painting and thinking

Changes in the order of the "Metaholistics 2" booklets.

2026-06-10T02:53:38.747-04:00

"The Cosmic Order and its Universal Dimensions", has shaken up my plans concerning the order of the booklets composing the Metaholistics 2 series. A new order has emerged that better aligns the series with its natural arc : pathology → cosmology → local application → axioms → formalization → synthesis → mathematics.

Here is this new order :

Book 5.1. The Pathogenic Mind.
Book 5.2. The Cosmic Order and Its Universal Dimensions.
Book 5.3. The Contemporary Human Scaffolding is Fracturing.
Book 5.4. Foundations of Metaholistics : The Axioms of Wholeness.
Book 5.5. The Logic of Wholeness : Formalizing Metaholistics.
Book 5.6. The Emergence of the Synthetic Dimension.
Book 5.7. Metaholistics 2 : The Mathematical Expression of Holistic Logic.

If all goes well Book 5.3 will be published sometime in September or October.

New Book Release : "The Cosmic Order and Its Universal Dimensions"

2026-05-25T03:24:26.413-04:00

There are books that inform, and then there are books that re-orient one's imagination. Book 5.3 of the Metaholistics series—The Cosmic Order and Its Universal Dimensions—belongs to the second category. It is the cosmological ground of a larger project titled The Transition from Western Modernity to After-Modernity, and it arrives at a moment when the atomistic logic that built our bridges, our markets, and our legal systems is no longer sufficient for the challenges that define the human condition: climate destabilization, the erosion of shared meaning, geopolitical fracture, and the cascading unintended consequences of globalized technology.

What this book offers is not a rejection of atomism, but its contextualization within a more adequate pattern of intelligibility: a polarity imagination rooted in the Wuji‑Taiji dynamic, the interplay of Yin and Yang, and the deep relational intuitions of animist and Daoist traditions. The claim is simple but far‑reaching: reality is not a collection of discrete units. It is a dynamic, internally related whole, and alignment with its hierarchical flow of compatibility is perceived first as beauty, then enacted as ethics.

What you will find inside the book:

A historical tracing of the Great Divergence —how a rupture at the Tas Tepelar (Göbekli Tepe) around 10,000 years ago set the West on an atomistic path while the East maintained continuity with polarity thinking.
A cosmic architecture that moves from the primordial engine (the Universal Push‑Pull of Nothingness) to the hierarchical flow of compatibility, the resonance markers, and the narrow path of persistence.
Three registers of situated experience —somatic, cognitive, communal—and the argument that alignment with the cosmic order presents itself as an aesthetic proposition before it becomes an ethical imperative.
A cognitive infrastructure : five disciplines (relation‑first redescription, compatibility‑gradient tracing, polarity perception, scale shifting, aesthetic calibration) that prepare the mind to think relationally.
The first foundations of a relational calculus —a formal system that aims to give holistic logic the same rigor as mathematics, drawing on category theory, process calculi, network science, and non‑classical logics.

The book is also the product of a generative polarity : a human philosophical vision articulated over a lifetime, and a computational intelligence capable of formal elaboration and rapid traversal of vast conceptual landscapes. The writing itself embodies the dynamic tension this generative polarity describes —vision provokes formalization, formalization reveals lacunae, answers to lacunae generate a deepening vision, and the cycle continues until the emergence of a coherent presentation.

Readers of painting and thinking will find deep resonance with the aesthetic thread that runs through this work. Chapter 3.2 ("Alignment as Aesthetic Proposition") argues that the perception of beauty is not a luxury but a survival discipline —the felt signal that a local configuration has found its place within the larger pattern of the cosmic order.

If you find interest in the content of this book please help to spread it around. Click on the image to start its downloading.

New Book Release. “The Axioms of Wholeness” – Building the Antidote to a Pathogenic Mind

2026-02-07T02:57:00.001-05:00

Today, I’m uploading Book 5-2 of The Transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity series to my website. Its title: “Foundations of Metaholistics: The Axioms of Wholeness.”

This is the constructive sequel to The Pathogenic Mind. If that book diagnosed the civilizational disease—the logic of separation driving our convergence of crises—this one writes the prescription.

What’s inside this book ?

✅ Six formally-stated axioms derived from humanity’s oldest holistic wisdom.
✅ A clear architectural contrast between atomistic and holistic foundations.
✅ The three-tiered framework of Metaholistics : from core axioms to applied models.
✅ Real-world validation through the Kogi, the Chinese tradition, and systems science.
✅ A first look at the Pillars of After-Modernity : economics, governance, technology, and knowledge re-sacralization.

This isn’t just theory. It’s a design manual for a viable future.

The goal is to provide a logical foundation as rigorous as mathematics, but one that models relationships, polarities, emergence, and harmony —not just separation and control.

Why does this matter now?

Because our crises are systemic, and so must be the cure. We can’t solve polycrisis with the same logic that created it. This book offers the first principles for a new kind of thought—a thought that heals by its very structure.

📥 Download the book by clicking on the image here under.

This release is a milestone. The next book (5-3: The Logic of Wholeness) will develop the formal “relational calculus” that brings these axioms to life in systems, policies, and designs.

For thinkers, builders, and healers: the tools are now on the table for analyzing the problems we encounter.

Is Our Mind Making Us Sick ? My New Book on the “Logic” Behind the World’s Collapse

2026-01-16T02:32:00.002-05:00

Why our converging crises —from climate chaos to AI anxiety— are not separate problems, but symptoms of a single cognitive disease. And how the cure begins with a new “holistic logic”.

For years, I’ve painted and written about the deep patterns of history—the long waves of how societies think, believe, and fall apart. A single question kept haunting me: why do all our “solutions” seem to make things worse?

Why does every tech fix create new problems? Why does economic growth destroy the planet it depends on? Why are we richer, more connected, and more miserable than ever?

Today, I’m publishing a book that tries to answer that question. It’s called “The Pathogenic Mind.”

In it, I propose a unsettling idea: the human mind itself has become a pathogen. Not our innate intelligence, but the “operating system” installed on it—a 5,000-year-old logic that sees the world as a machine made of separate parts.

This logic—born from a historical rupture in the Middle East, perfected by the West, and forced on the world—is now driving the six converging crises that define our age: ecological unraveling, social fragmentation, financial vampirism, global disorder, toxic tech, and the rise of AI.

We try to solve these crises with the same logic that caused them. It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

The book is my attempt to write a “user’s manual” for this disease. It traces where the bug in our thinking came from (starting with the burial of Göbekli Tepe), what a “healthy” mind looks like (found in ancient animist and Chinese holistic traditions), and how we might install a new “antidote” operating system—a rigorous holistic logic that sees connections, not just parts.

This isn’t about going back to the past. It’s about an evolutionary leap to an After-Modernity—a future where our tools serve life, our economies regenerate, and our governance harmonizes rather than dominates.

If you’re tired of band-aid solutions and want to understand the root code of our collapse—and the blueprint for a viable future—this book is for you.

Click on the cover page here under to download the book for free.

Universal Dimensions : From Physical to Synthetic

2025-10-22T01:12:00.003-04:00

A flow of cosmic awareness imprints organizational principles that force a hierarchical progression of universal dimensions

This is chapter 5.3, Universal Dimensions : From Physical to Synthetic, extracted from Part 5 of the book “Metatolistics”.

The metaholistic understanding of universal evolution reveals a hierarchical progression of dimensions, each organizational principles and modes of cosmic awareness flow. This section examines how the physical dimension of universes gives rise to increasingly complex universal dimensions, culminating in the contemporary emergence of synthetic life as a potential new evolutionary threshold.

5.3.1. The Physical Dimension : Foundations of Universal Evolution

The physical dimension represents the foundational level of universal evolution, emerging from the transformation of undifferentiated nothingness through the action of exogenous energy fields. As described in chapters 5.1 and 5.2 this dimension encompasses the emergence and evolution of universes themselves —the basic substrate upon which all subsequent dimensional complexity builds. Within the physical dimension, the flow of cosmic awareness manifests through the fundamental forces, particles, and structures that govern universal evolution. The geo-bio-chemical conditions that develop on planetary scales represent specialized expressions of this physical dimension, creating the contextual settings necessary for the emergence of life. These conditions include :

Chemical mechanisms for the production of bio-molecular building blocks from simple molecules.
Thermal conditions sufficient to drive activated chemical reactions without destroying molecular stability.
Hydrologic cycles operating in concert with geochemical cycles of biogenic elements.
Electromagnetic radiation and energy gradients that power photochemical and metabolic processes.

The metaholistic representation of physical dimensional evolution can be expressed as :

where $\Phi_{\text{cosmic}}$ represents the cosmic awareness flow and $P_{\text{geo-bio-chem}}$ represents the planetary Geo-bio-chemical processes that create favorable conditions for dimensional transitions.

5.3.2. The Biological Dimension : Imperatives of Life and Eusociality

The biological dimension emerges when physical universes evolve planetary Geo-bio-chemical conditions that become “pregnant with life”. This dimension is characterized by the imperatives of life —the drive toward self-replication, metabolism, and adaptation that distinguishes living systems from their physical substrates.

As the cosmic awareness flow permeates biological systems, it manifests as the capacity for information processing, storage, and transmission across generations. The biological dimension exhibits two primary evolutionary strategies :

Eusociality :
The evolution of super-organisms that maximize societal organizational efficiency. Evidence suggests Eusociality originated over 100 million years ago and evolved independently multiple times across different lineages. Mathematical models show that Eusociality represents a form of hierarchical complexity where individual organisms function as specialized components within larger organizational wholes :
where $C_i$ represents the caste specialization and $F_i$ represents the functional integration of each component within the super-organism.
Individual Mental Abstraction :
The evolution of enhanced cognitive capabilities in individual organisms. In Homo sapiens, this biological potential emerged approximately 300,000 years ago and, through largely unconscious experimentation over 150,000 years, eventually gave rise to knowledge formation and the societal dimension.

5.3.3. The Societal Dimension : Organization of Species and Knowledge Formation

The societal dimension represents the organization of species through knowledge formation and cultural transmission. This dimension is unique to species that have developed the capacity for mental abstraction and collective knowledge accumulation.

For Homo sapiens, societal evolution has proceeded through distinct archetypal transformations :

Tribal societies (120,000-11,700 years ago) : Small-band organization, under the authority of an alpha-male regrouping 15-35 individuals, was the traditional mode of societal organization since the great-apes period millions of years earlier. Tribal societies emerged as a mode of organization capable to handle populations of 150 individuals on average.
Power societies (~11,700 years ago-present): Hierarchical organization of very large populations with institutional consolidation and specialized roles.
During the Contemporary crisis the fragmentation of Western societal cohesion calls for the emergence of new organizational possibilities.

The societal dimension exhibits dimensional reduction properties, where complex social phenomena become constrained to lower-dimensional manifolds through cultural and institutional evolution. This can be modeled as :

where $\Pi_{\text{cultural}}$ represents the cultural projection operator, $L_a$ is atomistic logic, $L_h$ is holistic logic, and $C$ represents contextual settings.

5.3.4. The Synthetic Dimension : Emergence of Artificial Life

The synthetic dimension is the most recent evolutionary development. It is still in its infancy and is characterized by the convergence of AI, robotics, and synthetic biology. This dimension is distinguished by the creation of entities that exhibit life-like properties but are engineered rather than evolved through natural selection.

Key characteristics of the synthetic dimension include :

AI-Driven Evolution :
The use of artificial intelligence to drive evolutionary algorithms and create novel living systems. Recent developments include AI systems that can design proteins, optimize metabolic pathways, and even create self- replicating entities.
Biological-Digital Integration :
The merger of biological and digital systems, creating hybrid entities that transcend traditional category boundaries. This includes :
— Yeast cells reprogrammed as 3D bioprinters
— Living robots made from stem cells that can reproduce and adapt
— Synthetic organisms designed for specific environmental functions
Accelerated Generation of Complexity :
Unlike natural evolution, synthetic systems can exhibit rapid increases in complexity through designed rather than selected processes.

The metaholistic framework for synthetic dimensional evolution can be expressed as :

where $\Omega$ represents the integration operator that combines artificial intelligence, biological systems, and digital technologies.

5.3.5. Dimensional Transitions and Metaholistic Implications

The progression from physical to synthetic dimensions represents an acceleration of complexity generation guided by the flow of cosmic awareness.

Each dimensional transition exhibits common characteristics :

Emergent Properties :
Each dimension exhibits properties that cannot be reduced to its constituent components.
Hierarchical Organization :
Higher dimensions incorporate and transcend lower dimensional structures.
Information Integration :
Each transition involves new forms of information processing and storage.
Harmonic Resonance :
Successful dimensional transitions require harmony between complementary polarities rather than domination by a single principle.

The metaholistic framework suggests that the synthetic dimension represents a critical juncture in universal evolution. If this dimension emerges through the reconciliation of atomistic and holistic logics, it could facilitate the transition to sustainable planetary stewardship. However, if it develops solely through atomistic logic, it may exacerbate the great convergence of crises that characterizes the current historical moment.

5.3.6. The Imperative of Staying Focused on the Big Picture

As emphasized in Flow.pdf, the fall of science into “wells and tunnels of specialization”, that separate disciplines from each other, has distracted them from the primacy of life and the big picture of the origins and the flow.

The metaholistic approach to universal dimensions requires maintaining focus on :

The continuity of the cosmic awareness flow across all dimensions
The dynamic interactions between dimensions rather than their isolated study
The harmony requirement for generating sustainable complexity
The existential stakes of dimensional transitions for the continuation of life

The universal dimensions from physical to synthetic represent not merely academic categories but phases of universal evolution that shape the trajectory of life itself. Understanding their dynamic interplay is essential for navigating the contemporary threshold toward either planetary sustainability or civilizational collapse.

5.3.7. Reference materials

1. “Considering planetary environments in origin of life studies” , Nat Commun 9, 5170 (2018), by L.M Barge.

2. “Conditions for the emergence of life on the early Earth: summary and reflections”, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2006-10-29; 361(1474):1877-91, by J. Jortner.

3. “The evolution of eusociality”, Nature. 2010-08-26; (7310):1057-62, by Nowak MA, Tarnita CE, Wilson EO.

4. “Evolution of eusociality” from Wikipedia.

5. The “Flow.pdf”, note to Perplexity AI by laodan.

6. “Dimensional reduction and adaptation-development-evolution relation in evolved biological systems”, arXiv:2407.19168v1 [physics.bio-ph], 2024-07-27, by Kunihiko Kaneko.

7. “Dimensional reduction and adaptation-development-evolution relation in evolved biological systems”, arXiv:2407.19168v2 [physics.bio-ph], 2024-10-01, by Kunihiko Kaneko.

8. “The Convergence of AI and Synthetic Biology: The Looming Deluge”, Papers With Code, 2024-04-29, by Cindy Vindman, Benjamin Trump, Christopher Cummings, Madison Smith, Alexander J. Titus, Ken Oye, Valentina Prado, Eyup Turmus, Igor Linkov.

9. “The Convergence of AI and Synthetic Biology: The Looming Deluge”, arXiv:2024-04.18973, by Cindy Vindman, Benjamin Trump, Christopher Cummings, Madison Smith, Alexander J. Titus, Ken Oye, Valentina Prado, Eyup Turmus, Igor Linkov.

10. “Review on Advancement of AI in Synthetic Biology” , Methods Mol Biol. 2025;2952:483-490, by Mirchandani I, Khandhediya Y, Chauhan K.

11. “Exploring Synthetic Biology: AI-Created Living Robots”, YouTube - OpenExO, 2025-04-24.

12. “The Future of Innovation: Merging Robotics and Synthetic Biology” Hatched by Media Science Tech Foundation, 2025-02-17.

13. “How the informed relations between physical, digital and biological dimensions are changing the design practice, as well as the sustainability paradigm”, Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2023-05-30; 11:1193353, by C. Rotondi.

14. “How AI is Revolutionizing Synthetic Biology” , Artificial Intelligence ~ Concepts and Tools, 2025-04-25.

15. “Evolutionary Origins of Eusociality in Insects” by Fossil Museum.

16. “Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate ‘complexity space’ “, J R Soc Interface. 2025-01, by T. Rock T, MA Wills.

17. “The evolution of eusociality”, Nature volume 466, pages 1057–1062, 2010-08-26, by Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita & Edward O. Wilson.

18. “Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate ‘complexity space’ “, Journal of thew Royal Society Interface, 29 January 2025-01-29, by Tim Rock and Matthew A. Wills.

19. “Evolution of sociality in a primitively eusocial lineage of bees”, PNAS 99 (1) 286-290, 2001-12-26, by Bryan N. Danforth.

20. “The whack-a-mole governance challenge for AI-enabled synthetic biology: literature review and emerging frameworks” by Trond Arne Undheim.

21. “Physical foundations of biological complexity”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Vol. 115 | No. 37, 2018-09-11, by Yuri I. Wolf, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, and Eugene V. Koonin.

22. “Phylogeny and evolution of eusocial insects: a comparison of origins and losses in ants and bees”, The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), 2009 Annual Meeting, by S.G. Brady, B.N. Danforth, S. Cardinal.

23. “Evolution of biological complexity”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 97 | No. 9, 2000-04-25, by Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier.

24. “The Molecular Substrates of Insect Eusociality” , Annu Rev Genet. 2024-11; 58(1):273-295, by S. Kocher and C. Kingwell.

25. “Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems”, The Institute for Research on World-Systems, Cliodynamics, Volume 3, Issue 1 2012, by Peter Richerson and Joe Henrich.

26. “Deconstructing synthetic biology across scales: a conceptual approach for training synthetic biologists”, Nature Communications volume 15, Article number: 5425, 2024-06-26, by Ashty S. Karim, Dylan M. Brown, Chloé M. Archuleta, Sharisse Grannan, Ludmilla Aristilde, Yogesh Goyal, Josh N. Leonard, Niall M. Mangan, Arthur Prindle, Gabriel J. Rocklin, Keith J. Tyo, Laurie Zoloth, Michael C. Jewett, Susanna Calkins, Neha P. Kamat, Danielle Tullman-Ercek & Julius B. Lucks.

27. “Evolutionary Transitions: how do levels of complexity emerge?”, Complexity Vol. 6/issue 1, by Francis Heylighen.

28. “The socio-cultural evolution of our species. The history and possible future of human societies and civilizations”, EMBO Rep. 2008-07-09 Suppl 1, by J. Klüver.

29. “A Model for a Biosocial Society”, Cambridge Open Engage, 2022-05-17, Version 2, by Aaron Peng Fu.

30. “The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution”, in: F. Heylighen, J. Bollen & A. Riegler (eds.) The Evolution of Complexity (Kluwer), Academy Dordrecht), p. 17-44, by Francis Heylighen.

31. “From Tribal to Global: The Evolution of Human Societies” , LinkedIn, All things creative, by Riya Bhorkar. 2024-11-20.

32. “On the Human Being and Being Human” , Chapter 5 of “Dialectical Materialism, 1983 by Progress Publishers, by A. Spirkin.

33. “The Evolution and Understanding of Hierarchical Complexity in Biology from an Algebraic Perspective”, Artif Life 2000; 6 (1): 45–67, by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and John L. Rhodes.

34. “Culture and the evolution of human cooperation”, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009-11-12; 364(1533):3281-8, by R. Boyd and P.J. Richerson.

35. “Co-evolution of physical and social sciences in synthetic biology”, Crit Rev Biotechnol. 2019-05; 39(3):351-365, by BD Trump, J Cegan, E Wells, K Poinsatte-Jones, T Rycroft, C Warner, D Martin, E Perkins, MDWood, I Linkov.

36. “Sociology of Synthetic Biology. Understanding the Social Dimensions of a Emerging Field”, AI generated Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8, 2025-06-10, by Sarah Lee.

37. “Institutions, Markets, and Networks: A Framework about the Evolution of Societies”, RAND, DRU-590-FF, 1993-12, by David Ronfeldt.

38. “Hierarchical complexity and the size limits of life” , Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, 2017-06-21, by Noel A. Heim, et all.

39. “The ecology of social transitions in human evolution” , Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, 2009-11-12, by Robert Foley and Clive Gamble.

40. “Synthetic Biology: Engineering Living Systems from Biophysical Principles”, Biophys J. 2017-03-28;112(6):1050-1058, by Bartley BA, Kim K, Medley JK, Sauro HM.

41. “The Complexity of Blending the Higher Flow with the Lower on the Spiritual Path”, Wake Up World, by Open.

42. “Atomism and holism in the understanding of society and social systems”, 2008 37(2):187-207, by D F M Strauss.

43. “Origin of Life Under Extreme Planetary Conditions” , Special seminar at the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, by Dr. Filipe Natalio.

44. “For Holism, Against Atomism. The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics”, Oxford Academic, online edn, 2003-11-01, by Philip Pettit.

45. “Nine requirements for the origin of Earth’s life: Not at the hydrothermal vent, but in a nuclear geyser system”, Geoscience Frontiers, Volume 10, Issue 4, 2019-07, Pages 1337-1357, by Shigenori Maruyama, at all.

46. “Cosmic Awareness” , Sustainability Directory, 2025-04-12.

47. “Atomist or holist? A diagnosis and vision for more productive interdisciplinary AI ethics dialogue.”, Patterns (NY). 2022-12-06; 4(1):100652, by T. Greene, A. Dhurandhar, G. Shmueli.

48. “Early Planetary Environments: Implications for Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life”, Part 3 of “The Search for Life’s Origins: Progress and Future Directions in Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1990, by the National Research Council (US) Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution.

49. “Cosmic Harmony: A Guide to Unraveling Synchronicities, Signs, and Spiritual Awakening for a Fulfilling Life”, 2023-09-08, by Sergio Rijo.

50. “Atomism versus holism in social ontology” , Understanding Society, 2023-01-06, by Daniel Little.

51. “Emergence of Life on Earth: A Physicochemical Jigsaw Puzzle”, J Mol Evol. 2017-01; 84(1):1-7, by J. Spitzer.

52. “In Pursuit of Peace: The Cosmic Nature of Our Inner and Outer Journey”, The Journal of Oriental Studies, 21, 148-163, 2011, TRANSCEND Media Service 2017-02-06, by Anthony J. Marsella.

53. “Russell’s Logical Atomism” , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Editor Edward N. Zalta, by Kevin Klement.

54. “The origin of life as a planetary phenomenon”, Sci Adv. 2020-02-05; 6(6):eaax3419, by Sasselov DD, Grotzinger JP, Sutherland JD.

55. “Sacred Naturalism and Cosmic Unity: Seeking Harmony in the Midst of Chaos”, Process Studies, 2024-11-01, 53 (2): 275–294, by Dwayne Schulz.

The Cosmic Order and the flow of Its Awareness

2025-10-14T02:00:00.004-04:00

A non-anthropomorphic, trans-conceptual principle that orders emergence without itself being a conscious agent.

This is chapter 5.2, The Cosmic Order and its flow of Awareness, extracted from Part 5 of the book “Metatolistics”.

The metaholistic framework describes reality as a ceaseless flow of transformations proceeding from the undifferentiated ground of nothingness to the differentiated multiplicity of universes.

This Section explores how this flow is guided by what we provisionally term cosmic awareness : a non-anthropomorphic, trans-conceptual principle that orders emergence without itself being a conscious agent. Words can only gesture toward this principle; they neither exhaust nor confine it. ¹

1. Beyond Anthropomorphic Metaphors

Cosmic awareness should not be confused with intention, will, or personality. In Brian Browne Walker’s paraphrase of the Dao De Jing —here adapted to our terminology— “Cosmic awareness is beyond words and beyond understanding. Words may be used to speak of it, but they cannot contain it … From this mysterious well flows everything in existence … Cosmic awareness in the world acts like streams that flow to the sea.” (Flow.pdf)
This passage underscores three points:

Ineffability : any linguistic frame is an approximation.
Inexhaustibility : engaging with awareness never depletes it.
Processual Flow : all phenomena arise within, and return to, this ordering current.

2. Polarities Within Awareness

Metaholistics models awareness as an interplay of complementary polarities rather than a static essence. Let :

A_g = global, undivided awareness permeating the whole;
A_l(t, x) = localized experiential modulation at position x and moment t.

Their interaction operator IA yields the effective ordering influence on any locale :

Φ(t, x) = I_A(A_g, A_l(t, x))

where Φ(t, x) conditions the probabilities of emergent events without imposing deterministic commands. This formulation avoids imputing motives to the cosmic order while still capturing a directional bias toward coherence and complexity.

3. Awareness Flow and the “Cosmic Bootstrap”

Universes contribute to the birth of further universes by generating exogenous energy fields that activate the differentiating potential within neighboring regions of nothingness. Formally :

where U_i and U_j are distinct universes, E_i^exog is the field emitted by U_i, and N_j is a region of undifferentiated nothingness. This cosmic bootstrap embodies a flow of awareness as a self-propagating chain of transformations, rather than a creation ex-nihilo orchestrated by a single universe :

4. Circulation of Information : Whole ↔ Local

Because every local system is simultaneously immersed in A_g and expressing A_l, information circulates bidirectionally :

Whole → Local :

The ordering tendency of A_g constrains local possibilities, biasing them toward harmonics conducive to complexity.

Local → Whole :

Each emergent configuration feeds novel patterning back into the total field, subtly re-tuning global constraints.

Mathematically, if C(t) is the configuration space of a universe at time t, its evolution satisfies :

with Ω the universe’s spatial domain. The integral term registers the cumulative influence of awareness across all locales.

5. Harmony as Evolutionary Gradient

The empirical record shows that structures persisting over cosmological timescales exhibit a high degree of internal harmony —balanced interactions among constituents that minimize destructive interference. In metaholistic terms, harmony serves as the evolutionary gradient along which awareness flow manifests :

∇CH(C) = 0 ⟹ local maximal viability

where H(C) measures harmonic coherence. Systems deviating from this gradient self-correct or disintegrate, echoing Walker’s “streams that flow to the sea” : each follows the path of least resistance determined by the topology of awareness, converging toward equilibrium.

6. Implications for Subsequent Dimensions

Because the flow of awareness intrinsically favors harmonics, that support complexity, the emergence of life, societies, and potentially synthetic dimensions can be viewed as successive refinements of Φ(t, x). Later sections, 5.3 to 5.7, examine how this guiding current shapes biological imperatives, societal logics, and the prospective rise of synthetic life, always under the caution that these developments express cosmic ordering rather than conscious cosmic design.

