Forever Becoming: eugyppius

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The Liberal Day-dream

Ideal - Real

Global - Local

If you do a full lifecycle analysis of an average large EV, it's a worse option ecologically overall - and also culturally and socially because of the slave labor involved in the mining, refining and manufacturing - it's probably a worse option than a standard internal combustion vehicle.

And yet taxpayers are now being asked, in fact, to subsidize an option which is really engineered not to solve the climate, not to solve overshoot, but to keep the machine going - to maintain investment, to maintain jobs, to increase the span of the economy.

In other words, to maintain business as usual by alternative means. But it's business as usual that has got us into this situation.

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

The truth is that all human societies, even liberal democracies, have aristocrats.

Whether their aristocracies are formally acknowledged with ranks and titles and special badges, or whether they slum it with the rest of us, matters much less than you might imagine. Humans are hierarchical chimps and we recreate the same social structures over and over.

In fact, I think one of the greatest defects of modern liberal democracy, is its promotion of an informal elite – people who, for reasons of birth or social standing, wield significant power, but because of liberal democratic principles, are allowed (or compelled) to do so in underhanded, informal, less-than-legible ways.

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

According to the chivalric code, which had a decisive influence on the development of the notion of military honour in Europe, it is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk.

It is only honourable to attack the enemy on the battlefield. It is dishonourable, by contrast, to kill the enemy in an underhanded way - by poisoning, for instance. Symmetry and reciprocity must be ensured.

An enemy in a war is not a criminal who must be destroyed at any cost. Rather, he is an equal opponent, a competing player. Such an enemy is afforded equal rights.

With drone warfare, we reach the pinnacle of asymmetry. The degradation and transformation of the opponent into a criminal is the precondition of targeted killing, which resembles a kind of policing.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.71, 73

And the computer we’re talking on, rather than being a two or three-thousand dollar Apple, might be a million dollar Apple. If you factor the real cost of what it takes for the supply chains to make this thing, then you’re like, “Okay, we would actually not even do manufacturing the same way.”

We only do manufacturing this way because we’ve been able to externalize all the costs to the environment. Now, we’re hitting planetary boundaries. We’re not going to be able to keep doing that.

And so nobody is thinking seriously enough about what does an economy that does not externalize costs look like and how do we retool our total global infrastructure in that way? And how do we do it in the time we have, factoring that we’re already in diminishing returns on hydrocarbons and everything is oriented towards growth, and you have to completely change the financial system?

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'Homegrown Human - Daniel Schmachtenberger - Existential Risk'

Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.

Feminism has inherited these contradictions. It sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about woman is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.2-3

Rousseauism’s Christianized psychology has led to the tendency of liberals toward glumness or depression in the face of the political tensions, wars, and atrocities that daily contradict their assumptions.

Perhaps the more we are sensitized by reading and education, the more we must repress the facts of chthonian nature.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.38

The peoples of the victorious nations had taken to heart their wartime propaganda about the rights of small nations, making the world safe for democracy, and putting an end both to power politics and to secret diplomacy.

These ideals had been given concrete form in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Whether the defeated Powers felt the same enthusiasm for these high ideals is subject to dispute, but they had been promised, on November 5, 1918, that the peace settlements would be negotiated and would be based on the Fourteen Points.

When it became clear that the settlements were to be imposed rather than negotiated, that the Fourteen Points had been lost in the confusion, and that the terms of the settlements had been reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small nations had been excluded and in which power politics played a much larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of feeling against the treaties.

Certainly there were grounds for criticism, and, equally certainly, the terms of the peace settlements were far from perfect; but criticism should have been directed rather at the hypocrisy and lack of realism in the ideals of the wartime propaganda and at the lack of honesty of the chief negotiators in carrying on the pretense that these ideals were still in effect while they violated them daily, and necessarily violated them.

The settlements were clearly made by secret negotiations, by the Great Powers exclusively, and by power politics. They had to be. No settlements could ever have been made on any other bases.

The failure of the chief negotiators (at least the Anglo-Americans) to admit this is regrettable, but behind their reluctance to admit it is the even more regrettable fact that the lack of political experience and political education of the American and English electorates made it dangerous for the negotiators to admit the facts of life in international political relationships.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.169

Again and again, the dream has been a world where kings and aristocrats were things of the past, where every man and woman is free to attain a better standard of living based on their own merits, but the reality has been a world of tribal groups vying for power using universal ideals to hide their sectional interests.

