man as subject repeatedly recognized that what he had thought was a being-in-itself actually received its content by means of the form given to it by the subject. 

The history of the human mind constantly replayed this drama of the subject's becoming conscious of itself and the consequent destruction of the previously uncriticized form of consciousness. 

The structures of human knowledge were not fixed and timeless, as Kant supposed, but were historically determined stages that evolved in a continuing dialectic until consciousness achieved absolute knowledge of itself. What at any moment was seen as fixed and certain was constantly overcome by the evolving mind, thereby opening up new possibilities and greater freedom. 

Every stage of philosophy from the ancient Presocratics onward, every form of thought in human history, was both an incomplete perspective and yet a necessary step in this great intellectual evolution. Every era's world view was both a valid truth unto itself and also an imperfect stage in the larger process of absolute truth's self-unfolding.

[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 380




[…] a paradigm emerges in the history of science, it is recognized as superior, as true and valid, precisely when that paradigm resonates with the current archetypal state of the evolving collective psyche. 

A paradigm appears to account for more data, and for more important data, it seems more relevant, more cogent, more attractive, fundamentally because it has become archetypally appropriate to that culture or individual at that moment in its evolution. 

The pursuit of knowledge always takes place within a given paradigm, within a conceptual matrix - a womb that provides an intellectually nourishing structure, that fosters growth and increasing complexity and sophistication - until gradually that structure is experienced as constricting, a limitation, a prison, producing a tension of irresolvable contradictions, and finally a crisis is reached. 

Then some inspired Promethean genius comes along and is graced with an inner breakthrough to a new vision that gives the scientific mind a new sense of being cognitively connected-reconnected to the world: an intellectual revolution occurs, and a new paradigm is born. Here we see why such geniuses regularly experience their intellectual breakthrough as a profound illumination, a revelation of the divine creative principle itself, as with Newton's exclamation to God, "I think Thy thoughts after Thee!" For the human mind is following the numinous archetypal path that is unfolding from within it.

And here we can see why the same paradigm, such as the Aristotelian or the Newtonian, is perceived as a liberation at time and then a constriction, a prison, at another. 

[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 438



The question is one of faith, of choosing our own 'grade of significance'. Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something much better: that we can become oak trees.

What is good and what is bad? What is virtuous and what is evil? It all depends on our faith. Taking our bearings from the four Great Truths discussed in this book, and studying the interconnections between these four landmarks on our 'map', we do not find it difficult to discern what constitutes the true progress of a human being:

- His first task is to learn from society and ‘tradition' and to find his temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.

- His second task is to interiorise the knowledge he has gained, sift it, sort it out, keep the good and jettison the bad; this process may be called 'individuation', becoming self-directed.

[E. F. Schumacher]
A Guide for the Perplexed, p.155




Modernisation theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of the state in social change. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions.

Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family. The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systemic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.

It should be clear by now that the concept of modernization tells us no more about the history of the West than about the rest of the world. The more we learn about that history, the more the rise of industrial capitalism in the West appears to have been the product of a unique conjunction of circumstances, the outcome of a particular history that gives the impression of inevitability only in retrospect, having been determined largely by the defeat of social groups opposed to large-scale production and by the elimination of competing programs of economic development.

Modern mass production was by no means the only system under which industrialization might have been achieved. In the words of Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, it did not grow out of the "imminent logic of technological change.” It was the product of an “implicit collective choice, arrived at in the obscurity of uncountable small conflicts.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.163




The upshot of the Marxian scheme of history was that certain things had to happen in sequence, whether they happened under bourgeois or "proletarian" auspices: the destruction of the old landed aristocracy; the rise of a new ruling class in its place; the "annihilation" of small-scale production; the transformation of peasants and artisans into wage workers; the replacement of communal, patriarchal, and “idyllic” arrangements by contractual arrangements; a new individualism in personal life; the collapse of religion and the spread of scientific habits of thought; the demystification of authority.

Modernization was a "multifaceted process involving changes in all areas of human thought and activity," according to Samuel P. Huntington. According to Lerner, it was a "systemic" process that repeated itself "in virtually all modernizing societies, on all continents of the world, regardless of variations in race, color, creed."

