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'.
Great piece. I think "democracy" as a meme will be around for a while yet--it is too useful for those who still want to usher in what they consider technocracy. Here in the US, we have seen that our maximum leader need not be anything but a figurehead, which may very well be the whole purpose of the exercise.
Many already realize that their elected politicians say whatever is required to get elected, after which most of what the voters want can be safely ignored. As for the "emperor-king-president" or whatever we call him, people have been conditioned here in the US for almost 4 years now that a cardboard cutout can be installed as "leader" with no discernable change in the way the country is run. If Harris can pull off a win, another 4 years of this nonsense will cement the idea in place pretty thoroughly. I'd say the idea of a "president" is itself a meme at that point, and nothing more.
and today in New York sandrine dixson decleve will say that there is still time to create and earth4all and you professor say that we will very soon collapse an return to the Middle ages why do you two not agree your both club of rome members ?
but i do not wasted ugo it is just because i want to live i enjoy live and i want a renewable energy world but i do not understand the exxon graph outlook quark stated to my we have enough crude oil left until 2030 i asked the earth4all team and also they say the window is still open to have an earth4all but then some of your posts say the oppositie of earth4all abd professor per espen stoknes sees population growing to 2050 there very mixed messages also from the club of rome facebook posts so sorry i did do nothing wrong and i think it is very human to by afraid of death even for animals look at slautherhouses i seen sheet crying in tears they knew they would die also a friend of my from my church that did die on his deathbed did cry and he believed in god so i think it is humain !
I feel like empires are meme gestalt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) so not founding on a single meme as pillar, could happen, but this make the empire quite fragile with a single point of failure so temporally quite limited, and we could find some examples: the kingdoms that rise and fall within the span of a generation (infallibility of the king), the usual economic bubbles (X value can only go up), religious sects based on charismatic leader and a lot of Italian political parties.
We must understand that meme are a lot like labels but are a bit more complex than the usual definition of it. A meme is a single tag that we use to understand the world (example "food") but also the automatic process that put other labels/things in it (to me a worm is not "food" but in Thailand can be a delicacy), the meme is also a container for "recipes", the sequences of action/though to get a result (cooking but also driving) that are perceived as a single unit. Looking at this, we can understand that meme competes between themselves but also mutate trough time adapting until can become something quite different from their origin.
As a general rule, I feel like Hobs was right in his analysis, we make Leviathans in the form of gestalt of rules and relations that we accept to bound our actions, this precedes the formalization or rationalization of it and the codification in a cluster so coherent that can be a meme, and we do it as the best interest for both our live and as good for our community. Empire fall before the emperor, still can be difficult for people in it to perceive the collapse before reality kick in: meme are though so come after reality as perceptions of it, we can go for a long time without seeing something but still have to coope with the rality of effects of this invisible thing.
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.
Very well done, Bill Rees would point out that the greatest meme driving overshoot is ‘growthism’
Let's hope for climatism. We really need need it!
”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”
Great piece. I think "democracy" as a meme will be around for a while yet--it is too useful for those who still want to usher in what they consider technocracy. Here in the US, we have seen that our maximum leader need not be anything but a figurehead, which may very well be the whole purpose of the exercise.
Many already realize that their elected politicians say whatever is required to get elected, after which most of what the voters want can be safely ignored. As for the "emperor-king-president" or whatever we call him, people have been conditioned here in the US for almost 4 years now that a cardboard cutout can be installed as "leader" with no discernable change in the way the country is run. If Harris can pull off a win, another 4 years of this nonsense will cement the idea in place pretty thoroughly. I'd say the idea of a "president" is itself a meme at that point, and nothing more.
must I now say farewell to my family and friends with your youtube video is it truly to late will most of us not see the year 2030 ?
and today in New York sandrine dixson decleve will say that there is still time to create and earth4all and you professor say that we will very soon collapse an return to the Middle ages why do you two not agree your both club of rome members ?
Aaron, I block you for your own good. You must stop spending your life on the Web. Stop that, take a walk, meet people, do something.
shame you block me for this because i am scared and just ask question's for information i did not say bad language or hurt somebody !
It is not because of that. Aaron -- you have only one life to live. Don't waste it in this way.
but i do not wasted ugo it is just because i want to live i enjoy live and i want a renewable energy world but i do not understand the exxon graph outlook quark stated to my we have enough crude oil left until 2030 i asked the earth4all team and also they say the window is still open to have an earth4all but then some of your posts say the oppositie of earth4all abd professor per espen stoknes sees population growing to 2050 there very mixed messages also from the club of rome facebook posts so sorry i did do nothing wrong and i think it is very human to by afraid of death even for animals look at slautherhouses i seen sheet crying in tears they knew they would die also a friend of my from my church that did die on his deathbed did cry and he believed in god so i think it is humain !
I feel like empires are meme gestalt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) so not founding on a single meme as pillar, could happen, but this make the empire quite fragile with a single point of failure so temporally quite limited, and we could find some examples: the kingdoms that rise and fall within the span of a generation (infallibility of the king), the usual economic bubbles (X value can only go up), religious sects based on charismatic leader and a lot of Italian political parties.
We must understand that meme are a lot like labels but are a bit more complex than the usual definition of it. A meme is a single tag that we use to understand the world (example "food") but also the automatic process that put other labels/things in it (to me a worm is not "food" but in Thailand can be a delicacy), the meme is also a container for "recipes", the sequences of action/though to get a result (cooking but also driving) that are perceived as a single unit. Looking at this, we can understand that meme competes between themselves but also mutate trough time adapting until can become something quite different from their origin.
As a general rule, I feel like Hobs was right in his analysis, we make Leviathans in the form of gestalt of rules and relations that we accept to bound our actions, this precedes the formalization or rationalization of it and the codification in a cluster so coherent that can be a meme, and we do it as the best interest for both our live and as good for our community. Empire fall before the emperor, still can be difficult for people in it to perceive the collapse before reality kick in: meme are though so come after reality as perceptions of it, we can go for a long time without seeing something but still have to coope with the rality of effects of this invisible thing.
"Inche Kay Che" : "I, the person, remain"
Excellent piece. Historical and timely. What would Marcus Aurelius say? What are the 'new stoics' thinking and doing?