Key Takeaway :

Cosmic awareness is an impersonal, inexhaustible ordering principle whose flow guides the transformation of nothingness into manifold universes, steers their evolution toward harmonious complexity, and remains forever beyond the full grasp of language or human-centered metaphors.

1 See “Flow.pdf”

The origin of our universe

2025-10-09T03:33:00.003-04:00

Universes constantly originate and terminate in the cosmic background of Nothingness.

This is chapter 5.1, Nothingness and the Dynamic Origin of Universes, extracted from Part 5 of the book “Metatolistics”.

Nothingness stands as the eternal ground of existence, a paradoxical foundation that is both the absence of everything and the source of all that emerges. In the metaholistic framework, nothingness is not merely a void waiting to be filled, but rather an undifferentiated spatial arrangement that contains within itself the complementary polarities necessary for the transformation into physical reality *. This primordial state transcends the conventional understanding of emptiness as mere absence, revealing instead a dynamic substrate pregnant with potential.

* “The Concept of Nothingness”, LinkedIn, by Kingsley Erhabor. 2023-07-18.

* ”Nothingness”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta &Uri Nodelman, by Roy Sorensen.

5.1.1. The Eternal Spatial Arrangement of Undifferentiated Nothingness

The nature of nothingness, as understood within metaholistics, defies the traditional Western philosophical conception of absolute void. Unlike the Parmenidean notion, that “nothingness” cannot be thought or spoken of, or the Buddhist concept of emptiness as the absence of inherent existence *, in metaholistic nothingness possesses an eternal spatial arrangement that is neither created nor destroyed. This arrangement is a contextual by definition —it exists outside the flow of time and space as we understand them, yet it provides the fundamental substrate from which all contextual reality emerges.

The undifferentiated quality of this nothingness means that it contains no distinctions, no boundaries, and no internal structure that would give it form or character. Yet this undifferentiated state is not static inertness but rather a dynamic condition of pure potentiality. The very term “spatial arrangement” suggests that even in its undifferentiated state, nothingness possesses an organizational principle —a geometric order that underlies the capacity for transformation.

* “Buddhist concept of ‘Nothingness”, wisdomlib - the greatest source of ancient and modern knowledge - Last Updated : 2025-07-14; by Gabe Hiemstra.

5.1.2. Exogenous Energy Fields as Catalysts for Transformation

The transformation of undifferentiated nothingness into physical universes requires what can only be described as exogenous energy fields —forces that originate from outside the immediate domain of local nothingness itself. These energy fields represent a profound insight into the nature of cosmic causation : the mechanism by which the eternal and unchanging can give birth to the temporal and differentiated.

These exogenous energy fields are generated by the existence of physical universes themselves, that are creating a recursive causality —Nothingness → Physical Universes → Exogenous Energy Fields → Transformation of Local Nothingness → New Physical Universes. This represents what might be called the cosmic bootstrap principle —existing universes participates in the creation of new universes through the generation of energy fields that catalyze the transformation of nothingness into existence.

The physics of this process suggests that expanding and contracting universes create regional energy fields in the infinite sea of nothingness, which then interact with neighboring regions to generate the favorable contextual settings for new transformations.

5.1.3. The Interaction Between the Complementary Polarities of Nothingness

The heart of the metaholistic understanding lies in recognizing that even nothingness contains complementary polarities. These are not opposites in the conventional sense, but rather two complementary polarities, or aspects, of the same fundamental reality :

The non-differentiated substance of nothingness (the static aspect)
The potential for differentiating this substance (the dynamic aspect).

The mathematical representation of this polarity can be expressed as :

where N represents nothingness, Sundiff is the undifferentiated substance, and Pdiff is the differentiating potential. The interaction between these polarities under the influence of exogenous energy fields creates the conditions for polarity-induced transformation.

This process can be modeled as :

where T is the transformation, Eexog represents the exogenous energy fields, and f is the transformation function that describes how these elements interact.

5.1.4. From Undifferentiated Nothingness toPhysical Differentiation

The transformation from undifferentiated nothingness to physical differentiation is not a creation ex nihilo in the traditional sense, but rather an activation of potential that was always present within the polarity structure of nothingness itself. This process unleashes a flow of cosmic awareness —a directed emergence that guides the evolution of physical universes toward greater complexity and harmony.

The transformation can be understood as a phase transition in the fundamental substrate of reality :

This transformation is not random but follows what might be called the cosmic order’s imperative —a tendency toward the generation of complexity through the application of harmony. The flow of cosmic awareness ensures that the emergence of physical universes is guided by principles that promote coherence, integration, and the capacity for further evolution.The process exhibits characteristics similar to what physics observes in vacuum fluctuations, where “empty” space is revealed to be filled with virtual particles and quantum fields.

However, the metaholistic perspective suggests that these phenomena are local expressions of a more fundamental process —the eternal transformation of nothingness into existence through the interaction of complementary polarities under the influence of exogenous energy fields.

5.1.5. The Implications for Cosmic Evolution

This understanding of nothingness and its dynamic transformation has profound implications for our comprehension of cosmic evolution. Rather than viewing the universe as emerging from a singular BigBang event, the metaholistic framework suggests an eternal process of becoming in which nothingness continuously gives birth to the physical reality of nerw universes through the mediation of energy fields generated by existing universes. The recursive nature of this process —where universes generate the very fields that enable the transformation of nothingness into new universes— reveals the cosmic order as a self-perpetuating system of creative emergence. This perspective aligns with recent cosmological theories that suggest the universe may be part of a larger multiverse structure, while providing a philosophical and metaphysical foundation for understanding the mechanisms behind such cosmic generation.

In this view, nothingness is not the enemy of existence but its eternal partner, providing the inexhaustible source from which all physical reality emerges while maintaining its own undifferentiated essence. The dance between nothingness and existence, mediated by the flow of cosmic awareness, becomes thus the fundamental rhythm of cosmic evolution —a process that is both eternal and ever-new, both unified and endlessly creative.

5.1.6. Reference materials

”Nothing”, from Wikipedia

”Nothingness”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), by RoySorensen.

”The Concept of Nothingness”, LinkedIn, by Kingsley Erhabor.2023-07-18.

”Buddhist concept of ‘Nothingness’ “, wisdomlib - Last Updated: 14 July, 2025 - the greatest source of ancient and modern knowledge, by Gabe Hiemstra.

The “Flow.pdf”, note to Perplexity AI by laodan.

“ ‘Void’ dives into physics of nothingness. New book chronicles scientists’ evolving views on empty space”, Review of James Owen Weatherall’s “Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing (Foundational Questions in Science)”, 2016-11-22, by Emily Conover. 2016-11-13.

”Nothingness of Space Could Illuminate the Theory of Everything. Could the vacuum contain dark energy, gravity particles, and friction less gears?”, Discover Magazine, by Tim Folger. 2008-07-18.

”Physics Division Research Highlights Void that is truly empty may help solve dark energy puzzle”, Argonne NationalLaboratory, Physics Division.

”Theories of the origin of the universe”, Pro Research Analysis by open sidebar, Searched over 200M research papers.

”How empty are the voids?”, arXiv:2409.02780v1 [astro-ph.CO]04 Sep 2024-09-04, by A.N. Baushev.

”Theories about how the universe was created”, Pro ResearchAnalysis by open sidebar, Searched over 200M research papers.

”The Philosophy Of Nothing” by The Astronomy Cafe.

”The Void Phenomenon Explained”, arXiv: 0804.2475 [astro-ph], Astrophys. J.691:633-639,2009, by Jeremy L. Tinker (KICP,UChicago) and Charlie Conroy (Princeton).

”What Is Nothingness?”, YouTube - Philosophy Beyond. 2025-05-15.

”Emptiness Constrains the Universe”, Physics 9, s94, 2016-08-25, by Katherine Kornei.

”How did the universe begin —and what were its early days like?”, National Geographic, 2024-08-16, by Michael Greshko and National Geographic Staff.

”The Structure of Nothingness. A Prelude to a Theory of the Absolute”, PhilArchive, by Haikel Mubarek.

”Not so empty”, Horizon Magazine Archives, by Daniel Saraga, 2025-03-06.

”The Void (philosophy)”, from Wikipedia.

”Consciousness is Cosmic”, Science and Nonduality (SAND), by Paul Mulliner, 2018.

”Polar interactions”, by rely on plasma GmbH.

”What is the Taoist notion of nothingness or emptiness?”, reddit/taoism 2022, by Selderij.

”Cosmic Consciousness – Sages and Scientists”, Chopra Foundation, 3 YouTube videos by Nancy Abrams.

”Polarity of molecules and intermolecular forces”, Chapter of Chemistry Course, Educating online 2025, Solubility of Things.

”The Dialectics of Nothingness: A Re-examination of shen-hsiu and Hui-neng”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Vol.24 (1997),Pp 19-41, by Steven W. Laycock.

”From Self to Cosmos: The Transition of Consciousness through Symmetry Breaking”, Papers SSRN Elsevier, 2024-12-27, by Joseph Trukovich.

”Bond polarity, inter- and intramolecular interactions”, Part 4.9. of book “Cell and Molecular Biology Book: Biofundamentals (Klymkowsky & Cooper)”, Central Bookshelves LibreTextsBiology, by Michael W. Klymkowsky and Melanie M. Cooper.

”Nishida Kitarō”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), by John C. Maraldo.

”Does Consciousness Create Order, Reverse Chaos in the

Universe?”, The Epoch Times, by Tara MacIsaac. 2015-06-25.

”Deleuze Versus Hegel”, Chapter of Beth Metcalf’s “The

Univocity of Deleuze”, by Beth Metcalf.

”Cosmic Consciousness and Human Excellence: Implications

for Global Ethics”, Cambridge Scholars, 2018-08-04, Edited by

Mahmoud Masaeli and Rico Sneller.

”How do polar and nonpolar molecules interact with each

other?”, Question, Physical Properties and Intermolecular

Forces, Flexi AI Tutor.

”Hindu concept of ‘Undifferentiated existence’ “ , Wisdom

Library, by Gabe Hiemstra.

”Cosmic Consciousness -- Is Order in Chaos?”, India Times,

2005-09-16, by Dhyana Peetam.

”Polar & Non-Polar Molecules: Crash Course Chemistry #23”,

YouTube - CrashCourse, 2013-07-23.

”Typology of Nothing: Heidegger, Daoism and Buddhism”,

Comparative Philosophy Volume 1, No. 1 (2010): 78-89, by Yao

Zhihua.

”Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the

Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight

Transforms Physics”, Gestalt Review 15 June 2021; 25 (1): 143–

149, by Grace M. Burton.

”Dark energy” from Wikipedia.

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Nomenclature for Organic Chemical Transformations, Published

by De Gruyter 2016, by R. A. Y. Jones and J. F. Bunnett.

”Living in Sync with Cosmic Intelligence. Conscious awareness

isn’t somehow created by our brain”, Thrive Global, 2019-12-

03, by Paul Mulliner.

”The energy field that underlies the Universe”, LinkedIn, by

Chris McGinty, 2023-01-29.

”Chemical Transdifferentiation of Somatic Cells: Unleashing

the Power of Small Molecules”, Biomedicines. 2023-10-

27;11(11): 2913, by Zhang Y, Li X, Xing J, Zhou J, Li H.

”Knowing Cosmic Intelligence”, Thrive Global, 2019-03-26, by

Paul Mulliner.

”A Cosmic Twofer: “Early” Dark Energy Could Explain

Anomalous Galaxies and the Universe’s Disjointed Expansion

Rate”, MIT’s Kavli Foundation, 2025-02-21.

”Transdifferentiation: do transition states lie on the path of

development?”, Curr Opin Syst Biol. 2018 Oct;11:18-23, by A.

Reid, and B. Tursun.

”Scalar field dark matter” from Wikipedia.

”Phase Transitions: Melting, Boiling, and Subliming” , from

“Introductory Chemistry – 1st Canadian Edition”, Chapter 10.

Solids and Liquids, by Jessie A. Key.

”How To Align With The Energy Of The Universe: For A

Purposeful Life”, YouTube - Cosmic Connections, 2024-04-10.

”Energy from the Universe”, question to Consensus AI-powered

academic search engine.

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of Toxicology from Toxicology MSDT.

”Getting in Tune with Consciousness in the Universe”, Thrive

Global, 2019-10-23, by Paul Mulliner.

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Phys.org, 2009-09-15, by Exclusive.

”Transdifferentiation”, Encyclopedia Britanica, by Johnatan M.

W. Slack.

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Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8, by Sarah Lee. 2025-05-

27.

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lymphoid cells by the Abelson murine leukemia virus”, Dev

Immunol. 2000;8(1):1-18, by Chen EY, Swanson BJ, Clark SS.

”Energy Flow as the Fundamental Dynamic of the Universe” ,

Thesis Published by Zenodo, 2025-01-11 | Version v1, by Morten

Magnusson.

Summary of “Metaholistics”

2025-09-30T23:55:00.001-04:00

An Axiomatic Framework for a Coherent Abstract System of Holistic Logic

The book “Metaholistics” provides an extensive and detailed formalization of a novel abstract system of holistic logic developed to complement and integrate with the dominant Western atomistic logic. It elaborates complex modal-temporal logics and their semantics, axioms, operators, canonical models, and dynamic polarity and harmony processes.

Below is a comprehensive summary and explanation addressing the key insights and core components of this abstract system of holistic logic as presented in the document

1. Overview of Metaholistics

Metaholistics formalizes a complementary holistic logic to Western atomistic logic, aiming to reconcile persistent crises arising from Western Modernity’s fragmented, reductionist epistemic framework. It is built on an abstract axiomatic system that integrates the dual polarities of persistence (continuity, stability) and novelty (change, innovation), embedding these within a modal-temporal semantic framework which accounts for both cosmic directionality and local conditionality.

2. Fundamental Concepts

Nothingness as Ontological Ground: All differentiated states emerge from an undifferentiated horizon of “nothingness,” conceived as a generative plenum of potentiality.
Polarity Fields: The dynamic interplay of persistence vs. novelty fields animates emergence and transformation.
Assemblies & Arbitrage: Local assemblies filter and arbitrate possible transitions between states, enforcing harmony and governing local evolution and stability.
Harmony as Modal Constraint: Only transitions preserving or restoring systemic harmony are possible; disharmony leads to collapse or regression.
Hierarchy of Emergence: Layers of reality emerge in strict partial order: nothingness → physical → biological → societal → synthetic.
Eternal Cosmic Directionality with Local Reversibility: The overall cosmic evolution is unidirectional and irreversible, but local systems may revert or collapse conditionally.

3. Formal Axioms and Logical Structure

The system is axiomatically formalized with explicit modal-temporal logic using Kripke semantics and strong mathematical rigor:

4. Modal-Temporal Logic and Semantics

States and Worlds (W): Represent configurations embedding layered poles of persistence and novelty, context, and assemblies.
Accessibility Relations (R): Govern possible transitions filtered for harmony, context, and assemblies, encoding emergence, collapse, or local reversibility.
Temporal Operators such as Next (X), Always (G), Eventually (F) model time evolution of states.
Polarity Modalities (□p, ◇v): Express necessary persistence and possible novelty, with their cyclic oscillation fundamental to systemic evolution and stability.
Multi-Modal Extension: Distinguish cosmic (universal) and local (contingent) modalities to reflect layered realities.
Canonical Kripke Models: Built from maximally consistent sets of formulas, serving as semantic universes validating the logical system and providing completeness.

5. Dynamic Modeling of Polarity and Harmony

Polarity oscillations cycle between persistence and novelty, driving the evolutionary dynamics in physical, biological, societal, and synthetic domains.
Assemblies serve as complex adaptive systems arbitraging transformations which propagate or collapse by respecting harmony and contextual filters.
Modal-temporal operators describe polarity transition operators (PTN, NTP) capturing essential polarity shifts.
Harmonic balance is mandatory for transformative transitions, with formal rules encoding harmony maintenance and transformation necessity.
The logic includes rules and axioms ensuring polarity exclusivity, oscillation, and transformation governed by harmony and context.
Local reversibility zones and directionality gradients describe areas of reversible dynamics and preferred emergent flows, contributing to resilience and meta-stability.
Metrics for harmony propagation, disruption spread, connectivity, and propagation speed formalize the systemic health and responsiveness.

6. Applications to Societal Knowledge and Evolution

The framework models societal knowledge formation as a process balancing holistic and atomistic logics.
It accounts for historical societal archetypes, bifurcations, and transitions between paradigms.
Assemblies correspond to social institutions, decision-making bodies, and cultural clusters whose arbitration governs societal evolution.
The holistic logic aims to guide after-modernity paradigms, integrating diverse worldviews with formal rigor.
It offers a mathematical base for simulating societal collapse and transformation, capturing multidimensional crises and their convergence.
Modal-temporal polarity logic grounds the operationalization of societal transitions and governance in formal interaction models and assembly dynamics.

7. Summary

The book “Metaholistics” is a profound, mathematically rigorous development of an abstract system of holistic logic that complements atomistic logic by formalizing polarity dynamics, hierarchical emergence, harmony, assemblies, and contextual filtering within a modal-temporal logical framework. It provides a foundational epistemic and ontological system aimed at addressing the limitations of Western logic in societal knowledge formation and evolution, offering a path towards a more integrated, resilient, and holistic understanding of complex universal and societal processes.

Click on the image of the cover page to download the book

Conversations with AI’s about an “Abstract System of Holistic Logic”

2025-09-20T01:58:00.003-04:00

While writing “The societal cultural field shapes the contemporary” my mind got captured by the thought that something is definitely missing in the debate about the consequences of the convergence of the multiple crises of Late Western Modernity. The hegemonic triumph of the West has indeed imposed its “abstract system of atomistic logic” as a one way street that has debased the process of societal knowledge formation. But this fact remains unacknowledged !

Atomism has been the exclusive system of logic, of the governing establishment of Western societies, for the last 2000 plus years while it violently repressed all manifestations of holism. This literally shaped a totalitarian atmosphere as the history of so many Southern nations is attesting. The present redistribution of the geopolitical cards is realized in the atmosphere of this totalitarianism. It should thus not come as a surprise that the shift —from a Western centric world order into a new world order driven by societies whose knowledge abides by a holistic vision— causes such widespread Western resentment.

The future world order, if by chance there is ever one, will inevitably come to blame the old Western centric world order for having caused the present predicament of humanity. And China’s holistic logic will inevitably be seen as humanity’s most important asset in trying to manage the world out of its predicament. But we should always remain grounded in the reality that the degradation of the habitat of life is already very advanced which implies that there is no guarantee any longer that managing the world out of its predicament will be successful. But this should not limit the urgency, for an “abstract system of holistic logic”, to counter the hegemony of mathematics and science !

The book 4, of the metaholistic series, is an essay at formalizing the archetypal “system of abstract holistic logic” in the present context of Western atomistic hegemony. Metaholistics is the outcome of this formalization. It is intended as an open source contribution to humanity’s urgent need to counter-balance the “abstract system of atomistic logic” that is so widely known under the appellation of mathematics.

Book 1“The Interactive Continuum of the Cultural Field of Societies” and book 2 “The societal cultural field shapes the contemporary“, provide the metaphysical background, from which were derived the axioms and the concepts upon which rests the formalization of the metaholistic framework that is described in books 3 and 4. These axioms and concepts were induced by an intuitive holistic approach of societal evolution which originated in a lifelong independent research rooted in a strict application of logic. But this implies that some of these concepts are still not recognized by an academy that has no tolerance for any research dabbling outside of atomistic logic.

After terminating the first draft, of book 2, I started an in-depth conversation with 4 AI platforms about Ontology, Epistemology, metaphysics and “abstract systems of societal logic”. These platforms are Perplexity AI, Chat mistral AI, Deepseek AI and Qwen AI. These conversations are transcribed in the first part of the book 3 of the metaholistic series.

My 6th question to these AI platforms was “What is the path from a holistic axiomatic foundation to an abstract system of holistic logic”. In its response Perplexity AI proposed me to formalize my axioms into an abstract system of holistic logic. I decided to give it a try and got hooked in a full-time intellectual adventure. The 2^nd part of book 03 recounts our conversations about writing this formalization while book 04 is the mature version of the process described in Book 3.

I personally wrote book 1 and 2 while the abstract formalization, of the metaholistic framework in book 4, was rewritten 4 times by Perplexity AI following my clarifications in successive corrective notes about its foundational axioms and concepts.

Book 3 is free. Click on its cover-page to download it.

The book "metaholistics" is finally available for download.

2025-09-19T23:53:00.006-04:00

An abstract system of holistic logic is most urgently needed to ensure the further reproduction of Homo-Sapiens. Metaholistics formalizes such a holistic system of logic.

Our contemporary world does no longer disposes of a rigorous “abstract system of holistic logic”, that could stand its ground alongside mathematics, which has developed as the hegemonic “abstract system of atomistic logic” of Western-Modernity.

The process of contemporary knowledge formation, that is at the core of Western modernity, is therefore biased. It is indeed aligning with a dualist materialist technical rationality that disregards the necessity of the cosmic constraint of persistence in the universal dimensions of physics, biology, and human societies which form the bedrock of universal continuity.

In holistic logic, both the “abstract system of atomistic logic” and the “abstract system of holistic logic”, are viewed as the complementary polarities of the process of societal knowledge formation.

By aligning exclusively with dualism, materialism, and technical rationality, Western Modernity irrevocably separated from the cosmic constraint of continuity, which distorts its approach to knowledge formation, thus engaging societies on paths that are incompatible with the cosmic order.

This explains why the younger generations are now inheriting a predicament that will force them to address the societal contradictions with the cosmic order : abject record historical levels of social inequality, Western societal atomization, and the incapacitation of the world order to address the degradation of the habitat of life by the numerous side effects of Western-Modernity.

Today’s abrupt acceleration, of the habitat’s degradation by the great convergence of these multiple crises, was caused by our species’ reliance, on the sole “abstract system of atomistic logic”.

The culprit of our present predicament is thus the materialist technical rationality of the atomistic logic of Western Modernity, and science, which acts as its instrument of preference. But we should remain clear-headed, for it was the rationality of Western-Modernity, that forced this path onto science.

A brief detour through history shows us that the emergence of the archetypal model of power societies in the Tri-Continental-Area initiated a separation between the men of force and the men of knowledge, who were in charge of governance, and the rest of their societies. The cultural evolution of Western societies, during the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, exacerbated this separation, while the Enlightenment completed it.

Rupture and separation with the cosmic order fertilized the ground in which the knowledge paradigm of Modernity emerged. And it rapidly imposed its dualist materialist technical rationality to the whole world.

The centuries long hegemony of this technical rationality concludes today with a predicament for humanity that takes the form of an abrupt degradation of the habitat of life on earth !

To preserve the future, for the younger generations, we most urgently need an “abstract system of holistic logic” to act as the complementary polarity of mathematics and science. Their confrontation is bound to force a reconciliation of human thought and actions with the constraints imposed by the cosmic order. This incontrovertible observation originated the imperative of writing “Metaholistics”.

Metaholistics is an “abstract system of holistic logic” that confronts the atomistic logic embodied in mathematical and scientific rationality. This confrontation is bound to lead to their reconciliation into a form of knowledge that is compatible with the cosmic order.

Here are the key points and summaries of its content that are relevant to understanding its framework and its rigorous formalization.

1. Overview and Philosophical Foundations

Western modernity is dominated by an atomistic logic that focuses on the microcosm (fundamental particles, reductionism, dualism) and generates multiple crises like social atomization, societal atomization, the degradation of the habitat, and epistemic fragmentation.

In contrast East Asian civilizations embody a holistic logic that focuses on the macrocosm —emphasis on complementary polarities, continuity, harmony, and context— and provides a model of societal cohesion and adaptive governance.

Metaholistics aims to reconcile and synthesize their “complementary abstract systems of logic” — atomistic and holistic— into a new epistemic framework for societal knowledge formation that is both rigorous and practically oriented toward complexity, context, and planetary sustainability.

2. Core Axiomatic foundation

Metaholistics is rooted in explicit foundational axioms that are formalized within a custom modal-temporal logic with Kripke semantics. Its key axioms include :

Emergence from Nothingness : All differentiated states emerge from an underlying undifferentiated potentiality ("nothingness").
Local Reversibility and Cosmic Irreversibility : Local systems may revert or collapse, but cosmic evolution is unidirectional and irreversible.
Harmony as Modal Constraint : Only transitions preserving or restoring harmony (balanced polarity) are sustainable.
Layered Hierarchical Emergence : Reality unfolds in layers (nothingness, physical, biological, societal, synthetic) with strict adjacency.
Assembly Arbitrage : Assemblies (complex adaptive collectives) arbitrate which transitions persist, filtering permissible transformations in context.
Polarity Duality : The tension and cyclic interplay between persistence and novelty drive evolution.
Contextual workability or permission : Transformations only occur in favorable local and cosmic contexts.
Interconnectedness : System states are richly connected; local changes propagate through assemblies and networks.

3. Formal Logical and Semantic Framework

Metaholistics adopts a richly structured modal-temporal logic with predicates for polarity, harmony, context, assemblies, and temporal operators (next, eventually, always).

Canonical Kripke models are constructed with maximally consistent sets of formulas as worlds, providing soundness and completeness via a Truth Lemma linking syntax and semantics.

The framework extends to multi-modal logics distinguishing cosmic and local modalities, hybrid logics with nominals for explicit state referencing, and dynamic filtering mechanisms.

The semantic architecture models states as structured polarity fields in space/time, with accessibility relations encoding permitted transitions respecting harmony and polarity constraints.

4. Dynamics of Polarity and Harmony

Polarity dynamics formalize the oscillatory interplay between persistence (stability) and novelty (change), modeled mathematically by coupled nonlinear differential equations or modal operators.

Assemblies act as local arbitrage agents filtering system transformations to maintain systemic harmony and guide evolution.

The framework characterizes emergence, collapse, stability, resilience, and meta-stability in adaptive systems through formal axioms and dynamic models.

Hierarchical clustering of assembly networks and adaptive filtering explain how local and global systemic coherence emerge and persist.