It was best understood not as the Westernization of the world but as the recapitulation, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, of a series of events first played out in Europe. The example of the West might serve to stimulate a desire for change, but change came chiefly from within.

Changes in one part of the social organism were functionally interconnected to changes in other parts: thus the growth of trade, the development of a labor market, and the advent of factory production coincided with changes in family structure, the extended family giving way to the nuclear or "conjugal" family.

Weber pointed out that when “developmental sequences” are twisted into ideal types, the resulting constructs take on the appearance of a “historical sequence unrolling with the necessity of a law.”

For historians who inherit from the Enlightenment (in the form of Marxism) a belief that moral progress requires the replacement of local attachments and a parochial outlook by successively wider and more inclusive identities, culminating in the Workers' International, the intensely localistic element in nineteenth-century radicalism (not to mention the religious spirit that often informed it) comes as a disconcerting discovery.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.154, 160, 162, 216




It is no part of his defense of the Populists to conscript them into the advancing march of progress. “They saw the coming society and they did not like it.”

For those who still believe that "modernization” is destined to carry the day, such a judgment will consign the Populists to the garbage dump of history. As Goodwyn notes, "the idea that workable small-unit democracy is possible within large-unit systems of economic production is alien to the shared presumptions of 'progress' that unite capitalists and communists in a religious brotherhood."

The obsolescence of small-scale production, a closely related dogma, needs reexamination in its own right, and Goodwyn calls for a new look at the "entire subject of large-scale agriculture in the modern state, both under capitalist and communist systems of organization."

The originality of Goodwyn's interpretation lies in his rejection of the usual assumption that progress brings democracy. He thinks, on the contrary, that a belief in the inexorable laws of development usually goes along with a certain contempt for ordinary people and their antiquated customs and ideas. In the 1890s, the “people" and "progressive society," he argues, represented contrasting and competing, not complementary, symbols.

The "contest between the people' and 'the progressive society'” ended in the defeat of the former and the rise of the progressive movement," a more cautious and limited movement than Populism, founded on the ruins of participatory democracy.

The denunciation of Goodwyn's work by Marxist historians confirms his contention that socialists share with liberals a dogmatic commitment to progressive views of history, which makes it impossible for them to see any value in the radical movements once mounted by small proprietors.

Small forms are "inefficient," [James] Green declares; and Populism, a defense of small farms and "traditional ways of life," was a "rudimentary," "petty-bourgeois" form of social protest.

The "condescension" that runs through these interpretations, according to Goodwyn, grows out of the "American historical tradition of conveying the national experience as a purposeful and generally progressive saga, almost divinely exonerated ... from the vicissitudes elsewhere afflicting the human condition."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.220-1




I am working with some Cynefin associates into recognising the value of Kegan’s development stages, not as a linear progression but as a highly contextual set of modulators, the resultant map of which allows us to take the 3As [Agency, Affordance, Assemblage] perspective in determining the nature of change […]

[…] my issue with maturity models is not necessarily the description of their stages, but the idea that progress through them is linear. Hence my earlier suggestion of treating the stages in a non-linear way by describing them as modulators that can vary in strength etc. in different contexts.

Learning and maturity are emergent, contextual and complex processes.

[Dave Snowden]
'Stairways to heaven?'




Arnold Toynbee has elevated the Question-Answer Logic to a Challenge-Response structure in the history of culture. The Question becomes an act of defiance, a Challenge [English in original – trans.], with an accompanying Response. This is an important advance in capturing the historical sense; it allows one to recognize dialectical tension, beyond polarities, thereby leaving behind the psychologico-centered, individualist a-historicism of naturalist thought.

What is gained through this way of approaching things is extraordinary, because it touches on the dialectical structure of every historical situation.

But even Toynbee can't escape the typical danger that immediately threatens his specifically historical mode of thinking. By placing in succession his twenty-odd higher cultures or civilizations, one after the other, he erases the core uniqueness of the historical event; and with it goes the proper structure of the historical.

General laws of world history are of no importance. In the end, this amounts to the submission of history to laws or statistical probabilities in a functionalist vein.

