I've just discovered your site via the Dark Mountain Project. On reading a few posts – looking forward to reading more! – there's a point of resonance between your post on medieval power structures and this post on the new philanthropy I'd like to point out. Actually, not just a narrow point, but a confluence, a convergence. This also relates to your wonderful post on Australia and Bali!
Gates, Krugman, all of the globalists, share a world-view that is essentially reductivist. As you said in the Bali post, (they) "just don't see anything that hasn't been coated with a thick varnish of Quant." The danger comes when this mindset has so much power coupled with an inherent blindness, an inability to discern their own fully developed self-interest as opposed to maintaining a path of undefined selfishness. This dynamic prevents them from seeing the danger of their ways. Not just to some abstract other, "the poor, the environment," etc., but to themselves and those they care about.
The tie-in with the Abbott enjoying his patio comes with the way that image highlights the quantum change between then and now. In Medieval Europe it was reasonable to think that power held close and used to live off the populace was a feasible strategy for survival, perhaps a feasible strategy for achieving a level of culture otherwise unobtainable. The elites fed their guilt through a system of contrition managed within the ecclesiastical system itself. They behaved unethically – they sinned – and the mechanism for their contrition was managed by the same system that allowed them to be unethical and bestowed a practical advantage on them. "Sling yer 'ook!" Indeed! It worked, as cruel as it was.
Today that equation has shifted. Simply put, that transaction no longer pays off. When the Captains of Industry and their ecclesiasts, now academic apologists, try to play that same game – refusing to see outside their own perspective – They expect to focus the same social pathology that led them to concentrate power and wealth, at the expense of everyone and everything, on "solving the world's problems." They decide, not out of contrition, but from an overweening pride, to share their secrets of success with the world's underprivileged! They're shocked that anyone would criticize their methods, or impugn their motives. They measure their successes by how well their results match their models and narrow expectations. Of course, "they export more! That can only be good, right?"
Today this kind of behavior does not simply enslave a region or despoil an area, these methods and mindsets threaten our very survival. Including the survival of the ones who refuse to see that their own prodigious efforts are not enhancing anyone's survival, but only hastening greater catastrophe.
This crisis of imagination, this scatoma, not of a poor underclass wishing to mimic an elite, but of that elite itself, a blindness to the toxicity of their stance, underlies all of our predicaments. In part this is a race for extinction, a race between the powerful and delusional and the rest of life on earth. Who will expire first. But it's not just that. Without efforts to winkle-out the strands of non-pathological human constructs available through study of other places and other times, and the development of alternative "cosmologies," we lose no matter what. The passing of the moderns will leave a hole. We need to work on ways to fill that hole, or there won't be anything between what's left of us and a massive fall to the lowest entropy. A fall whose details are unknowable, but one that can only be mitigated by bringing a new perspective, way of seeing, thinking acting, a new cosmology.
You mention a self-organizing group, like ants re-colonizing a fallow ground. If we take a broader view, we are all of us always attempting to self-organize on a constantly changing ground of reality. The successful examples, evolutionarily successful, not as measured by some reductivist measure, are the ones that create dynamic systems that, as you also point out, need to make renewal and transformation possible by reducing the space for experimentation to within socially – at the widest sense of what that can mean – acceptable proportions. Mystery as functional, myster-ization as disfunctional, because it rips myth apart from metis.
This is a great way to see the driving mechanism behind modernism's failures. By seeking to demystify, like any good adolescent, coming to an awareness of his power, modernism stripped away the underlying system of myth and metis, story and practice, meaning and application. As a result, the two aspects have spun off into dangerous simulacra of what they had been, high energy by-products of a fission….
Let me draw to a close here for now! You might be able to tell, I'm enthused and pleased to make your acquaintance! I look forward to following your posts, and reading more of your work!
Medieval Evil and Feeding Cars
I've just discovered your site via the Dark Mountain Project. On reading a few posts – looking forward to reading more! – there's a point of resonance between your post on medieval power structures and this post on the new philanthropy I'd like to point out. Actually, not just a narrow point, but a confluence, a convergence. This also relates to your wonderful post on Australia and Bali!
Gates, Krugman, all of the globalists, share a world-view that is essentially reductivist. As you said in the Bali post, (they) "just don't see anything that hasn't been coated with a thick varnish of Quant." The danger comes when this mindset has so much power coupled with an inherent blindness, an inability to discern their own fully developed self-interest as opposed to maintaining a path of undefined selfishness. This dynamic prevents them from seeing the danger of their ways. Not just to some abstract other, "the poor, the environment," etc., but to themselves and those they care about.
The tie-in with the Abbott enjoying his patio comes with the way that image highlights the quantum change between then and now. In Medieval Europe it was reasonable to think that power held close and used to live off the populace was a feasible strategy for survival, perhaps a feasible strategy for achieving a level of culture otherwise unobtainable. The elites fed their guilt through a system of contrition managed within the ecclesiastical system itself. They behaved unethically – they sinned – and the mechanism for their contrition was managed by the same system that allowed them to be unethical and bestowed a practical advantage on them. "Sling yer 'ook!" Indeed! It worked, as cruel as it was.
Today that equation has shifted. Simply put, that transaction no longer pays off. When the Captains of Industry and their ecclesiasts, now academic apologists, try to play that same game – refusing to see outside their own perspective – They expect to focus the same social pathology that led them to concentrate power and wealth, at the expense of everyone and everything, on "solving the world's problems." They decide, not out of contrition, but from an overweening pride, to share their secrets of success with the world's underprivileged! They're shocked that anyone would criticize their methods, or impugn their motives. They measure their successes by how well their results match their models and narrow expectations. Of course, "they export more! That can only be good, right?"
Today this kind of behavior does not simply enslave a region or despoil an area, these methods and mindsets threaten our very survival. Including the survival of the ones who refuse to see that their own prodigious efforts are not enhancing anyone's survival, but only hastening greater catastrophe.
This crisis of imagination, this scatoma, not of a poor underclass wishing to mimic an elite, but of that elite itself, a blindness to the toxicity of their stance, underlies all of our predicaments. In part this is a race for extinction, a race between the powerful and delusional and the rest of life on earth. Who will expire first. But it's not just that. Without efforts to winkle-out the strands of non-pathological human constructs available through study of other places and other times, and the development of alternative "cosmologies," we lose no matter what. The passing of the moderns will leave a hole. We need to work on ways to fill that hole, or there won't be anything between what's left of us and a massive fall to the lowest entropy. A fall whose details are unknowable, but one that can only be mitigated by bringing a new perspective, way of seeing, thinking acting, a new cosmology.
You mention a self-organizing group, like ants re-colonizing a fallow ground. If we take a broader view, we are all of us always attempting to self-organize on a constantly changing ground of reality. The successful examples, evolutionarily successful, not as measured by some reductivist measure, are the ones that create dynamic systems that, as you also point out, need to make renewal and transformation possible by reducing the space for experimentation to within socially – at the widest sense of what that can mean – acceptable proportions. Mystery as functional, myster-ization as disfunctional, because it rips myth apart from metis.
This is a great way to see the driving mechanism behind modernism's failures. By seeking to demystify, like any good adolescent, coming to an awareness of his power, modernism stripped away the underlying system of myth and metis, story and practice, meaning and application. As a result, the two aspects have spun off into dangerous simulacra of what they had been, high energy by-products of a fission….
Let me draw to a close here for now! You might be able to tell, I'm enthused and pleased to make your acquaintance! I look forward to following your posts, and reading more of your work!