Cultivating Intellectual Humility Is Not Enough: To Understand More, One Must Demolish Certainty…

In Oneself Or Others… Neurological Demolition Is How Understanding Progresses…

It’s right to be wrong, as long as one is willing to correct and go deeper. What does going deeper mean? It means under-standing at least one axiom used previously, and previously unchallenged, or an emotion used previously, and previously unsuspected.

This is construction, but on the locale of previous constructions which have therefore to be demolished. 

Neurological change requires energy. Literally. 

And energy is the ultimate worth.

One trains for physical activity by practicing the activity. Practice enables one to get more active by reinforcing what ones uses. It is the same with mental activity, on an even greater scale (actually physical activity is part of mental, because it requires motor neurons, and also proprioception and equilibrioception, both senses among the eight senses which the ancient had not discovered…) Flexing neural networks instead of muscles. However, muscles already exist, whereas neural networks are not in general genetically given… Those corresponding to language, science, culture are humanly given. Thus genuine progress in understanding requires new neural networks… created ex-nihilo, or through massive reorganization.

“Debate” means, originally, beating completely. Debate is thrilling, but brutal, and thrilling precisely because it’s so brutal. Kindness or a smile can kill, but only rarely. It’s killing with ideas which is common.

Intellectuals, in an old tradition inherited from the most prestigious among them, deny that any of the preceding is true… Out of self-preservation, no doubt. To admit engaging in creative mental activity as a weapon of mass neurological destruction does not feel like having much of a future!… But that creative destruction is how civilization regenerates.

So, if we want higher knowledge, we require not just humility, but beating up completely… Others too, not just ourselves… And finding pleasure in it.

This goes of course completely against an agenda of behaving like snowflakes, and expecting, even ordering others, to respect every single snowflake.

In particular no ideology should be beyond any suspicion, or beyond debate. Blasphemy, in matters intellectual, and to achieve mental progress, is a moral imperative. 

There is no higher mental activity than the advancement of understanding. But it rests on the destruction of yesterday’s minds. Far from being cuddly and cute, the advancement of understanding requires brutality and arrogance. (The root of arrogantia, ad-roguare, means to ask forcefully… the PIE root being “reg”, straight line…)

Of course one should be as gentle as possible.

However, the core of mental progress is to demolish old neurology and build new ones. Short of outright physically torturing people, that’s as aggressive as it gets.

This implies that, should it impose gentleness as a sine qua non condition, a civilization will not progress in understanding… and thus will collapse because, as the ecology it stands on evolves, any civilization has to progress in its understanding (remember the Mayan civilization which imploded from mismanaging an ecological crisis it had created).

Now of course, change is growing superexponentially. So, then, must understanding, and, thus the demolition of old neurologies. This is why it is unwise, and not even caring, to take care of the sensitivity of others as if that should be mission number one.

Quite the opposite: sensitivity being one of the reasons to shun the progress of understanding, sensitivity should be bulldozed over, not just by necessity, but also as training, and a matter of principle.  

***

Make no mistake. The preceding is even more important emotionally than logically. I was just dreaming, I don’t remember the overall motive. It was outside in a vehicle, vivid blue sky. Not a cloud in the sky (It’s snowing outside where I am presently, we have not seen the sun for days…). In the distance in that dream a mountain, shaped like a truncated pyramid, with a glacier perched on top. We were going somewhere. Considering the environment resembled the American north-west. While the dream went on it was clearly defined by a powerful emotional aura: the motive, what moved the dream (which I have now forgotten, but which left a trace, no doubt, to be recovered in the appropriate circumstantial configuration… in another dream…). The point is that the now forgotten emotion drove the logic of the dream. So emotions are fully part of our understanding. Emotions are what stands the most under.

Full under-standing then requires emotional change.

So when Galileo pointed at the shadows of mountains on the Moon, experienced church authorities could feel that if the Moon was just another planet, if the planets then were just like Earth, if indeed moons orbit around Jupiter, four of them, no less, then what was viewed as sure and self-obvious for millennia, the Ptolemaic theory, could be completely wrong. The emotion of what was once certainty, now proven thoroughly wrong, would no doubt extend to give a lethal aura to all the impossible statements of the Catholic church, foundation to all what made the lives of these authorities pleasant or even possible.

That’s why the Catholic authorities kidnapped and then tortured Giordano Bruno for seven years before piercing him here and there and burning him alive.

The Catholic plutocrats knew all too well that the shattering of a pseudo-scientific theory would feed from and provide the same emotional aura to demolish their own pseudo-divine status.

***

Ah, to finish with a joke. Jokes are mental bulldozers… They torpedo old certainties with new perspectives.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and all the other genders that were made up, are from… the Moon.

In other words, they are lunatics (let’s be all too clear!)

Please don’t restrain the applause while I prepare a few jokes on those who believe in Muhammad flying on some sort of horse from Mecca to Jerusalem. To be shot down by the Israeli Iron Dome, or something…

Patrice Ayme 

Muhammad, Buraq, the winged horse-like creature with “the beautiful face” and Judeo-Christian archangel Gabriel observe “shameless women” being punished in Hell for showing their hair (that’s why they hang from it). Persian 15th c. The emotion conveyed: women without shame should be half undressed, hanged by their hair, and roasted from below. So better be shameful, girls! You may not like it otherwise. And then Muslim “judges” prepared the appropriate logic, namely Sharia laws.

Similar paintings from the same period represent nude roasting women hung by their tongues for having answered their husbands inappropriately. So girls, learn to stay silent…

P/S:

Survival of civilization depends upon technological progress. Respect to those dying for it.

The passengers of the Titan, the submersible visiting the Titanic, died probably because the carbon fiber hull failed. Implosion of such a hull happens at 2400 kilometers an hour, roughly 700 meters per second. However, that doesn’t mean there were no warning signs. Apparently there were, and they would have been probably a significant noise. The rumor has it that the sub dumped its weights. The only way that would be known is if they had informed the surface that they had decided to go for an emergency escape to the surface… No doubt because of loud sounds caused by delamination violently separating the resin-carbon fiber mix into layers…..

Some bemoan the useless loss of life… But it’s not that useless. Let’s call them technology and progress martyrs.

Thus next time someone tries to build a carbon fiber submarine, they, and the authorities, will have to be smarter and more careful about it.

Carbon fiber, if used massively, could help with a sustainable society… Thus save lives, millions of lives, maybe even more.

The problems with carbon fiber  though have been numerous: it tends to delaminate, and be sensitive to salt water or oxygen intrusions. Also it tends to fail catastrophically. The most recent planes are mostly built of carbon fiber, and the tech has required metallic meshes within to resist lightning and inform about cracks. 