[…] historical knowledge for Hegel is not simply a judgment [of the past] but also and simultaneously an act of progress. But in its systematic character [the dialectic] easily loses its grip on the uniqueness and the historical happening becomes transformed into a pure rational process.

The necessity of making every historical test the basis of a general law of history's ebb and flow has even wrapped the best and wisest minds of the nineteenth century in a dense fog of generalizations. The inflation of the historical event to a general law of humanity pays homage to a century guilty of naturalist positivism, incapable of understanding and evaluating any truth except as a foreseeable and to a certain degree calculable general matter of course.

[Carl Schmitt]
‘The Planetary Tension Between Orient and Occident and the Opposition Between Land and Sea’, Chap. III



Related posts:-
Lines and Circles 
The Colour Wheel 
Everything is Connected 
The Pyramid

Concentrate / Decentrate



Concentrate                     -                      Decentrate
Hyper-                             -                      Hypo-
Life                                  -                      Death
Multiply                          -                      Divide
Limited                            -                      Unlimited
Real                                  -                      Ideal
Flawed                              -                      Perfect
Creation                            -                      Destruction
            



Within every living thing there is a tug of war, consisting of the the pull towards life, and the pull towards death. The life urge is conservative, the death urge expansive.

Life is defined by the process of limitation; a thing is only a thing because of all the things it is not; from a sea of infinite possibility certain characteristics are chosen, at the expense of others. Infinity is bounded.

Death is the return to infinity; the unbinding of what has been bound. If life is synonymous with 'limited', then death is synonymous with 'unlimited.'

As humans we have an urge towards expansiveness - the need to constantly explore new territory - that must be balanced by the imposition of limits. A lack of boundaries allows us to adventure to far flung places, full of mystery and novelty - but whenever we travel to extremes we also dance with death.







Concentrative thinking is centripetal. It focuses to a point. It borns gravity. It “charges” by multiplying low potential into high and cold into heat.



Decentrative thinking is centrifugal. It expands into space. It borns radiation. It “discharges” by dividing high potential into low and heat into cold.

The journey toward gravity simulates life and the opposite journey simulates death in the forever repeating cycles which, together in their continuity, simulate eternal life.

[Walter Russell]
A New Concept of the Universe, p. 14-16





One of the characteristic patterns of capitalism is of things getting concentrated into ever smaller spaces. Of things becoming more tightly packed. Of extremes.


Some examples:

- money and power is concentrated into fewer hands, producing extreme wealth/poverty.

- people are concentrated into smaller spaces, producing areas of extreme density (cities) and extreme sparsity (countryside).

- pixels are concentrated into smaller spaces producing extreme definition (HD).


Unchecked concentration leads to extremes.

For instance, the more you gather separate things together into one entity, and the tighter you pack them, the more mass you create; the more you concentrate flavours, the more exaggerated is the affect on the tastebuds; the more you focus talent into one area, the greater are the potential products of that talent; and by focusing wealth and power in fewer hands, the more extreme things can be done with this wealth and power.

Its akin to taking a long-slow wave - with shallow troughs and peaks - and packing it into a very small space. Its highs and lows are exaggerated - higher highs and lower lows - but its duration, its lifespan, is significantly shortened.

Imagine an athlete who trains so hard that they surpass all previous achievements in their field. They push their body to its limits, but in doing so wear it out in a very short space of time. They burn brightly - brighter than anything thus far - but their flame is extinguished unusually soon.

A high peak is always followed by a swift and steep descent. The brighter you burn, you shorter you shine: this is the eternal balance.

Through concentrating things we have made certain advances that would not have been possible otherwise. We have reached extremes that would have been unattainable if things were more evenly spread. These are the victories of capitalism.

Capitalism is, amongst other things, a pattern of runaway growth. It is unchecked linear progress, an infinite line moving into infinite space. In disregarding limits, it ends up going to extremes.

The longer it continues, the more tightly things will be packed, and the more extreme these things will become. It is turning a beach full of sand into a few boulders of sandstone.

If you want to make sandstone then it is 'good'. If you want a beach full of sand then it is 'bad'. Each have their downsides and upsides.  