However, these facts have never diminished the dream. It is the dream of Jordan Peterson; it is the dream of Elon Musk; it is the dream of Chris Rufo; and it remains the dream of most Americans who have not already been won over by the allures of resentment.

‘Identity politics’ is the enemy of the dream, because ‘identity politics’ brings reality front and centre. Reality is always the enemy of the dream.

[Academic Agent]
'The Rufo Reich and Mecha-Bentham', The Forbidden Texts

The Rise of the Managers

Simple - Complex

The aspiration to value-neutrality often hides a claim to manipulative power. Beneath bureaucratic forms and lofty idealism are often to be found Nietzschean premises.

As “good determinists,” liberals knew that history always marches forward. “The human race never turns back to an old order.”

The best hope lay in an orderly “transition to that which Dewey and Beard have called a ‘technological-rationalist society.’” even if the “more valid equality” it promised meant the “inevitable sacrifice” of individual liberties.

“There is something ponderously fatal about such a transition,” Josephson mused, “but if it results in order, enthusiasm, harmony, we will be content with our sacrifice.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.363

"The public interest in a problem," Lippmann argued, "is limited to this: that there shall be rules. ...The public is interested in law, not in the laws; in the method of law, not in the substance." Questions of substance should be left to experts, whose access to scientific knowledge immunized them against the emotional "symbols" and "stereotypes" that dominated public debate.

Lippmann […] rejected the "mystical fallacy of democracy" and the "usual appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracy." Democratic theory presupposed an "omnicompetent citizen," a "jack of all trades" who could be found only in a "simple self-contained community." In the "wide and unpredictable environment" of the modern world, the old ideal of citizenship was obsolete.

In a complex industrial society, government had to be carried on by officials who were expected to "conceive a common interest." In their attempt to stretch their minds beyond the limits of immediate experience," these officials would be guided either by public opinion or by expert knowledge. There was no escape from this choice.

Public opinion was unreliable, according to Lippmann, because it could be united only by an appeal to slogans and “symbolic pictures.” In a society ruled by public opinion, government became the art of "manipulation" - the "manufacture of consent." "Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. ... Everything is on the plane of assertion and propaganda."

At best, public debate was a disagreeable necessity - not the very essence of democracy, as Brownson or Bourne would have argued, but its "primary defect," which arose only because "exact knowledge," unfortunately, was in limited supply. Ideally public debate would not take place at all; decisions would be based on scientific "standards of measurement" alone. Science cut through "entangling stereotypes and slogans," the "threads of memory and emotion" that kept the "responsible administrator" tied up in knots.

Like Edmund Burke, Lippmann distrusted memory as an important source of conflict and disagreement. He proposed to counter its influence, however, not with custom but with “organized intelligence."

An earlier theory of democracy had considered ordinary citizens at least competent to manage their own affairs, if not consistently capable of self-denial and sacrifice. Their opinions were held to command respect, as Lippman saw it, because the business of government did not greatly exceed their experience. But it was “not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.366

The "practical comfort of the moment" outweighed the "great moral issues of the future.” The question of how to provide practical comfort" was a technical question, not something that could be settled by an appeal to first principles. It was a question for "experts," not for "orators.”

As a lawyer, Arnold might have been expected to recognize the intractability of conflicting interests and to doubt the possibility of making politics an exact science. His faith in expertise, however, exceeded even that of many social scientists.

He measured intellectual progress precisely by the absence of debate.

Doctors, he argued, no longer engaged in pointless controversies about the rival claims of homeopathic and allopathic schools of medicine. The medical profession had been "taken over by men of skill rather than men of principle," with the result that there was "little left in medicine for thinking men to debate.”

Whereas medical learning had become "technical rather than philosophical,” however, economic and legal learning remained “predominantly philosophical” - a sure sign of cultural lag.

He too dismissed as "irrational" the notion that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." "Public argument never convinces the other side," he wrote; its only function was to rally the true believers. The "noise of competing theories" drowned out the voice of the expert. To submit social questions to the "feeble judgment of the common herd" was the height of folly.

Arnold did not have to engage in this kind of self-deception, since he held no brief for democracy in the first place. Insofar as the idea of democracy had any substance, it was simply another name for “humanitarian imperialism,” in his view. It meant the universalisation of material well-being, engineered by “fact-minded persons” and “competent diagnosticians.”