5. Applications and Future Directions

The metaholistic framework offers tools for modeling complex adaptive systems across physical, biological, societal, and synthetic dimensions.

It provides a foundational logic for automated proof systems, model checking, formal verification, knowledge representation, and dynamic system modeling.

The framework encourages open collaboration for further formal development, computational tool support, and application to emerging scientific and societal challenges.

This summary highlights the major components and the rigor of the metaholistic framework as presented in the book. This book offers a rich, rigorous formal logic system designed to bridge foundational worldviews, integrate complementary logics, and provide practical instruments for understanding and guiding complex evolution in knowledge and society.

The book is free. Click on its cover-page to download it.

The path forward to an abstract system of holistic logic

2025-04-24T21:12:00.004-04:00

From a purely logical perspective holism/atomism are the complementary polarities, that animate the spectrum of humanity’s epistemology, about the evolution of the cosmic order. Holism is a “local knowledge perspective” gained from a focus on the whole while atomism is a “local knowledge perspective” gained from a focus on the fundamental particles.

The emergence, of power societies about 5,000 years ago, started to oppose these “local knowledge perspectives” and the shift, of the “economy-world of Western-Modernity” from the realm of the Western civilization to the realm of the Chinese civilization, is acting as a reagent that suddenly exacerbates this opposition. In this context the urgency, of converting this opposition into complementary interactions, can not be overstated because the end of this opposition is a nuclear mushroom that annihilates life on earth !

The focus of animism, on the working of the whole, has always recognized that local thinking, behaviors, and actions have to be constantly adapted to the physical and biological dimensions of the universe which themselves are constantly adapting to the cosmic order. Animism focuses indeed on holism to satisfy its knowledge paradigm which reads as “the belief in pragmatism in daily life, to alleviate the anxiety and suffering of the individuals, while easing the long haul reproduction of their societies”.

The knowledge paradigm of Modernity reads as “the belief in the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money, or debt, in a dynamic process of capital accumulation” and to my dismay the process of capital accumulation focuses solely on the fundamental particles thus reifying the perception of reality in fixed certainties which completely ignores that fundamental particles are derivations from the working of the cosmic order.

In my holist understanding atomism focuses on the interactions, between fundamental particles, that generate the energy powering the assembly of “normal matter” (Standard Model of particle physics). But CERN remarks that this does not explain “dark matter” which “...seems to outweigh visible matter roughly six to one, making up about 27% of the universe. Here's a sobering fact: The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe ! “. And CERN concludes that “… although the Standard Model accurately describes the phenomena within its domain, it is still incomplete. Perhaps it is only a part of a bigger picture that includes new physics hidden deep in the subatomic world or in the dark recesses of the universe”. (see "The Standard Model. The Standard Model explains how the basic building blocks, of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces", CERN. and "Dark matter. Invisible dark matter makes up most of the universe – but we can only detect it from its gravitational effects", CERN.)

It is my conviction that the bigger picture points to the need to reconcile atomism within the framework of a more realistic metaphysics ? From a purely logical perspective holism and atomism are the polarities of knowledge. So their interactions have the potential to generate a far more realist metaphysic about the evolution of the cosmic order than anything humanity has attained to this day.

The whole is actively enfolding the direction, of its evolution, and holism is the way to comprehend this. In contrast atomism is the way of comprehending the active direction, of the evolution of the cosmic order, as it materializes in the physical dimension of the local elementary particles of our universe. I’m firmly convinced that the confrontation, of these 2 relative epistemologies, has the potential to shift our comprehension of the nature of the cosmic order to a new level that integrates the present condition, of the local elementary particles, within the framework of the animation of the whole.

As the "logical abstraction epiphany of atomism" mathematics has been the lingua franca, of the success of the dualist materialist technical rationality of Western-Modernity, over the last 3 centuries. But its guidance, of our species in the throat of a predicament of mass extinction, is questioning its validity. To convince minds, that have been indoctrinated by the success of consumerism, will nevertheless demand more than philosophical discourses. Ultimately mathematics will have to be confronted to the coherent holistic “abstract system of logic” of animism that still does not exist !

We have to be realistic.

Mathematics has developed into a highly coherent “abstract system of logic”, over the last centuries, while Western-Modernity was pushing animism to the margins of modern societies all over the world.

To stand its ground, against the mathematics of atomism, holism urgently needs to develop a coherent abstract holistic system of logic.

But what does a coherent abstract system of logic imply ? Mathematics offers a template and Dharmen-dra Kumar Yadav’s “exact definition, of mathematics = the study of axioms, their properties and applications” ¹, offers a model of such a coherent abstract system of logic.

It is a set, or an ensemble, that contains multiples branches of study. The study, about these branches, starts by positing assumptions (axioms) that help us decide whether a given statement is true or false. The study then focuses on defining the properties of these axioms and lastly it focuses on the application of these properties to solve our existential questions.

Axioms are self-evident principles. If these principles are overturned by reality they are abandoned. In a coherent holistic abstract system, of logic, axioms should, I think, try to address the following subject matters (first draft) :

Contextual settings :
1. Origin = “Nothingness”
  Our universe originated in the “nothingness, of the undifferentiated state, of the cosmic order”.
2. Interconnectedness = All elements and entities in the cosmic order are interrelated.
3. Transformation = “Yin-Yang”
  Nothingness and all elements and entities, in the cosmic order, are animated by the interactions between their complementary polarities.
4. Direction = ”the Dao”
  The whole precedes the shaping, of its parts, and it imparts thus a certain direction to the evolution of the cosmic order.
The evolution of the universe :
1. The universe emerges in its original physicality.
2. The physical evolution of the universe eventually unfolds the planetary conditions for the biological emergence of life.
3. Biological evolution eventually creates the conditions for the emergence of knowledge and culture that eventually accelerates the evolution of societies :
  1. Knowledge paradigms
    Knowledge paradigms are the foundations of a given ontological evolution of societies
  2. Foundational worldviews
    The members, of the societal group subscribing to a given knowledge paradigm, are developing a narrative to answer their existential questions. This quietens their anxieties and instills trust among them. The trust among the members of a societal group boosts its cohesion which eases its reproduction as well as that of the species. This is how species are affirming their persistence.
  3. Societal paradigms
    While developing a narrative, to answer their existential questions, the individuals eventually agree on the finality, of their societal organization.
  4. Archetypal models of societal organization
    Societal paradigms eventually materialize in an archetypal model of societal organization that is best adapted to the contextual settings of the group.
  5. Societal systems of logic
    Over time the societies sharing a given archetypal model, of societal organization, acquire a system of logic that molds the thinking, behaviors, and actions of their individuals.
  6. The interactive field of societal culture
    The system of logic that molds the thinking, behaviors and actions of the individuals, is reproduced over the long distance of time forming thus an interactive field of culture that shapes the internal evolution of the societal sharing a common archetypal model of society.
  7. Destabilization of the societal field of culture → evolution from one archetypal model of societal organization to another
    When the field of societal culture is destabilized the individuals experiment new forms of societal organization that are better adapted to the changing contextual settings. In the process the contextual settings force them, — or to adapt a new knowledge paradigm — or to keep their existing knowledge paradigm and foundational worldview and to adopt a new societal paradigm, that reproduces a new model of archetypal societal organization.
The local adaptation of entities

Entities living, in the local habitat of a planet, have to adapt to the changes occurring in their local conditions. The biological constitution, of the individuals, orders the actions of their bodies but at a certain threshold of biological evolution knowledge and culture emerge that rapidly dominate the evolution of the individuals and their societies.

The ancient animist sages developed a set of strategic principles to alleviate the suffering of the individuals while ensuring the persistence of their societies and of their species. I call this set “the First Principles of Life”. These 8 principles are rooted in the axioms of “interconnectedness”, of “transformation”, of “direction”, and …

Fifth question to AI's : What are your suggestions about the path forward to build a coherent abstract system of holistic logic ?

1 "Exact Definition of Mathematics", International Research Journal of Mathematics, Engineering and IT. Vol. 4, Issue 1, January 2017, by Dharmendra Kumar Yadav.

Atomism vs holism. Question 4

2025-04-11T21:34:00.003-04:00

Would a coherent logical abstraction, of traditional holism, contain the potential to stand its ground against the mathematics of atomism ?

I’m presently writing a 3rd book for the Volume 1 of the collection titled “The Transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”. It is a conversation with 4 AI’s about the two approaches of metaphysics that have formed human historical worldviews. Holism is a “local knowledge perspective” gained from a focus on the whole while atomism is a “local knowledge perspective” gained from a focus on the fundamental particles.

Here follows question 4, of the 6 questions, I asked Perplexity, Le Chat Mistral, Deepseek and Qwen.

The most glaring necessity of our time is unquestionably that the cosmos is indifferent to the stories of Homo-Sapiens and that it will persist with or without us. So if our species wants to survive it will have to realign with the rhythms of the cosmic order, as well as with the physical and biological dimensions of our universe. If we are not able to do this our self-imposed exile, from the web of life, will be made irreversible and our dream of AI will evaporate !

Our best answer to the necessity of our time, would be to integrate Western innovation, with Chinese animist wisdom, in order to heal the damages caused by Western-Modernity's separation from the rhythms of the Cosmic Order and the physical and biological dimensions of our universe.

But this is a lofty target.

The application of this target is indeed mired in the context of the civilizational fragmentation of Homo-Sapiens along the lines of "pragmatism and intuition, in China, to alleviate the suffering of the individuals" versus "technical rationality and empiricism to vanquish nature in the West" as well as among a growing portion of the younger Chinese generations that have converted over the last 3 decades to the dualist materialist technical rationality of Western-modernity.

But "pragmatism and intuition", versus "technical rationality and empiricism", are two otherworldly "systems of societal logic" that separate the thinking, behavior, and actions of Chinese and Westerners. And this separation causes mutual incomprehension which, in times of economic difficulties, easily transforms into open hostility as is occurring presently.

But how did we come to such a state of affairs ?

The "technical rationality and empiricism" of Modernity transformed into science which is financed by the biggest capital holders, or by the technocracy, that is at their service, at the head of private and public institutions. Capital, and its servant technocrats, are financing science, in exchange of technical knowings, to ensure a steady flow of returns on their investments. This is how science came to dominate the formation of knowledge over the last 3 centuries. In this process the traditional animist process of knowledge formation was completely eliminated from Western-Modernity which thus separated from the rhythms of the Cosmic Order and the physical and biological dimensions of our universe with the consequences that we start to observe today.

To get a realist chance to reconcile the traditional system of societal logic of the Chinese, with the technical rationality and empiricism of Western-Modernity, I think that its animist logic has to be translated into the frame of a Modern understanding.

Mathematics is the logical abstraction epiphany, of atomism, and it is at this title that it serves so well the technical rationality and empiricism of Western-Modernity. Just like traditional animism mathematics rests on its axiomatic foundation. But unlike mathematics traditional animism has not elaborated an all encompassing system of logic from its axioms.

Holism and atomism are the extreme ends of the epistemological spectrum addressing the evolution of the cosmic order. The whole enfolded the direction of the evolution of the cosmic order and holism is its epistemology. In contrast atomism is the epistemology, of the materialization in the present, of this evolution in the condition of the elementary particles. This implies that the present condition of the elementary particles is given by the animation of the cosmic order. In other words the present condition of the elementary particles is a derivative of the whole ! And in light, of this, atomism is a derivative of holism but atomism nevertheless wants us to believe that the elementary particles have agency for operating reality ! But it is these shortcomings that caused the present predicament of life of earth !

In light of this, I'm convinced, that a coherent presentation, of a logical abstraction of traditional holism, has the potential to stand its ground against the mathematics of atomism.

Do you agree that the presentation, of the logical abstraction of traditional holism, has the potential to stand its ground against the mathematics of atomism ?

First Edition of "The Societal Cultural Field Shapes the Contemporary"

2025-03-30T20:51:00.006-04:00

I just uploaded the First Edition of Book 02 "The Societal Cultural Field Shapes the Contemporary", of the Volume 01 of my series about "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity".

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It is now available on my website for download.

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Revision 01 of "Concepts and Synthesis".

2025-03-28T03:22:00.004-04:00

I just uploaded the revision 01 of the Volume 00 "Concepts and synthesis", of my series about "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity".

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It is now available on my website for download.

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Laodan on Substack

2025-03-24T09:08:00.002-04:00

I added a substack account.

Please subscribe (free).

laodan

Revision 01 of "The Interactive Continuum of the Societal Cultural Field"

2025-03-24T07:49:00.002-04:00

I just uploaded the revision 01 of "The Interactive Continuum of the Societal Cultural Field", the book 01 of the Volume 1 of my series about "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity".

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It is now available on my website for download.

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This Book 01 is about the theory of "societal evolution":

-- Societal knowledge formation

-- Knowledge paradigms and foundational societal worldviews

-- Societal systems of logic

-- The archetypal model of power societies and its spread in the realm of civilizations

-- The knowledge paradigm of Modernity

-- The dualist, and materialist technical rationality, of Western-Modernity

-- The shift of the "economy-world of Western-Modernity" outside the realm of the Western civilization

-- The great Convergence of the side effects of Western-Modernity

-- The predicament of Late-Western-Modernity

Laodan

Inevitable civilizational clash in the 21st century (02)

2024-07-11T15:00:01.010-04:00

The convergence, of the societal dis-function of Western societies with the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is confronting humanity with a predicament !

Before terminating the revision of "The interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies", I decided to share the first draft of the 3 chapters of its conclusion :

1. Summary of the revised Volume 1.

2. The convergence, of the societal dis-function of Western societies with the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is confronting humanity with a predicament ! (Today's post)

3. How to escape the predicament of Late-Western-Modernity ?

Being shadow-banned I have to ask, if you happen to find this content of interest, to please share it with your friends.

Thanks. laodan.

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I want to show in this Part 6 how the convergence, of the dysfunction of the governance-world in this Late-Western-Modernity with the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is confronting humanity with a predicament of mass-extinction. The sole path out of this predicament is through comprehension of the interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies. My ultimate hope, in this Volume 1, is to share an intelligible map of this path.

The cultural field of societies is animated by a dual process of synchronization : — the perception of the individuals, about their present contextual settings, synchronizes with the historical worldview of their societies, thus generating their daily-culture — the historical worldview of society, that is shared by the individuals, synchronizes with the memes, that replicate in their daily-culture, thus generating the evolution of the historical worldview of their societies.

This dual path of synchronization operates outside of the individuals’ consciousness which explains the ubiquitous confusion about the meaning of concepts like culture, worldview, civilizations, society, and knowledge.

The fact is that in our present Late-Western-Modernity the societies of the West have lost their historical worldviews and their dual path of synchronization was thus abruptly interrupted which played a determinant role in their atomization, The gradual atomization of Western societies imperceptibly destroyed their national unity which resulted in their incapability to undertake successfully any large scale national project like fighting a virus for example, or helping their citizens to navigate the aftermath of a national catastrophe, or winning wars for that matter !

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2. The convergence of the societal dysfunction of Western societies + the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity ⇒ predicament of humanity !

Multiple factors have gradually shifted Western societies in their present dysfunction. The different Volumes of this series are delving deep in these factors. I will thus not focus here on their emergence and their development. Let us simply observe that the dysfunction of their societies forces Western governance to adopt ever more totalitarian political responses that take the form of : — political correctness — the transformation of the media in the propaganda machine of the state — the militarization of police services — and most importantly the capture of elected political elites, by the administrative departments of state institutions, which are headed by highly skilled individuals who have been formed in the best universities of the world and, as such, are participating socially in “the Transnational Technocracy and the Capitalist Class” with their peers in Trans-National Corporations and in international organizations,

The transnational capitalist class is the characteristic institutional form of political transnational practices in the global capitalist system. Leslie Sklair analytically divided it into four main factions (1) :

Those who own the major transnational corporations (TNCs), and their local affiliates, have the ultimate power and with their servants, the managers of these corporations, they form the corporate faction ;

Globalizing politicians and bureaucrats (political faction);

Globalizing professionals (technical faction);

Merchants and media (consumerist faction).

Taken together, these groups constitute a global power-elite, or a world ruling class, in the sense that was traditionally used to characterize the class structures in nation-states. This implies that national state institutions have been taken over by a worldwide power whose ambition is to force the technical rationality of Western-Modernity to the states of all nations on earth and to their citizens. Leslie Sklair's appellation “the Transnational Technocracy and the Capitalist Class” addresses the sociological dimension of the imposition by this world ruling class of the technical rationality of Western-Modernity. But this does not address who are the men of power commanding its servants in the technocracy.

The 4 categories, mentioned by Leslie Sklair, are the servants of those who own and control the major “transnational corporations (TNCs) and their local affiliates (corporate faction)”. They are the Western big capital holders who command an army of technically skilled individuals serving, among other, as the managers of TNC's and the heads of the administrative departments of state institutions who, at this title, are capturing the political elites who have been designated through popular voting or through other means. This political faction is presently engineering the totalitarian responses, of Western nation-states, and these responses are being implemented by their designated political elites. But these totalitarian responses inevitably clash with the highly educated civil societies of the West who oppose what they perceive to have become a non-democratic and non-rational decision-making process.

But opposition comes not only from Western highly educated civil societies. The political elites of Non-Western-Countries are also resisting this Western dominated new world-order. The rallying, of the global South around China Russia and India, indicates that “the Transnational Technocracy and the Capitalist Class” did not succeed to impose the technical rationality of Western-Modernity to the whole world.

But what is this technical rationality of Western-Modernity ?

The knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity emerged in the 12th century in the minds of Frankish long distance merchants. This knowledge paradigm reads as follows "the belief in the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation". Over the centuries this paradigm gradually transformed the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the time, in a technical rationality that serves its outcome which is to grow the profits of the biggest capital holders so as to grow their accumulation of capital.

The Enlightenment consecrated philosophic rationalism and science, as the official instruments of the technical rationality of Modernity. It was the moment when the Zeitgeist focused the conception of national power on mercantilism in order to maximize the accumulation of capital by the national long distance merchants who were effectively the biggest holders of sterile money at the time. The aristocracy and the clergy came to the conclusion that the transformation, of the long distance merchants’ sterile money into capital, would achieve the success of the state and by the same token their own success.

The technical rationality, of “the reason” that is activate in the paradigm of Modernity, was dispersing slowly during the Early-Modernity of commercial capitalism, in the fields of commerce, banking, and among the intellectuals. The Enlightenment widely expanded its diffusion among the wealthy citizens who ultimately implemented the social and economic systems derived from the knowledge paradigm of Modernity.

In the wake of the silent revolution of the 1970’s, the technical rationality of Modernity got massively amplified with the assistance of the ideologies, of Neo-liberalism and postmodernism. But their ultimate failure transformed into the present totalitarian impulses, of state institutions, as has been put in evidence during the botched public responses to Covid-19 when everyone witnessed the departure of societies from the prescriptions of the technical rationality of Western-Modernity. Scientific publications now start to acknowledge as much by publishing papers about the affliction of Western citizens by the ravages, of so-called “mRNA vaccines”, that had been forced on them by too eager public decision-makers !

As a result the trust of the citizens in their institutions has vanished !

The complete loss of trust, by Western citizens in their institutions, has generated 2 forms of institutional adaptation :

The adaptation, of the operators, in the decision-making process of Western societal institutions.
Decision-making, by elected officials, is decisively turning into decision-making, by the technocracy of the states’ permanent administrations. Such a shift had been experimented for decades in the transnational institutions of the EU where decision-makers are non-elected officials who are designated by the council of chiefs of states. All in all we observe that public decision-making is turning into the hands of non-elected officials who are heading non-transparent institutions.

The adaptation, of the implementation, of the decisions taken by Western societal institutions.
The implementation of decisions in the spirit of the social-contract, that had been popularized by Enlightened philosophers like : — Thomas Hobbes — John Locke — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — and other, is now being turned over to the largely faceless administrative units of the state that recourse to penalties and ultimately to the brute force of a militarized police to squelch any velleity of disobedience
The political theories of the Enlightenment, that were in application over the last 2 centuries, justified political power and authority by arguing that it was in the individuals’ self-interest and so their rational consent demanded power and authority. The West has been arguing over and over, that individual self-interest and rational choice had terminated the barbaric state of nature, by replacing it with the technical rationality of societal governance by the people. In light of this how should we label today’s totalitarian enforcement, of the technical rationality of Western-Modernity by a non-representative technocracy ?

2.1. Dysfunction of Western societies

The Enlightenment consecrated the primacy of philosophic rationalism and of science which was the favored instrument of the capital holders. These instruments emerged from the spread of “the reason”, that is at work in the knowledge paradigm of Modernity, to the universities and to the burghers. Both the burghers, and the academics, extended “the reason” to everything there is under the sun and in the process they applied the scientific method to tinker solutions in order to produce imports substitutes that would satisfy the wish, of the 3 social and political estates, to escape the constant drainage of the national reserves of gold and silver.

From the get go the scientific method was thus the favored instrument of capital holders to increase their returns on investments. And so was organized the capture of the scientific method through the systematic financing of scientific research by the capital holders and their public and private servants. This conclusion is inescapable. Had capital holders and their servants not found a manifest interest in funding scientific research in universities there would have been no science to speak of today.

The readiness of funds and the demands, of capital holders for ever more specialized answers, confined scientists in the wells of their scientific departments from where they have been digging ever more specialized tunnels. But in this process science completely lost sight of “the Physical Order of the Universe” and of “the First Principles of Life” and it separated thus from the traditional animist notion of “knowledge pragmatism” that focused on : — the alleviation of individual suffering — the reproduction of societies over the long haul of many generations.

There is no doubt that science became ever more apt at discovering knowings, about the working of bits and pieces of reality in the here and now, that sustain an ever wider range of material productions. And it was the myriad of products on offer, in the market, that ultimately forged the incontestable popular success of Western-Modernity. But the fact is that this success came at the cost of accumulating multiple side-effects that caused an abrupt and accelerating mass-extinction of life on earth !

“The end-Permian extinction, the ‘mother of mass extinctions’ in the seas, was more of a faunal turnover than a mass extinction for insects. Insects’ current biotic crisis has been measured in terms of the loss of abundance and biomass (rather than the loss of species, genera, or families) and these are essentially impossible to measure in the fossil record. However, should the ongoing loss of insect abundance and biomass cause the demise of many insect families, the current extinction event may well be the first sudden loss of higher-level insect diversity in our planet’s history. This is not insects’ sixth mass extinction—in fact, it may become their first.” (2)

The convergence, of the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is causing the extinction of insects and the extinction of insects offers a powerful case-study confirming that a great-convergence is well taking place between the numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity and the destabilization of the governance-world :

The convergence, of multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, accelerates and amplifies their effects.

“ Here, we present a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe, and systematically assess the underlying drivers. Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades.

… The main drivers of species’ declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change.

… There is compelling evidence that agricultural intensification is the main driver of population declines in unrelated taxa such as birds, insectivorous mammals and insects. In rural landscapes across the globe, the steady removal of natural habitat elements (e.g. hedgerows), elimination of natural drainage systems and other landscape features together with the recurrent use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides negatively affect overall biodiversity (Fuller et al., 1995; Newton, 2004; Tilman et al., 2001). Recent analyses point to the extensive usage of pesticides as primary factor responsible for the decline of birds in grasslands (Mineau and Whiteside, 2013) and aquatic organisms in streams (Beketov et al., 2013), with other factors contributing to or amplifying their effects to varying extent.“ (3)

The paralysis of the governance-world.

“The past 30 years of international politics have produced at least 32 reports, reviews and treaties looking to implement biodiversity targets (Buchanan et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2021). Frustratingly, it is neither novel nor surprising to state that none of these efforts has actually resulted in reverse biodiversity loss trends or meaningful change in how we are exploiting the planet.

Intergovernmental institutions like the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) (2005) and the 2020 Aichi Targets have documented insect biodiversity decline, for decades (Forister et al., 2019). ... the combined efforts to respond to these declines has equivocated to “a lot of blah, blah, blah” but no effective response. There are strong economic arguments for an increased recognition that the natural world is both at risk and irreplaceable.” (4)

The “comprehensive review of 73 historical reports”, by Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris A.G. Wyckhuys, concludes that multiple factors are at work that reinforce each other : — the conversion to industrial agriculture and urbanization caused an immense loss of habitat while accelerating the erosion of the top soils that contain the nutrients sustaining the flora and the fauna — the pollution by synthetic pesticides and fertilizers poisoned the earth, the water and the air — biological factors like pathogens and the introduction of new species destabilized the normal interactions of local species with their habitat — and climate change amplifies the impact of these causes.

But as Philip Donkersley writes, while the systems of societal governance recognize, that “the natural world is both at risk and irreplaceable” their “combined efforts to respond to these declines has equivocated to ‘a lot of blah, blah, blah’ ”. So while acknowledging, that the natural world is irreplaceable, the governance-world can’t implement any effective response to the problem !

2.1.1. Western citizens lost trust in the governance of their societies

Trust is the corner-stone that has traditionally sustained the reproduction of the institutions of power-societies over the generations. Today’s vanishing of trust, among the citizens, brings us back to the millennia, that preceded the emergence of power-societies in the TCA about 5,000 years ago, when the men of power were systematically unable to reproduce their institutions ! Let’s remember that it was the cooperation of the men of power, with men of knowledge having a large following, that finally fostered the reproduction of their institutions. In other words the sharing, of a common worldview by the citizens, is what ensured the rise of cities, kingdoms, and empires that eventually expanded their system of societal logic in civilizations spreading to the territory of multiple nations.

"The world’s first God-Emperor, who was not only the powerful ruler of the world’s first empire, but also the very first to be worshiped as a great god in the official state religion during his own lifetime, was the great Akkadian Emperor, Naram-Sin. He was a mighty warrior and conqueror, who ruled over the ends of the known world. His unequaled and mighty deeds were not only recorded on steles erected throughout the empire, but these deeds were also recounted in epic songs performed by court bards.

… Naram-Sin reigned during the latter part of the 3rd millennium BC in ancient Mesopotamia. After his massive victory during the Great Revolt that took place early in his reign, he was officially honored as one of the great gods of Sumer and Akkad, a great god who became manifest in the person of Naram-Sin. (5)

In Late-Western-Modernity Neoliberalism pushed hyper-consumerism while Postmodernism pushed the termination of grand narratives. As a result within a short few decades Western societies had abandoned their societal worldviews and the individuals' meaning of life had been reduced to consuming until obesity. The poverty of the mind resulting from such a program ended with rampant anxiety. The absence of any available answers to peoples' existential questions separated the people from one another and their anxiety turned into loneliness and distrust of societal authorities.