SpaceX planned to make giant tanks out of carbon fiber, to use in their giant rocket, but after building a gigantic carbon fiber, they renounced and went back to steel (NASA had the same problem in the past, abandoning their single stage to orbit craft when carbon fiber tanks failed). Also a Falcon 9 was lost when a carbon fiber tank delaminated and had an oxygen intrusion. It exploded instantaneously.  

Some bemoan the cost to society. But the oceans need to be conquered: they make ⅔ of the planet. However, whereas the difference of pressure with the moon is one atmosphere, it’s nearly 400 atmospheres with the wreck of the Titanic. So 400 times harder, in a sense.

Worldwide, hundreds of private subs already operate. Rescue cost was nothing. Even the crew and management of the powerful French Ifremer Atalante, which rushed to the site across the Atlantic, besides the humane factor of maritime solidarity, probably considered this real life exercise to be instructive.

Patrice Ayme

French ship Atalante with its diving robot rushes to the rescue of Titan… It arrived to learn the sub had imploded…

We, And Our Pandora Boxes, Are The Dark Side… That’s What Gods Do! Smile!

ARE CLIMATE CHANGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PANDORA BOXES? OF COURSE. SO WHAT?

Humanity’s most fundamental production has always been Pandora’s boxes: curiosity, disobedience, and unforeseen consequences guaranteed [1]. Pandora, the first woman, driven by curiosity and disobedience, is our business model, humanity’s true Joan of Arc.

Humanity has been shaping Earth for 5 million years. Bipedal locomotion freed our arms and hands, turning them into tools and weapons platforms. Dogs wish they had hands, but they don’t. Raccoons have hands, but their arms can’t swing. Bipedalism also made fast and far locomotion possible out of the ancestral forests chimpanzees are never free of. Exploiting the savannah brought combat to dath with formidable predators, such as giant baboons…ruthless business rivals who were eliminated a million years ago, or so.

Humanity has always opened pandora boxes, that’s what we do, as we progress, and how we progress: Nous sommes une force qui va (V. Hugo redux). God-like powers have come with the Dark Side of extermination and climate change: all the planet’s megafauna was exterminated, tamed, or driven to near extinction… And this process started a long time ago. Example: the Mayas probably collapsed the climate of Yucatan… by destroying the primary forest which kept it moist (and they had known this should be avoided, for a long time, and had a preliminary collpase into drought… However hybris, blossoming demography and war changed this in the Seventh Century…)

10,000 years ago, much of the megafauna’s mass was made of… lions. Lions can eat rabbits, but also elephants. Humans couldn’t milk lions, so they replaced them with methane belching and farting cattle… Cattle became the largest megafauna in mass, producing a lot of methane, which probably changed the climate, prevented another oscillation into another glacial advance (climate models seem to indicate).

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrosted, real deep (up to a mile!). This is going to melt, expelling gigatons of CO2 and CH4, presenting both disaster and opportunity….

CHAT AI, another pandora box, is an immense opportunity. All it does is connect pieces of disparate, often obscure, knowledge and relate them with logic. This is going to enable tremendous scientific advances, and a democratization and tremendous expansion of knowledge.

Applying CHAT AI to permafrost melt will show to the aghast multitudes that there is a danger of world hypoxia (lowering of oxygen level). The writings and the detailed logic (from yours truly) exist, they have been ignored, CHAT AI will find them.   

We, and our pandora boxes, are the dark side… that’s what gods do! Smile! We may as well, when in doubt… L’univers sourit aux audacieux…

Patrice Ayme

***

Pandora’s Box containing all the evils and troubles of the world was part of Zeus’ devious schemes: 

Zeus created Pandora, the first woman, as a punishment for Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. (So you see, humans were initially male…) Titan Prometheus was a champion of humans who taught them many important skills, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, mathematics, and writing.

Pandora was given the box as a gift but was told never to open it. However, her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box, releasing all the negative forces into the world.

Pandora’s Box represents the concept of unleashing chaos, destruction, and suffering by indulging in curiosity, and disobedience. The myth claims that once such negative forces are unleashed, they cannot be put back.

Metaphorically, Pandora’s Box refers to situations where someone does something seemingly innocuous but ends up causing a lot of damage or problems. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences, and we should be mindful of the potential repercussions before we act.

North American Arctodus Primus, the huge “short face bear”, could run at 40mph (65 kmh) on its long legs, and was mostly predatory. The idea has been suggested that it long blocked penetration by humans…probably until more advanced hunting techniques such as very fast, efficient poison arrows were invented… Ye spoisoned arrows were another pandora box, but they got rid of most of the dangerous megafaune…. Another North American denizen was Homotherium, a giant saber tooth cat.

In North America, Homotherium first appeared during the Irvingtonian stage, about 1.8 million years ago, and persisted until the end of the Pleistocene, around 10,000 years ago. They were among the largest predators of their time, with an estimated body mass of up to 400 kg (880 lbs). They likely hunted large herbivores such as bison, horses, and camels, and may have also scavenged on the remains of other predators’ kills.

Homotherium is known from numerous fossils found throughout North America. It was clearly eliminated, with most of its prey, which inculded American elephants, by Homo Sapiens…

MBS: Make Saudi Arabia Into An Open Society.

What’s the way out for the world? More advanced thinking, as produced by direct democracy. The Open Society, was practiced by Athens, 25 centuries ago, and extolled by general Pericles and his thoughtfull spouse, the great philosopher Aspasia: “Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him.” The Open Society is a crucial ingredient in real democracy.

Arguably the two most successful polities the direct descendency of which we presently enjoy, Greece-Rome and Qin, practiced quite a bit of the same openness, buttressed by legalism. Rome copied deliberately the leading, most democratic Greek City states. China and Europe then descend from then most-Open Societies, Qin, Greek democracies and their Roman parrot.

Athens’ power rested on high tech, her navy, and silver mines (the latter paying for the former; slaves operated the mines). 

Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salam (MBS) has been the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. He has modernized this fascinating realm with violent enthusiasm. It is unlikely he could keep on modernizing without violence: a Saudi king was assassinated by a nephew, a little while ago. MBS has many enemies inside the Royal family, let alone in the rest of Arabia… naturally he has to look terrifying to insure his own safety. Authentic progressives must agree that more progress is to be had with MBS than with regressive raving maniacs mad with god… who have often been the alternative.

***

MBS should make Saudi Arabia into an Open Society. This is the best, safest solution. How safe is that for the Saud family? How safe is it for Arabia?

Arabia is so backwards in mentality, from Wahhabism, that it will take a long time to effect change, and MBS and eventual successors, should, and could lead the charge. So as change leaders, they would be safe for a long time… considering the long way to go.