As ever, the critical factor - the thing that determines 'bad' and 'good' - is context.

In light of the current problems that face us as a species, we cannot afford to keep wanting a few boulders of sandstone. We must begin to think in terms of sand, and beaches.





A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.

For example, when it comes to eggs, a bird can be made to prefer the artificial versions to their own, and humans can be similarly exploited by junk food. The idea is that the elicited behaviours evolved for the "normal" stimuli of the ancestor's natural environment, but the behaviours are now hijacked by the supernormal stimulus.

'Supernormal stimulus'


In semiotics and postmodernism, hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).

Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.

'Hyperreality'


Concentration leads to hyper-stimulation leads to addiction:

- Food                                        - extreme tastes
- Pornography                           - extreme bodies
- Drugs                                      - extreme highs
- Social media                           - extreme connectivity
- Films & video games                - extreme sights & sounds
- Music                                      - extreme sound





The point that nearly everyone in the debate is trying to evade is that the collection of extravagant energy-wasting habits that pass for a normal middle class lifestyle these days is, in James Howard Kunstler’s useful phrase, an arrangement without a future.

Those habits only became possible in the first place because our species broke into the planet’s supply of stored carbon and burnt through half a billion years of fossil sunlight in a wild three-century-long joyride. 

Now the needle on the gas gauge is moving inexorably toward that threatening letter E, and the joyride is over. It really is as simple as that.

[John Michael Greer]
'Renewables: The Next Fracking?' 





An enclosed social circle can quickly evolve political views, and the concentration of Britain's intelligentsia within small networks predominantly in west and north London helped to radically shift accepted ideas and prevent dissenting voices emerging.

As Cass Sunstein noted in Going to Extremes: 'Social networks can operate as polarisation machines because they help to confirm and thus amplify people's antecendent views.'

Interactivity between a group with political leanings of a certain bent acts as an echo chamber, progressively radicalising them even more.

[Ed West]
The Diversity Illusion, p. 62-3





I think that status is a hyper-normal stimuli […] what porn is to sex, sugar and salt and fat concentrated in a Frappuccino, or a McDonalds is to food - void of the actual nutrition […]

In an evolutionary environment we couldn’t necessarily have more than 150 people pay attention to us - now we can have a huge number of people pay attention to us and have it metricised with likes.

I think it is like sugar, a hyper-normal stimulus that is [unlikely] not to be bad for us, and we have to have a very mature relationship to it. Addiction of any kind - any hyper-normal stimulus that decreases normal stimulus - is going to end up being net bad for us.

I think one of the metrics for how healthy a society is, is inverse relationship to addictive dynamics. 

Addiction will give me a spike and then a crash, and then because of the crash I’m craving something that will spike me because I feel really shitty. But then I get in an erosion of baseline over time from the effects of that.

A healthier, more effective relationship to pleasure is anti-addictive. A healthy environment conditions people who are not prone to addiction, which means having more authenticity of choice. Addiction or compulsion writ large is less authenticity of choice.

If there is a healthy status relationship - in a tribal environment, where I can’t really lie and people are watching me, and know me - if I’m thought well of it’s because I’m actually doing well by everybody and I have authentic healthy relationships, as as opposed to [being able to] signal things that aren’t true, get more status though negative signalling about other people, and so on - that is the same kind of thing as the fast food, or the porn.

So I think we have a hypo-normal environment of the healthy stimulus which actually creates a baseline well being. Most people, when they go camping with their friends and they’re in nature in real authentic human relationships, they’re checking their phone for dopamine hits from email or Facebook less - because they’re actually having an authentic, meaningful, engaging interaction.

But in a world where there is a lot of isolation, [little] connection to nature and meaningfulness, that hypo-normal environment creates increased susceptibility to hyper-normal stimuli. 

Hyper-normal stimuli happen to be good for markets, because on the supply side addiction is good for the lifetime value of a customer, but is bad for society as a whole.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Portal (with host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #027 - On Avoiding Apocalypses' (3:11:40)





[…] globalisation creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. 

We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are now interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks […] when one falls, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard.