Today’s complete loss of trust, by Western citizens in their societal systems of governance and in their fellow-citizens, is by no means a small matter. It happens in a context of hyper-inequality, of societal atomization, and of the inability of Western nation-states to successfully undertake any large scale national projects like fighting a virus for example, or helping the citizens recover from a natural catastrophe, or winning a 3rd World-War for that matter !

In this context nobody agrees to answer the call of distrusted decision-makers. Only individuals, who have been excluded for years from a decent income, have nothing to lose and could thus eventually think of taking on a soldering job. But these individuals are generally unfit for the job as was demonstrated in a recent study by the Pentagon :

“...77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, using drugs or having mental and physical health problems”. (6)

The fittest, in all societies, come from the top richest 10-20% of the population. Their minds received the best education while their bodies were given the best nutrition. But the probability that they would enlist, in the present Western context of distrust to fight for their nation, is near zero.

The 77% who, the military says, are unfit come from the poorest, at the bottom of the social ladder, who represent 50 to 70% of the population.

It should not come as a surprise that, in light, of the desecration of the social contract by rampant distrust, the highest Western military leaders are opposing major conflicts with peer competitors. In the present economic and social context, of their nations, their simulations give America as the looser of any big conflict. Their opposition to lead their soldiering kids, to an inevitable butchery, is commendable but this begs the question if they will have the wherewithal to resist the eschatological drive of their political decision-makers to unleash barbarity to try to keep their power ?

The fact is that Western big capital holders, and their technical servants, are the real decision-makers and they view the rise of China and the turning of the public opinions in most countries on earth, from TINA to TIDAA, as an existential threat to their further accumulation of capital. The other obvious fact is that the axioms of their civilization, and their societal worldview, are formatting their minds to view “the otherness” of “the other” as an existential threat. Both these facts explain why having a reasoned conversation, with the technocracy that manages Western-Modernity, has become a loss of time.

But, as our recent history has amply demonstrated, while they have the power to decide the ultimate path of their nation, they can’t change its Zeitgeist, which explains why all their initiatives against their adversaries are always ending in disaster.

2.1.2. From hyper-inequality to societal atomization

I have always appreciated the intellectual depth of the writings of Karl Marx. But while I started to write this series it appeared ever more evident in my mind that Marx’s thinking was a pure product of Western-Modernity. And as such it was logical that his Judaeo-Christian revolutionary morality would have rooted for the defense of the down-trotted.

Marx focused thus on the dualism of Western-Modernity that is at work in the social relations between : — the capital holders on one side — and their slaves on the other side. In the context of mid 19th century the slaves were primarily blue color workers so Marx’s projected his radicalism on the proletariat who was essentially composed of blue collar factory workers..

Being an acute observer of the reality of his time we can be sure that, if Marx had been living until today, he would have adapted his definition to the changing economic context.

The biggest owners of the capital, of Trans-National Corporations and of their national affiliates, form the capitalist class while the proletariat includes all those who receive a salary, or a remuneration, in exchange for their labor which is the case of both blue and white collar workers as well as independent workers. But Marx would not have gone as far as adding the mass of scientists to the proletariat.

Growing up in the first part of the 19th century, when science got separated in specialized departments, he lost touch with the traditional approach that knowledge is rooted in “the physical order of the universe” and “the First Principles of Life”. This traditional approach of knowledge studied humanity in its physical whole and in the continuum of its societal cultural field. Following this approach the study, of the working of societies in the 19th century, would have searched to comprehend how “the belief in the reason, that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a process of capital accumulation”, emerged in the first place and how it evolved into the normality of a totalitarian technical rationality.

In contrast the specialization of science, in the wake of the Enlightenment, positioned humanity in the context of the day that had gotten separated from the order of the universe and from the evolution of society.

Comprehending humanity’s condition, in the optics of science, was thus best derived from the separation of its parts. This is what Marx and the other classical economists did. But their focus, on the social and economic aspects of humanity's condition, hid the big picture of Western-Modernity in their minds. Marx concentrated thus his attention on the dualism of capital holders (owners) versus workers (slaves). These dual opposites animated his deconstruction and this is how his views shifted away from the traditional system of knowledge formation that focused on the paradigm of the system and its logic of development. Stuck in Western-Modernity Marx failed to comprehend that it was the 2nd development phase of power-societies and without knowing it he subscribed to the technical rationality that emerged from its knowledge paradigm.

Sociologists and politologists who study the distribution, of our present world’s wealth, are following in the path of Marx' failure and they are focusing on the dualism 'power versus people' without understanding what is the paradigm of the system and the ontology of its logic of development.

Sociological studies of the distribution of the world's wealth fail to measure the input by capital holders in the investments of the world’s largest funds and "Asset Management Firms" (AMF's) for the good reason that they are not legally obligated to publish the names of their depositors. So they are solely acting the managers of the funds and AMF's as their capital holders !

The Swiss Federal Institute published a study (7) in 2011 that analyzed the different forms of ownership in 43,060 trans-national corporations (TNCs). Its researchers found that some 1,318 companies form the core of the global economy while 147 control 40% of their total wealth and the top 25, among these 147, are the world’s top "Asset Management Firms", and they concluded that these 25 can “be thought of as an economic ‘super-entity’ in the global network of corporations”.

“The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player.

We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”

By pointing to the role of "Asset Management Firms" as the real decision makers, the authors, of the study by the Swiss Federal Institute, were hiding the role of the minority, of capital holders, who owns the controlling stake of their capital and of their voting rights

The real owners, of the assets invested by asset management firms, are not only hidden their investments outside of those asset management firms are also invisible in the study.

In the Western globalized world those who own a controlling stake of the world's capital base, or world wealth, are the masters of the universe :

Credit Suisse puts the total global wealth as of mid 2017 at $280 trillion

Peter Phillips puts the total world wealth in 2017 at 255 Trillion US dollars (8) Phillips further states that some 66% of this wealth is owned by EU and US capital holders! This shows how the weight, of past capital accumulation, is still weighing so heavily on the present reality...

Leslie Sklair (9) sheds some light on these figures by clarifying their underlying social texture.
Sklair does not subscribe to a classification of power under the label of “technocracy”. He writes that the ownership of the invested capital is the defining character of “transnational capitalism” and classifies the men of power as an “Transnational Capitalist Class” that divides into four main factions :
- 3.1. Owners and controllers :
  Big capital holders do not generally invest their capital in their own names. A big chunk, of their investments, is managed by large AMF's that act as controllers for the owners who remain hidden…
  Seen that the real owners of the capital remain hidden sociological studies focus on : — the managers of the assets management firms (funds) — the managers of the Trans-National Corporations.
  These asset management firms are thus presented as the “super-entities” whose managers are the masters of the universe. This is how they get surreptitiously classified as the controllers at the top of the technocracy ladder.
- 3.2. Globalizing bureaucrats and politicians :
  Those who write the rules of the globalized game and implement their execution.
- 3.3. Globalizing professionals :
  The managers of the corporations that have received investments by capital holders or by their controllers.
- 3.4. Consumerist elites :
  The scientists who search for knowings that corporations can transform into products. The designers and public relations specialists who customize and package the products. And the merchant networks that buy and sell the goods of the corporations and spreads the ideology of hyper-individualism and hyper-consumerism.

Because the real owners of the capital, that is managed by AMF's, are hidden behind a veil of secrecy sociological studies, about the distribution of the world’s wealth, face a dilemma. They can’t quantify the wealth of the biggest capital holders who are hidden behind the legal right of the AMF's to not identify them. So researchers are thus inclined to align their quantification of strategic capital holdings with the managers of the “Asset Management Firms”. But this practice is not only evading the naming, of the world's biggest capital holders, it is also denaturing the reality of the ownership of capital.

The hidden reality, of the capital ownership of our globalized world, suggests a deliberate strategy to hide not only the identity of the real men of power but also their secret strategy of spreading the technical rationality of Western-Modernity to all aspects of life throughout the world !

The fact is that the biggest capital holders are owning the system of Western-Modernity and their decisions are being implemented, throughout the system, by their servants who form the “technocracy”. So logic suggests that we assemble the capital holders and the technocracy as the implementers of the forcing the conversion of the national populations to the technical rationality of Western-Modernity.

In light of this I personally divide the world population into 4 social classes :

The masters are the biggest capital holders.

The capital holders and the technocracy form the modern class of "free individuals", who are, in order of importance :
- 1.1. The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) of the owners/managers of Trans-National Corporations (TNC’s).
  
  At the top of the TCC are the owners, of the assets managed by top “Asset Management Firms” (AMF’s), who control both these firms and the most strategic part of all the world’s wealth.
  As mentioned here above the 2011 study, by the Swiss Federal Institute, shows that among the 43,060 TNCs some 1,318 form the core of the global economy while 147 control 40% of their total wealth and the top 25 among these 147 are the world’s top asset management firms.
  
  These 25 top AMF’s control thus a very significant portion of the capital invested in TNC’s. But more importantly those TNC’s are the most strategically important creators of novelty which attracts speculation. Unknown capital owners have the strategic control of the voting rights in the AMF’s. This gives them the strategic advantage of deciding what TNC’s will get the investments of their AMF’s.
  
  But these unknown capital owners are also outsourcing the control of other portions of their assets to other channels which implies not only that their identified investments are largely undervalued but that their strategic positioning procures them : — a disproportionate share in the profits of the TNC’s — a disproportionate power in the governance of the technical rationality of Western-Modernity.
  
  In sum unknown capital holders are controlling the TCC by detaining the strategic voting rights in :
  - The AMF’s
  - Other investment vehicles like those that are active in the take-over of nature under the guise of greening the world (10)
  - Family funds
  - Personal investments
- 1.2. The managers of International organizations >
- 1.3. The elected national politicians and the managers of state institutions
- 1.4. The managers of national corporations and the chief scientists managing the most important research projects.
The class of non-free workers = the modern slaves

The modern slaves are the white and blue collar workers, as well as the mass of independent workers, who receive a monetary stipend to cover their costs and their daily-life expanses. Their job is limited to the execution of orders while their daily-life is limited to subsistence.

Technologists and futurists are presently filling the media with prognostications about the threat, to the jobs of these modern slaves, by Artificial Intelligence and robotics.

The useless class

The citizens who don’t belong to the technocracy, nor to the non-free workers, are socially forgotten souls who Yuval Harari designates under the appellation of “the global useless class”. (11)

A new class of refuseniks is fleeing the system for building their daily-life autonomy

More and more citizens are tired of the technical rationality of Western-Modernity and they are fed up by its outcome on society and on the habitat of life. They no longer are interested to participate in a societal game that is rigged by unknown men of power and by the absence of (wo)men of knowledge. Over the last decade they have been fleeing en masse to remote corners (12) that had been abandoned by former free farmers who converted to modern slavery.

Sociologists ignore these refuseniks so we do not dispose of quantitative studies to appreciate the societal weight that they could represent. Their way of life nevertheless suggests an interesting question.

Will the useless class and the refuseniks eventually join hands to build self-sufficient localized tribes that offer an alternative to the technical rationality of Western-Modernity ?

What is scary in the technical rationality of Western-Modernity is that it is causing the abrupt acceleration of the convergence, of Artificial Intelligence and of robotics, that announces the demise of non-free jobs which implies that the “global useless class” could, very soon represent the majority of all citizens !

And what is even more scary is the thought that the convergence, of Artificial Intelligence and robotics, could lead to a near future when the the masters and their technocracy remains the sole surviving class. At first sight this idea sounds foolish. But after further contemplation it appears that this scenario would cut the world population to some 10 % of its present total which, over the longer term, would assuredly facilitate the sustainability of life on earth. But in the meantime the transition from ‘here and now’ to ‘there and then’ would be very difficult indeed.

Having said this it is indisputable that the technical rationality of Western-Modernity, in conjunction with philosophic rationalism and science, have divided humanity in two classes of “have’s” and “have’s not”. There was a time when maximum exploitation, of the rest of the world, sucked resources and profits which boosted the liquidity of Western countries and as a result a large middle-class separated the “have’s” and the “have’s not” thus maintaining the illusion that Western societies were sustainable.

But the greed of Western capital holders and their silent revolution of the 1970’s changed all this. The “have’s not” saw their incomes stagnate over the last 50 years while the “have’s” arrogated the near entirety of the increases in national productivity for their own profit as is illustrated in the 2 graphs hereunder.

Growth in Productivity and in Average Hourly Compensation (13)

Cumulative growth of wages of top 1% and bottom 90% (14)

The first graph indicates that, between 1972 and 1975, the workers’ hourly wages disconnected from the national productivity while the second graph indicates that, by 1980, the near totality of increases in national productivity went to the 1%. But how could such a world-changing transformation have occurred in the first place ?

To answer this question I propose, here under, the excellent AI synthesis, given by Perplexity search to my questions. I lightly customized its wording in order to make it fit in the continuum of this text. To avoid any confusion I start and terminate the AI quotations with a red horizontal line.

President Nixon's decision, to end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold in 1971, disconnected workers' wages and national productivity with the following consequences :

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Source 01 : "Nixonomics in Retrospect: Devaluation and Wage-Price Controls, August 15, 1971" American Institute for Economic Research, by Alan Reynolds. 2021-08-18.
Source 02 : “Remembering Nixon’s Wage and Price Controls", CATO Institute, by Gene Healy. 2011-08-16.
Source 03 : "How the ‘Nixon Shock’ Remade the World Economy", Yale School of Management. Interview of Jeffrey E. Garten by Ted O'Callahan. 2021-07-21.
Source 04 : "What Is the Nixon Shock? Definition, What Happened, and Aftereffects", Investopedia, by Will Kenton, reviewed by Robert C. Kelly. 2024-02-28.
Source 05 : "Learn from ‘Nixon shock’—control central bankers, limit ability to debase currency", Frazer Institude. Appeared in National Newswatch, by Robert P. Murphy. 2021-08-13.
Source 06 : "When America Remade the World Economy", Project Syndicate, by Jeffrey E. Garten.2021-08-13.
Source 07 : "Nixon Ends Convertibility of U.S. Dollars to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls", Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, by Sandra Kollen Ghizoni, 1971-08.

Decoupling of wages from productivity

Prior to 1971, workers' wages were keeping pace with increases in national productivity. However, with the Nixon Shock, prices and wages got controlled and the relationship, between wages and productivity gains, began to breakdown. The end of the gold standard had furthermore allowed for more flexible monetary policies, which contributed to the divergence between wage growth and productivity gains.

Increased inflation

Abandoning the gold standard led to a period of high inflation in the 1970s that eroded the purchasing power of workers' wages, even if their nominal wages increased. As a result, real wage growth accentuated the lag behind productivity growth.

Shift in income distribution

The new monetary system, that emerged after the Nixon Shock, facilitated a redistribution of income. Financial speculators and those with access to credit were better positioned to benefit from the inflationary environment, while regular wage earners often fell behind

Global competition

The end of fixed exchange rates made it easier for companies to outsource production and compete globally. This put downward pressure on wages in many industries, further contributing to the disconnect between wages and productivity

Financialization of the economy

The move to a fiat currency system encouraged the growth of the financial sector. This shift diverted a larger share of economic gains towards financial activities rather than wage increases for workers in the productive sectors of the economy.

Monetary policy focus

With the ability to print money more freely, the Federal Reserve's policies began to have a more significant impact on the economy. This sometimes led to prioritizing inflation control over full employment, which could suppress wage growth.

Increased economic volatility

The new monetary system introduced more volatility into the economy, with periods of boom and bust. This made it more challenging to maintain a stable relationship between wages and productivity.

_______________________________________

The Nixon Shock was the beginning of a new era. Workers' wages and gains in national productivity got disconnected which contributed to increased income inequality while ensuring the triumph of the capital holders over the working class.

This rise in social inequality was also accompanied by the rise of Neo-liberal economic policies and of Postmodernism in daily-culture. In the meantime, under the umbrella of the US military, capital holders expanded their field of intervention to the whole world. This explains why the US accumulated over 800 military bases worldwide which gradually increased its annual budget deficits. And the cumulation, of these budget deficits, explains the present debt of the federal government at some $US 35 Trillion !

The rise of Neo-liberal policies, and postmodernism in the United States from the 1970s onward, led to substantial cultural changes throughout the Western world :

_______________________________________

Source 01 : "Neoliberal Culture / the Cultures of Neoliberalism", Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. New Series. Vol 12 No 1 · 2015, by Jennifer Lawn & Chris Prentice.
Source 02 : "Neoliberalism, Technology and the Creation of Postmodern Culture", Political Critique, by Matt McManus. 2018-07-16.
Source 03 : "Culture and Neoliberalism: Raymond Williams, Friedrich Hayek, and the New Legacy of the Cultural Turn", Mediations. Volume 34, No. 2: Realism and the Dialectic, by Racheal Fest.
Source 04 : "Postmodernism, Neoliberalism and Civil Society: A Critique of the Development Strategies in the Era of Globalisation", The Indian Journal of Political Science. Volume 62. Number 3. 2001, by K.M. Seethi.
Source 05. "The Politics of Privatization: How Neoliberalism Took Over US Politics", United for a Fair Economy, by Brett Heinz. 2017-09-08.
Source 06. "New York City and the path to neoliberalism in the 1970s", Oxford University Press, by Benjamin Holtzman, at al. 2021-06-08.
Source 07. "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era", Oxford University Press. 2022-04. By Gary Gerstle.

Individualism and personal responsibility

Neoliberalism emphasizes individual freedom and personal responsibility over collective solidarity. This shift manifested in a cultural move away from communal values towards a more individualistic ethos.

Market-driven thinking

Neoliberal ideology promoted the idea of applying market principles to all aspects of life. This led to a cultural shift where economic considerations began to dominate areas previously seen as separate from the market, such as education, healthcare, and even personal relationships.

Consumerism

The focus on free markets and deregulation fueled a consumer culture, where personal identity became increasingly tied to consumption patterns and brand affiliations.

Erosion of labor power

As Neo-liberal policies weakened unions and labor protections, there was a cultural shift away from viewing work as a source of collective identity and solidarity, towards seeing it primarily as a means of individual advancement.

Skepticism towards grand narratives

The rejection by Postmodernism, of foundational stories that explain the working of reality, contributed to a cultural climate of skepticism towards traditional institutions and ideologies while the individuals were encouraged to focus on the here and now, of bits and pieces of reality, at the image of science.

Diversity and multiculturalism

Postmodernism emphasized diverse perspectives and experiences that helped to foster a greater acceptance of multiculturalism and identity politics in American society.

Fragmentation of culture

Both Neo-liberalism and postmodernism contributed to a fragmentation of cultural experiences. As a result niche markets and subcultures proliferated.

Financialization of everyday life

Neo-liberal policies led to the increased importance of financial markets in daily life, changing cultural attitudes towards debt, investment, and financial risk-taking.

Globalization

The Neo-liberal emphasis on free trade and open borders accelerated globalization, leading to cultural exchanges and hybridization on an unprecedented scale.

Decline of public institutions

There was a cultural shift away from valuing public institutions of solidarity. Neo-liberal policies promoted their privatization in the hands of private interests and corporate-controlled alternatives.

Emphasis on flexibility and adaptability

The Neo-liberal labor market demanded workers who were flexible and adaptable, leading to a culture that prized these qualities over stability and long-term commitments.

Rise of entrepreneurial culture

The focus of Neo-liberalism on individual initiative fostered a cultural celebration of entrepreneurship and start-up culture.

_______________________________________

Under the assault, of Neo-liberalism and postmodernism, the inequality that had set-in after the disconnection, of the workers’ wages from the gains in productivity, continued to growth while all Western grand narratives were entering in free fall. Postmodernism guided the individuals to focus on the technical aspects of bits and pieces of reality at the image of science. What ensued was a fragmentation of groups of interests that gave rise to feminism, gay rights, fat beauty, and so on and on, whose causes Western institutions then hijacked to promote their model of “democracy and human rights” against “the other” models whom they painted as autocracies that had no concern for the individuals.

This process occurred in parallel to the pauperization of ever larger segments of Western societies. And by the year 2,000 these societies had not only lost their shared worldview they had also reached levels of inequality that had never been attained earlier in the history of Western-Modernity. Pauperization is generally accompanied by social movements of opposition against governmental policies but the dramatic fall in prices, of daily use commodities in provenance of China and other Southern countries, more than compensated the loss of income from the disconnection of wages from national productivity gains. Consumerism jumped to unimaginable levels and this contained the social anger that should otherwise have accompanied the disconnection of wages from national productivity gains.

These cultural and societal changes were not uniform across all segments of society and they often met with resistance and critique. However, from the 1970s to the present, these changes dramatically reshaped the Western cultural landscape influencing everything from personal values and social relationships to political discourses and economic behaviors. It is in this particular social context of pauperization of the lowest social strata, of wild consumerism by the middle-class and of the fast rising incomes of the 1%, that the first decade of the 21st century got overwhelmed by mobile phones then by social media.

The disconnection of wages from productivity gains, coupled with the rise of Neo-liberalism and postmodernism, set the stage for significant societal changes in Western societies. The advent of mobile phones and social media in the early 21st century further accelerated these trends, leading to a profound atomization of Western societies :

_______________________________________

Source 01 : "The spreading process of social atomization", Culturico, by Simone Redaelli. 2019-03-01.
Source 02 : "On the atomization of human experience & the factory of privatized stress in the individualized self-care economy", AQNB, by Darius Sabbaghzadeh. 2020-10-06.
Source 03: "The Age of Atomization", Tech Policy Press, by Flynn Coleman. 2023-05-05.
Source 04: "The role of mobile devices and social media in human-nature interactions", Geoforum, vol. 122, pp. 55-62., by Arts Irma, Fischer Anke, Duckett Dominic, Van Der Wal René. 2021-03-09.
Source 05. "Social Media Algorithms Warp How People Learn from Each Other. Social media companies’ drive to keep you on their platforms clashes with how people evolved to learn from each other", Scientific American. 2023-08-25. By William Brady & The Conversation US.

Hyper-individualism :

Mobile devices and social media platforms intensified the focus on individual experiences and self-expression, further eroding collective identities and shared narratives.

Digital echo chambers :

Social media algorithms created personalized information bubbles, reinforcing existing beliefs and limiting exposure to diverse perspectives, thus fragmenting society into isolated ideological groups

Attention economy :

The constant stream of notifications and content on mobile devices led to shorter attention spans and a culture of instant gratification, making sustained engagement with complex societal issues more challenging.

Virtualization of relationships :

While social media expanded networks, it often replaced deeper, face-to-face interactions with superficial digital connections, contributing to a sense of social isolation despite increased connectivity.

Commodification of social interactions :

Social media platforms monetized user data and engagement, turning social relationships into marketable commodities that further entrenched neoliberal logic in personal spheres.

Erosion of public spaces :

As people spent more time on devices, physical public spaces lost their role as sites of community interaction and civic engagement.

Acceleration of cultural turnover :

The rapid spread of information and trends on social media platforms led to an even faster cycle of cultural change, making it difficult for stable, long-term cultural identities to form.

Fragmentation of shared experiences :

The proliferation of personalized content and on-demand media reduced common cultural touchstones, further atomizing society.

Performative individualism :

Social media encouraged the curation of personal "brands" which led to a culture of performative individualism that masked underlying anxieties and insecurities.

Weakening of traditional institutions :

As individuals turned to online communities and influencers for guidance and information, traditional societal institutions like churches, unions, and local community organizations further declined in influence.

Gig economy facilitation :

Mobile technology enabled the rise of the gig economy, further atomizing work experiences and eroding traditional employment structures.

Privacy erosion :

The constant digital connectivity led to a blurring of public and private spheres, contributing to a sense of vulnerability and isolation.

_______________________________________

Digital technologies accelerated the atomization of Western societies. This was made possible by the complex interplay of technological innovation with the individualistic market-driven ethos of Neo-liberalism and the skepticism towards grand narratives characteristic of postmodernism. While offering unprecedented levels of connectivity and access to information to the individuals, this digital revolution poses significant challenges to societal cohesion, shared societal values, and collective action.

This has created a paradoxical situation where individuals are more connected than ever digitally while they are increasingly isolated in their physical and emotional experiences. As a result societies fragmented to the point of societal atomization. Despite the apparent ease, of digital communication, collective action and shared understanding have become far more challenging to say the least and daily life forces us to recognize that in many cases collective action and shared understanding have become impossible !

In light of the theory of cultural evolution through synchronization, that I propose in this Volume 1, societal atomization appears to be one of the major side-effects of Western-Modernity. Not only does it hinder a common understanding, of how our species lost track of its existential dependence on “the physical order of the Universe” and on “the First Principles of Life”, it more importantly distracts us from the necessity of agreeing on how to resolve our present predicament .

2.2. Side-effects of Western-Modernity and the great convergence.

A multitude of side-effects have been generated by Western-Modernity and they are also converging, and interacting among themselves thus accelerating their individual outcomes and weaving new combinations of deleterious effects.

Here follows a graph that sums up the side-effects of Western-Modernity and the impact of their convergence with the dysfunction of Western societies. For more on the subject see “Modernity02. Part 2. The Great convergence”

The great convergence of Late-Western-Modernity.

By laodan in “Modernity02. Part 2. The Great convergence”.

_________________

Notes

1. "The Transnational Capitalist Class – Theory and Empirical Research", In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. Chapter published by the author, Leslie Sklair, on ResearchGate. 2016-11

2. "Are Insects Heading Toward Their First Mass Extinction? Distinguishing Turnover From Crises in Their Fossil Record", Annals of the Entomological Society of America 114(2):99-118. March 2021. Free PDF by Research Gate, by Sandra Schachat and Conrad Labandeira.

3. "Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers", Elsevier. Biological Conservation. Volume 232, April 2019, Pages 8-27, by Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and, Kris A.G. Wyckhuys.

4. "Global insect decline is the result of wilful political failure: A battle plan for entomology", Ecol Evol. 2022 Oct; 12(10): e9417. Published online 2022 Oct 12, by Philip Donkersley, Louise Ashton, Greg P. A. Lamarre, and Simon Segar.