A precedent calling for forging ahead arises from the French Revolution. Louis XVI of France’s error was to stop half-way: Louis saw the need for change, his wife read the most recent subversive literature (Voltaire, Rousseau)… and Louis had not wanted to be king. Conscious that French plutocrats had to pay taxes (they were exempt and the US war of independence had ruined France), Louis decided to start a revolution. However, when he found that it involved a constitutional monarchy, he tried to stop the revolution. One thing led to another, many heads got cut.

Emperor Nicholas II of Russia had the same exact problem: Nicholas instituted democratizing reforms, so democratizing that the Kaiser and the Prussian General Staff thought that their own military dictatorship was undermined by them. However, after the Germans declared war, Nicholas abandoned all and any reforms… although he was stridently and extensively warned of the danger of doing so… for years.

So the advice of progressives to MBS should be for MBS to lead the change and the charge, and not falter: be both the autocrat in chief, and the revolutionary leader. He can then argue that he inherited the problem, and nobody is in a better position to solve it. He can also argue he needs muscle to do so against the old believers (Peter the Great of Russia had the same problem) and various plutocrats who inherited wealth and power too. A show of goodwill will bring forgetfulness, and redemption. An Open Society is always smarter and, as catastrophic changes are sure to pile up, as climate change accelerates, Saudi Arabia needs all the brains it can get. MBS can stay the brain in chief, even if rough. Open up!

***

Some are particularly resentful because a Washington Post journalist was cut up, more or less alive, and MBS had something to do with it, considering some of his subordinates did it (all of SA is subordinate to MBS!)

Well, yes, sure. And also MBS is criticized for the war in Yemen with opponents, the Houthis, propped by Iran. MBS was allied with the UAE. I am no specialist of that conflict. Obama sent drones and hunted Al Qaeda in the Bin Laden ancestral home region…. busting the occasional weddings, killing hundreds. I don’t see why Obama gets a pass for killing wedding parties of thoroughly innocent people, hundreds of innocents whom Obama ordered killed, while MBS is vilipended because some Saudi security tortured one opponent to death. If it turns out, it’s Obama and the US Deep State who got MBS and the UAE in Yemen.

Indeed, Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s high altitude capital and largest city, Sana’a, demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. After failed negotiations, the rebels seized the presidential palace in January 2015. President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government resigned. Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support… So MBS’ Yemen adventure started in Washington.

***

There is a big difference between very discreetly expressed view points of MBS, and say the rehashing of atrocious mass-murdering world-imperial Kremlin propaganda to which Pope Francis abandonned himself recently, in a most un-Christian and thoroughly regressive way. The Pope said that a big “very wise guy” told him that NATO was “barking at the gates of Russia”. It apparently did not come to the attention of the geographically unaware Pope that Russia is all over Eurasia, over 11 time zones. The Pope doesn’t realize that it is immoral that a country owns so much real estate conquered over dozens of ethnicities… Even Lenin and Stalin understood this… But the Pope doesn’t.

So MBS? MBS has a difficult situation. The Pope doesn’t. And Putin threatened the entire planet with “radioactive ashes” if it doesn’t obey him, in an attempted return to the maximal expansion of the Kremlin empire achieved when Europe conquered Africa… to pacify and modernize it… Whereas Russia was establishing its Nineteenth Century empire for strictly genocidal purposes over many old nations (including the Balts, Poland, Ukraine… not just Tatars and Chechens).

No evil of that order with MBS, but a will to progress. So give him reason to progress more. The same applies to other authoritarian regimes progressing out of tenebrous pasts…

Patrice Ayme

Mecca at night. The scale is enormous. Kaaba, the Cube, is the 13 meter tall black building at the center of Islam’s most important mosque, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is perfectly visible in the center of the photograph. The cult of the meteorite at the center is older than Islam. Many buildings from Mahomet’s time have been destroyed to be replaced by modern ones, sadly. It’s also sad that non-Muslims are forbidden in Mecca. It would be good to open that up. Any savage can penetrate Christianism’s most sacred buildings (although not all).

Science, Mars, Or Moral Bust

In the first democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said she was “a progressive who likes to get things done.” Let’s hope they will be less plutocratic than the “things” done by her husband. Meanwhile the question came up from others that going to Mars, or similar colossal techno-scientific progress had no humanitarian value. Before a more organized rebuttal, here goes my poetical opinion:

***

Science, Mars, Or Moral Bust

Many are the passions

Many are the tragedies

Against tragedies goodness,

All too often contend in vain.

Lest emotions move men and fate

Out of complacency, indifference,

Careers, self-admiring seriousness,

And obey the call of love for mind, sentience..

Yet, even when passions move us,

Towards the noblest goals, with the best intentions

All too often we find there is nothing

We can do at all, against pain and suffering:

When our magic, our science, come short..

To feel right and think right,

Does not mean we can do right.

For enabling goodness we need the powers,

The very powers which feed from,

By, and with, the Dark Side.

Power itself is dark.

Yet noble, and fundamentally us.

So yes, by any means,

Go to Mars.

It will nurture new emotions,

Wealth of transcendent emotions,

Not just lofty and intricate thoughts,

Humanity define.

We have always gone to Mars,

Ever since we left leafy trees.

We will stop,

Only when our fundamental lust,

What defines us,

Progress,

Dies with us.

 

Correct Globalization

First, some answers to some questions:

Kevin Berger ponders: “Truth Saved Germany After 1945,″ and asks: “How real, how deep was denazification, really? Both internationally (case in point, the USA) and domestically?”

Answer: Germany is still denazifying. I follow German TV and I can tell you today’s Germans view the Nazis as monsters from another planet. Today’s Germans are completely French republicans, as far as Nazism is concerned.

It was not yet the case after the war. Thanks in great part to the ambiguous influence of the USA, reinvigorated by its discrete campaign of annihilation of French ports, just because they could, countless Nazis escaped prosecution. Even more were put in leadership roles, from financial bankster Schacht, creatur of JP Morgan, genitor of Hitler, to top Nazi Marshall Von Manstein (who blocked denazification in the German army), to the industrialist Thyssen (author of the 1940 book “I paid Hitler”).

But then from trial to trial, and revelation to revelation, the truth has come out. The latest guy on trial, then a young accountant at Auschwitz, fully admits how terrible the Nazi system was and his role in it.

The Bush family was never asked to regurgitate the fortune it made from managing his arms industry for Hitler. This is typical of the absence of denazification of the USA.

Whereas of course the heroic SNCF, the French Railways, which suffered hundreds of summarily executed resistance fighters, was required to pay reparations, by USA Jews, for having transported Jews under the Nazi gun… That outrage, punishing an institution which fought the Nazis to great loss of life of its own members, pertains to the same mentality which decided that flattening French cities, after the Nazis had been defeated in France, was strategic. This is the reality of 2015: it’s strategic, for the USA to keep on flattening France.

Thus, when Obama evokes “anti-Americanism”, it’s hopefully, tongue in cheek.