We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogenous framework of firms that all resemble on another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur… I shiver at the thought. I rephrase here: we will have fewer but more severe crises.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 225-6





[Nathan] Myhrvold enlightened me about an additional way to interpret and prove how globalisation takes us into Extremistan: the notion of species density. 

[…] out of the sixty thousand main words in English, only a few hundred constitute the bulk of what is used in writings, and even fewer appear regularly in conversation. Likewise, the more people aggregate in a particular city, the more likely a stranger will be to pick that city as his destination. The big get bigger and the small stay small, or get relatively smaller.

Simply, larger environments are more scalable than smaller ones - allowing the biggest to get even bigger, at the expense of the smallest, through the mechanism of preferential attachment […]

We have evidence that small islands have many more species per square meter than larger ones, and, of course, than continents. As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute - we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers, and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively. Cultural life will be dominated by fewer persons: we have fewer books per reader in English than in Italian […] Companies will be more uneven in size. And fads will be more acute. So will runs on the banks, of course.

[…] I am not saying that we need to stop globalisation and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs - and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 219, 317




But you may say: "Yes, but we have lived that way for a million years." Consciousness and purpose have been characteristic of man for at least a million years, and may have been with us a great deal longer than that. I am not prepared to say that dogs and cats are not conscious, still less that porpoises are not conscious.

So you may say: "Why worry about that?”

But what worries me is the addition of modern technology to the old system. Today the purposes of consciousness are implemented by more and more effective machinery, transportation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides, and so forth. Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us. A pathology - a loss of balance - is threatened.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p.440




With an unending stream of technological innovations, modern life was subject to an unprecedentedly disorienting rapidity of change. 

Gigantism and turmoil, excessive noise, speed, and complexity dominated the human environment. The world in which man lived was becoming as impersonal as the cosmos of his science. With the pervasive anonymity, hollowness, and materialism of modern life, man's capacity to retain his humanity in an environment determined by technology seemed increasingly in doubt. 

For many, the question of human freedom, of mankind's ability to maintain mastery over its own creation, had become acute.

[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 362-3




[…] one does not have to be a believer in total equality, whatever that may mean, to be able to see that the existence of inordinately rich people in any society today is a very great evil. Some inequalities of wealth and income are no doubt ‘natural' and functionally justifiable, and there are few people who do not spontaneously recognise this. 

But here again, as in all human affairs, it is a matter of scale. 

Excessive wealth, like power, tends to corrupt. Even if the rich are not ‘idle rich', even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practising greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy. 

[E.F. Schumacher]
Small is Beautiful, p. 234




World-city and province - the two basic ideas of every civilization - bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. 

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. 

In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. 

[...] the stone city in which is housed a quite artificial living, that has become divorced from Mother Earth and is completely anti-natural - the city of footless thought, that draws the streams of life from the land and uses them up within itself. 

This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end - what does it signify? 

[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 32 and Man and Technics, p. 62




The Pintupi data show that, as Peterson (1972) argues more generally for Aboriginal Australia, the emotional identification of persons with particular places leads older men to reside near their own primary sacred sites.

This pattern ensures that people will return to marginal areas, to exploit the entire region, and makes for increased efficiency in a regional system, potentially supporting a larger population.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.155




[…] the emergence of the new left […] would once again attempt to combine socialism with localism and “community” - with no more success, in the end, than the guild socialists had enjoyed in their own day.

Repeated failures of this sort indicate that it is the basic premise of progressive thought - the assumption that economic abundance comes before everything else, which leads unavoidably to an acceptance of centralised production and administration as the only way to achieve it - that needs to be rejected.

Until it is, “community” will remain an empty slogan.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.328




Congress passed the most important financial legislation since the Great Depression in 1999 - the Financial Services Act. This law paves the way for banks, insurance companies, and investment firms to merge into colossal megacorporations.

The act repeals the 1933 Glass-Steagall law that was designed to protect bank depositors and insurance buyers from high-risk manipulation of their funds by banks and insurance companies. Glass-Steagall prevented the various types of financial institutions from intermingling funds and services.