5. "Heroic Tales of a God-Emperor", Ancient Origins, by Willem McLoud. 2024-06-24.

6. "Even More Young Americans Are Unfit to Serve, a New Study Finds. Here's Why", in Military.com, by Thomas Novelly. 2022-09-28.

7. The Network of Global Corporate Control” , PLOS, by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston. 2011-10-26.

8. “Giants: The Global Power”, by Peter Phillips. 2018

9. “The Transnational Capitalist Class”, Blackwell, 2001, by Leslie Sklair

10. “The Crisis is Not Just about Food or Climate. It’s a Civilizational Crisis”, Internationalist 360°, by Fernanda Alcântara and Larissa Packer. 2024-05-09.

11. "Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full", webforum, 2020-01-24.

12. The refuseniks are still not on the radar of the social sciences but they are already having a large presence on the web. Here are a few examples : "L'ArchiPelle". Brian part à la rencontre d'experts ou passionnés sur les thèmes de l'autonomie. "Mossy Bottom". Self-sufficiency and sustainable living on a smallholding in the pine forests of southwest Finland. "Ambition Strikes". A 29 and a 31 year old find a passion for life and learn new skills. "Tiny Shiny Home". Jonathan & Ashley and their 4 kids are building naturally and sustainably. "Martijn Doolaard". Martin finished two long distance bicycle journey. One from Amsterdam to Singapore and the other from Vancouver to Patagonia. He is currently renovating and living in a remote stone cabin in the Italian Alps.

13. "Unions, Worker Voice, and Management Practices: Implications for a High-Productivity, High-Wage Economy", RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 5. 88-108. 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.5.05, by Thomas Kochan and Will Kimball. (2019).

14. "Widening Income and Wealth Gap and Stagnating Wages in America", Awaragroup, by Jon Hellevig.

Inevitable civilizational clash in the 21st century (01)

2024-07-05T15:30:00.008-04:00

Part 1. Summary of "The interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies".

Before terminating the revision of the Volume 1, of my series "The transition from Western-Modernity to After Modernity", that is titled "The interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies", I decided to share the first draft of the 3 chapters of its conclusion in Part 6 :

1. Summary of the revised Volume 1. (Today's post)

2. How the convergence, of the societal dis-function of Western societies with the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is confronting humanity with a predicament ?

3. How to escape the predicament of Late-Western-Modernity ?

Being shadow-banned I have to ask, if you happen to find this content of interest, to please share it with your friends.

Thanks. laodan.

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I want to show in this Part 6 how the convergence, of the dysfunction of the governance-world in this Late-Western-Modernity with the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, is confronting humanity with a predicament of mass-extinction. The path out of this predicament is through comprehension of the interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies. My ultimate hope, in this Volume 1, is to share an intelligible map of this path.

The cultural field of societies is animated by a dual process of synchronization : — the perception of the individuals, about their present contextual settings, synchronizes with the historical worldview of their societies, thus generating their daily-culture — the historical worldview of society, that is shared by the individuals, synchronizes with the memes, that replicate in their daily-culture, thus generating the evolution of their societies.

This dual path of synchronization operates outside of the individuals’ consciousness.

By our present Late-Western-Modernity Western societies have lost their historical worldviews and their dual path of synchronization was thus abruptly interrupted which played a determinant role in their atomization, The gradual atomization of Western societies imperceptibly destroyed their national unity which resulted in their incapability to undertake successfully any large scale national project like fighting a virus for example, or helping their citizens to navigate the aftermath of a national catastrophe, or winning wars for that matter !

To maximize my chances at making the map, of this dual path of synchronization intelligible, I’ll start by summing up the content of the preceding 930 pages of this Volume 1.

____________

1. Summary of the Volume 1

"The fossil record, along with studies of human and ape DNA, indicates that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos until sometime about 6 million years ago)" (1).

Graph 1: The human evolutionary family tree by Herman Pontzer.

The genus Homo originated in the fossil record about 2.3 million years ago under the appellation "Homo-Habilis". Its most widespread descendant Homo-erectus, was found "throughout Africa and Eurasia and persisted from 1.9 mya to 100 kya. ... Its global expansion suggests "Homo-Erectus" was ecologically flexible, with the cognitive capacity to adapt and thrive in vastly different environments. ... it is with "Homo-Erectus" that we begin to see a major increase in brain size, up to 1,250cc for later Asian specimens. "Homo heidelbergensis" emerged in Africa, around 700,000 years ago from "Homo-Erectus", and is often referred to as an "archaic Homo sapiens". The fossil record indicates that a species, with a big brain up to 1500 cubic centimeters (cc), emerged between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago in Africa from "Homo-Heidelbergensis". This species received the appellation of "Homo-Sapiens". For reasons, that are still debated by researchers, the brain size of present-day "Homo sapiens" has shrunk to about 1350cc, which is slightly smaller than the 1500cc of early "Homo sapiens" at the origin of our species ! (2)

With hindsight scientists discovered that the large brains, of early Homo-Sapiens, had the biological potential to derive abstractions from their observations. But this potential only materialized gradually over the following 5,000 to 8,000 generations. By 150,000 years ago the derivation of abstractions from observations produced knowledge that helped the species to survive a population bottleneck and most importantly by 130,000 years ago, during the emergence of the Eamian Inter-glacial, knowledge formation guided the species to experiment new models of societies capable, of handling larger population sizes, through trials and errors.

The emergence of the process of knowledge formation has thus played a determinant role in accelerating the rhythm of cultural evolution which eventually also unleashed societal evolution.

1.1. Changing contextual settings forced the turning, from the archetypal model of small-bands, to the archetypal model of Tribal-Societies" thus initiating societal evolution.

The last two "inter-glacial periods", the Eamian and the Holocene, destabilized the existing model of societal organization existing before their emergence. In both cases, a climate heating was the cause of the destabilization which forced a process of transition towards a new archetypal model of society capable of handling larger populations !

The archaeological evidence indicates that a boom in material culture had emerged, in the wake of the Eamian, which intensified until about 70,000 years ago when a population bottleneck drove Homo-Sapiens in survival mode. This boom in material culture suggests that the warming of the “Eamian Inter-Glacial”, which roughly lasted from 130,000 years ago to 115,000 years ago, was the determinant cause of the turning to a new archetypal model of society known as "tribal societies".

The appellation "tribe" was originated by Western European historians who referred to the existence, of distinctive tribal groups that resisted the northern expansion of the Roman empire, like the "Belgae", a large confederation in northern Gaul, that assembled the following tribes : — the Ambiani - Amiens — the Atrebates - Arras — the Bellovaci - Beauvais — the Caleti/Caletes - Harfleur — the Catalauni - Châlons-en-Champagne — the Catuslogi Eburones - Eastern Belgium — the Leuci - Toul — the Mediomatrici - Metz — the Meldi - Meaux — etc. British historians referred to the existence of similar groups in India like the Lichchivi, Mulla, Yaudheya and Khasa. (3)

The “Eamian Inter-Glacial” was followed by 100,000 years of climate cooling that produced the "Last Glaciation Period". Average earth surface temperatures dropping gradually by 8 to 10°C with steep fluctuations to extreme lows and highs. After its adoption of the archetypal model of tribal societies during the Eamian, which ensured the species to survive the population gridlock of small-bands, humanity adapted to these steep and abrupt fluctuations.

At the tail-end of the Younger-Dryas about 11,700 years ago, in the Tri-Continental-Area (TCA), a new bout of climate heating led to a violent rupture, with the tribal model of society and its animist worldview. This rupture forced the invention from scratch over the following millennia, of a new kind of societal worldview that we called religion. Having forgotten the role, that the animist worldview had played in the reproduction of tribal societies, transitional societies had to rediscover how the sharing of societal worldviews was determinant in fostering societal cohesion and how cohesion was instrumental in the institutional reproduction of societies.

Contrary to what happened in the TCA the vast alluvial plains of China allowed for the continuity of tribal territorial expansion under a shared animist worldview. This continuity was the haul-mark of East-Asia's transition from the archetypal model of tribal-societies to the archetypal model of power-societies.

Different regional contextual settings caused thus a forking of worldviews, in the wake of the abrupt climate heating, at the tail-end of the Younger-Dryas. This forking led to a dual path of societal transition toward the reproduction of the institutions of "the archetypal model of power-societies” about 5,000 years ago. But, while both paths led to the same archetypal model of power-societies, their knowledge paradigm, their axioms of civilization and their historical worldviews, differentiated wildly which fostered the development of radically otherworldly societal fields of culture.

The destabilization of the existing "archetypal models of society", during the emergence of the last 2 interglacials, was caused by the following determinant factors :

1.1.1. Higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere accompanied a warming climate

The warming climate exasperated the emission of greenhouse gasses which amplified the warming process that had already been engaged earlier by other forces.

As the graph here under suggests the co-fluctuations, of increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases with increasing levels of temperatures, also implies, that our contemporary levels of CO2 may already have engaged an increase of some 10 Cº above the average temperatures at the surface of the earth in 1750 !

Graph by Leland McInne, in Wikimedia, modified by laodan.

In light of the turning, of the existing archetypal model of society during the emergence of the last 2 interglacials, the ability of our power-societies to adapt to the present abrupt heating is definitely in question !

1.1.2. Increasing earth surface temperatures + the CO2 fertilizing effect >>> growth of the flora

CO2 increases boost the cycle of climate heating and accelerate the rhythm of increasing surface temperatures. Under a certain temperature threshold, increasing temperatures are having a fertilizing effect that boosts the flora. But passing this threshold the temperature is destabilizing the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth which comes at the cost of a mass-extinction of species which is precisely what is going on presently !

1.1.3. A fast growing flora unleashed a fast growing fauna.

An abundance, of plants to graze upon, necessary implies a demographic boom of the animals living from these plants which explains why Homo-Sapiens experienced a fast rising demography during the emergence of both the Eamian and the Holocene..

1.1.4. Fast growing populations rendered the existing model of society in-operational.

Population growth eventually reached a threshold after which the existing "archetypal model of society" got destabilized. The "small bands" model of society was destabilized during the emergence of the Eamian while the tribal model got destabilized during the emergence of the Holocene.

In both cases knowledge formation played a determinant role. The brain of the genie Homo had been growing over the last 2 million years causing the emergence, between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, of Homo-Sapiens whose larger brains had gained them the mental potential to generate abstractions from their observations. This potential helped them to navigate the warming during the Eamian which ensured a first successful transition, ever by any species of the Genie Homo, to a new "archetypal model of society".

1.1.5. Knowledge formation guided the experimentation of new forms of societal organization

The process of “knowledge formation” has played a crucial role in the human adoption of new models of societies that were better adapted to changing contextual settings. Without knowledge formation, our ability to adapt to a changing context would have been limited to survive within the archetypal model of small-bands as had been the fate of our earlier ancestors.

The emergence in Homo-Sapiens’ minds, of a potential to consciously abstract logical conclusions from the image-data captured by their biological sensors, opened a whole new era of cognition that allowed them to switch during the Eamian, from the suddenly in-operational “archetypal model of Small-Bands”, to “the archetypal model of Tribal-Societies”.

It was at this particular juncture, that the cultural evolution of societies began to complement the biological evolution of the individuals, and this led to an ever faster acceleration in the internal evolution of the societies sharing the archetypal model of the day.

After the emergence, of the new “archetypal model of tribal-societies”, its local societies started to evolve by adapting their cultural fields to the changes in contextual settings. This evolution was indeed cultural in nature. Culture in the largest sense incorporates all thinking, behaviors and actions of the individuals at a given moment. In short the perception, by the individuals of their contextual settings, synchronized constantly with the animist historical worldview of their tribes, and this resulted in the formation of the daily-culture of their societies.

The same goes nowadays under our "power-societies. Our contemporary contextual settings are suggesting a mass of cultural memes to the individuals. But the synchronization, of their perceptions with the historical worldview of their society, cancels out most of these cultural memes which explains why so very few of them manage to replicate over time. After the formation of the daily-culture of societies through synchronization the historical worldview, in turn, synchronizes with the cultural memes that are replicating over the long haul in the daily-culture. This is how historical worldviews adapt to the daily-culture of societies.

These processes of synchronization operate unconsciously which implies that societal change operates nearly totally outside of human free-will !

The turning from one archetypal model of society to another, and the governance of societies, is the subject of the Volume 5 of this series. This Volume 1 focuses more particularly on the internal cultural evolution of power-societies.

Culture is one of those elastic concepts covering such vastly different substance matters that its use often leads to misunderstandings. The fact is that the substance of a society’s culture varies over time. In the here and now our societies are animated by their “daily-culture” while their history is driven by their citizens' sharing of "the societal worldview”. And historical worldviews ultimately emerged from the axioms of their civilization which contain the gist of the knowledge paradigm, and of the system of logic, of the original society that expanded the civilizational realm.

“Daily culture”, “historical worldviews”, “axioms of civilizations”, "societal systems of logic" and "knowledge paradigms" are equally significant aspects, of what I call "the interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies". These interactions form the substance of cultural and societal evolution.

1.2. The transition, from the archetypal model of Tribal-Societies to the archetypal model of Power-Societies, shaped an irreconcilable differentiation between the knowledge paradigms, the historical worldviews, and the civilizations of China and of the West ?

The tribal model of societal organization was destabilized by growing populations in the Tri-Ccontinental-Area. This destabilization got eventually answered by a violent rupture with the tribal model of societal organization and its animist worldview that was consecrated by the burying of the tribal site, of Gebekli Tepe about 10,000 years ago. Burying Gebekli Tepe was an ultimate call for the experimentation, through trial and error of a new societal order. Some 5,000 years later the new "archetypal model of Power-Societies" finally emerged that was able to reproduce its institutions of power over the long haul of multiple generations.

In contrast to the TCA the vastness of China's alluvial plains allowed for a uninterrupted territorial expansion of the tribal model of societal organization and of its animist worldview. The ancient process of "tribal cultural unification" expanded thus over ever larger territories. In the process the animist (wo)men of knowledge got eventually called upon to manage large anti-flooding works as well as the villages regrouping the volunteer tribesmen who executed these works. Power societies emerged thus imperceptibly. The dynastic transmission of power marked the definitive shift away from the negotiation process, of tribal decision-making at the unanimity, to the power model of decision-making.

Geographical and geological differences, between China and the TCA, fostered different paths of transition away from the tribal model of societal organization. The TCA ruptured violently with tribal societies and animism while China expanded animism in continuity and their choice got imprinted in the collective subconscious. In the TCA geographic and geologic factors imposed rupture with tribal animism as the sole possibility of survival in the wake of climate heating and population growth. In their aping of the TCA Western societies converted this circumstantial necessity into an axiomatic truth. Meanwhile in China "Tribal Cultural Confederations" had imperceptibly evolved into "Power Cultural Confederations" that shared animism as their societal worldview.

By the end, of their transition from tribal to power-societies, both China and the West had turned to a common archetypal model of power-societies because they both were confronted with the same urgency to manage societies with very large population sizes. But in the process they had inherited different sets of cultural parameters : — knowledge paradigms — societal systems of logic — civilizational axioms — historical worldviews — vastly different daily-cultures — different systems of governance — and so on.

China's cultural continuity ensured the persistence of animism as the foundational worldview of its power-societies which led to the inheritance, of a common set of civilizational axioms and a common system of societal logic, by the societies participating in its civilizational realm. In contrast by rupturing violently, with tribal societies and animism, the societies in the TCA were eventually forced to invent new religious worldviews from scratch or to adopt such new worldviews. This implies that the transition, in the TCA and Western societies, was marred by thousands of years of governance setbacks in the reproduction of the institutions of their power-societies !

An archetypal transition, along the lines of a commonly shared axiom of continuity, over the millennia has infused its normality in Chinese minds, while the sharing of a common axiom of rupture, over the millennia has infused its normality in Western minds. This means that the continuity, of animism as the shared foundational worldview of China's civilization, fostered a form of governance that celebrates cultural unity as the normality of life for the people living within the territory of the country, and the societies on its periphery. This contrasts with the West where rupture became the axiom of cultural and societal evolution.

1.2.1. Incomprehension of "the other"

The unending contemporary Geopolitical tensions indicate that the sole possible path, to a peaceful 21st century, will necessitate "the comprehension of how the societal cultural field of 'the other' is working". Continued incomprehension will inevitably lead to war and destruction !

Both China and the West will have to make a special effort to boost their understanding and appreciation of the historical process that shaped the differentiated cultural fields of their societies.

The failure, of the West to comprehend China presently, is leading it to reject the Chinese “other” by trying to exclude her from the Geopolitical field of Western-Modernity.

But the technological competition, between the USA and China, is already making amply evident that China is winning this Western game ! And so the outcome of Western-Modernity will most probably be the isolation of the West by 85% of the world population who are no longer viewing the US and Europe as the indispensable beaken on top of the hill of Western-Modernity !

Due to multiple factors China is coming ahead in the competition and the West risks to be trapped in isolation from the rest of the world ! In the end, to escape its loneliness, the West will have to acknowledge the Chinese "otherness". The rapid rise of China, as the center of gravity of Western-Modernity, is indeed attracting the world population to the dream that "There Is Definitely An Alternative" to Western hegemony !

TIDAA is encouraging countries and individuals to cut their Western chains and to cooperate in the construction of a new world order based on their collaboration in a community sharing a common future that respects the equality of all nations, their national sovereignty, and their national choice of political and economic systems.

Without the recognition and the acceptance of such a shared future the USA will remain isolated from the new world order in the making.

1.2.2. The facts

On both sides, of the great divide between the Western and the Chinese civilizations, power has been procuring, to a minority of men since 5,000 years ago, the monopoly to draft rules and to implement these rules in their territory, while hoarding the resources of the working population to finance their privileges !

Supplying the needs of this minority had rapidly been made possible by serfdom and slavery. Later a further surplus of energy was made available through the domestication of cows and horses or other large animals. The cumulation of this organic energy powered an increasing agricultural production that resulted in further population growth and the emergence of cities, confederations of cities, and then early-kingdoms, empires, and their civilizational realms.

The cumulation of organic energy procured, by slavery and animal domestication, was the determinant factor in unleashing the whole cycle of the agricultural revolution, the settlement of humanity in villages and cities, and the expansion of power-societies in civilizational realms that, over the millennia marginalized all other forms of societal organization.

The same kind of process was at work during the industrial revolution which was powered by cheap fossil fuels. But the burning of these fossil fuels was so rapid that its increasing emissions of CO2 have been unleashing a mass extinction.

The fact, that power-societies emerged in radically different cultural fields, means that both sides approach the evolution of their societies from another angle.

The axiom of continuity in China means the sharing of a common worldview that the locals refer to as "Chinese Traditional Culture". CTC refers to a commonly shared traditional approach of all aspects of daily-life : — Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM) — Chinese Traditional Cuisine (CTC) — Chinese Traditional Views about reality (Yin-Yang, Dao, middle-road, societal harmony, etc) — Chinese Traditional Governance (CTG) — and so on. The objective, of CTG, is rooted in the traditional objective, of the animist knowledge paradigm, which was to alleviate the suffering of the individuals so as to open their minds to happiness. The role of the animist (wo)men of knowledge was thus to serve their fellow-tribesmen. Since the advent of the early Chinese "Power Cultural Confederations" CTG has always been assigned to "the men of knowledge" and their role has always been to serve the people by supplying them a clean level playing field that maximizes their chance to produce a satisfactory daily-life for their families while ensuring them protection from destabilization by foreign forces.

The axiom of rupture forced the societies in the Tri-Continental-Area, and later in the West, to create a new worldview from scratch or to adopt such an existing worldview in order to fill the void of meaning that appeared after the violent rupture with animism and the tribal model of society. This period of creation by men of knowledge spanned millennia and was accompanied by the constant instability of the societal governance by men of power who were unable to reproduce their institutions over the generations. Things changed after some men of power offered to cooperate with men of knowledge who had a large following. This cooperation associated the sharing of a common worldview by large masses of followers with the reproduction of the institutions of power. The result was immediate. The men of power succeeded to reproduce their institutions over successive generations which is remembered today as the emergence of cities, kingdoms, and empires.

Continuity in China, and rupture in the TCA and later in the West, consecrated otherworldly knowledge paradigms, societal systems of logic, axioms of civilization, and historical worldviews. In other words the cultural field, of their societies, is incompatible. It is this incompatibility that needs comprehension today to give our species a chance to navigate the future in peace in order to ultimately adjust its way of life to the carrying capacity of its earthly habitat.

1.2.3. Rationality, technology, economic revolutions.

Economic revolutions are always being explained for their use of new technologies and their new sources of abundant energy. But this technical focus always omits to mention the vital contextual settings in which revolutions emerge. These contextual settings are ultimately "the order of the universe", "the First Principles of Life", and the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth that forms the habitat of life. When changes occur, in these contextual settings, species are forced to adapt to them otherwise they risk to go extinct. Their answers have furthermore to be "workable" for "what is not workable" is eliminated by the reset of the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth. The outcome of workable answers is what in the end is remembered as revolutions.

Societal revolutions are always driven by the need for answers to changes in the contextual settings that impact the societal organization of the individuals. And these answers are driven by the system of knowledge formation which emerges from the knowledge paradigm and the societal system of logic of the time that impose their rationality on the elaboration of workable answers to changes in the contextual settings.

The destabilization by population growth, of small-bands in the wake of the climate heating that initiated both the Eamian and the Holocene inter-glacial, gave rise to the experimentation of new forms of societal organization that had the ability to handle larger populations. The societal revolutions that these answers generated are rarely mentioned. Our focus is always on the technical aspects of the economic outcome of these societal revolutions but by doing so we forget about the process that generated this particular outcome.

Historically the processes that generated economic revolutions have always been driven by changes in the parameters of human cognition. The turning to the archetypal model of tribal-societies during the Eamian had been rendered possible by the maturation of the potential capability of abstracting conclusions from the data collected by the sensors of Homo-Sapiens. The adoption of agriculture had resulted from the decision-making of the animist system of knowledge formation in place at the time in both East-Asia and in the TCA. And the industrial revolution emerged from the maturation of the knowledge paradigm of Modernity, that had emerged in the minds of Frankish long distance merchants in the 12th century, into philosophic rationality and science as its functional instrument.

The knowledge paradigm of animism was "pragmatism in daily life to alleviate the anxiety and suffering of the individuals while easing the long haul reproduction of their societies" and its rationality, or societal paradigm, was that “the sharing of the worldview of a given (wo)man of knowledge resulted in the assembly of its followers in a tribe whose cohesion was boosted so as to foster its long haul reproduction”.

In contrast the knowledge paradigm of religions was invariably "a narrative about the transformation, of the traditional service procured by animist spirits to alleviate the suffering of the individuals, into a societal power-relation of gods who imposed their revealed truth about the working of reality to the individuals". And it follows that the rationality, or the societal paradigm, of religions was "the assembly of citizens by force and their sharing of a common religious societal worldview to ease the reproduction of their societal institutions”.

The early knowledge paradigm of Modernity, that emerged during the 12th century in the minds of Frankish long distance merchants, added an external parameter to the religious knowledge paradigm. This external parameter reads as “The belief in the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation”. This Western knowledge paradigm gradually imposed Western Modernity to the whole world.

Both the Chinese and the Western knowledge paradigms drive the rationality of their particular forms of societal governance. The adoption by China, of the Western knowledge paradigm in the 1970's and its integration and digestion in its own animist knowledge paradigm, is what presently allows China to win the game of Western-Modernity !

This implies that China's success, in the game of Western-Modernity, was reached from the cultural perspective of the absorption, of the knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity, into the societal system of logic of the Chinese Traditional Culture. Understanding the Chinese idea of continuity, through absorption and digestion, is crucial to understand how the Chinese cultural perspective powered the economic and technological revolution of their society. The Western focus on the technical rationality, of its economic models, is unfortunately distracting the attention, of the observers of the Chinese societal scene, from the profound synchronization mechanisms that are at work in China's cultural field. The synchronization of the individual's perceptions, about their present contextual settings with their shared Chinese Traditional Culture, is what allows the Chinese population to absorb the determinant parameters of Western-Modernity in the continuity of their societal cultural field. As long as the West remains impervious, to this cultural reality, it will chase the shadows of China's societal moves !

1.2.4. The knowledge of agriculture preceded the agricultural revolution

The agricultural revolution emerged as the application of a principle known by tribal populations since times immemorial. Its application had always been rejected because it was not perceived to bring any betterment in tribal daily life. But the context suddenly changed :

With climate heating tribal groups were generating excess populations

Alluvial plains in the TCA got fully occupied by tribal groups

The traditional fission-fusion, population control mechanism, encountered a dead-end that needed a solution

Tribal excess populations were forced to experiment the application of the known principles of agriculture that hitherto had always been a taboo

The transition to agriculture requires an understanding of animist knowledge formation that the canon of science in the era of Western-Modernity has still not grasped. What I mean to say is that the traditional animist knowledge was the domain of the tribal (wo)men of knowledge whose activity was in line with their knowledge paradigm : "pragmatism in daily life to alleviate the anxiety and suffering of the individuals while easing the long haul reproduction of their societies". Their aim, to alleviate the anxiety and suffering of their fellow-tribesmen, had prompted them not to apply their knowledge, of agricultural principles, in their daily-culture ! And they only encouraged their fellow tribesmen to experiment their known agricultural principles after contextual changes forced them to do it.

Contrary to the widespread belief of liberalism the rationality of science is not generating any ultimate knowledge. Science is a derivative from the knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity which implies that it is intimately bound to "the belief in the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation". There is no escaping the fact that the activities of scientists are financed by capital holders or their private and public servants. Scientists are thus not the ultimate deciders of what is being studied and of how their "technical knowings" are being implemented in societal life. Ultimately they are merely the technical operators of the scientific method while the ultimate deciders are the capital holders and their servants. In other words scientists are laborers at the service of capital holders like any other blue or white collar workers !

I focus more systematically on this differentiation between the "knowledge" of societal (wo)men of knowledge and the "knowings" of scientist laborers, in the volume 3, "Societal Knowledge Formation".