Kevin: “Is today’s “German mindset” that far removed from yesterday’s (case in point, Germany’s recent conduct in the EU)? The Nazi’s enablers are still here, untouched, unpunished, how can there be truth?”

Well the austerity thing is a very vast problem, which, as you hint, did not originate in Germany. (Actually in the 1930s France was austerian, whereas the USA, the UK and Germany, starting in 1933, were all very much into default, devaluation and massive liquidity creation!)

The French Socialist Finance minster (Mr. Sapin) is as hard line on Greece than his German colleague (who holds that France has to be reformed, “by force”. I don’t disagree: austerity ought to be removed, but not reforms).

“The Nazi enablers”, the really effective ones, not just the noisy ones, were more based in New York-the USA than Berlin (this is one of my main theses). It is not just a question of Ford financing Hitler (1920), or of Schacht-JP Morgan (1923), or the Wall Street Morgenthau plan of 1928.

Kevin: “Hell, I’d even say that as WWII fades more and more into History, it becomes a mythology, if not a religion, a unction divine if you will (case in point, the system below, its drivers, its collaborators and its parasites). Where is the truth, where there is myth only?”

This is exactly why it is important to understand that Hitler was a plutocratically constructed phenomenon, in the general sense of the word “plutocracy”. And that much of Hitler’s power, and advice, came from the global plutocracy, based in the UK and the USA.

It is important to get the mythology right. It’s not obvious, as the Nazis themselves spread disingenuously the disinformation that they were against “plutocrats” (while feeding at their teat).

Kevin: “Patrice says: “What I reproach to Gandhi was to view the minor problem (getting the British exploitation of India to stop) to be major,”

What about [the free trade deals]? The “major” problem is not the above-mentioned Islam in this case, but the global (Anglo, it never can hurts to point out) exploitation system you rail against, which is triumphing overall (and thus exhausting itself, along with everything else).

There is no jumping out of the runaway train”

These global free trade treaties have caused massive unemployment in the industrial workers class in the USA, recent studies have shown. Even the Wall Street Journal (!) had an editorial about this, a few days ago, and said that had to be fixed.

This evidence was long denied by the economists paid by plutocrats in the last 35 years that plutocracy has reigned over the minds, in the West.

The question, thus is not so much about “Anglo” than about “Pluto”. For a long time, the average denizen of the UK and the USA profited from empire. But now it’s clearly not the case in Britain. And clearly, in the USA, the writing is on the wall: although fracking has been profitable for the average citizen of the USA, as the Greenhouse Crisis gathers pace, this is not going to be the case anymore. The anti-flooding (from sea level rise) plan of New York City cost (put in place by Mayor Blumberg) cost 20 billion dollars (when Antarctica starts to melt big time, stopping the sea will not be a possibility.

So how to fix a lot of things?

A carbon tax.

It should be applied, worldwide.

When? The Conference in Paris is the place to impose it. Although I do not think it is on the agenda. Instead complicated laws are supposed to be brought forward. That will not work.

A carbon tax will increase the availability of local work (as it taxes world transportation: ships emit lots of CO2). It is also absolutely necessary if one wants to be serious about decreasing CO2 emissions.

I will explain this next.

Patrice Ayme’

CIVILIZATION ILLUSION: Shocking Arabophilia?

Who invented “Arabic” numerals? Well, actually not the Arabs. (Let me hasten to point out that if I have nothing against the Arabs, especially considering my personal history; quite the opposite, I want Arabia to be a beacon of civilization! But this starts with explaining that Arabia lost a grip on civilization, and why. But first one has to adjudicate the progress of civilization correctly.)

In truth, the Indians. Great civilizations invent great ideas, that’s why they are great. Some civilizations are great, others are small, too small to produce enough new ideas to survive. The “Pythagoras” theorem, that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the side of a triangle, was known (at least in part) to Babylonians and Egyptians, a millennium earlier (and the Greeks got it from them). This means the latter two made great civilizations, and the roots of Greece.

I do believe that there is such a thing as a superior culture, incarnated by a superior society, causing superior civilization, organized as a superior state, defended with superior skills at war. All great civilizations shared in that primary certainty: the very ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Franks… And the Europeans, up to a recent time.

This chain of superiority is not just a belief, it has to be a requirement: when the culture fails, so, in the end, does the society, crushed by plutocracy, and then so do military defenses. That argument was made by a Mongol general to the Caliph in Baghdad, shortly before crushing him, and his family, under a carpet, with horses.

Al-Khwarizmi In Bagdad’s House Of Wisdom, Yet Not An Arab

Here I was, enjoying the company of three superbly French fluent American girls. For some reason I forgot, the conversation veered to the French and American educational systems. I said they used to be the best, and are now going down. (See the PISA, UNESCO ratings.)

OK, as usual my conversational skills are tuned to make a good situation bad, and a bad one, worse. Something about me loving to pierce deeply the human soul with thought torpedoes. Indeed those smart and bilingual girls are enrolled in the one and only public high school in a city viewed in many places as an apex of intellect.

I added somberly that this degeneracy is particularly striking in the case of France. After all, the Franks, and then the French, were at the apex of civilization for more than 15 centuries. Education was made mandatory by the Carolingians in mid-Eight Century (before Charlemagne… whose father was strangely derelict by not teaching him how to read; but that’s another plot.)

If I expected a favorable audience. A rude surprise came my way.

I was told: ”What are you talking about?”

Well, I insisted, you know, even the USA, in more than one way, descends directly from France. After all the Franks of “Francia” not only conquered most of Europe, including Britain. They imprinted their superior Frank civilization on all of Europe. You know, Charlemagne “renovated” the “Roman empire”…

Those nice, well educated, polite girls fell on me. I had not taken the appropriate classes. They just did. Europe, the Franks, etc., were not the superior civilization. The Arabs were. The Arabs were the superior civilization, they invented all what mattered, while Europe lived in savagery.

The Arabs “invented everything, all the mathematics, the science, even the numbers and the zero. We just learned it at school.”…

“Learned it at school?” I felt like asking them if one of their professors was called Osama bin Laden Junior.

As they already looked at me as if I were an unreconstructed racist loony just emerging from a swamp somewhere in the company of a few dinosaurs, I did not try the flippant side.

Instead I asked whether they knew that, under the Arabs all women lived in slavery, and the Caliphs were obsessive about marrying Greco-Roman princesses or slaves (presumably because Arab women, having been enslaves abused and mistreated from birth were of insufficient quality; one does not imagine European lords desperate to acquire Arab slaves to marry them! Yet, that’s exactly what Arab worthies were doing; a lot of the business of Venice consisted in ferrying slaves picked-up in what is now Ukraine, and sell them to Arabs; Frankish law did not forbid that trade).