But after years of interelite squabbles between banks, insurance companies, and investment firms, and after tens of millions of dollars spent on congressional lobbying, Congress opened the door to the creation of all-purpose giant financial mega-firms.

Overall, the U.S. economy has performed very well in recent years under the policies initiated by the global elite. But the benefits of that performance have been very unevenly distributed.

The global economy has produced growth and profit for America's largest corporations, and it has raised the aggregate income of the nation. But at the same time, it has contributed to a decline in average earnings of American workers and an increase in inequality in America.

[Thomas R. Dye]
Top Down Policymaking, p.20, 25




Could it be the development of the very civilisation that brought about these technological advances has also been responsible for the introduction and spread of some of the world’s most terrible epidemics of disease?

My suggestion is that the West's desire for progress, growth, and increase has brought about the very diseases that have become its scourge. Take a simple example: Every farmer and market gardener knows that the more he or she attempts to increase yields per acre by farming intensively, the greater the chance is that a crop will be totally wiped out by disease or natural disaster.

In order to increase yields, monocultures are developed that can be planted ever closer together and cultivated and harvested in the most concentrated ways possible. This requires the use of fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides. The end result is a system in which variety and flexibility have been reduced to such an extent that when a disease strikes it can spread through the whole crop and destroy it.

Add to this the increasing ease of travel to and from distant parts by ship and caravan, and suddenly it becomes possible to transfer new diseases from across the world into a population with absolutely no resistance.

It could be argued that the history of the West is not so much that of kings, princes, and popes; of wars and treaties; of scientists, engineers, and philosophers; of arts and literature; but rather of the creation, rise, and triumph of infectious diseases like plague, typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis.

In a very real sense, human beings create the conditions for their own illness, out of their dreams, beliefs, values, social structures, and thought.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.111-2, 115




Starting in the late 18th century, and increasingly in the 19th, Britain became the champion of free trade; but it was in its interests to do so. Indeed, by then, Britain had become the first shipping nation in the world, the leading industrial economy, the supreme naval power and the largest colonial country.

In effect, the advocacy of free trade by Britain was little more than a disguised request for free commercial access to the whole world, including, of course, its rivals' colonies. Some of the weaker colonial powers, such as Belgium, had no option but to accept the ‘opening’ of its colonies to free trade, but most resisted strenuously.

The fostering of economic dependence of the colony on the metropole meant principally the prevention of self-sufficiency. This could be achieved negatively by discouraging the development in the colonies of industries that would compete with home industries. In the 19th century, for example, Britain, despite her advocacy of free trade for other countries, was concerned with Indian competition for the British textile industry, trying everything to stifle it.

Positively, economic dependency of the colony was fostered through highly specialized development of a few products for export. In the aggregate, the colonial world produced a wide range of goods, but the monoculture of cash crops often prevailed in individual colonies: sugar and its by-products in the Caribbean, cocoa in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), groundnuts in Senegal, sisal in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and so on.

Monoculture meant extreme dependence since the crop in question was rarely a basic subsistence crop and was scarcely ever consumed locally in significant amounts. The French, for example, produced wine in Algeria, a Muslim country where religion forbids alcoholic beverages. After nearly a quarter century of ‘independence’, Ghana, the world’s leading producer of cocoa, still imports most of the little chocolate it consumes from Britain!

Not only were colonial cash crops not consumed locally, but they also took away much land from subsistence agriculture, thereby leading oftentimes to a decline in the native standard of living and a deterioration in the quality of the diet. High-yield, low-quality root crops such as manioc and yams, for instance, were substituted for more varied and protein-richer cereal and bean crops. In extreme cases, such as in the West Indies, food had to be massively imported because nearly all available arable land was in sugar cane.

Dependency thus generally meant impoverishment as well. Paradoxically, the more ‘developed’ a colony was in terms of export productivity, the worse the diet of its population. Black South Africans, for instance, have one of the highest incidences of kwashiokor - a nutritional disease caused by a starchy diet - even though their country is by far the most highly developed industrial power on the African continent, with one of the continent's highest per capita income.

