Good reading Ugo! Empires and the last Emperor to come?
Herbivores are plenty and predators few; the energy flows up. Once there was a Republic, yet they could not handle the oligarchs ... the urban ground, the essential craft and skills grew predatory and military. Gold was a meme ... a power to ignore reality.
The herbivores, even the wandering pastoralists, their grass and their waterholes, must have that insurance against the lean time, the knowledge store, some rule to pass over the years.
Further back even than the Western Iron Age, Nimrud was abandoned to the sand and the memes in alabaster only stare at us now in the museum. A last king appears in a poem and is no more.
Even across a continent that demanded a recent expanding frontier, the soil decarbonised, lost to air, leached to feed a plurality of cities, there are signs, memes in capitols, even where the canals run dry, the mines drain the ancient stores, forests restructured by a meme are not renewed by fire, many plans are gone awry.
NB I owe (sic) quite a lot these days to the late David Graeber and his 'sprawling' scholarship, 'Debt, the First 5000 Years'.
Let's hope for climatism. We really need need it!
Good reading Ugo! Empires and the last Emperor to come?
Herbivores are plenty and predators few; the energy flows up. Once there was a Republic, yet they could not handle the oligarchs ... the urban ground, the essential craft and skills grew predatory and military. Gold was a meme ... a power to ignore reality.
The herbivores, even the wandering pastoralists, their grass and their waterholes, must have that insurance against the lean time, the knowledge store, some rule to pass over the years.
Further back even than the Western Iron Age, Nimrud was abandoned to the sand and the memes in alabaster only stare at us now in the museum. A last king appears in a poem and is no more.
Even across a continent that demanded a recent expanding frontier, the soil decarbonised, lost to air, leached to feed a plurality of cities, there are signs, memes in capitols, even where the canals run dry, the mines drain the ancient stores, forests restructured by a meme are not renewed by fire, many plans are gone awry.
NB I owe (sic) quite a lot these days to the late David Graeber and his 'sprawling' scholarship, 'Debt, the First 5000 Years'.
lucid and powerful as usual. Thank you for the insightful words that help me see the mess in a new light.
Excellent piece. Historical and timely. What would Marcus Aurelius say? What are the 'new stoics' thinking and doing?
”Toren und gescheite Leute sind gleich unschädlich. Nur die Halbnarren und die Halbweisen, das sind die gefährlichsten.”
Goethe
Working as a psychiatrist I like the song by Swedish pop group, The Arc:
”It takes a fool to remain sane”