I told those students that the Greeks invented the zero, and part of the numeral system we used today. However blocked by the arrogance of Euclid, contempt for traders (who used a part modernized numeral system), and increasing fascism, the nascent numeral system was exported to India, where it was fully developed.

It’s true that Constantinople theocratic fascism had led many Roman intellectuals and their books to flee to Zoroastrian Persia. When Persia fell to the ISLAMIC STATE (no kidding!), the invading Arabs found themselves in command of many intellectuals and books (plus tens of millions of Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews).

The Arab army conquered with unbelievable success and savagery (killing the wounded, and all military age men throughout Syria, which was very rich, and Roman Catholic). The parts of the world it had acquired possession of, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, Persia, were, at the time, the richest (because of superior agricultural production, irrigation, and, well, civilization). Fundamentalist Islam was going to durably spoil the soup.

So did the “Arabs” invent lots of things during the Middle Ages?

Well, if you are ready to call Spaniards, North Africans, Persians, Kurds, Turks and Jews “Arabs”, they sure did.

Now, of course, if one goes to North Africa, many people call themselves “Arabs”. So it is, for example, in Algeria. However, genetic studies show that Algerians are European with 1% of Arab genes (one probably would get similar results in France… As France was partly occupied for decades in the Eight Century by the main armies from Arabia… Amusingly, because these armies were busy getting killed in France, they were NOT in North Africa…).

The girls objected that the Church killed all intellectuals in Europe. Was not Copernic killed? Was not Galileo killed, or put in jail, or something?

The truth is horrifying: Copernic was not only not killed by the Church, but he was an Abbot. He died in his bed, clutching his book, dedicated to… the Pope (that the book was plagiarized from Buridan, and that Copernic removed the thanks to Aristarchus of Samos for having invented the idea, were probably subtle maneuvers of Abbot Copernic to circumvent the crusade of the Church against the hyper genius Buridanus… Who had proven Aristotle wrong, thus was an enemy of the Church!)

Galileo Galilei was best friend to the Pope (from when they were kids). Yet they got into a tiff about the tides. Galileo was wrong, but he pulled rank, as a university professor, on the Pope, telling him he did not know what he was talking about. This goes a long way to explain why Galileo ended his life confined by law to his mansion.

Make no mistake: the Church assassinated a number of thinkers.

However, overall, intellectuals fared much worse under Islam.

You see, Muhammad was a bandit, a raider, a war chief, the head of state, a prophet, and the head of Islam all at the same time. His “successors” (“Caliphs”) were supposed to be the same: head of state, and head of the state at the same time.

The relationship of the Christian Church with the state was different in the West. First, for nearly three centuries, it was viewed as an enemy of the state (as Christian officers refused to take the military oath of obedience, and Christians had made the Church into secretive, paramilitary organization). Then Roman emperors, from Constantine to Theodosius saw they could use it to their advantage, and made “Orthodox Catholicism” into the official religion.

This led to disaster.

Basically, the problem of the Late Empire was barbarity, and plutocracy running out of control. Christianity, with its insistence on non-violence, and that this city was not worth saving, made the problem worse, and the plutocrats loved it.

In the end, after two centuries of this increasing mess, the Franks took control, and remade Christianity, and an armada of saints they invented, to reflect their own secular humanism, cynically founded as the shock part of the Roman army, ever since Constantine.

Yet Church and State became completely separated.

The Frankish state principles, freedom, tolerance, secularism, mitigated plutocracy, outlawing of slavery, became the founding principles of Western civilization.

How come none of this is taught?

And if the “Arabs” invented something, then, what is it?

Arabic numbers? Well not really. The first work in the West (meaning west of India) on the modern number system is Al-Khwarizmi‘s On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals (ca. 825).

The author, a famous thinker and mathematician was born in Eastern Greater Iran, now called Uzbekistan.

As I projected my flow of knowledge their way, far from being awed the little girls started to look at me as if they had met the Devil incarnate. One brandished Sumer.

Yes, Sumer. Sumerian cities (partly) invented many ideas at the root of civilization, including the bicameral system, and the alphabet (in collaboration with mathematically refined, inventive Egypt).

Yet, Sumerian cities have little to do with the nefarious ideology which has oppressed the Middle East for most of the last 14 centuries. Quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a university professor is in jail. French justice is after him for taking part in an act of terrorism which killed 4 people in Paris… 34 (thirty-four) years ago. Those people did not just happen to be Jewish, they were targeted, because they were Jewish (there is no prescription for Crimes Against Humanity; killing people because of whom they are, instead of what they did, is a Crime Against Humanity).

Canada agreed to extradite him to France. Canada, and the rest of the Anglosphere is becoming more aware of the vicious thought and mood system emanating from the (literally interpreted) Qur’an.

If no one is here to fight for civilization, it will die. It starts by calling the Barbarians barbarian, as the Greeks pointed out.

Teaching little girls that Francia was nothing and Arabia everything in the way of thinking, is uprooting their roots. It’s even uprooting the roots of civilization.

One can teach parrots French. One cannot teach parrots civilization. Time to treat young human beings with the dignity of truth, to help raise them above the status of parrots. It starts with the reality of history.

Great civilizations invent great ideas, that’s why they are great. It matters who invented what, and how deep: because it enables to find which civilizations were great. Great thinking doesn’t arise ex-nihilo. Egypt, Babylon, Sumer, Greece, were great because they were more open, smarter societies than their more close minded and brutish competitors. Open to new ideas, open to common sense, always beat brutes with their heads in the sand.

Patrice Ayme’

Reverse Yalta, Free Ukraine

What’s the proximal genesis of the system of thought that made Ukraine a subject of Moscow? Yalta. The present events in Ukraine are echoes of a momentous, and horrendous, event, Washington’s division of the world with Stalin, in 1945.

Ukraine is a vivid demonstration that plutocracy is not just about stealing from the People. It never was. Plutocracy, in full, is a mass murdering frame of mind. Or should I say, greed of mind? In Ukraine the (“democratically” elected) plutocrats in power unleashed special forces to fire war weapons such as sniper rifles and Kalashnikovs into demonstrators. We The People had to submit, or fire back with hunting rifles. Casualties are in the hundreds.

The exploitative mentality starts with lauding greed, it ends up with extermination. It does not just exterminate nations, it can displace them. This is Roosevelt’s work:

Poland & Ukraine: Displaced West By Dying Roosevelt & Mass Murderer Stalin

With the help of (satanic?) Anglo-Saxon leaders, Stalin did to Eastern Europe what Jefferson and Jackson did to the Indians. Mass deportation to cause extermination. Or, at least the tearing off roots. No wonder the president of the USA collaborated.

