The Ideal Form

Confused Azalea

      The issues I have with dualism are the same as the issues I have with straight lines. Straight lines resolve nothing unless attached to the manufactured rounding of curves which a Trinity accomplishes for those who might not yet be brain dead. Dualism itself is the therapeutic equivalent of this Trinity or Dialectic in thinking. All along the assumption that a straight line is going somewhere is the error. The value of a straight line is to organize thought into something like a line of books on a shelf.

    So let's talk about Werner Sombart, an economist, historian and sociologist, mostly an historicist, who died in 1941, whose more radical ideas prevented him from finding work in Germany's elite post World War One academic institutions until the Nazi took over. Sombart had actually read Das Kapital, and according to the likes of Engel et al, Sombart was one of the few Germans who had actually understood Marx's Critique of Political Economy.

   Sombart was the first man of letters to coin the phrase "Late Stage Capitalism." He had ideas about the role Jews played in the social movement that began with the spirit of feudalism that became early capitalism. He saw this social movement as an "in this together" which ended with the Industrial Revolution and with the increasing dominance of an isolating spirit in society that lost touch with "in this together." Late Stage Capitalism for Sombart was a new spirit, a reuniting of the "in this together" that produced amongst other things, pogroms of Jewish people and anyone else who failed to share the same understanding of a power higher than the higher power of sect or of an individual. For Sombart National Socialism was a revival, a new spirit of the commitments between people which had supported the feudal world for a very long time.

  My own view on this area of thinking wanders back through the generations to Plato's Ideal Forms and the intensity with which the western mind has clung to them while ignoring the role Socrates played in Plato's playground. With respect to capital as a moral understanding, both Ricardo and Adam Smith erected an ideal form upon which Capital as in Kapital was builded here from Freiberg to Yale, via, Rome, Paris, Chicago and Oxford 

   That Ideal Form was the beginning of a straight line called the "Free Market." There is no grand unified thinking for us people. What we have is useful lines that go nowhere. The Free Market is nothing more than yet another straight line, it has nothing to do with the reality of something like an Azalea

Line of Books

Losing the word retard.

A  Slime Mold Community

    As you slowly become decrepit you lose things, throw them over a cliff, you can see parts of them but don't have the eyesight to see all of them, and yes indeed, I lost a word. Couldn't sleep for thinking about it, round and round like an out of a control crab. 

    Before reading and writing rose to prominence the first explosions of passion for us Great Apes were dictated by unmanageable demands for expression. Anything that made a determined  "I am Here" "I seem to exist!" or "Look at Me" statement was good enough. Don't take my word for these collapses of balance, you might recognize it in the tapestry you may have enjoyed while hunting down a word that at one time was a regular visitor to your vocabulary but which is apparently lost possibly for ever. 

    I have to wonder at the filter which acknowledges that some words are verboten in this or that social context. Then all of a sudden that filter is gone, lost in the Popeye of "I am what I am." A "this is me." On the whole when a "this is me" is rejected by a group the filter returns until the word is actually lost.

   I was hoping to lose the smile I have for the word retard, I was hoping to find my self no longer reaching or the word retard in the bread aisle of the Walmart, but you know - politics. Last night in my dream about outsider artists that eat people for breakfast I forgot the word Sanskrit, which in the English language translates as refined, polished, well-done, perfected.

Gibbon and the Pale Horseman

Another Day Down

      The Fourth Horseman mentioned in the book of Revelations, the pale, or sometimes greenish yellow one, depending on translation, was traditionally represented by a chap called Odoacar, the First Barbarian King of Rome, who ruled from 476 to 493. For Edward Gibbon Odoacar's reign serves to mark the end of the Western Roman Empire.

     Gibbon reckoned the dominating obsession the Jewish Sect that became Christianity had with the immanent end of the world, and the return of their savior, gave them an unhealthy and wholly irrational fanaticism which while it might have served the sect during times of persecution, it did produce in Christians an intense disregard for non-Christians which over time included Jews. As Christianity, came to dominate the Roman elites this intolerance toward pagans fractured the social cohesion of the Roman Empire. 

    I think our dilemma is to grasp the extent to which the Roman Empire was a cohesive collective. The answer is that as Rome expanded it practiced pluralism under the yoke of a non-democratic imperial hierarchy. To move east to Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the conqueror of half the world when he was a boy was tutored by Aristotle. As Alexander's empire grew, Aristotle wanted his student to put Greeks in charge of provinces. Alexander knew better, the massive empire he'd taken from the Persians would be organized in the same tried and trusted way the Persian's had managed it. The locals would run it.

     

Horsemen of The Apocalypse

Leaf in Nest

      In discussion with the various entities I share the world with, many of whom fail the test for sentience, I find myself losing faith in the accuracy of large language models. Let's put it this way, I know it's not that easy to cool things in outer space and I know that in space electricity is precious. And yet, apparently, there is nowhere more suitable than outer space for the construction of these future Lords of Destiny currently referred to as Data Centers. Apparently space is cold, so cooling's not a problem, as well, up above the clouds there's an unlimited amount of renewable electricity, and if you add to this the life span of a GPU that's been protected from radiation, then Bingo, invest your life savings in a company that sends stuff to space.

     Don't get me wrong I still believe Copy and Paste was the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse, and don't give me any of that new age crap about the Book of Revelations not being about the future, and don't even begin to suggest that the Turin Test has anything to do with the first horseman of the Apocalypse, or try to tell me the Turin Test has anything to do with intelligence. No! The First Horseman was a cult leader called Pythagoras who died when he was seventy five around 500 BC.

    "OK! So who was the second horseman."

    Adam Smith's assertion that self interest in a free market unintentionally promotes the broader welfare of society. 

    "I thought there were four horsemen?"

    We'll know tomorrow.