More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it.
Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.”
One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model.
He concluded that strictly speaking, there was no such thing as altruism. It was only selfishness taking the long view, acknowledging the real costs of behavior and making sure to pay them in order not to run up any long-term debts.
Effects did not follow from causes, and one did not get one’s just deserts.
So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.
The multinationals had mostly originated in the wealthy industrial nations, and so in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations—extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them.
So the stock market rise was probably some kind of bubble phenomenon, and if it burst it might very well be enough to bring everything down again. Or perhaps not; economics was a bizarre field, and there were senses in which the whole stock market was simply too unreal to have impacts beyond itself.
What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.
One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.
We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place.”
That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy.
Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease.
Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful.