All right. Everybody knows that Stalin started his career as a Christian fanatic, before turning to robbing banks. However, FDR and Churchill are often viewed as saints. Yet, the map above is their work. Large parts of Poland and Austro-Hungary became part of Stalin’s dominion. Lviv, second city of Ukraine, population 2 million, liberated a few days ago, was long part of Poland and, or the (Holly German) Roman empire. It was thrown to Stalin, like a piece of meat to a bear.

The tearing into pieces of Europe was agreed to in what Churchill called the “Naughty Document”. It’s also known by the euphemism of “Percentage Agreement”. Here is the proof of the plot between American, English, and Soviet plutocrats:

Dividing Europe As If It Were A Pie

Ukraine is a nation of 46 million. Ukraine is older than Russia. It has its own language, Ukrainian. Ukraine founded Russia, but was abused by its creation. Yalta is a place in Crimea where a conspiracy between a moribund plutocrat, an exhausted statesman, and a mass murdering, ursine gangster sealed the fate of the world for the next 69 years.

The usage of the word “plutocrat” is fully justified in Ukraine. Killing people is the plutocrats’ highest calling. The leaders of Ukraine are not just satanic, although that would justify calling them plutocrats. They are also filthy rich… the  28 nations of the European Union have frozen their assets, blocked their visas (that followed sanctions against Switzerland for discriminating against EU’s Croatia). The EU explicitly accused Ukrainian leaders to be drenched in blood.

The foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland were sent to Kiev to negotiate with the Ukrainian dictator/president on behalf of the EU. Shots could be heard as the foreign ministers went here and there.

Eastern Ukraine was long part of the Russian empire, where Ukrainian was outlawed, so that only Moscow’s language would rule. Western and Central Ukraine speaks Ukrainian. It was long more or less part of Poland. Ukrainian is closer to Polish (70% in common) than to Russian (62%).

Systems of thoughts and moods are highly persistent, they have a life of their own.

Russia’s childhood was tortured in the fire and monstrosity of the Mongol conquest and tyrannical three centuries long occupation. However, yesterday’s traumas can’t live on in tomorrow’s world.

YALTA’ LONG LASTING PAIN:

Yalta was a conference in Crimea organized by Stalin in February 1945. The “Soviet” dictator had refused to travel outside of the USSR for organizing the post- World War Two world. Three men, none of them a continental Western European, divided Western Europe, as if it were a prey. Which it was.

Unbelievably, the dying Roosevelt travelled all the way to Yalta, so that he could surrender half of Europe to Stalin. Including, of course, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics. That horrendous betrayal was rendered possible by excluding France’s combative general and president Charles De Gaulle from the conference.

The war against Nazism started in 1939 when Poland, backed up by France, refused to surrender its territory to Hitler. Hitler was backed up by Stalin, American plutocrats (and, to its shame, until excuses are finally proffered, Washington).

For the perverse, it made sense that neither Poland nor France were invited at Yalta. After all, it was French and Polish resistance to Nazism had caused World War Two. At least, so the subconscious of Stalin, part of British higher society, American racists, and Washington had it. The French and the Poles had spoiled a good thing.

De Gaulle was both a politician, a minister of war and a combat general during desperate 1940. His niece, who resisted Nazism, was sent to the Ravensbrück extermination camp. De Gaulle would not have surrendered to Stalin; at the time France had an expert one million man army that had played a crucial “Spitze”, point, role on the Western front in 1944. One of the main ideas of De Gaulle as president of France in 1958-1969 was that “Yalta” was one of the main trauma of the world. (Although I have solid personal reasons to hate De Gaulle,  I recognize that he was very right on some points, including that one.)

Yalta displaced entire countries to the west, to make more room for the Kremlin’s subjects. Poland was displaced to extinguish German provinces such as Pomerania and Silesia. But then, so that Poland could not become a problem, it was amputated of much of its territory. The eastern half of Poland was made “Ukrainian”. (Right now the largest city there, in ex-Poland, has been “freed”, after arresting the government police.)

What is the meaning of all this?

Simple. Yalta, by cutting the world in two, established the American Century and the, even shorter, Soviet Century. Now the USA and the USSR Russia are back to their old trick, fossil combustibles. The USSR (aka Russia) blackmails Europe with its energy supply. Yet Czar Vladimir I is terrified by other people’s minds, and thus cracks down on the highest added value, brain work. Hence Vladimir’s petrostate becomes ever more so every year.

Meanwhile the USA is busy making a fortune from the building greenhouse (by methane leaking fracking, and selling the coal to German anti-nuclear fanatics). The USA has a much more diversified economy, and more than twice the population. The USA also enjoy a much more sophisticated oligarchic propaganda. The USA does not crack down on computer usage, which is central to the 21C economy. Instead it has made it an integral part of the surveillance state.

What’s the progressive thing to do? Obviously support the anti-plutocratic revolution in Ukraine. The same day that more than 60 people were killed by gunfire in Ukraine, Libyans were voting for a Constituent Assembly (the USA took 13 years between Independence in 1776 and a Constitutional Assembly in 1789).

The story of Ukraine is about correcting some wrongs that developed in the last millennium. In Libya it’s more like correcting wrongs that developed in the last two millennia (thanks to horrors visited mostly by rabid Christianity and its Islamist poodle; earlier Libya had given the Severian dynasty to Rome, so non Christianized Romans were not too nasty to Libya ).

I have my eye on Venezuela too, where a famous beauty queen taking part in an anti-government demonstration was shot to death this week. Venezuela is another petrostate (with colossal reserves).

The anti-plutocratic revolution has to spread around the planet until we change from a short-termist, murderously exploitative model to a gentler, more sustainable, more democratic, and that means more intelligent, model.

If Ukraine becomes as good as, say, the present France or the USA, the latter two will be encouraged to morph into the more advanced forms we need. This is what happened in Switzerland, where direct democracy has blossomed out only in the last two decades, and brought enormous riches (spiritual and economic).

Patrice Aymé

Future Economics Was Seen Before

Paul Krugman says in “New Thinking…”: “We’ve had a couple of centuries of economic thought at this point, and quite a few smart people doing the thinking.”

Excuse me: economics was named and conceptualized by Xenophon, 24 centuries ago. Differently from physics, that was practiced only partly and primitively, economics was already highly advanced, 25 centuries ago.

For example, the 200 trireme Athenian Navy that later defeated the monster Persian plutocracy was built, at huge ecological cost, with a public-private partnership system.

Adam Smith himself went to learn his stuff at the feet of French “physiocrats” who flourished 240 years ago (the head of that school was the top surgeon in France).

As I have argued, the sort of public-private government sponsored technologically progressing economy we need today was fully, and self-consciously, in command of France in 1600. Hence Henri IV’s slogan “workers ought to have a chicken in every pot”. A cursory inspection of history show that, from dams in Yemen, thousands of years ago, to the Roman army building roads, to Caesar’ draining the swamps to the construction of China or Europe’s canal systems in the Middle Ages, the biggest picture, in economics, is from the government.