An additional source of dependence of colonial economies was that the few commodities, whether mineral or agricultural, in which they specialized were highly susceptible to extraordinary price fluctuations on the world market or, alternatively, were produced under conditions where the colonial power artificially imposed by force a very low price.

[Pierre L. van den Berghe]
The Ethnic Phenomenon, p. 102




The British Empire was at its very best a civilising force and at its very worst a ruthlessly efficient exploitation engine, but at no point did it seek to fundamentally annihilate the cultures and traditions of the people it subjugated. The GAE does.

[…] The GAE […] confers absolutely no benefits to either coloniser or colonised. The rewards, instead, go the obscenely rich financiers such as Larry Fink, or else mascot avatars of GAE ideology such as the obscenely fat Lizzo.

The GAE is a uniquely evil force in history totally unlike previous colonial empires. The GAE seeks total transformation of a culture in its own image using mass psychological warfare – as it did in Germany after World War II – on its subject populations and even on its own. It is a sick anti-civilisation cancer, a kind of all-consuming, all-destroying vortex that will not stop until everyone in the world has lost their history.

We face a totally evil enemy. The GAE has no redeeming features. It cannot be defended from the point of view of anyone who cares about humanity. It is anti-humanity and will destroy all you love.

[Academic Agent]
What is the Global American Empire (GAE)?, The Forbidden Texts, Substack

--

The GAE asset strips the whole world for the benefit of a small minority. Total extraction.




The industrial processes that turned government into this sprawling bureaucratised mess, have also done something very strange to our elites.

Mass society, human mobility and technology have untethered them from the local environments that used to give them meaning. We now have a class of globalising, extra-national super-elites, who identify primarily with each other, and who have lost contact with their native populations.

They have furthermore developed a peculiar agenda, one which reflects their own anxieties and aspirations. In implementing this agenda, they have the same problems as everyone else: They have to manipulate the bureaucratic monolith in all of its heavy, bewildering complexity.

In fact, elite withdrawal from specific national contexts and commitment to a bland, unpalatable universalising agenda means their task is even harder.

[eugyppius]
‘Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure: II - Mass containment as conspiracy and as emergent phenomenon’, eugyppius: a plague chronicle


--


The problem is less that we have elites, than that we have particularly bad ones, who have turned on the populations that sustain them.

This is not without historical precedent. Some elite factions during the rise of European feudalism, for example, developed a similar hostility and rapaciousness towards their peoples.

But, this is very far from the normal way of things. In healthy human societies, elites share a basic cultural outlook and an ethnic identity with their societies. Like everyone else, elites will strive to enrich themselves and further their own advantage, but ideally they and the people beneath them will share mutual interests sufficiently, to keep their rapaciousness in check and to ensure some degree of mutual regard.

[eugyppius]
‘Liberalism, Progressivism, Leftism’, eugyppius: a plague chronicle




Overshoot means you've exceeded your carrying capacity.

Any farmer who has a bunch of cattle knows that if you put too many cows out in the pasture, they'll eat the grass until there's nothing but mud and then they die. Now, if you import a lot of grass from other farmers, you can keep your cattle going. That's what humans have been doing.

We talk about urban ecology - that's nonsense. The city is not a complete ecosystem. The city is the human equivalent of a livestock feed lot because you have all of these consumer organisms jammed into one area. Geographers and urban economists often say, "Well, cities are no problem, and are only 2-3% of the surface area of the Earth." But that's from their narrow, reductionist, simplistic perspective.

If we look at human beings from an ecological point of view, then each city occupies on Earth an area anywhere between a 100 and a 1,000 times more land than is within the political or built-up area of the city. So the human urban ecosystem now is larger than the entire planet because cities have become parasitic on their environments because of globalization.

I did an early study of Tokyo. Tokyo is 38 million people, the whole population of Canada […] Tokyo uses more bio-capacity than the entire nation of Japan, about twice as much as a matter of fact. So the ecological footprint of Tokyo is larger than the entire country of Japan, and it's only something like a quarter or a third of the Japanese population. So Japan has exceeded its carrying capacity because of globalization, the capacity to bring in the resources needed to sustain its overpopulation.

And because we can do that, we become blinded to the reality of our overshoot.