A democratic regime, to be sure, had to “carry its people along with it emotionally”; but that did not imply that the people should take an active part in governing themselves. As long as the governing classes grasped the nature and importance of political symbolism, they could satisfy the public demand for inspiring slogans and “ceremonials” without allowing public “ritual” to interfere with production and distribution.

When the public came to value “practical results” more highly than “preconceived principles,” a “competent, practical, opportunistic governing class” would find it possible to get on with the serious work of making people comfortable, without having to inspire and amuse them as well.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.432, 434-6

[…] from ancient Rome to medieval England, there were bureaucracies also in the pre-modern world.

With industrialisation and the emergence of mass society, however, the bureaucratic apparatus has expanded to the point that a quantitative difference has become a qualitative one. In their scale, complexity, and their power, modern bureaucracies are like nothing the world has ever seen before, and they cause states to behave in new and incomprehensible ways.

Above all, power has been steadily diffused downwards, through the ranks of countless even mid-level functionaries, and government policies are subject to enormous inertia.

Those who doubt this, should look at the military. This is one sector of the bureaucracy, which for operational reasons has tried to avoid the unmanageable diffusion of powers and prerogatives. They have gone to extreme lengths to establish clear lines of command, ensure obedience to orders, and avoid excessive consensus-based decision making.

Without this overt command discipline, it is impossible for any single person to direct bureaucratic structures, or for the bureaucrats themselves to shift strategies, absorb new information, or take up fresh initiatives quickly.

The one thing I want to convey here, more than anything else, is the complexity and extent of modern western governments. These are unbelievably elaborate systems, and they are not easily controlled or understood by individuals or confined groups.

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

The civil servant has as his nineteenth-century counterpart and opposite the social reformer: Saint Simonians, Comtians, utilitarians, English ameliorists such as Charles Booth, the early Fabian socialists. Their characteristic lament is: if only government could learn to be scientific!

[...] in his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge, organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal lawlike generalizations, Weber provided the key to much of the modern age.

The manager's claim to moral neutrality, which is itself an important part of the way the manager presents himself and functions in the social and moral world, is thus parallel to the claims to moral neutrality made by many physical scientists.

So we can now see in bare skeletal outline a progress first from the Enlightenment's ideal for a social science to the aspirations of social reformers, next from the aspirations of social reformers to the ideals of practice and justification of civil servants and managers, then from the practices of management to the theoretical codification of these practices and of the norms governing them by sociologists and organization theorists and finally from the employment of the textbooks written by those theorists in schools of management and business schools to the theoretically informed managerial practice of the contemporary technocratic expert.

But in every case the rise of managerial expertise would have to be the same central theme, and such expertise, as we have already seen, has two sides to it: there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power.

Both of these, we can now perceive, derive from the history of the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value were distinguished by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twentieth-century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of eighteenth-century philosophy.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.92, 100-1

[...] Nietzsche's prophetic irrationalism - irrationalism because Nietzsche's problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason - remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture.

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.133

RAND’s rational choice is an argument that denies the obvious - cooperation, self-sacrifice, and abnegation do exist, people do love each other and don’t always think of themselves first, elections are won fairly and agreed to by all contestants, elected officials do act on the public interest, marriages and institutions do last.

Rational choice has given birth to a world shaped by decisions made in the dark, outside the realm of public debate - justified by false objectivity (change the parameters if you don’t like the results) and biased scientific bases that denigrate collective responsibility (much like the corporate battle cry of “it’s all for the shareholders,” discarding as demote previous social commitments of companies to employees, government, and community).

Moreover, deliberately or not, rational choice theory has become a handy rhetorical weapon for groups whose political and financial aims are to reconstruct the social system of the United States - returning the country to pre-New Deal days, while making billions in the process. These changes have resulted in a society where, for instance, the top 5 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the wealth and where corporate executive pay is 400 times greater than that of the average worker.

The final irony of rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is (in academic terms, it is normative but not empirical), positing a make-believe structure where only one kind of rationality is extant.

[Alex Abella]
Soldiers of Reason, p.308-9

The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production. This process increased man’s ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree.

But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers.

And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers.

[...] The ultimate nature of that new system of economic and social life is not yet clear, but we might call it the “pluralist economy,” and characterize its social structure as one which provides prestige, rewards, and power to managerial groups of experts whose contributions to the system are derived from their expertise and “know-how.”