At this point there is plenty of evidence that, in the USA, government disfunctionality is bringing the real economy down.

The main actors and agents in today’s economics originated in government. Look at, say lasers. They were made possible by Kastler’s discovery of Optical Pumping in the Normale Sup lab 100% financed by the French government.

More recently, the same lab, still funded 100% by the French government, found how to count photons, without destroying them (that was also rewarded with a Nobel). Nothing that interests private, for profit entrepreneurs, today, but, no doubt, one of the pillars of the future sci-fi economy.

Economics will continue to be dismal as long as we don’t focus on the scientific understanding of growth and innovation.

Imperial Rome went down because of a deliberate effort against elite innovation; leaving the field to be dominated by simple generals such as Diocletian… Instead of the top-notch intellectuals the best regimes throughout history surrounded themselves with.

In physics one studies, to start with, friction-less trains of mass zero, to teach basic dynamics. Similarly fans of economic theory as taught in USA schools say that economics is like other sciences: economics starts with simplified, basic formulas.

They opine that basic market theory assumes that goods are available as needed to be purchased by consumers with “perfect knowledge.” As one advances to higher-level classes, one learns the corrections for effect of advertising, imperfect knowledge, and externalities such as polluting air and water.

Nice. And that’s indeed what is taught as “economics” in the USA and all and any organization that advocates the economic system thriving in the USA (complete with a for-profit, “marketplace“, Obamacare).

But this is all wrong.

Reducing economics to the market’s inner guts, assumes a plutophile vision of economics. It assumes that economics is all about, and only about, the “free market”. But there is no such a thing. A market is never “free”. What looks “free” is actually government regulated. Even ‘deregulation’ is government regulated.

What looked like financial deregulation under Clinton was actually the regulation of providing the largest financial actors with a number of advantages on smaller actors and over the rest of the socioeconomy.  

Even more fundamentally, giant economies, such as the Inca empire, or (a large part of) Late Rome did without free market, and thrived. Economically (that Rome thrive economically until overrun by savages is a recent and surprising discovery in 21 C archeology).

Stalin’s “free-market”-free economy thrived enough to vanquish Hitler. Nazi economists were so sure of the superiority of their free market, they thought there was no way it would not take more than a few months to destroy the “command and control” USSR. That illusion did not survive contact with Soviet made and conceived T34 tanks. To add injury to insult, the Soviets were then able to out-produce the Nazi style free market.

The UK and the USA used a command and control economic model similar to the one used by the Soviets to out-produce the Nazis. Mass production concentrated on very few types, decided from above. The USA effort was headed by a young Canadian economist, Galbraith.

Nowadays, the People’s Republic of China’s economy, which uses a lot of command and control of the economy, has been persistently doing much better economically than the “free market” West.

So “economics” is a much larger subject than just what American economists call the “free market”.

That the biggest picture, in economics, is from the government is the perspective that eludes persistently American economists. In economy, God is not the market. God is the (hopefully democratic) government.

If the government is democratic, most people will profit from the economy beyond mere subsistence, and so more minds will partake in the society, making the civilization smarter. A virtuous circle of involvement.

And what economic science ought to guide the government? Not the free market, assuredly, as this is the creature of the government. The government needs to be guided by real, all-encompassing economic science.

What could be a proper foundation for the whole science of economics? Energy. Just as in physics. Just as what is desperately in need of regulation now. See fracking, and the just uncovered fact it’s about 50% of USA greenhouse emissions right now.

Of course that will tell Obama nothing: he is not really the guy governing right now. It’s rather the creature down below that is governing, a magma of a few thousands plutocrats with crocodilian aspirations. They govern the jungle that feed them, complete with economists perched on the highest branches, eying the scraps left by the kills they gorge on. 

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Henri IV used the word “laboureurs” (from the Roman word, laborare, to work). That, of course gave the English “laborers”, and “labor”. So, three centuries before Henry Ford, Henri argued that workers ought to be paid enough to be well fed. Something denied to 50 million citizens of the USA (many of them working, see preceding essay). Today.

PHILOSOPHY FEEDS ENGINEERING, And Reciprocally. Case Of Papin.

Of DENIS PAPIN, The REAL Inventor Of The Steam Engine and The Steam Boat… Because  His Nature Got Steamed Up, When Fiercely Protesting Against The Powers that Be!

WE THINK, THEREFORE WE HOPE FOR MORE & BETTER STUFF:

An ancient silliness condemns philosophers for making commoners feel bad. Yet it’s the mark of any new philosophy worth its salt to do such a thing. Hurting warns of danger or damage, it’s a good thing, most of the time. New philosophy informs us that our old thinking  leaves something to be desired, and opportunities exist, that had been left unexploited.

Also, new thoughts are about constructing new brain geometry, while demolishing erroneous structures. As all demolition and construction require energy, this demands pain and effort. To be as brainy a human as can be, one has to learn, that means, one has to learn to love pain and effort. Philosophers hold the whip, when they go to the public, and they talk.

To preserve civilization, having a sustainable philosophy is more important than having the right engineering. Not that the latter is not necessary too, but the philosophy leads the engineering. Moreover, philosophy is harder to come by, because it’s less tangible, harder to demonstrate, more iconoclast thus more irritating! The case of steam power demonstrates this best.

Why Then? Philosophy Empowers Engineering

Philosophy’s importance in engineering is why two different French protestants, having fled France’s religious intolerance, developed the steam powered piston engine in the Seventeenth Century, and applied it to boats. It was not a coincidence that individuals of the same rebellious mental (protestant protesting) background did so. After twenty centuries of stasis with steam power (both ancient Egyptians and Greeks used steam power in their temples, to move large objects magically, mesmerizing the vulgum).

The Romans could have developed steam power, 17 centuries earlier. Both the power of steam and paddles were known. Extremely intricate wheeled and teethed mechanisms were in common usage. Paddle mechanisms counted the distance a boat covered. But, after a few decades of fascist plutocracy, Greco-Romans did not see the point of steam power, or, more generally technological progress. They waited like sitting ducks until the exhaustion of their world was upon them.

The attitude was very different in the 17C. Brains were active, so were the armies, and mental diversity was of the essence. even the rabid Louis XIV financed Dutch savant (for example Huyghens, the wave master).

England’s Cromwell, the “Lord Protector“, was alerted on the “incredible strength and swiftness” of a French steam boat built in… the Netherlands.

In Roman times, the same tyranny reigned over “Britannia” (now the UK), Lower Germany (Netherlands), and Gallia (France), and that tyranny was globally hostile to spectacular technological progress. The inventor of a steam boat would have been paid by the Greco-Roman emperor NOT to develop it (that may well have happened, from allusions in the records we have).