As long as you can import from elsewhere, you are blind to the fact that you've exceeded your local carrying capacity. But what you're doing in the meantime is drawing down the available productive capacity in other places. And every country in Europe is in that circumstance.

Japan is in that circumstance where they're living on imported carrying capacity or the assimilative capacity of the rest of the planet to absorb their carbon and other waste. We don't actually measure the other waste.

[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube




Another consequence of the short period of cheap and plentiful oil, of course, is the monster cities of today. We say to ourselves, Well, man needs a city; culture cannot arise out of subsistence farming; there has to be a sort of critical density of people to make mutual fertilization possible and produce the flowering of the human spirit.

Cities have existed for five or six thousand years; but they could never grow beyond a very modest size. Why not? Because a big city doesn't live on itself, it lives on the land, it lives off the land.

An inland city lives off the circle of land around it to be provisioned; and in the past that circle couldn't be very large, because the only transport energy was animal and man. Of course, a city situated by the sea could use one other transport energy, namely wind power, and therefore the biggest cities grew up on the seashore, where they could be provisioned by ships. And so we know of no city, until about a hundred years ago, that grew beyond something like two hundred or three hundred thousand people.

Then this bottleneck of how to provision a city was broken by man exploiting fossil fuels, first coal, then oil, and developing a transport technology to use them, so that big cities could be provisioned from all over the world: the hinterland, as it were, of the city became the world.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 17




In sum, specialization of economic activities, by breaking up the economic process, had made it possible for people to concentrate on one portion of the process and, by maximizing that portion, to jeopardize the rest.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘Western Civilisation to 1914,’ p.29




Since such economic independence could, according to the theory, be obtained only by the Great Powers, the lesser states were to be deprived of sovereignty in its fullest sense and be reduced to a kind of vassal or client condition in respect to the Great Powers.

The theory was that each Great Power, in order to enjoy full sovereignty, must adopt a policy of autarky. Since no power, however great, could be self-sufficient within its own national boundaries, it must extend this sphere of autarky to include its weaker neighbors, and this sphere would have political as well as economic implications, since it was unthinkable that any Great Power should permit its lesser neighbors to endanger it by suddenly cutting off its supplies or markets.

The theory thus led to the conception of “continental blocs” consisting of aggregates of lesser states about the few Great Powers. This theory was entirely in accord with the political development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This development had seen an increasing disparity in the powers of states with a decreasing number of Great Powers.

This decline in the number of Great Powers occurred because of the advance of technology, which had progressed to a point where only a few states could follow. The theory of continental blocs was also in accord with the growth of communications, transportation, weapons, and administrative techniques.

These made it almost inevitable that the world would be integrated into increasingly large political units.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.230




This inevitably brings together the capital owned by a large number of persons to create an enterprise controlled by a small number of persons.

The financiers did all they could to make the former number as large as possible and the latter number as small as possible. The former was achieved by stock splitting, issuing securities of low par value, and by high-pressure security salesmanship. The latter was achieved by plural-voting stock, nonvoting stock, pyramiding of holding companies, election of directors by cooptation, and similar techniques.

The result of this was that larger and larger aggregates of wealth fell into the control of smaller and smaller groups of men.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘Finance, Commercial Policy, & Business Activity,’ p.213




‘We are talking about something like $200 billion that used to go to the worst-off three-fifths of the population, and now goes to the best-off fifth …’

The stagnant incomes of the majority in America’s ‘winner-take-all’ capitalism are not the inevitable by-product of technological innovation. Comparisons with no less technologically developed economies suggest strongly that they are the result of public policies. According to well-researched estimates, in 1990 American CEOs earned roughly 150 times the average worker’s salary, while in Japan the figure was 16 and in Germany 21.

‘What is occurring is a huge transfer of wealth from lower skilled, middle class American workers to the owners of capital assets and to a new technological aristocracy with a large element of compensation tied to new stock values.’

[…] the Japanese social contract guaranteeing full employment has prevented the growth of a proletariat and, in more recent times, of an underclass. By comparison with most western countries, Japan is an egalitarian society in which nearly everyone is middle class.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.115-16, 173


   
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