These managers and experts, who clearly are a minority in any society, are recruited from the society as a whole, can be selected only by a process of “careers open to talent” on a trial-and-error basis, and require freedom of assembly, discussion, and decision in order to produce the innovations needed for the future success, or even the survival, of the system in which they function.

Thus the pluralist economy and the managerial society, from the early 1940’s, have forced the growth of a new kind of economic organization which will be totally unlike the four types of pre-1939 (American laissez faire, Stalinist Communism, authoritarian Fascism, and underdeveloped areas).

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.241, 348

Regardless of the outcome of the situation, it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the democratic voter in control of the political system.

This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning, in which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be established and limited by the experts on the economic system even as he will replace the governmental side; then the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their planning within these established limitations.

Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another.

But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Age,’ p.548

Both the Soviet system and the free market are experiments in economic rationalism.

Free marketeers tell us that the unprecedented productivity of a rational economic system will remove the causes of social conflict and war. Soviet Marxists used to assure us that socialist planning would make scarcity a thing of the past. Both tell us that rising productivity will of itself solve most social problems, both exalt economic growth over all other goals and values.

Like the Bolsheviks, the shock troops of the free market are resolutely hostile to any tradition that stands in the way of what they view as economic progress. If their goals demand the sacrifice of a few cultures on the way, it is a price which free marketeers do not shrink from paying.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.141

Democratic / Autocratic

Centralised / Dispersed

Top Down / Bottom Up

Deep / Shallow

Deep               -                  Shallow
Vertical -                   Horizontal
Professional          -                  Amateur
Engineer -                   Artist
Diligent                -                   Dilettante
Specific                -                   General
Defined                -                   Undefined
Narrow             -                   Wide
Mono                -                   Poly
Tied             -                   Untied
Closed                   -                   Open
Perfect                   -                   Flawed
Solid             -                   Liquid
Apollo                   -                  Hermes

There is nothing as conservative as a deep expert!

[Dave Snowden]
'Managing for Serendipity or why we should lay off "best practice" in KM'

We summarize these two 'zones' of characteristic as the diligent and the dilettante.

Diligence refers to the focused, assiduous character of the entrepreneur, driven by a single-minded passion and purpose. Dilettante refers to the impulsive, intuitive and opportunistic aspects of entrepreneurship. Importantly, it is the transition from dilettante to diligent which converts innovative ideas into entrepreneurial applications.

It follows that the effective entrepreneur or entrepreneurial enterprise must be at once flighty, amateurish, naive, flitting from idea to project without fixing for too long and drifting on free of commitment; until, when they happen upon and recognize something of particular interest, they become attentive, assiduous and persevering.

The contrast between breadth of references and depth of attention recalls Edward De Bono's distinction between 'lateral' and 'vertical' thinking, and the contrast between 'divergent' and convergent' creative processes [...] Hence, the diligent-dilettante dichotomy is rooted in creativity theory.

Arthur Koestler emphasized that creativity requires 'mental cross-fertilisation.' Howard Gruber describes creativity operating across a 'network of enterprises', while Sawyer notes a creative capacity to switch between fields or domains. Through these multiple contacts, creative connections can be made and new ideas emerge. Creative 'field-switching' fits with our description of the 'dilettante' above.

At the same time, creativity theory also emphasizes the importance of domain-specific expertise, a laboriously acquired repertoire of craft, experience and knowledge which allows creative impulses to take root and allows creative people to polish and refine their ideas into a completed form.

[...] The dilettante must also be diligent - and creative connections between fields must be channelled into expertise and knowledge within a designated field.

[...] work within a domain, but also think outside of it.

[...] becoming too diligent or too dilettante [...] can lead to limiting characteristics: turning recognizers into dreamers, developers into tinkerers, and so on.

[Chris Bilton & Stephen Cummings]
Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation, p. 121-23

The dilettante is adept at taking everything out of context. This can be productive certainly, when the contexts are false. But it is impossible for the dilettante to form new concepts from mere fragments.

[Florian Havemann, as quoted by Karl Heinz Bohrer]
'The Three Cultures' in Observations on "the Spiritual Situation of the Age", p. 149

To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.

[...] the way the loss of opportunities for self-realization plays out is not through a paucity of options but a surfeit of them, all of which we feel capable of pursuing only to a shallow degree before we get frustrated or bored.

[Things that encourage a shallow level of participation may be] a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.

Consumerism [...] keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena - a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably [...] But this comes at the expense of developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.