The ascent of the Roman republic had been the ascent of the right engineering. Yet, when Rome became uncontrollably fascist and plutocratic, all things of the mind went down, including engineering. This was directly related to the emperors’ anti-progress mood. Hey, progress in engineering could reverse engineer itself into philosophical progress!… Emperors understood that much.

Emperors forbade to use advanced engineering… as it would augment unemployment, they claimed meekly. The Romans could have made steam ships: they had all the ingredients. But not the right philosophy.

The first maker of a steam boat mysteriously disappeared from the records. French engineer and German academic Denis Papin built the first piston engine that is still documented today in 1690 [1].

As a protestant, Papin had to flee the horrendous criminal activities of the self described sun tyrant, Louis XIV, the superstition fanatic. DENIS PAPIN, with the apparent collaboration of the great Leibnitz, operated a fully functional steamship more than one hundred kilometers down a German river in 1707. Papin died destitute, but several of his steam devices came to be used a century after he invented them.

Some will say progress is neither necessary, nor welcome. And indeed Papin’s steamship was destroyed by (German) opponents of progress.

Roman plutocracy already tried to stop progress. And succeeded. What happened? The Romans ran out of economy, finance, army, military superiority resources, finally bringing the quasi-collapse of civilization. Even before serious invasions started. The fact that advanced double curvature composite bows from Central Asia could penetrate legionaries’ armor did not help. Ultimately the Franks took over, not just because they had better weapons, but a better, less plutocratic philosophy. (As demonstrated by Charles Martel’s nationalization of the church, to pay for the largest army since the heydays of Rome, circa 720 CE.)

Having read PLUTOCRACY: New World Order, Oakwood, a hydrologist from Britain, opined that: “There is nothing new in saying ‘our civilisation will collapse because of our evil and selfish ways’. Mankind has been predicting that since the dawn of Man. You may well respond: ‘but this time it’s different’. They all said that too.”

Sorry to break the bad news, but everything is new about this world. The reason they said that ‘but this time its different’, is it was true, it is true, and it is more true than ever. Contrarily to what Nietzsche and much antique mythology, Greek or Indian, believed, the world is not an eternal return of the same. The world NEVER returns to the same.

The concept of “sustainable” has to be caveat that it is valid ONLY IN DYNAMIC sense.  Ever since there are men, and they ravage.

It is precisely because mankind has been (correctly) predicting that “our civilization will collapse because of our evil and selfish ways” that civilizations have kept improving, as they had to, due to out increasingly more powerful technologies. How did they improve? By becoming ever more moral. However horrendous exactions in the last century or so, the level of mayhem has been much less than was common in the past (we know this from many paleontological and anthropological studies; life in the Amazon had a very high probability to end with murder, for example). This is not just a factoid, but a warning…

For example, we keep on pumping CO2, we modify the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. This never happened before, ever since there were dinosaurs, and they disappeared (this is an allusion to Dekkan Super Traps, when the world reeled under a massive core eruption, with probable massive CO2 releases, followed by backlashes: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/trapped-by-super-traps/).

Oakwood: “If there are/were any societies in history that did not have a wealthy/privileged elite, they are/were very very rare. This seems to be the norm of human society.”

To complain about the principle leadership was not my point in “PLUTOCRACY“. Philosophers have always been, in some sense, a privileged elite, the ultimate luxury of the top societies. Wisdom itself is privilege. So I aspire to belong to the maximally privileged elite.

The plutocratic phenomenon happens when an elite takes control, basically to lead a maximum number of people down, the Dark Side (this is the exact opposite of wisdom uses the Dark Side to blast a mess clean).

Besides, once again, there is nothing as a typical “human society“. There is no eternal return of the same. All civilization is un-natural, and the more technological, the less natural.

The present rule of increasing plutocracy is increasingly exasperating. Hopefully, by finding out what is going on in the darker corners of the human mind, and acting in a timely manner, to prevent further deterioration, the future will not be dire.

Most of us will prefer to live now, rather than in any prior period. Even common people presently live better than the greatest lords.

The question is not whether the situation is more dire now rather than before. It obviously is, because of the very success of our species. We are now trying to fly a new vehicle, the latest version of spaceship Earth. That version of this spaceship never existed before. And thus it may crash, as all new prototypes tend to do. We don’t want to crash. It’s a very primordial urge.

So we should not sequester civilization. Tax the rich before they get total control. Remember that not taxing the rich is a self fulfilling non linear effect. As happened to the Greco-Roman empire.

So progress and tax, but don’t sequester, be it only for the children. Not just that we love them, and they deserve to be loved. But also because they sustain us, as we hope, weaken, and give away all we had dear, satisfying our primordial urge to the utmost.

***

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: And how do we avoid a civilizational crash? The question of energy is central. Not just by making it sustainable, but also making our mastery of energy great enough to address the problems we have (that is what the Romans did not do enough of, in the end).

One of the problems being that, having run out of planet (we consume already much more than the planet can sustain), we need to expand in the solar system. This is not utopia, but a clear and present necessity. But using the same basic technique as prehistoric man, or Denis Papin, that is, making a big pile of chemicals and combining them with oxygen, is not good enough for doing so. So fusion research for space propulsion ought to be financed much more than it presently is!

***

[1] Denis Papin had studied under the great physicist Huyghens (who was financed by Louis XIV early on!). He worked on vacuum pumps and a device to “digest” bones (early pressure cooker, so he invented that too!)

At the University of Marburg in Germany, Papin revisited an idea that Huygens had suggested — using gunpowder to drive an engine. But Papin soon realized that was impractical. It left a piston full of non-condensable gas after each explosion.

Papin’s sketch of his first steam engine.

But if he used steam, the gas would condense to almost nothing. Then a piston stroke could be fully completed. Instead of exploding gunpowder to create pressure, he could do it with steam, and then condense steam to create a vacuum. Air pressure could drive the working stroke. That is how the first real steam engines worked.

Papin published the design of such an engine in 1690 — the one he holds proudly at the Louvre, today, among a gallery of better known French thinkers. A puddle of water in the cylinder would be alternately boiled and condensed. Boiling filled the cylinder with steam. Work got done when the atmospheric drove the piston downward during condensation. Later English blacksmiths improved the welded seals. Steam engine became common by 1712, and were used in mines to pump water out. They delivered 6 horsepower. Only then did Watt enter the picture! I mean Watt’s mom and dad would soon meet and procreate… Watt was born in 1736, when the early steam engineers were… dead.

Watt improved on Thomas Newcomen‘s 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, a full century after Pain’s original work. In other words, attributing posthumous power to Watt is a misattribution which obscures the real evolution of… man-made power. And that, the misattribution of how a major invention happened is… immoral. (Because it misleads the youth, and then everybody on the nature of invention…)