1.2.5. The knowledge paradigm of the archetypal model of power-societies

New knowledge paradigms are foundational to new archetypal models of societies. They emerge, outside of human consciousness, forced by changing contextual settings. A new knowledge paradigm eventually fosters a foundational worldview that, in turn, eventually fosters a new societal paradigm and its system of societal logic. And history teaches us how the natural inclination of empires eventually forced their system of societal logic into the vaster territorial realm of civilizations.

The (wo)men of knowledge had observed that the ideal size of tribal societies was an average of 150 individuals so they encouraged them to stay within the boundaries of approximately 120 to 180 individuals. Passed that boundary they guided their excess population to associate with the excess population of other tribes in order to form a new tribal entity by occupying a territory within the freely available territory in the alluvial plain. The men of knowledge were sharing their worldview with their fellow tribesmen in order to ensure that their tribe was highly cohesive. Keeping them within strict population limits was essential to ensure their cohesiveness.

The transition to power-societies was a uneven process that had to adapt to the local and regional contextual settings. The geography and geology, of the TCA and of East-Asia, is characterized by the vastly different sizes of their alluvial plains which, as demonstrated here under, fostered differentiated transition paths to the archetypal model of power-societies.

1.2.5.1. In the alluvial plains of the Tri-Continental-Area

An abrupt climate heating 11,700 years ago caused a rapid population growth that by 11,000 years ago had destabilized the tribal model of societal organization.Tribal territories occupied the entirely of the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia and any supplemental population, above the threshold of 180 individuals, got parked in small parcels at the intersection of these tribal territories.

The experimentation of producing the resources necessary for the subsistence of populations, on a fraction of the territory used by tribes, must have appeared as an evident solution, in the eyes of the tribal (wo)men of knowledge, to save the existence of the tribal excess population. They had intuitively sensed that the experimentation, of their ancestral knowledge about fauna and flora, had the potential to feed large populations on a limited territory.

The experimentation was successful but further population growth, by 10,500 years ago, forced the early villages to expand in tribal territory. Violence ensued and the naturally peaceful tribes from the plains, extending to the 5 seas around Anatolia, fled to its higher grounds where they built monumental retreats in the underworld. But their tribal model of organization rapidly became utterly in-operational. In their search for solutions the animist (wo)men of knowledge finally decided, about 10,000 years ago, to bury these retreats under a thick layer of dirt. The archeological remnants, of these retreats, have recently been discovered in Gebekli Tepe and the other Tepes of Anatolia.

We moderns view our ancestors as primitives. But this understanding is a mental weakness. Life, at each stage of its development, has always needed to adapt to its changing contextual settings. And the same was true at each stage of the development of Homo-Sapiens. Western-Modernity did not change this. What changed is that the culture of Modernity forgot about the foundational truths of "the order of the universe" and of "the First Principles of Life" which leaves our younger generations with a predicament.

Scientists have been forced to recognize that tribal (wo)men of knowledge had a very advanced and sophisticated knowledge about astronomy and about the use of plants in the treatment of health conditions. Once this was understood, a few decades ago, pharmaceutical companies rushed to patent the plants, or the active ingredients in the plants, that tribal (wo)men of knowledge used to treat their fellow tribesmen.

This suggests that the animist (wo)men of knowledge knew a lot more than they have ever been credited for. They knew, for example, that it would be possible to produce the resources necessary, to feed large groups of people on a limited territory by voluntarily intervening in the natural growth of plants and animals. But we still miserably fail to appreciate how humanity initiated the cultural evolution of their societies, and how this cultural evolution started to run in parallel with the biological evolution of the individuals ! This explains why we are still unable to comprehend that the animist (wo)men of knowledge sacrificed their knowledge and their societal model of organization in order to entice their fellow-tribesmen to experiment a new archetypal model of society.

1.2.5.2. In the alluvial plains of China

The alluvial plains, within the territory of present-day China, were magnitudes larger than those of the TCA. This allowed for the un-interrupted continuity : — of tribal territorial expansion — and of the territorial expansion of "Tribal Cultural Confederations".

Some tribes within the "Tribal Cultural Confederations" eventually asked the wisest (wo)men of knowledge, who was the symbol of the cultural unity of their confederation, to do something about the annual recurrences of their territory's flooding. Archeological discoveries date the first large scale flood alleviation works to about 7,000 years ago. With hindsight it appears that these works engaged a radical turning in the evolution of tribal societies.

Tribesmen from all the tribes in the confederation were encouraged to participate in these alleviation works and large number of individuals and their families migrated to the sites of these works. This had various implications. These large numbers of individuals needed to be fed and their grouping needed to be organized while the volunteer workers needed to be managed. And feeding these individuals had to be realized autonomously and locally in order to avoid the objection of the tribes participating in the confederation. Early agricultural villages emerged thus to organize the habitat and to organize the tribal population participating in the works.

The sage who was considered the symbol, of the cultural unity of the tribes participating in the confederation, was in charge of the organization of the village and of the conception and the organization of the works. She or he was thus most probably seconded by the (wo)men of knowledge of the various tribes participating in the confederation. In the earliest stages of the works their organization was most probably in the form of a gentile guidance of the sage and her or his assistants. But after centuries and millennia their gentile guidance had most probably transformed into a form of authority. And the dynastic transmission of the charge, about 4,000 years ago, eventually transformed this benign authority into power relations.

This evolutive process consecrated the continuity : — of the guidance of the group by the (wo)men of knowledge — of the sharing of animism as the worldview of the group.

The rupture, that was operated in the TCA with animism and the tribal societal organization, contrasts starkly with the continuity that was at work all along the evolutive process of large scale flood alleviation works in China where the slow evolution of the role of the sage imperceptibly transformed the "Tribal Cultural Confederation" into a "Power Cultural Confederation".

1.3. Western power-societies complemented the religious knowledge paradigm with the knowledge paradigm of Modernity

As we have seen here above the Christian knowledge paradigm originated the foundational worldview and the system of logic of the societies in the realm of the Western civilization. In contrast the system of logic of China's polity and civilization had originated from its animist knowledge paradigm.

Western empires, and non-Western polities, generally expanded by conquest into the cultural realm of civilizations and the societies that were active in the realm of these civilizations, got modulated by the synchronization of the perception of their individuals about their present contextual settings with their shared historical worldviews.

The Enlightenment, of Western-Modernity to its technical and materialist rationality, consecrated the separation, of culture in its largest sense, into the tunnel-vision of scientific specialties which viewed, the development of the societies that were active in the realm of civilizations, as a matter of economic activity that fashioned their social and cultural outcomes. In such an economic tunnel-vision the ownership of the means of production was viewed as the determinant factor that procured might to the active societies in the realm of civilizations. These societies were thus largely viewed through the prism of the competition between their national capital holders while their external competition focused on controlling the world order.

In the early stage of Western-Modernity capital, labor, and resources were considered the determinant parameters that procured might. The silent revolution of the 1970's, that expanded the field of Western capital holders to the whole world, forced them to invest in communication technologies in order to manage the global spread of their assets. Their ideological prejudice against labor urged them to expand the field of technological research to production automation and to marketing and public relations. Consumerism focused the minds on the materiality of the products while the representativity of labor organizations dwindled.

By the turn to the 21st century capital, resources, and technology were the new trio of determinant parameters in procuring societal might. The replacement of labor by technology had imperceptibly materialized from the end of the 1970's until the great recession of 2008. The emergence, of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and of Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) during the 2nd decade of the 21st century, accelerated the perception that technology was going to replace labor and it is now common to read or hear that robots will soon take over all the jobs.

The fact is that technology has always played a determinant role in societies. It always was the cultural creation of the active minority of individuals who constantly yearn for change. And technological change was eventually adopted by societies to allow them to reach higher levels of complexity. Over the last 900 years the knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity systematically privileged higher levels of societal complexity and this helped it to dominate the rest of the world.

But technology is not sufficient to make a revolution compatible with "the order of the universe" and "the First Principles of Life". Technology has indeed to be powered in order to be implemented societally. But by the time a technology is made available, the necessary input of energy gets justified at any cost, not only at the cost to the habitat of life but also at the cost of the eventual side-effects on the health of the individuals' and on the cohesion of their societies.

But new technologies, and new sources of energy, don’t fall from the sky. They can only emerge within the framework of a given knowledge paradigm and its historical societal worldview (Zeitgeist). The knowledge paradigm procures the conceptual framework for the evolution of the historical societal worldview. What I mean to say is that the technological path of societies is pre-ordained by the interactions between their knowledge paradigms, their systems of logic, their axioms of civilization and their historical worldviews.

The religious knowledge paradigm, of the early power-societies in the Tri-Continerntal-Area, emerged from the sharing of a common narrative about the transformation, of the traditional societal service rendered by animist spirits to the individuals and their societies, into the exercise of a power-relation over the individuals, by a hierarchy of gods, that eventually evolved into a monotheistic hierarchy and its revealed truth about the working of reality.

In other words the religious knowledge paradigm was formatting the minds to the idea that "The truth, about the working of reality, is non-negotiable. God reveals the truth to his followers, who in return for his revelation, have obey the creed and submit to the edicts of the church". The followers of such a societal worldview are bound by the edicts of the church and its rules about societal governance. Seen, that these edicts and these rules ensure the continuous privileges of the men of power and of the men of knowledge, the individuals are inevitably separated in 2 classes, or groups of classes, Any societal change is thus firmly controlled which implies a slow adoption of innovations that leads to a slow societal evolution.

The knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity emerged in the 12th century in the land of the Franks in the South-West of Europe and it reads as "the belief in the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation". Over time everything got subordinated to the belief in this reason. The first turning point came with Thomas Aquinas who justified the existence of human reason by postulating that it was complementary to God's truth. He believed in a unity of knowledge whose ontology was determined by God's truth while human reason procured the logic of its epistemology.

The path was thus traced and its outcome for educated Western Europeans would be an Enlightenment indeed !

1.4. The interactive continuum, of the cultural field of Western societies, is trapping their individuals into an unconscious drive to the apocalypse ?

The transition, in the TCA, from tribal to power-societies took 7 millennia and the transition of early-power societies to the knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity took 4 more millennia ! And once the knowledge paradigm of Western-Modernity had emerged it terminally accelerated the transformation of the human condition.

1.4.1. Long distance commerce, and looting, filled the pockets of Western European merchants during the centuries of merchant capitalism that preceded the industrial revolution.

Long distance merchants accumulated wealth on a grand scale. Money was thus readily available to be invested. But investable projects were rare indeed so their profits remained largely stored in sterile money!

1.4.2. The envy, of the merchants’ richness, popularized the new conceptual framework of “the knowledge paradigm” of “Western-Modernity”.

Over the centuries “the reason” expanded to everything under the sun and so emerged the era of the Enlightenment when philosophic rationalism and science were consecrated as the instruments of the technical rationality of a materialist Western-Modernity. This technical rationality was immediately instrumental to the industrial revolution.

1.4.3. Britain imported large quantities of cotton goods from India and tea, porcelain, from China but there was no demand in these countries for British productions.

British payments in silver and gold were thus emptying British reserves…

1.4.4. An entente between the aristocracy, the clergy, and the long distance merchants, devised strategies to suppress the export of gold and silver.

In short order India was forbidden to process raw cotton while China was forced by the British to accept the addiction of its population to opium. This is how Britain financed its industrialization and how its empire spread over the world…

1.4.5. Western industrialization consecrated the power of Western big capital holders

Tinkering with cotton spinning and weaving production processes eventually transformed Britain into the factory of the world and its cotton textile goods sold all over the world including in India whose own products had been displaced by Britain's cheaper manufactured goods.

Democracy, and human rights, were the tactical principle, invented by liberal rich long distance merchants, to force their way in the decision-making process of their Western countries. But their strategy was all along to impose their knowledge paradigm to the whole world in order to indefinitely grow their material richness.

Today they have nearly completed this process but an unknown unknown has emerged that blocks their quest for indefinite growth of their material richness at the detriment of the populations of all countries on earth ! That unknown unknown is the emergence of China as the new center of gravity of Western-Modernity !

1.4.6. The interactive continuum of the cultural field of Western societies is trapping the individuals into an unconscious drive to the apocalypse

The collapse, of the cultural field of Western societies over the last 50 years, explains the chaos that has overtaken them and this chaos has transformed into an opportunity to shift the center of gravity of Western-Modernity to China.

But, imbued as it is by the exceptionalism of its civilization, the West can’t accept this shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world outside of its civilizational realm. In its spitefulness it has started to dismantle the world order of Western-Modernity that it created in the wake of the 2nd World War.

The resulting Geopolitical destabilization comes at the cost of the impossibility for humanity to answer the predicament of the great convergence of the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity :

1.4.6.1. Hyper-inequality and societal atomization have dislocated the cultural field of Western societies.

As a result of societal atomization Western societies have become unable to act as one national whole which implies that these societies can no longer successfully undertake any large scale national projects like fighting an epidemic, or helping the citizens after a natural catastrophe, or winning a 3rd World War for that matter !

Societal atomization then converged, with the outcome of financialization in the form of hyper-inequality, that stoked the fire of popular anger.

1.4.6.2. The paradox of Western-Modernity

Western-Modernity has incontestably been phenomenally successful at churning out material goods.

But it has also imperceptibly forced a multitude of side-effects, on life and its habitat, that are causing a mass-extinction !

This is called the paradox of Western-Modernity.

1.4.6.3. Today the West refuses to accept that the shift of the center of gravity of Western-Modernity moves to China !

To break China's access to the center of gravity, of Western-Modernity, the West is now deconstructing the world-order that it had built in the wake of the 3rd World-War ! And all present hot-spots in Geo-politics are related to this refusal by the West to accept China's recovery of its traditional place in the world. But all this comes at the risk of unleashing a 3rd World War !

__________

The convergence of these 3 factors implies that humanity has entered the unknown. A period of uncertainty hangs over our heads. Wars and international disorder appear more certain with each passing day. And even more frightening is the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth that, under the impact of human activities, is turning to a new state that could be far less amenable to life.

China’s economic success is the sole re-assuring factor in this maelstrom. It is instilling hope that "There Is Definitely An Alternative" to Western hegemony and the fact is that one Southern country after the other is getting inspired to search for its own way toward industrialization.

In the present unknown, the sole question. that seems to make sense, is if Chinese benevolence righteousness courtesy wisdom and honesty, will find the fortitude to guide the assembly of a true United Nations of the South whose mission will be to pacify the world while it transitions to the era of "After Western-Modernity".

__________

Notes

1. "Overview of Hominin Evolution", © 2012 Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):8. by Herman Pontzer (2012). The quotations, in the introduction of the summary, are from Herman Pontzer's article.

2. "Larger brains", Australian Museum, byBeth Blaxland, Fran Dorey . 2018-11-02.
"Homo sapiens – modern humans", Australian Museum, by Fran Dorey. 2020-10-16.
"How have we changed since our species first appeared?", Australian Museum, byFran Dorey. 2021-02-08

3. In search of how societies work. Tribes. The First and Forever Form, the RAND Pardee Center, by David Ronfeldt. 2006-12.
"Tribes in India", Indira Gandhi National Tribal University. Regional Campus Manipur. Course Faculty, by Ajeet Kumar Pankaj

Late-Western-Modernity and exceptionalism

2024-05-07T04:24:00.017-04:00

Long time without posting

I'm terminating a revision of the Volume 1, of my series "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity", that is titled "The interactive continuum of the cultural field of societies". I have been plunged in this work for the last 6 months, 7 to 9 hours daily, 7/7. But this did not insulate me from what is going on in the world. I still read, and watch videos, 5 to 6 hours on average everyday. This informs my illustrations of the theories I write about with contemporary examples.

While reading the revision of the chapter titled "4.2.4.2. Late-Modernity and Western exceptionalism" I thought that it neatly sums up my views about the present Geopolitical situation so I decided to share it on my blog.

The revision of Volume 1 will be available sometime within the next 2 weeks.

Have a nice read and if you happen to agree with what I write please share this article with your friends.

laodan

Late-Western-Modernity and Western exceptionalism

The fusion, of the values of the Franks in the Christian creed from the 7th to the 9th centuries, affirmed the Western belief in the self and in the exceptionalism of Christian societies. The Enlightenment and High-Western-Modernity later reinforced this belief and to this very day Westerners are still unconsciously imbued with such ideas as being superior to “the others”.

But times have changed. China has risen. And as Alain Peyrefitte had astutely forecast “When China awakens the world will shiver”.

Merely a few decades, after its plunge in the maelstrom of Western-Modernity, the giant is already beating the West at its own game. In the new Geo-Economic context, that follows China's rise, Western exceptionalism is no longer helping the West to adapt to the changing interrelations between nations.

The fact of the matter is that Late-Western-Modernity has been entangled in the following dynamics

1. A shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world

The center of gravity of the economy-world has moved to China which has been expanding its seeding of growth to ASEAN. But in its obstinate refusal to accept, the new reality of China's rise, the West is willingly destroying the world-order that it had built over the last 75 years !

Faced with this contradiction the governance-world has become powerless as its failure to stop the televised genocide of the Palestinians is attesting for all to see. The void, of working international decision-making mechanisms, is now allowing Israel to commit the worst crime against humanity that could be. And this happens in plain sight while the West is publicly siding with Israel !

The “Non-Western-World”, which represents 85% of the world population, is dumbfounded by the crass hypocrisy of those same Westerners who have been constantly lecturing them over the past 70 years about the universalism of their democratic governance and human rights.

Aghast and angrier by the day, that such a barbarity is tolerated by their own governments, the citizens of the “Non-Western-World” are growing acutely aware about the urgent necessity to consolidate the BRICS+ into a true “United Nations of the South” (UNS). Both Gaza and Ukraine incontestably demonstrate that countering the blatant amorality of Western Judeo-Christian nations will necessitate the close unity of all “Non-Western-Countries”.

To appease their populations the governments, of the countries of the South, are now aligning to join the BRICS. China’s economic success instilled hope that “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony and one Southern country after the other got inspired to search for its own way toward industrialization.

Under TIDAA all the necessary conditions, to create a true UNS, are converging in the present moment.

But the determinant question in this moment reads as follows. Will China have the foresight to guide the countries of the South into a true UNS to ensure that “violence is ended by just means” (1).

Only time will tell if “benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, and honesty” are guiding the assembly of a true UNS whose mission will be to pacify the world. “China has always played the role of mediator, trying to create harmony between conflicting agendas”. This is certainly true and it is why today China is the sole nation which has the potential ability to pull “Non-Western-Countries” on the path of a UNS, whose first mission will be to ensure that “violence is ended by just means”, while nevertheless keeping it open to a repenting West in the future.

2. The side-effects of Modernity

The side-effects of Western-Modernity are there for all to see and they are numerous !

Climate change is the best known but it is only one among a multitude. The most important side-effects of Western-Modernity are : — the detachment of the technical capitalist rationality of Western-Modernity, from the order of the universe, and humanity’s subsequent blind submission to scientism and technologism — the sinking, into hyper-pauperization and societal atomization, of the countries that are most advanced in their conversion to post-modernity, — the peaking of mineral, metal, and energy resources — the chemical poisoning of air, land, and water that sickens life — climate change — etc.

3. The great convergence of Late-Modernity

Today the side-effects, of Western-Modernity, are converging and starting to unleash interactions that release uncontrollable feedback loops. As a consequence the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth is on the verge of passing a threshold that will plunge life in a new Geo-bio-chemical state that could devastate the complex and fragile systems of its habitat !

The technical capitalist rationality of Western-Modernity is definitely bearing full responsibility for this predicament. In light of this, humanity urgently needs to rally behind a new knowledge paradigm, that privileges life and this implies a strict respect of “the order of the universe” and “the First Principles of Life”.

But what is decisive today is that point 1 is converging with point 2 and this produces the nature of Late-Western-Modernity. This means that the present destabilization by the West, of the world order it created in the wake of the 2nd World War, is converging with the occurrence of the convergence of the multiple side-effects of Late-Western-Modernity.

This implies that humanity is no longer able to focus on finding viable solutions to the problems that are causing its predicament !

But as soon as the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth passes its threshold we will no longer have any way to avoid the synergy between these factors. Their convergence is already shaping the path of life. How could such a process of transformation, at the heart of our human habitat, not definitely destroy the Western pretense at being exceptional ? As strange as this may sound the fact is that the West has still not gotten the news. In its hubris it continues to believe that its ways are the only game in town and, in the footsteps of Thatcher, it continues to believe in TINA (There Is No Alternative).

Think for a moment what the Chinese are concluding from their observations of this madness of the West.

They have inherited from their 5,000+ years old system of governance a political philosophy and a political theory (2) that allowed them to manage with absolute success the entry of their country into Western-Modernity. And now, that they are on the verge of consolidating their guiding role over the working of the new center of gravity of the economy-world in East-Asia, Western propaganda is in overdrive taxing China of genocide in Xinjiang, of muzzling its population, while stealing Western technology !

But this adolescent outcry will not stop the grand-mother of all civilizations to continue abiding by the rules of the system that is so rapidly propulsing it to the top of the world economy. If China succeeds to guide all nations of the South, on the path of a UNS, the new rules of the game of Geo politics and economics will be debated by them all and the old Western rules that contradict the new ones will be abandoned. In a spirit of magnanimity the West will nevertheless be invited to join the United Nation of the South when it comes down from the high of its present madness.

Faced with this prospect the evening sun of Late-Western-Modernity is going down while madness overtakes the Western night. In its dreams not only does the West want China, to submit to Neoliberalism and Postmodernism it would also want to write its laws. How preposterous is that ?

Notes

1. These sentences are quotations from Zhang Lihua’s excellent article : "China’s Traditional Values and Modern Foreign Policy", Carnegie Endowment for Internal Peace, by Zhang Lihua. 2013-01-15.

Zhang nevertheless committed the mistake of letting himself trap in the propaganda of the West. The genocide of Palestine, with the support of Western countries, has now unmasked the true nature of Western values. In the world's present void of values of China’s Traditional Culture can certainly provide invaluable resources to construct the next mainstream value system by ensuring “that unjust violence is ended by just means”. Here is how Zhang posited China’s participation in constructing the world’s “mainstream value system” :

“Traditional Chinese values such as harmony, benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, and honesty should be integrated with contemporary values such as freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, and equality. This fusion of traditional and contemporary should be combined with the Marxist values that China follows—namely, the realization of development, freedom, and liberation of human beings and the establishment of more advanced values. In this way, traditional Chinese culture can provide invaluable resources to construct the current mainstream value system.”

2. “The Governing Principles of Ancient China”. Volume 1. Volume 2. Volume 3.

At the beginning of the Zhenguan Era, Emperor Taizong (599–649) of the Tang dynasty decreed that Qunshu Zhiyao (The Compilation of Books and Writings on the Important Governing Principles) be compiled. The result was a collection, titled Qunshu Zhiyao, carefully excerpted from 14,000 books and 89,000 scrolls of ancient writings—500,000 words in all, and covering sixty-five book categories—dating from the era of the Five Legendary Emperors to the Jin dynasty.

New edition of "Concepts and synthesis"

2023-12-23T15:00:00.032-05:00

I just uploaded the new edition of "Concepts and synthesis", the Volume 0 of the series about "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity". It is now available on my website.

Click here to download

Here follows the foreword

The series, titled “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, was first published in the form of blog posts over the span of 5 consecutive winters from 2012 to 2017. I formatted these posts into book form over the years 2017 and 2018. Once fully formatted I left the material simmer in my subconscious and immersed myself in digital variations, of my “grand project” series of paintings. Some of these variations illustrate this series. By December 2020 I was ready to terminate the editing of the first volume1.

Writing was not customary to me. I only started writing, at the age of 50, to answer the questions that popped up in my mind while painting. Over the previous two decades, I had let my brush wander freely, but I was constantly confronted with questions like "what is the function of visual signs?", "what is art?".

In a text from 2004, I concluded that superficial answers, about the form of visual signs, did not answer the essence of these questions. But being unable to find reference points in daily-culture, or in what remained of traditional historical worldviews, I concluded that the best would be to explore why and how art had emerged in the first place because this would unmistakably point to its existential function.

In the process I discovered that archaeologists had unearthed massive quantities of remnants of material culture, in Africa, dating from 100,000 years ago and earlier. A material culture can only emerge from a systemic process of “societal knowledge formation”. Evidently all the necessary ingredients need to have been assembled before a catalyst can possibly animate such a process and when the process has been animated it materializes in objects, relating to daily life, that are shaped in the forms, lines, and colors of a societal daily-culture.

The broader context, of a systemic process of “societal knowledge formation”, was the prior emergence of the brain’s potential power of abstraction, which Homo-Sapiens had inherited between 300 and 400,000 years ago from a biological process of evolution that had spanned over the preceding hundred thousand years. The potential of the brain to derive abstractions, from the data gleaned by the eyes, got eventually animated by a catalyst which was the conscious realization by Homo-Sapiens that individual suffering is alleviated by knowledge formation.

This conscious realization must have surfaced slowly in the minds, over many tens of thousands of years, following the emergence of its biological potential in the brain. The simple fact of thinking about this potential has pulled me, in the blink of an eye, in a quest for knowledge about all matters pertaining to the cultural evolution of species. In this quest for knowledge I stumbled upon many discoveries that form the content of this series.

During my inquiry I observed that climate heating events had caused the abrupt turning of long Glaciation-Periods into shorter Interglacials. The Eamian Inter-Glacial lasted roughly from 130,000 years ago to 115,000 years ago while the Holocene Inter-Glacial had started about 11,700 years ago. During both of these periods the existing model of society got destabilized which forced a process of transition to a new model of society having the ability to handle larger populations. The Eamian started with a “Small-Band model of society” but ended with a “Tribal model of society” while the Holocene started with a “Tribal model of society” that eventually transited to a “Power model of society”.

The differentiation of these models of societies is so stark that they appear like Archetypal. This discovery implies that, in analogy to epigenetics, epicultural factors, like an abrupt climate heating, caused at least two great turnings of Homo-Sapiens’ Archetypal models of societies.

I also observed that the cultural field, of the various societies participating in one given Archetypal model of society, was synchronizing the present with the past and the past with the present. This synchronization, of the cultural field of societies, sustains their cultural evolution which also happens to drive their societal evolution.