[...] Novelty trumps sustained focus, whose rewards are not immediately felt and may never come at all [...] if our focus is mistakenly fixed on something ultimately worthless. Rather than taking advantage of that "increasingly marginal utility" that comes with practicing something difficult, our will to dilettantism develops momentum.

[...] Dilettantism is a perfectly rational response to the hyperaccessibility of stuff available to us in the market, all of which imposes on us time constraints where there was once material scarcity. These time constraints become more itchy the more we recognize how much we are missing out on (thanks to ever more invasive marketing efforts, often blended in to the substance of the material we are gathering for self-realization).

We opt instead for “diversity,” and begin setting about to rationalize the preferability of novelty even further, abetted by the underlying message of much our culture of disposability.

Concentration takes on more of the qualities of work—it becomes a disutility rather than an end vis-a-vis the stuff we acquire. If something requires us to concentrate, it costs us more and forces us to sacrifice more of the stuff we might otherwise consume. In other words, consumerism makes the will and ability to concentrate seem a detriment to ourselves.

[Rob Horning]
'The alluring danger of dilettantism'

In direct opposition to the trend in mainstream culture toward greater specialization, we need to actively promote the generalist - the one who sees connections and makes links across different disciplines. In this regard, one of the most hopeful trends is the increasing respect for more feminine values and ways of thinking.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.189

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist.

But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints.

Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own specialty, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.

But the amateur, because he loves things, may, in the course of his life, finds points at which to dig deep.

[Jacob Burckhardt]
Reflections on History (1868)

I would say that what makes an artist rather than a dilettante or poseur is the seriousness of commitment to their work, the evolution (or deepening) of their work over time, and the quality of their work relative to accepted standards of originality, formal invention, handling of material, etc.

['bricology']
'Microproperty in Flow World' (comments section), Click Opera

For Rorty, the most pernicious idea in that intellectual atmosphere was that technical clarity in problem solving was the chief intellectual virtue.

"That's a recipe for scholasticism if I've ever heard it," he says, shaking his head disapprovingly.

"What about imaginative virtues? If you don't allow people to be unclear, intellectual progress grinds to a halt. It's the vague people who are the pioneers."

[James Ryerson]
'The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty's pragmatic pilgrimage'

It is in the nature of generalisation that there will be many exceptions, and experts will always disagree with any generalisation, as experts should.

Fine-grained analysis is the expert's prerogative. However, the more fine-grained the expert analysis, the more difficult it may be to see an overall pattern: it cannot be other than the view from close up. This will inevitably lead some to the conclusion that no pattern exists, but I believe this to be a mistake.

One has to stand back in order to see patterns at all; there is a ‘necessary distance’ for such pattern recognition to work.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 242

Experts are narrowly focused persons who need to “tunnel.” In situations where tunnelling is safe, because Black Swans are not consequential, the expert will do well.

You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together - the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 147

The present danger does not really lie in the loss of universality on the part of the scientist, but rather in his pretence and claim for totality […]

What we have to deplore therefore is not so much the fact that scientists are specialising, but rather the fact that specialists are generalising.

'The true nihilism of today is reductionism […] Contemporary nihilism no longer brandishes the word nothingness; today nihilism is camouflaged as nothing-but-ness. Human phenomena are thus turned into mere epiphenomena.'

[Victor E. Frankl]
Reductionism and Nihilism

The sustained study of natural, historical or literary phenomena, doesn’t make you smarter or better at understanding the world.

As the sophistication of theory and interpretation increases, the scope of inquiry narrows, and the possibilities for self-deception and absurdity only multiply. Hence the familiar jokes, about the ridiculous ideas that only someone with a doctoral degree could propagate.

There are errors and mistaken interpretations to which low-information observers are subject, but high-information, critical thinkers also build intellectual worlds that are subject to deeper, harder errors, and these people will never be convinced they are wrong.

[eugyppius]
‘Why People Believe Wrong Things’, eugyppius: a plague chronicle

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

Chinese Whispers

Ben Goldacre: There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well ... [and] until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon.

Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

amoebic vodka: As for scientists taking responsiblilty for communicating science to the public, we have to ask why? In most cases companies and government bodies don’t expect the people responsible for decision making and doing the job to talk to the media. They employ spokespeople or entire PR departments to do that for them.

MostlySunny: What you have quite rightly highlighted in your column is the powerful effect the
media has on society in shaping popular “opinion” and “morality”. The media defines for society “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong”.

