John Gray: Why this crisis is a turning point in history

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4/1/2020 article in New Statesman:
https://www.newstatesman.com/internatio ... nt-history

In other words Western Civilization is crumbling while Eastern Civilization is advancing.

Thank you for posting that. John Gray’s articles are always worth reading.

Things you predict will never be the same will be, OTOH this will produce changes we can't imagine now.

Some of these changes will hit you like a sledgehammer while others changes that are just as or even more important you won't or hardly notice.

Hmm. Most of this sounds reasonable, but describing Vucic, Milosevic's old information minister and far right nationalist, as "blunt" makes it appear like Vucic was an objective voice that merely hit a harsh tone.

On reshaping the economy: as long as the only way is faster, faster, they will rebuild it to be even more 'just-in-time', even more interconnected. That might come with restricted mivement for people, but not for capital.
After all, there is no Coltan in Colorado

I'm sure that's what they'll try to do since it's in their financial interest to do exactly that. The question is whether anything will spring up in the current space to prevent that (whether legislation, NGO's, or any other new stakeholders that might be able to complicate that dance).

I was listening to the Mark Blyth and Carrie Nordlund show recently and Mark had a good metaphor for comparing the US to Europe - ie. that the US economy is a Mustang where the European economy is a Volvo, where the Mustang is fun to drive but your dead if it wrecks whereas the Volvo is more conservative but has contingency plans. It sounds about right, and I consider what you mentioned above - ie. that the US is the place in the world where cowboy Capitalism gets practice and where everyone is buying rather than saving because, well, someone in the global economy has to be doing it otherwise the whole thing crashes if everyone saves at once (which makes me think - at least on this side of the water - things are likely to change far less than they will anywhere else).

The president of Bavaria just announced an incentive program for the Bavaraian automobile-industry to rebuild after the crisis. BMW is currently getting billions from the crisis-fund, and at the same time handing out billions in dividends to its shareholders.
I should mention: I'm self employed, and I'm getting nothing from the government, because I'm not entirely broke. And since my business finances and my private finances are the same, my business isn't getting any help, as long as I'm not also insolvent, as a person.

I'm tired of saving the car industry.

I'm really starting to think people like us are, when we can, better off actually getting hands-on in understanding the nuts and bolts of what's happening and not just figuring out what's wrong with the system but what should be happening and.... whew this is a big one.... both talking to other people who can see it accurately and trying to push for changes not at all on a 'this is the single source of the problem - fix this and all will be well' like so many sweeping public movements tend to be but actually hitting the nuts and bolts accurately and trying to push for the non-sexy minutia to get tuned adequately.

This is where I can't get enough of what Bret and Eric Weinstein are doing - ie. they're encouraging that sort of involvement. I spent a few hours with Eric and Lex's last podcast and ended up buying Sir Roger Penrose's 2007 brick on physics because the mentality is starting to hit me - we're headed into an environment where trusting my outsourcing of knowledge to experts is like trusting my outsourcing of expertise on cars to a used car dealer - ie. it's great if you don't mind getting grifted (or society at large getting grifted for that matter), really bad if - when you look in the mirror - you can't help but judge yourself for whether you're living up to full-spectrum adult responsibility. I'm starting to think I may need to get just as involved in looking at economics, having a much more solid notion of what's happening with money, etc. and if it's redundant and there's a few well-known economists who have it right - better to inflate the numbers on their team rather than simply 'go with my gut' on social heuristics and my best educated/miseducated guess on who knows what they're talking about. It's fine if someone literally doesn't have the mind for it, not so much if one both does and has the time - and even for as much as I work I'd still have to say I have both.

I managed to do the self-education in the humanities, to some extent, to figure out what needs to be taken seriously and what the hell trans-activists even mean when they say things like "biological sex is a social construct".
But economics is way worse. Mainly because I can't do the math. I basically have to trust Mark Blyth.

But I fo have an old friend from high school who became an economist and government official. He says he was shocked when he easily took apart the arguments of one of the senior government advisors, demonstrating that he was wrong and leaving him speechless. - the fact that the guy was not even up to arguing -in his field of expertise- with a junior official, only a year on the job, left my friend deeply worried. (My friend is on the spectrum and a bit of a human calculator. He doesn't have much of a political opinion, but he understands statistics etc. ... He's the perfect bureaucrat).

I think the world is way too complex for any person to have expertise in enough fields to make decisions responsibly.
It's used car salesmen all the way down, we get ripped off, but we also get a used car. And the opportunity to rip someone off when our expertise is asked for. I think that's the tacit agreement.

Jordan Hall said something I thought was really helpful on this on a recent Rebel Wisdom - the idea of layers of abstraction from fundamental competencies, where his example of level zero was a person who lived in the woods and needed competence to fix their own pipes vs level 1 as the person who calls a plumber, level 2 being the person who calls a superintendent who calls a plumber, and eventually by the time you're dealing with politics you're three or for layers abstracted and most of your reality becomes those third or fourth layer abstractions. I think what your friend and the guy he argued with demonstrated was that competence was less directly related to that layer than other sorts of people skills (which the guy probably had in lieu of grasp on economics).


I think the fewer opaque priesthoods we have though, especially in the day and age of Youtube, Quora, and just about any book you could want from Amazon, the better. To the degree that most people won't even bother with those sorts of things means that if nearly everyone whose not in a professional silo rolls over then the leeway for ripping eachother off broadens, perhaps enough for society-rending positive feedback loops to kick in. To the degree that there's a pretty good-sized body of credible watch dogs, people who can discern even among the complexity when people are doing things like, for example, abusing the peer review system with stuff that looks like science but has agenda all the way through it (Daniel Schmachtenberger beat up on some studies that tried off-patent drugs for people who were doing badly with Covid and using vitamin C as a placebo for the sake of suggesting that the generics didn't work and that a more expensive patented drug would be needed). Seems like when you get past the individual and into large groups you have a fluid dynamic situation and with that any opportunities that can be exploited at first will be by the least scrupulous or most sociopathic and then everyone has to run to catch up otherwise they start losing the race.

I really appreciated the Rebel Wisdom video you posted about interconnectivity, in the age of Coronavirus. I'm sorry I didn't respond at the time but I was struck in particular by Jim Rutt's insight. I can't stop thinking about the marble in the bowl.

I hope you will be able to post similar links in the future.

The last few have just been okay but I actually did see something in the last few days that I think you'd like. It's 'A Quality Existence', she tends to go over Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) along with John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, etc. a lot and in this one she ostensibly starts out by comparing the polarity between Peterson and Harris on truth and their other epistemological differences, however she seems to almost immediately springboard into Paul VanderKlay's thoughts on how the concept of deity helps us. I've only seen VanderKlay interviewed a few times so it was nice to hear his thoughts as compressed as she offered them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XEPiYw_N0E