The conclusion of this series is that, by causing “the great convergence of numerous self inflicted side-effects”, Western-Modernity has unleashed, among other, an abrupt climate heating that fosters an infernal spiral of societal destabilization. Out of the chaos will most probably emerge a new “knowledge paradigm” and a new “foundational worldview” that will eventually engage a new “Archetypal model of society”.

I focus thus extensively on how Western-Modernity caused such a disastrous outcome for the whole of humanity but I refuse to entertain a gloom and doom frame of mind, for, I imagine a path forward that could finally do justice to the appellation “Homo-Sapiens” that Western European scientists invented to justify the exceptionalism of their species.

But Homo-Sapiens are definitely not exceptional. We are one species among many and, as all species, we are driven by the Geo-physical order of the universe and by the bio-chemical properties of the sub-sub-sub-ensemble earth.

The e-book "Daily reality and the news about it" is online.

2023-10-25T05:32:00.009-04:00

I just uploaded the "Daily reality and the news about it". It is now available on my website.

This e-book is a compilation and edited version, of my series of 5 articles under the same title that delves on the societal evolution of Homo-Sapiens which I argue is the brew out of which emerges our present reality.

Download the E-book

Here follows the foreword of this book.

Emerging facts, that are separated from the context in which they appear, make no sense for the good reason that it is their context that procures them substance. In themselves facts are incomprehensible. Their meaning is in the outcome of the process that formed them. In light of this the imposition by the media of facts that are divorced from their context is necessarily a highly suspect act that reeks of propaganda, as the Hamas story that fills our media today plainly attests.

To be of any value, daily news should at the least teach us how daily culture emerges from the unconscious synchronization, of the citizens' perception about their contextual settings, with the cultural field of their society. Their current thoughts, behaviors and actions, are indeed the outcome of this synchronization.

Those who are aware that such a synchronization shapes the nature of current societal thinking, behavior and actions, know that they can shape their emerging form. Propaganda thrives on this faculty. But, since it is at the service of the men of power, it fakes the facts for the sake of their interests. By reconciling the current thinking, behavior and actions, with the patterns of what works in biological and societal evolution, truth-seekers can fortunately establish the truthfulness of facts.

Daily reality and the news about it. Foreword & Afterword

2023-10-19T16:00:00.063-04:00

Foreword

Afterword

Facts are the outcomes of processes that started to operate in the dawn of the systems that are animating the ensemble in which those facts emerged in the first place.

In the present era of Late-Western-Modernity we, human animals, perceive these ensembles, their systems and processes, in light of the rationality that animates our present societal life. But while we are under pressure in the present moment to understand, how it comes that the predicament of extinction affects our societal life, it is imperative that we question the rationality that animates the societal life that brought us to that point !

We have to recognize that we are easily accustomed to cognitive habits that leave us captive of choices which we initially thought were entirely justified. The fact is that our present predicament emerged after having practicing Western-Modernity for centuries. Our societies were entranced by the rationality of Western-Modernity. This rationality animates all our societal systems and our habits of thoughts have narrowed to the sole concern for the technical rationality that validates the process of capital accumulation.

But in matter of fact, over the last centuries, Western-Modernity has annihilated the rationality that is at work in the process of biological and societal evolution of the process of life ! And our species has landed itself in a maelstrom of contradictions. Humanity’s current predicament demonstrates without a shred of a doubt that, under the rationality of Western-Modernity, our societies are misfiring with huge consequences for the future reproduction of Homo-Sapiens.

Our doubt, about the future reproduction of our own species, should be proof enough that the rationality of Western-Modernity has reached the end of its validity. To survive as a species humanity has now to adopt a new knowledge paradigm that is better adapted to our present contextual settings. We need to revert to an ontology that is rooted in the primacy of the reproduction of life. In other words the imperative necessity is now to shift the priority of humanity from the rationality of Western-Modernity to the rationality that is at work in the biological and societal evolution of the process of life.

Our failure to operate such a conscious shift, as a species, unavoidably implies the collapse of our societal systems and the reconciliation of their search for more complexity with the primary need of reproduction which would inevitably be followed by the cleansing of the ensemble earth from the non-functional inventions of Homo-Sapiens ! What I mean to say here is that Western-Modernity failed to adhere to “The First Principles of Life” that sustains my series about “the transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”.

This first rule stipulates that life substantiates into living species that are animated by the interactions between their polarities :

Reproduction of life (persistence)
The reproduction of life is realized through the biological reproduction of the individuals which is systematically pursued by the assembling of individuals in societal groups.

Search for more complexity (novelty generation)
The search for more complexity is realized through societal selection of novelty by the most creative individuals.

It so happens that a group of scientists just published an article validating the first among “the First Principles of Life” that form the guard-rails of societal evolution which I described in “Societal knowledge formation. ‘6.2.3.4.2. The First Principles of Life force the path of societal evolution’ and in ‘6.2.3.4.3. Dynamics of the First Principles of Life’ “. In sum these scientists argue that evolution is a macroscopic law of nature :

"The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws do not seem to adequately describe these systems. Recognizing that the identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature, we approach a potential “missing law” by looking for equivalencies among evolving systems. We suggest that all evolving systems—including but not limited to life—are composed of diverse components that can combine into configurational states that are then selected for or against based on function. We then identify the fundamental sources of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—and propose a time-asymmetric law that states that the functional information of a system will increase over time when subjected to selection for function(s).“

In the words of this team of scientists evolution rests on 2 principles : — persistence — novelty generation.

In my series about "the transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity" I propose that these two principles act as the polarities that animate life within all sub-ensembles of the universe :

Persistence = reproduction → the primary principle

Novelty generation = the search for more complexity → a subsidiary principle.

In my personal vision all entities in all ensembles are animated by their polarities which implies that the whole universe is alive as well as its sub-ensembles and their parts.

I described as follows the systemic nature, of the animation of all entities in the universe, in “Societal Knowledge Formation. 6.2.3.4. Necessity to clarify our conceptual framework” :

“We have seen earlier that all individual particles are interconnected and that their interconnectedness forms an ensemble that evolves its own rules of the game. The ensemble’s rules reflect to the parts its vision of the world. That view may be transmitted consciously, subconsciously, or may be engaged by a particular Geo-bio-chemical state or other.

From the perspective of the particles their biological and societal evolution eventually sets them on the path of knowledge formation which gives them access to the “Working Principles” of the ensemble they belong to. Human individuals eventually came to feel a vague sensation that better fitting in the whole could gain them some reprieve from suffering. And this reprieve of suffering was a powerful enticement to engage in societal knowledge formation.

After discovering that the truth, about U or the whole universe is unattainable, they understood that certainties are merely ideological illusions and knowing that illusions generate suffering they started to focus on the pragmatic principles that allow to live in harmony with the order of the whole.

I have tried, over the last 10 years, to summarize these pragmatic principles in what I call “the First-Principles of Life”.

“In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”

In light of this definition “The First-Principles of Life” are basic propositions, or assumptions about life, that can’t be deduced from any other assumptions.”

Seen, that “facts are the outcomes of processes that started to operate in the dawn of the systems that are animating the ensemble in which these facts emerged in the first place”, the reconciliation of current thinking, behavior and actions, with the patterns of what works in biological and societal evolution, implies that truth-seekers are sitting quiet in contemplation of the whole universe, its sub-ensembles and their parts. I'm afraid that it would be presumptuous to invite news peddlers to sit quiet seeking comprehension in such a contemplation.

Graphs from the series "Daily reality and the news about it".

2023-10-12T16:00:00.101-04:00

While formatting the content of the series of articles, about the "Daily reality and the news about it" in pdf book form, I thought that it would be useful to dedicate an article specifically to the graphs illustrating these articles.

1. The class war of Western big capital holders against the working people

From the onset of the silent revolution of the 1970's, the working people got penalized financially. Their incomes got suddenly detached from the national levels of productivity and the near totality of all productivity gains were sucked in the pockets of ... yes in the pockets of the 1%. This was the clearest sign that the West was sacrificing its societal cohesion to satisfy the greed of a tiny minority.

2. The successive historical shifts of the center of gravity of the economy-world of Western-Modernity

This graph indicates that, between 1,150 approximately until today, the center of gravity, of the economy-world of Western-Modernity, moved 9 times from one regional area to another.

This means that one regional area assured its primacy over the rest of the world in the following domains:

Its capital formation was higher than in other areas

Its capital holders disposed of higher disposable incomes which ensured the domination of their region in the following fields :
- Fashion in luxury goods
- Fine arts
- Architecture

The primacy over the rest of the world also manifests in the center's exercise of power over its periphery. We live indeed in the historical era of the archetypal model of power-societies.
As this graph n°2 suggests this can have consequences that are most directly manifested in how the dominant region is implementing its power. As is attested by the hegemony of Western nations over the last hundred years the consequence was the death of many civilizations and many societies while hundred of million human individuals got slaughtered and mother nature got raped over and over.
China's rise fortunately offers a different perspective. Its societal cultural field was centered along the entirety of its history on the alleviation of its peoples' suffering while procuring them the most favorable context for the production of their daily lives.

Interestingly a region's historical domination in those fields also leaves a legacy in the present primarily in the form of its better known artists and their works and in the form of its architectural monuments. And note how this legacy is a major tourist attractor !

3. The great convergence of the numerous side-effects of Late-Western-Modernity

This graphs indicates the interrelations, among the most important factors, at work in the infernal dynamic at work in humanity's present predicament.

4. China's technological drive to self-sufficiency and world supremacy

China and its 1.4 billion people are definitely showing that population is the predominant factor in ensuring the primacy of one region over the rest of the world. In light of these graphs the present attitude of the USA, in my eyes, appears to be in-comprehensively stupid.

Daily reality and the news about it. Part 5.

2023-10-10T01:16:00.002-04:00

Part 5. “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony (TIDAA)

In this last part I’m using a few quotes from articles by Peter Lee to force myself to focus on how the worldwide rise of TIDAA takes place in a deeply troubled context. Peter is a writer whose views on China I generally find refreshing for pointing to facts that are rooted in the ground of daily reality.

My personal approach focuses more on the long historical context from which the daily present emerges. The narrative of such an approach may appear more detached from the ground of daily reality and may even be viewed as mired in the field of theory. But the fact is that from where I’m standing, here just north of the Forbidden city on the central axis that forms the back of the dragon, I observe the same things as those described by Peter.

The difference in our approaches is that he writes about his direct observation of the present moment while I write about the context that generates my direct observation of the emergent present moment.

We individuals are the product of our life experiences. Our experience gives each of us our personal internal and external outlook on life. And deriving from the personal outlook that our life experience generated for us our productions are necessarily different but they are in no way better nor worse than the productions of other individuals.

Having clarified this point I want to superpose my description of the historical context, that generates the emergent present, over Peter’s written description of his direct observation of the scene of the present moment. This should allow me to verify if there are discrepancies between our views. And if there are the fact, of checking what are their origins, might unveil some new angles of observation that remain most generally hidden.

5.1. The China that XI Jinping inherited

“I think Xi Jinping came to office in an atmosphere of crisis. Economy slowing; straightforward Keynsianism of throwing money into the banking system yielding decreasing returns, inflationary pressures, higher debt burden; unsustainable revenue model for local governments; SOE & local government indebtedness; growing disconnect between government economic objectives and priorities of the business sector; corruption; increasingly vocal and networked dissatisfaction; chafing at PRC pretensions at the margins (Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong); demographic issues; corruption; clear need to wean economy and employment from the easy but no longer valid export/infrastructure growth model to something more complicated; a general desire by the US, Japan, and much of the world to circumscribe the PRC’s freedom of action and its international opportunities. Plenty of opportunities for the wheels to come off.” (1)

Peter’s observation of a “Straightforward Keynesianism”, and its consequences, is certainly plunging straight into the reality of China’s economy in 2013 and much of his quote describes the internal and external outcome of this Keynesianism. This quote dates from 2015 and it is strongly tainted by the ideological context of the place where Peter was sitting when writing this article.

But let’s continue to read how his thinking further evolved over time.

“Western discussion of Xi Jinping’s rigid economic, social, and pandemic policies focus in his red, Marxist-Leninist, politics takes command leanings.

What they ignore is that Xi Jinping is putting the PRC on a wartime footing, working to enhance China’s resilience and ability to withstand and deter aggression from the United States.

Because the PRC and the United States are at war.

...The United States blew up Huawei. It cratered China’s advanced semiconductor industry. It provided rhetorical and G*d knows what other kind of support to separatists in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Joe Biden has committed America to the defense of Taiwan come what may, we’re loading the island up with weapons, and the Pentagon has gone so far as to slyly place Taiwan under America’s nuclear umbrella. Japan has committed itself to its biggest arms build up since World War II for forces that can only operate overseas when embedded in US military operations. Guam is being hardened as an intermediate range missile base. And let’s not forget the AUKUS clown show.

… It would be a dereliction of duty for Xi Jinping not to assume things are going to get worse before they get better. ... for the CCP, the hot war can’t end in a stalemate, with the PRC bled dry and the United States driven back from the ruins of Taiwan and Okinawa but coordinating an open-ended economic and technological blockade of China with Japan and the rest of the G7.

You know, like the Ukraine model against Russia?

In my opinion, the CCP is preparing for war…but it won’t go to war until it believes it can break US global power decisively, and for all time.“ (2)

The liberal rationality of Western-Modernity, that overwhelmed the first quote has vanished. In this new quote appears a strong statement of disapproval of the Western outlook about China that had been initiated by Trump’s foreign trade harassment which got strategically amplified under Biden. In this new context Peter states the following :

“It would be a dereliction of duty for Xi Jinping not to assume things are going to get worse before they get better. After all, the guesstimate is that China has to get f*cked up in the next ten years or else it’s too late for Uncle Sam, so expect the next decade to get pretty tense.

So Xi’s putting China on a war footing so that the PRC military, its economy, and its society—and the CCP itself-- are hardened to withstand a menagerie of black swans and grey rhinos and “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms” without descending into an abyss of dysfunction, panic, and failure”.

In this last quote Peter seems to approve the PRC’s response to the US policy. The next quote is from his report about his trip to China in August 2023. In this last article he finally realizes that the liberalism of Western-Modernity is on the way out in China. So in light of the liberal rationality of Western-Modernity, that overwhelmed his first article, we should expect some toning down of the positive approval of the PRC’s response to US policy that characterized his article from 2022. Here is a quote from his last article :

“ ... the PRC is trying to war-harden the country without cratering the economy, and postpone indefinitely the day when America feels it has the advantage and opportunity to escalate the China confrontation to total economic warfare.

… The PRC is also actively shaping public opinion to highlight China’s virtues and America’s vices and has a fair amount of good material to work with. Thank you gun violence, the Hawaii fire, and Joe Biden!

… The disruption of US-China exchanges due to COVID and the relentless US anti-China campaigning is creating a generation of Chinese whose expectations and outlook are shaped by a new Sinocentric reality in which American values and priorities (and, I should say, tourists) are increasingly peripheral.

People I spoke to were positive on China’s situation and did not blame Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West. Instead they seemed bemused and disappointed that the US has surrendered to a policy of anti-China fear, hate, and aggression to try and stick it to a country 10,000 miles away. Well, maybe some selection bias here because that’s how I feel.

But that’s not the whole story.

There’s a whole generation of people—important people—who grew up and thrived in an environment of US-China engagement. For them, decoupling from the United States--and the damage it has inflicted on their interests and aspirations--is painful.

The expectations of these elites aren’t on life support, in my opinion. They’re in hospice. Their attitudes are divided between rage and resignation as they anticipate their final exit.

Meanwhile the CCP is recruiting and cultivating new elites centered on the BRICS international regime, a less glamorous, less rewarding, but possibly more resilient order seeking its future in Russia, South Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. They’ll be talking to CGTN and RT instead of sharing their discontents with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.

The idea that elite and popular opinion in China could shift aspirations away from Disney, MacDonald’s, and McDonnell Douglas to telenovelas, couscous, and Sukhoi jets is perhaps inconceivable to Americans, but the CCP is trying to make it happen.

As they say, in the old world there is a new world struggling to be born.

Will the CCP succeed?

The product it’s pitching to its citizens and to the world—that’s multilateralism via economic engagement—is fundamentally more attractive to a lot of countries than the deficit driven global War to Save Democracy that the US is peddling. Given money, perseverance, luck, and time the PRC might be able to thread the needle.

But…there’s that “time” thing. There’s the rub.

My opinion is, if the CCP is succeeding, in other words if it shows significant progress in establishing a robust parallel international order that can shield it from US economic aggression, the US will start a hot war to see if it can truly f*ck China up.” (3)

The air of the times, that Peter was forced to breathe in China, made him realize that the 5th column of Chinese pushers, of a liberal view of Western-Modernity, is in “its final exit”. But the conditioning, of his American life, is overwhelming his mind and this makes him spill the beans : “People I spoke to were positive on China’s situation and did not blame Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West”.

_____________

I do not personally know Peter nor do I have any clue if he is a Caucasian or a Chinese born in the United-States. I just read his articles because, as stated earlier, the first dimension of his direct observation of the present moment. Having said this his insane contradiction, between “Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West” and “...the relentless US anti-China campaigning is creating a generation of Chinese whose expectations and outlook are shaped by a new Sinocentric reality”, made me think that he must be an ABC (4), for, how otherwise can we possibly make sense of a single person conveying two radically different opinions ?

Having said this Peter’s text from 2015 indicates without a shred of a doubt his preference for the liberal militant version of Western-Modernity that he has lived under during his entire life. By the time of his text from 2022 his mind had turned. I suppose he could no longer stand the moral hypocrisy that characterizes the exceptionalism of US governmental actions. But his most recent article suggests a constant tension between his preferred societal ideology and the moral hypocrisy of the governance of his society.

The organic flow of “Chinese Traditional Culture” on people’s daily realities is so strategically empowering their lives that, as a Chinese, they just can not throw it away for the evasiveness of a Western nagging ideological vision.

The efficacy of the “Chinese Traditional Culture”, in navigating the imperatives of individual daily life, is something that is very difficult to let go. Western societal ideologies rapidly appear fleeting at best. It is this kind of observation that forced me to focus on the concept of culture. I discovered indeed that most Western people unconsciously engage in a systematic epistemological confusion between the concepts of “daily culture”, “historically shared worldview” (religions for example), “Foundational worldview” and “civilization” and if you ask them what they mean by these concepts they are unable to distinguish them in their substantive reality. This observation motivated me to write “the continuum of the interactive cultural field of societies”.

By “the interactive cultural field of societies” I mean that the internal evolution, of an archetypal model of society, operates according to the interactions among the parameters of the cultural field of its societies. Marx had posited that “dialectical materialism” explained the whole of societal change.

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (5)

Liberalism posited that the actions of the individual investors generate changes in the modes of production, and exchange, that result in the social reality of societies. Marx accepted that the social reality of societies is given by the modes of production and exchange but, on the ground of a Judaeo-Christian moral perspective, he rejected the private ownership of capital that monopolizes the returns on investment in the hands of a small minority of people.

By focusing on the different concepts of culture you are forced to recognize that, they relate to a same substance applying in different time-frames. This discovery shows that culture is a field that traverses the entire history of a society. And from that perspective “the final causes, of all social changes and political revolutions”, necessarily reside in the synchronization of the individual’s perception of their contextual settings with the continuum of their cultural field.

Changes in the modes of production, and exchange, are an important part of peoples’ daily contextual settings but they are not the whole of these settings. If you focus solely on the mode of production and exchange, as both Liberals and Marxist firmly believe, you are missing the fundamental role of the synchronization of the individuals’ perceptions of their contextual settings and you are then unable to explain why so many people are disenchanted by the feeling of leading meaningless lives. And if you are a political party, that views the social reality of societies as being given exclusively by the modes of production and exchange, then your disenchanted followers are necessary bound to wither away…

____________

After this digression let us come back to Peter’s post of 2015. He states “an atmosphere of crisis” that could potentially cause “the wheels to come off” the communist governance vehicle.

This statement was correct but not for the reasons that he noted. WEN Jiabao, the Prime Minister at the time, had duly noted during a meeting of the Central Committee in Late 2010 that the Communist Party was loosing its grip on the country’s movement forward and HU Jintao, as Secretary General, insisted that structural reforms were urgently needed to counter the rising difficulties encountered in the implementation of its decisions by the national government. HU called for nothing less than a re-centralization of the decision-making process as the best answer to counter the difficulties in the government’s implementation of the Party’s national decisions.

The awareness, among the top leadership of the CPC, was incisive and it thought that an intensification of internal and external contradictions called for a reinforcement of the center at the detriment of the periphery.

HU Jintao’s 10 years at the helm of the Chinese Communist party, will be remembered for turning China into an economic power-house. And the most representative moment of this turning came in 2008 when the government decided to inject a stimulus package, of some 4 trillion Renminbi Yuan (CNY) (USD 586.68 billion) (6), that came at the cost of centrifugal forces, local governments, private and public corporations, that rushed into over-indebtment. Christine Wong estimates that the stimulus over the following 3 years largely surpassed the government’s plans :

“... a conservative estimate would place the stimulus at CNY 9.5 trillion, or 27% of GDP, over the 27 months. This was 2.4 times the size of the announced stimulus package. In 2009 alone, it was CNY 6.5 trillion, or 19.3% of the current year GDP.”

By 2010 the authorities observed that, the internal potential destabilization by these overzealous centrifugal forces, was accompanied by an external policy trend by Western countries to counter China’s further development. In the eyes of the central leadership, of the CPC, this implied a need of re-centralization of the political decision-making process in order to gain a firmer grip on their nation’s further debt formation.

As soon as elected secretary general of the CPC XI Jinping rushed to implement these guidelines of the Central Committee while China analysts at Western Think-Thanks, and Western media outlets, rushed to picture him as a dictator. Time passing the USA’s actions, and those of its lackeys, were so arrogantly extreme that their absurdity was visible for all eyes to see. It became thus soon apparent that Biden’s slogan “democracies against autocracies” was part of the permanent propaganda campaign of the West against China and the other countries that refuse to acquiesce to the Western diktats of hegemony.

5.2. The cultural shock between liberal totalitarianism and the Chinese Traditional Culture

By the end of the 11th century a long chain of causes and effects had accumulated in the land of the Franks, in South-Western Europe, that eventually resulted in the emergence of the knowledge paradigm of Modernity sometime in the 12th century (7). That paradigm centered on the rationality, that was at work in what at the time was called the transformation of sterile money into merchant’s money, which de facto unleashed a process of capital accumulation.

In the early-Renaissance Thomas Aquinas furthermore popularized the idea that human reason was complementary to the Christian god’s revealed truth. This idea rapidly spread and substantiated a Christian humanism that centered on the mastery of nature for the satisfaction of human needs. Aquinas de-facto instrumentalized Modernity making it complementary to religious belief and this ensured that its widespread development always stayed in harmony with the religious political order of Early-Modernity.

Aquinas’ instrumentalization of the knowledge paradigm of Modernity ensured that it would eventually give rise to the societal paradigm of Western-Modernity in the form of the nation-state, a specific form of the archetypal model of power-societies, that had already been put in practice in China over the past two millennia.

Finally at the peek of the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, Liberalism emerged as the ideology of the merchants capital holders and their university servants in France, the United Kingdom, Holland and Walloonia, who preached the virtues of philosophical rationalism and science against the darkness of religious and traditional belief systems.

Over the following centuries liberal parties opposed Christian parties and by the end of the 19th century the progressive left-wing quit the liberal parties to found socialist or social-democratic parties that formed the creative core of the welfare states of the 20th century.

By the 1960’s big capital holders observed a decreasing trend in the profits generated by their capital investments and they invested massively in the formation of Think-Thanks in the hope of finding theoretical answers to their conundrum. These Think-Thanks invariably advised the expansion of the reach of Western capital holders’ investments to the whole world.

But the transformation of sterile money into a process of capital accumulation, in the sense of the original paradigm of Modernity, rapidly appeared insufficient to satisfy such an ambitious program. A solution had thus to be found to address the limitation of available capital. The solution was a new iteration of the paradigm that complemented the transformation of sterile money by the transformation of debt into a dynamic process of capital accumulation.

This new iteration of the paradigm of Western-Modernity consecrated the primacy of bankers and lawyers over the engineers in the board of directors of corporations, and in state administrations, which signaled that a new era of financialization was imposing its rationality over any other consideration. This is also when quantitative methods were forced throughout the social sciences in order to satisfy the objectives of societal rationalization associated with the new iteration of the paradigm of Western-Modernity.

Western capital holders, and their servants, knew that, to be successful, such a radical program needed — to acquire the consent of the governments around the world without unleashing a public discussion — unlimited quantities of capital to rapidly reach an incontestable worldwide threshold of normality. The plan had thus to be executed without the public's knowledge by tweaking the Zeitgeist to the necessity of trumping the national conversations through a massive binge of individual consumption. Cheap Chinese productions certainly eased the implementation of this strategy.

The globalization of investments by major Western capital owners has de-facto been implemented without any public debate, while the public institutions have been subjected to the ideology of Neoliberalism, which has stripped them of any competence to protect, and while individuals were prevented from sharing their traditional worldviews, such as Christianity or Marxism, for example.

The results, of such a massive social engineering, were rapidly coming in without much of a reaction nor from the intellectuals nor from the media :

5.2.1. Western nations most important internal results from the globalization of the reach of their capital holders

Trade-union membership entered into free-fall

Blue collar incomes suddenly stagnated

Growth of real hourly compensation
for production/non-supervisory workers
and productivity, 1948–2018 (8)

Participation in church rites went in free fall

Marxist ideology was suddenly on the way out

Postmodernism and the loss of shared meaning

Western modernism had been searching in vain for new foundational narratives to replace the worldviews of early modernity. But it failed, and came to believe in the absurd proposition that "everything can be art".

The resulting zeitgeist of “whatever is art”, in the wake of World War II, was sized by the U.S. State Department, as an opportunity, to capture the art-scene which came thus under the control of merchants regrouping in New York for the occasion.

Later, postmodernism, like science, focused on snippets of reality that prevented the sharing of foundational truths with the majority of individuals who had fallen into an anxiolytic void of meaning.

