Grew up in communitarian village near the sea. Watched the city folk come in and destroy it. Then economic development rendered it a ghost town for rich boomers and immigrants to do the hard labour jobs.
Thank you for this incredible post. It contains information that could be valuable when creating a better society and world.
Some of us think we face an unprecedented existential threat from a ruling class that is intent on either destroying every last human or mutating them into remote controlled robot slaves. Some of us think that, before a better society can be successfully implemented, we need to stop our enemy's ability to harm humanity and the planet. As a retired engineer who worked on think tank teams that succeeded in creating solutions that the best experts said were impossible, I am doing my best to author a Substack that is exploring all possible ways of HOW to stop our enemy's ability to harm humanity and the planet. I invite you to take a look at it and consider participating. If you think it has merit you may want to invite others to take a look at it.
How to save European civilization? The answer is quite simple... we go to Hellas. The Abrahamic faiths are just perversions of Greek religion and philosophy. Platonic theocracies that began with the Jewish priests who repurposed Hellenic teachings to create Judaism at the library of Alexandria.
Return to our civilizational roots... we have authority over the Abrahams
Thank you for sharing this; I hadn't heard of Nesbit. What you present reminds me of Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism", and also of Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid", and other works. There is so much material out there that treads this ground so very well.
A word I associate strongly with The State is "efficiency". Maximising throughput is paramount. Standardisation serves this. Money as the embodiment of the notion that value can be both measured and stored in a standardised way serves this. Markets serve this. Efficiency, control, machinery, matter, equality, conformity, uniformity. These things.
What continues to surprise me – though it shouldn't at all – is how many thinkers have seen all this, written well and clearly about it, and yet how fringe they remain. I hope this is changing now. Lately, it seems like what was fringe is flirting its way steadily towards the center. Your work is part of this process. These are very interesting times indeed.
Oh my goodness. Tawney: that's a blast from the past. I read that book as an undergrad in the 80s. Beyond that, I've no recollection of it at all. Maybe I should revisit it. As to Kropotkin and Mutual Aid, as we'll see in the next post, Nisbet was a fan.
It does indeed seem like something may be changing. I guess we'll see. Thank you for the encouraging words and contributing to the comments section.
“The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature arose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.”
Statement of the [French Revolution’s] Committee of Public Safety
"We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe... As long as our economy and political systems prioritizes profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequity. So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system..."
Grew up in communitarian village near the sea. Watched the city folk come in and destroy it. Then economic development rendered it a ghost town for rich boomers and immigrants to do the hard labour jobs.
Thank you for this incredible post. It contains information that could be valuable when creating a better society and world.
Some of us think we face an unprecedented existential threat from a ruling class that is intent on either destroying every last human or mutating them into remote controlled robot slaves. Some of us think that, before a better society can be successfully implemented, we need to stop our enemy's ability to harm humanity and the planet. As a retired engineer who worked on think tank teams that succeeded in creating solutions that the best experts said were impossible, I am doing my best to author a Substack that is exploring all possible ways of HOW to stop our enemy's ability to harm humanity and the planet. I invite you to take a look at it and consider participating. If you think it has merit you may want to invite others to take a look at it.
https://solutionseeking.substack.com/about
Thanks again.
My preemptive forewarning: https://thecirculationofelites.substack.com/p/a-bookish-guy-in-a-bloggish-world
Appreciated. Time may tell...
How to save European civilization? The answer is quite simple... we go to Hellas. The Abrahamic faiths are just perversions of Greek religion and philosophy. Platonic theocracies that began with the Jewish priests who repurposed Hellenic teachings to create Judaism at the library of Alexandria.
Return to our civilizational roots... we have authority over the Abrahams
Thank you for sharing this; I hadn't heard of Nesbit. What you present reminds me of Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism", and also of Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid", and other works. There is so much material out there that treads this ground so very well.
A word I associate strongly with The State is "efficiency". Maximising throughput is paramount. Standardisation serves this. Money as the embodiment of the notion that value can be both measured and stored in a standardised way serves this. Markets serve this. Efficiency, control, machinery, matter, equality, conformity, uniformity. These things.
What continues to surprise me – though it shouldn't at all – is how many thinkers have seen all this, written well and clearly about it, and yet how fringe they remain. I hope this is changing now. Lately, it seems like what was fringe is flirting its way steadily towards the center. Your work is part of this process. These are very interesting times indeed.
Oh my goodness. Tawney: that's a blast from the past. I read that book as an undergrad in the 80s. Beyond that, I've no recollection of it at all. Maybe I should revisit it. As to Kropotkin and Mutual Aid, as we'll see in the next post, Nisbet was a fan.
It does indeed seem like something may be changing. I guess we'll see. Thank you for the encouraging words and contributing to the comments section.
“The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature arose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.”
Statement of the [French Revolution’s] Committee of Public Safety
"We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe... As long as our economy and political systems prioritizes profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequity. So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system..."
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), news conference (7-7-2020)
Jacobin psychopaths will be Jacobin psychopaths.