John A: I have often read both scientific papers and the newspaper reports and have found that the reporter has completely misunderstood the paper and even added conclusions that just didn't hold. If a factually false and conceptually misleading article is written concisely and clearly is that good science reporting?

Disseminating knowledge from the scientific community to a scientifically undereducated public requires effort on the part of all those involved. Scientists communicate all the time at conferences, in papers and indeed to anyone who shows the remotest interest (as many have learned to their cost at parties). It is the media's job to inform and educate the public, not the front-line scientist's. If the media is incapable of understanding scientists and unwilling to employ those who can, it is lazy and unfair to demand that scientists should come to them while they remain resolutely fixed.

amoebic vodka: We disagree that it is the job of the media to educate and inform. it is the job of the media to sell more copies, get more viewers or whatever it is the company in question needs to make money. In most cases this means the purpose of the media is to entertain (the exception perhaps being the BBC).
It’s not just science, the media misinterpretation of statistics in particular affects other subjects too. The annual ‘exams are getting easier’ stories for example.

Debate taken from 'Bad Science' blog, see here

Implicit here is the idea that advanced artists (and Lenins and Maos) see things ordinary people cannot, and therefore have a right to lead - or at least to special autonomy. So: "Avant-gardism is grounded in the dangerous notion that there exists an elite class possessing enlightened consciousness."

This is blunder number two, and it leads to the hoarding, rather than sharing, of information; to obfuscation and dissimulation, rather than openness and transparency; and to the deliberate blockage of autonomy and mutual self-empowerment.

[Gene Ray]
Art Schools Burning & Other Songs of Love and War, Chap. IV, para. 12

Scientists are generally a complex bunch who are extremely introverted but also love talking about their work to anyone who is interested. That's the problem. The 'public' aren't interested unless there's a 'sexy' conclusion or headline that can be given in the 20 second slot they'll allocate you on the evening news - at a workshop I attended (entitled something like 'communicating with a non-science audience and the media') I was told this about my own research by someone who used to be the editor of the financial times, and someone who used to be the news editor for Radio 4 (our supposed 'high brow' radio station)and apparently a well known presenter of Watchdog in the 80s.

The man from radio 4 was putting words into my mouth and drawing false conclusions from my work within 30 seconds.

Not sure about any 'deliberate blockage of autonomy' - maybe we don't communicate because we can't, in the conventional channels anyway. At least, we are blocked from communicating by a select few who choose what is and what is not interesting..

Further, there's the adjunct issue that everyone has different brains which are expert in different areas and interested in different areas. I have great difficulty digesting any engineering papers - this prevents me from bulding bridges and complex metal structures, but do I really want to anyway? The issue there is co-operation and collaboration. We can't do it all ourselves, so we need community to capitalise on those who are experts in those areas to help us fulfil our own goals.

[Debbora]

Adorno is allergic to the power-relations involved in propaganda and commercialism. For him, to countenance using something as imbalanced as the mass media to put over a "progressive message" is to agree with manipulation, setting up the artist in a hierarchy above the audience.

'Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture'

In 2004 Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy's presidential address to The American Sociological Association called for a public sociology. Burawoy considers the point that sociology has a role to play in the public domain and suggests that the academic sociologist should be more involved in public debate.

One of the main differences between the role of the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm.

'Pierre Bourdieu'
Wikipedia

When Mr. Smith enters the board room of his company, he is expected to limit his thinking narrowly to the specific purposes of the company or to those of that part of the company which he "represents."

Mercifully it is not entirely possible for him to do this and some company decisions are influenced by considerations which spring from wider and wiser parts of the mind. But ideally, Mr. Smith is expected to act as a pure, uncorrected consciousness - a dehumanized creature.

[Gregory Bateson]
'The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation', Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.452

A lot of the internal processes of these organisations, are devoted to the propagation or diffusion of the same ideas across thousands of different offices and organisations. Thus policies acquire an inertia, as more and more actors buy into them and further these policies in their own small ways.

It is very hard to sell many people at once on complicated ideas, and so there is inevitably an emphasis on simplicity and an absence of strategy. The ideal policy in this environment will be one where more of a given action is good and demanded, and less of a given action is bad and to be abhorred.

[eugyppius]
'Government by Vampire Zombie Squid', eugyppius: a plague chronicle

The Liberal Day-dream

The Rise of the Managers

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Chinese Whispers

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