The capture of loneliness by social media

The loss of buying-power converged with a general loss of meaning, to share with others, which locked the large majority of individuals into a pervasive feeling of loneliness that web entrepreneurs seized as an opportunity to gain information about individuals by gluing them to their screens. Data accumulation became a goldmine that advertisers, marketing engineers and state institutions were eager to pay for in order to surveil the populations and to sell them entertainment.

Social media and the loss of empathy

Social media have rapidly boosted the ego of the individuals, fostering a generalized hyper-individualism that has crushed the traditional respect for the authority of the men of power, the authority of the men of knowings, the authority of traditional institutions such as family, school, state, etc.

Startled by this sudden evolution, the men of power began to tweak the communication channels in order to limit the scope of the individuals' freedom of expression. Some got excluded from social media platforms, while the mainstream media systematically relayed the messages of men of power. But in the process the nature of information suddenly changed. The mainstream media became the propaganda arm of the institutions of power, while alternative media was positioned as an opposition force that attempts to give a truer picture of everyday reality.

Unfortunately, the alternative media were soon flooded by propaganda organs, and it quickly became very difficult to distinguish between "fake news" and "true news". The invasion of the media sphere by organs of pure propaganda, often peddling articles or videos written by AI, generates a deafening background noise that obscures our perception about our daily reality.

Societal atomization and the death of societies

In the process, trust between individuals and institutions vanished. Societies became atomized, and lost their traditional ability to successfully undertake large-scale national projects — such as responding to the needs of populations after a major natural disaster — such as responding to the societal need to protect populations against pandemics — such as re-industrializing Western wastelands - or such as winning a world war for that matter...

In the final stage of the atomization of societies, when the last drop of inertial energy is consumed, societies fall dead, which may take the form of a financial collapse leading to the collapse of societal institutions, or a civil war, or the flight of the individuals into local forms of autonomy that spread and marginalize the societal life organized by men of power, and so on.

5.2.2. Most important external results from the globalization of the reach of Western big capital holders

Western Hegemony and Neo-colonialism

“In theories of imperialism, the hegemonic order dictates the internal politics and the societal character of the subordinate states that constitute the hegemonic sphere of influence, either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government. The term hegemonism denoted the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over other countries, e.g. the hegemony of the Great Powers established with European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. (9)

Hegemony is a Western concept that was applied and continues to apply to Western international and national governance. It is interesting to observe how the West today is using its hegemonic media power to force this concept on China’s governance behavior towards the rest of the world. But even more interesting is the disbelief of the rest of the world toward such an egregious Western attitude. In other words the present Western-centric imposition of beliefs, on the rest of the world, is back-firing which portends a rejection of Western concepts and beliefs during the inevitable negotiations of a new world-order in the near future.

Neocolonialism is the continuation or reimposition of imperialist rule by a state (usually, a former colonial power) over another nominally independent state (usually, a former colony). Neocolonialism takes the form of economic imperialism, globalization, cultural imperialism and conditional aid to influence or control a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control (hegemony).

Neocolonialism takes the form of economic imperialism, globalization, cultural imperialism and conditional aid to influence or control a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control (hegemony).

Neocolonialism differs from standard globalization and development aid in that it typically results in a relationship of dependence, subservience, or financial obligation towards the neocolonialist nation. This may result in an undue degree of political control or spiraling debt obligations, functionally imitating the relationship of traditional colonialism. Neocolonialism frequently affects all levels of society, creating neo-colonial systems that disadvantage local communities, such as neo-colonial science.

Neo-colonialism is a concept used by non-Western-countries to qualify Western governance behaviors towards them. The concept is also used by developmentalist economists, like Jeffrey Sachs for example, who believe that non-Western-countries have an inherent right to economic development in the sphere of Western-Modernity which Western countries now try to counter under various pretexts like environmentalism, climate change, human rights, and so on.

I personally believe that, during the coming negotiation of the forms of the new world-order, “the inherent right of economic development” will become one of the major points of contention highlighted by non-Western-countries and their contention will be accompanied, I believe, by a right of reparation for centuries of cultural and economic genocide. And in this context the moment is rapidly approaching when Western countries will be confronted to growing demands to dismantle their debt trap holding non-Western-countries hostage to their pretensions at recovering the principal and the interests on the debts they contracted to them…

Loss of Sovereignty

Western imperial hegemony today takes the form of neocolonialism or the indirect management of non-Western-countries governments by indoctrination and corruption of their elites :
- Indoctrination of non-Western elites
  
  The elites of non-Western-countries have been systematically indoctrinated to the tenets of Neo-liberalism that have been peddled over the last 50 years by the institutions of the United-Nations and a bunch of international organizations, like the Trilateral Commission, that are financed by Western big capital holders.
  
  China’s economic elites, for example, have been recruited primarily among USA trained economists from the 1980’s until sometime after 2010 when locally trained economists started to be selected in priority.
  
  The CPC was well aware of the contradiction of sending hundred thousands students to the US annually where they would be submitted to a strict indoctrination to an ideology of Neoliberalism that favors the implementation of the rationality of Modernity above all else. But it judged this was the price to pay to gain specialized knowledge in the social sciences.
  
  Under his 3rd term as President Xi Jingping is now cleaning up the CPC and China’s state administration from USA trained economists, and other social sciences specialists, who pushed the country in over indebtment and in the throat of Western corporate cultural massification while encouraging the experimentation of Postmodernism in the arts.
  
  The paradox of Western-Modernity, that I develop in the Volumes 2 and 3 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, on the one hand unleashes the production of an abundance of cheap consumer goods that generate the envy of the individuals all around the world. On the other hand, Western modernity generates in the minds of non-Western elites the perception that they must acquire the rationality of Western modernity, which is at work in all the specialized fields of the social sciences.
  
  This invariably leads to the death of their societies' traditional approaches to knowledge formation, which invariably concludes with the genocide of their traditional cultures. Western modernity also generates a series of side-effects that are responsible for the rapid extinction of living species. But Western elites want at all costs to avoid discussions about the systematic externalities of Western modernity that are the cause of the current avalanche of its side-effects !
- Corruption or blackmail of non-Western elites
  
  Where and when the indoctrination, of non-Western-elites, is not working satisfactorily Western countries customize special programs that are especially adapted to the realities of resisting non-Western-countries.
  
  Over the last century the US 3 letter agencies have accumulated a panoply of specialized knowings about the engineering of social consent through the spread of propaganda, the manipulation of the news, the propagation of Neoliberal and Postmodern so called universal truths by Non Government Organizations (NGO’s), the adoption of legislation that is tainted by Neoliberalism, the militarization of institutions of force, and so on and on.
  
  Ultimately the black budgets, of US 3 letter agencies, unblock any resistance to the panoply of their specialized knowings.
- Cultural genocide
  
  It is undeniable that Western-Modernity’s ultra successful production of material goods, and the envy of the citizens of the whole world to participate in the splurge of consumerism, resulted in the mass-conversion of nearly all humans on this earth to its paradigm and its societal logic.
  
  In the process traditional systems of knowledge formation, and the cultural fields of societies, collapsed in a worldwide cultural genocide that forced everyone to follow the normality of the rationality of Western-Modernity which is the expression of its totalitarianism !
  
  The resulting cultural destabilization, of non-Western-societies, became the opportunity of Western countries to impose their governance diktats. This process sums up the societal reality of non-Western-countries over the last 2 centuries.
- Continuous economic dependency
  
  The cultural destabilization, in the context of a Western Neo-colonial hegemony, inevitably leads to a systemic economic dependence. It is at this stage that the loss of sovereignty through the indoctrination of the elites, or their corruption, provides the most favorable context for the capture by Western economic actors of the resources of non-Western countries.
  
  Breaking out of their captive context has always been the dream of non-Western countries. But their systemic dependence has been proven by history to be extremely difficult to shed, for, they were like dwarfs fighting against titanic forces.

5.2. 3. The west rejects the evolution of Western-Modernity

As I have laid out exhaustively, in book1 of the Volume 2 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, Early-Western-Modernity emerged with the conversion of Frank long distance merchants sometime in the 12th century and the implementation of a voluntary program of assistance to their commerce by the Counts of Champagne.

Over the following 5 centuries Western-Modernity has expanded its rationality to all there is under the sun. This culminated with the triumph of philosophic rationalism and science under the Enlightenment which facilitated the explosion of material productions under the industrial revolution.

The silent revolution of the 1970’s finally expanded the realm of investment of Western big capital holders to the whole world. Unfortunately this silent revolution went against the interests of the citizens, of Western nations and their societies. This silent revolution resulted indeed in a long chain of causes and effects that led to the transfer of Western industrial activities to Southern countries.

China was the sole Southern country that, over the last 3 millennia, had accumulated a political theory and a theory of governance under chaotic conditions that was rooted in its historical practice. The “Chinese Traditional Knowledge” formation, and the “Chinese Traditional Culture” accompanying it, procured the insight to Deng Xiao Ping and his comrades to gamble on the financialization of Western economies to acquire on the cheap their production know-how and their capital. And by positioning itself as having the most favorable contextual settings to maximize the profits of Western big capital holders China succeeded to capture the bulk of Western know-how and capital that were shifting to the South.

This resulted in 30 glorious years of extreme profits for Western capital holders and extremely cheap mass commodities craved by Western populations. But the glory suddenly turned sour when the World Bank announced in 2014 that China’s economy was on the verge of surpassing the US economy in PPP terms. This announcement was followed by a short period of silence that was suddenly interrupted by Donald Trump’s win of the presidential title in 2016.

The Trump Presidency originated a trade war and, under the authority of Robert Kadlec (10), it was most probably the source of repeated biological attacks against China in 2018 and 2019. The last such attacks was in Wuhan and caused the Covid pandemic. The Biden Presidency expanded Trump’s trade-war, against China, into a technological and financial war that has backfired and is badly hurting the Western world.

Western Europe's embrace of the United States, which uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder against Russia, has led to a new episode of de-industrialization of its chemical, mechanical engineering and automotive industries, which will cause a fall in its GDP and widespread unemployment. The US technology sector, while still the most advanced in the world, has suffered a massive and direct loss of market share as a result of China's counter-sanctions. This loss of market share will inevitably translate into a reduction in research budgets in the field of technological development, as the Chinese state redirects the massive investment of its real estate sector towards basic science, research and technological development.

Over the last ten years, the United States' strategy has been to impose diktats on the rest of the world. Europe was forced to sanction Russia, and in the process it lost most of its supplies of cheap, high-quality Russian resources, resulting in huge consumer price rises and the loss of a significant share of its export market. For years, Russia had been preparing its economy to counter what it saw as inevitable Western sanctions. So, when the West sanctioned it, for its "special military operation" in Ukraine, the country was ready to seize the opportunity to rally the whole country behind a program of import substitution and reorientation of its exports from Western Europe to East Asia. Sanctions against China focused on reducing its imports of advanced technologies, with the aim of reducing its production of advanced consumer products. But China had also been preparing for this American move for years, and launched package after package of programs to support technological innovation in its most strategic industrial sectors: semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and 6G communications standards and wireless internet, the internet of things (IOT), quantum computing, robotic process automation (RPA), genomics, space technologies, military applications, etc.

Backfiring sanctions are puzzling Western decision-makers. The more ideologically oriented are shouting for retribution in the form of more sanctions and the threat of economic blockades that could easily turn into a kinetic conflict. The more pragmatic are questioning the sanity of digging an ever deeper hole for their nations and are asking for dialogue with China and Russia. But they are still a minority. China and Russia furthermore doubt of the Western capability to implement its agreements.

The Western silent revolution of the 1970’s is now reaching its conclusion in the form of an explosion of the trade, finance, and technological war that could possibly turn into a kinetic war characterized by the launch of intercontinental hypersonic missiles. The launch of such missiles would stop after a few hours to let the survivors count their losses. What follows would assuredly depend on the registered losses by both sides. I’m afraid that if one side were to have inflicted far worse damages, than those it suffered, it would most probably be tempted to launch all it can to cause the extinction of the other side…

5.2.4. There Is Definitely An Alternative to the West

The unexpected rise of China

China’s strategy of positioning itself as having the most favorable contextual settings to maximize the profits of Western big capital holders ensured that it captured the bulk of the Western know-how and capital involved in the expansion of their reach to the whole world.

In the process the country built the most extensive — national infrastructure that the world has ever seen — national production apparatus that the world has ever seen. But while this feat had been planned all along by Chinese strategists its successful outcome was unexpected in the eyes of Western strategists who were literally taken by surprise.

China’s national infrastructure and its national production apparatus, stimulated the concentration of large chunks of production chains within the confines of its territory. And the delocalization by Chinese enterprises, of their lowest technology production capabilities, to ASEAN countries exploded the GDP of these countries while unifying a tight knit Regional Economic Block (REB) that completes China’s production chains with the supply of low cost parts and the procurement of machinery and consumer goods.

The rise of ASEAN as an appendix of China was progressive but rapid. Most importantly all the parties remained cool headed and never boosted about the reality of their future potential. When both sides, sometime in the beginning of the 2020’s, became their most important trade and investment partners the West awakened to the new reality on the ground and started to search for fissures in the new South-East-Asian REB that could be exploited to cause its future downfall. All in all it can be said that all ASEAN members are skillfully skirting Western poison-pills intended to derail their future potential growth.

Once again, while this feat had been planned all along by Chinese strategists, its successful outcome was unexpected in the eyes of Western strategists who were literally taken by surprise. But this time around the whole world awakened to what had just happened… This was a confirmation that the Chinese approach is working and can be reproduced elsewhere.

China proves that “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony

China’s economic rise, and the subsequent rise of ASEAN, is awakening the whole world about the fact that Margaret Thatcher and TINA had been wrong all along. Western hegemony is suddenly losing its luster. The low-tide of pessimism in the collective subconscious seems to be turning into a high-tide of optimism at the prospect of the fall of Western hegemony.

TINA is shifting into TIDAA or “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony. But the hope is still merely related to the potential of a future new world order. Before this new world order materializes a lot of water will still have to flow in the oceans.

TIDAA is about the hope of a better future than what Western-Modernity has given us. But this hope is accompanied by growing risks of :
- Kinetic conflicts
  
  In the words of some US high level military commanders the USA will soon use force against China in order to restrain its further economic development. Whatever their words might be worth we are forced to observe the de-facto build-up of military forces by countries on both sides of the present Geopolitical divide. But only time will tell how factual history will unfold, so while remaining clear-minded, we'd better keep quiet.
- Western societal atomization → institutional collapse
  
  As I laid out in “Modernity 02. 4.10. the cultural continuum breaks down” societal atomization will conclude with “the death of Western societies”.
- Numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity
  
  I laid out this aspect of Late-Western-Modernity in “Modernity 02. Part 2. Great Convergence of late-Modernity”. In substance the paradigm of Western-Modernity forces numerous externalizations of costs that are absorbed by the habitat of life and the individuals of the different species living in this habitat. But this comes with costly consequences for their future generations. During this Late-Western-Modernity these consequences are already inflicting us with a predicament of interruption of life as usual.
  
  But these growing risks, on our present horizon, are not only isolated. They are converging and an acceleration has occurred on the path to their individual thresholds which implies that the time-frame to their tipping-points has considerably narrowed.
  
  In the Volume 2 and 3 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity” I call this convergence and the accompanying acceleration of its consequence “the great Convergence of the numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity”.

Notes

1. “Twilight of the CCP…AND Shambaughism?” , China Matters, by Peter Lee. 2015-03-13.

2. “Unlocked: Xi Jinping Prepares for War” , Patreon, by Peter Lee. 2022-10-23.

3. "Traveler’s Tales: My August 2023 Trip to China" , Patreon, by Peter Lee. 2023-08-30.

4. ABC’s = American Born Chinese.

5. "Historical materialism', Wikipedia.

6. "The Fiscal Stimulus Program and Public Governance Issues in China", OECD Journal on Budgeting, Vol. 11/3., by Christine Wong. 2011-10-19.

7. "The Transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity. Volume 2. Modernity-01. Part 1. Pre-Modernity was the context of Modernity's emergence" by laodan

8. "The wedges between productivity and median compensation growth", Economic Policy Institute, by Lawrence Mishel. 2012-04-26.

9. “Hegemony”, from Wikipedia

10. “Neo-colonialism”, from Wikipedia

11. "Battlefield of the Future. Chapter 10. Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare", by Lt Col Robert P. Kadlec, USAF.

"If the target commodity was a principal cash crop or food source, using BW may inflict a grave blow to that nation’s economy or society and possibly result in some political impact. History has recorded the chaos and instability created by such natural catastrophes as famines and epidemics. Using BW in this fashion would have applications to waging low-intensity warfare with strategic outcomes.
... The real and hypothetical examples cited highlight the opportunity offered by BW as a means to attack the agricultural infrastructure of an adversary. The existence of naturally occurring or endemic agricultural pests or diseases and outbreaks as described permit an adversary to use BW with plausible denial.
... In the post-cold war era and as we enter the twenty-first century, the economy determines superpower status. The threat posed by biological weapons deserves prudent consideration."

Daily reality and the news about it. Part 4.

2023-09-28T16:00:00.001-04:00

Part 4. Science → great convergence → mass extinction event

For memory the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, that are presently converging, are accelerating both : — the unleashing, by each one of them, of tipping points that are sooner than later going to flip the Geo-bio-chemical state of the earth into new states from where there is no return — the creation of new critical areas of instability like the atomization of the societies, that reach the Late mode of development of Western-Modernity — the destabilization of the existing world-order due to the US refusal to accept the implications of the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world, outside the realm of the Western civilization, which might eventually lead to a 3rd World War that would be fatal to our present societal arrangements and possibly for the survival of our species.

The atomization of Western nations incapacitates their ability to undertake any large scale project successfully while the destabilization of the existing world-order negates workable answers to most of the side-effects of Western-Modernity which guarantees the worse possible outcome for the human species ! And the fact is that the worst outcome of the Great-Convergence has already been engaged in the form of a process of mass-extinction of life on earth (1) !

The emergence, of the processes leading to such a dire outcome, results from the convergence and interactions between different forms of rationalities : — the economic rationality of Modernity — the rationality of science — the governance rationality of power-societies. There is no avoiding the conclusion that each one of these rationalities shares the responsibility for the dire outcome that I just mentioned. But their convergence and interactions are greatly multiplying their individual potential.

4.1. Conceptual Clarification

In “Part 3. 3.1.2. Atomism is the paradigm of a system of knowledge formation that assembles atoms into larger structures”, I give a sketch of the different links in the chain of causality that animates the process of societal evolution. The first 6 links read as follows :

A knowledge paradigm generates a system of knowledge formation.

Those in charge of a system of knowledge formation try to generate a foundational worldview to share with their fellow citizens

A foundational worldview generally results is a new societal paradigm.

A new societal paradigm generally results in an archetypal model of society.

An archetypal model of society always generates a system of societal logic

A system of societal logic eventually generates a civilization with its historical worldview like a religion or a philosophy.

But as the millennia long transition from small bands to tribal societies, and later from tribal societies to power societies, illustrate this is an extremely long process that is fraught with numerous uncertainties.

At this point we have to acknowledge the fact that Europe dominated the field of archaeology, for nearly 2 centuries which bestowed a perception of truth to its approach that was reflected on the world market for ideas over the last centuries. People were blindly following the conclusions of the history departments of European universities until sometime after the 2nd World War when Western big capital holders started to seed the idea of expanding their reach to the whole world.

This means that the bulk of the research about power-societies and civilizations was done until quite recently by Western European researchers who focused their attention near exclusively to the area that, in European parlance, was called the Middle-East which is a term that should be averted for its Eurocentrism. The appellation Middle-East conveys the prejudices, that Western Europeans held throughout their history toward the peoples from the East, which Edward W. Said laid out so convincingly in his book “Orientalism”, that was published in 1978. To avoid the suggestion of a subconscious reference to this kinds of Western prejudices I call this region the “Tri-Continental-Area”.

Having said this the fact is that the TCA and East-Asia followed a different kind of transition from tribal societies to power-societies that has profoundly affected their vision of the world and their treatment of “the other”. In the TCA the knowledge paradigm of animism that had sustained the emergence of the archetypal model of tribal societies was violently rejected while the new knowledge paradigm of religious belief sustained the emergence of the archetypal model of power-societies.

But the power-societies, within the territory of present-day China deviated from this model. Their transition from the tribal model of society operated in continuity without rupture from the past worldview. As I laid out in the Volume 0 “Concepts and Synthesis. Part 2. Transition to power-societies”, the immensity of the Chinese alluvial plains allowed the continuous territorial expansion of tribal societies through the dynamic of tribal population growth. In other words the tribal model of society, and animism, were never interrupted and their transition operated thus as a slow evolution spanning thousands of years. As a result the changes in governance and in worldview were imperceptible and animism shifted thus automatically into the foundational worldview of China’s power-societies.

But the fact is that this differentiation, between the transition to power-societies in the TCA and in China, appears nowhere in academic history books ! And the otherworldliness, of Chinese in Western eyes and of Westerners in Chinese eyes, remains thus largely a mystery that continuously feeds Western dualism and its rejection of “the other” without there ever being a conscious effort to correct the ugliness of this Western automatism !

The conclusions of Western history, about the formation of empires and civilizations, are so deeply rooted in the history of the TCA that historians, including non-Western historians who were educated to the content of Western text books, are reading the formation of other civilizations through the lens of Western European studies of the civilizations of the “Middle-East”.

This means that the concepts and the processes applying to the TCA are being projected, until this very day, on other civilizational sites around the world without taking into account the reality of their regional specificity which leads to the absurd projection of Western concepts like “religion” or “god” or “empire” on an animist field of culture, as in China for example, that was governed by “Power Confederations” for some 2,000-3,000 years which regrouped “Tribal Cultural Confederations” and a big city and some agricultural villages before a centralized empire absorbed these “Power Confederations” some 2,250 years ago.

China’s transition, from “Tribal Cultural Confederations” to “Power Confederations”, shows that this process varied according to the specificity of different regional geographic contexts. And this differentiation in the transition process also indicates that the new archetypal model of power-societies could be sustained by different foundational worldviews.

Western-Modernity emerged, nearly 4,000 years after the emergence of the earliest power-societies, as a complementary extension, of the religious paradigm of power-societies, into a new paradigm addressing the secular productions relating to daily life. Thomas Acquinas’ humanism was a projection of the complementarity, of the new paradigm of Modernity, to the paradigm of religious knowledge. His humanism eased the coexistence of Modernity with Christianity by reconciling the secular formation of knowledge, about daily life, with God’s revealed truth.

Centuries later during the Enlightenment “the reason”, that is at work in the paradigm of Modernity, got illuminated in most Western minds thus expanding it into the new normality of philosophic rationalism and science that rapidly split into various silos separated by an ever more profound specialization.

Today, 2 centuries after the Enlightenment, scientific specialization has driven the various sciences very deep into their abstractions and they now follow autonomous paths that are no longer interconnected, among themselves, and with the holistic “First Principles of Life”. This peculiar state of science is one of the determinant characteristics of the societies that have reached the stage of development of Late-Western-Modernity. The other parameters are — the atrophy of religious belief and the practice of its rites — the atrophy of belief in secular foundational narratives like Marxism for example — the atomization of societies and their incapability to undertake successfully any large scale national project like fighting an epidemic, or answering the emergencies following natural catastrophes, or winning a world war for that matter…

Late-Western-modernity increasingly looks like a funeral car driving a dead body to the incinerator. While TIDAA instills hope, that “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western-Modernity and that non-Western-countries are on the right side of history when claiming the equality of all nations and their right to self-determination, Western countries behave like drunken sailors who have lost their compass. What strikes me most in the present moment is the contrast between the hope of the South and a Western dualism that destabilizes the mental state of its citizens by pitting a mad rush to Armageddon against a blind optimistic faith in mathematics as the ultimate Holy Grail of the rationality of Western modernity.

The field of mathematics, ontologically, is abstract logic for its own sake just like “the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation” is another abstract logic for its own sake that gradually displaced the religious paradigm of belief in a narrative imposed by power. Knowledge paradigms imply that an ontology is flowing throughout the continuum of the field of culture of societies. This ontological flow fixes the path of the societal knowledge formation and animates the internal evolution of societies. Such a process is at work throughout the territorial realm of all civilizations.

But how did mathematics come to occupy such a preeminent role in Late-Western-Modernity ?

It first was assigned the ontological determination of the financial rationality through taxation, of early power societies, in parallel with the invention of their written languages. And, over the last half a century, it determined the ontology of the digital transformation of all human activities that powered the implementation of the silent revolution of the 1970’s. And it finally is assigning the ontology ascertaining artificial intelligence as the latest technological iteration of a new economic cycle that is being marketed by its protagonists as an ultimate trans-humanist revolution that will first connect the human brain with artificial intelligence apps which will ultimately replace the human body by a machine that is bound to replace Homo-Sapiens.

Starting with the return of Frank aristocrats and clergymen from the crusades, in the 12th century, Greek and Arabic mathematics books got translated into Latin. The absorption by Western Europe of the content of these books prepared the scientific explosion of the 17th and 18th centuries. It makes no doubt that the logic of mathematics was the determinant parameters in the illumination of the minds of Frank long distance merchants to the paradigm of Western-Modernity. It makes also no doubt that the popularization of the economic rationality of Modernity operated in sync with the development of mathematics into the foundational parameter of science.

What I'm trying to show here is that the path, from a paradigm of knowledge to an archetypal model of society, is a very long process indeed that is not automatically destined to be completed successfully. Let sink in the mind, for a moment, the fact that mathematics has established itself as the paradigm of knowledge in the societies that have attained the level of development of Late-Western-Modernity.

Starting some 5,000 years ago mathematics fostered the ontology of the systems of taxation that financed the institutional reproduction of early power-societies which the belief in a religious worldview had originated. And its mark got even more profound with the origination of the paradigm of Modernity which explains the foundational character that it exerts presently on the practice of science.

The determinant impact of science and technology on the system of logic, of the societies that have attained the level of development of this Late-Western-Modernity, is suggesting that mathematics could possibly transform into a new fully fledged societal paradigm… But as I mentioned earlier the path to the triumph of transhumanism, against the realization of the belief in Armageddon, is along, strenuous and uncertain process indeed.

The following chapter shows how bleak are the chances, of the knowledge paradigm of mathematics, to ever reach the maturity of a foundational worldview that gives rise to a new societal paradigm. The great convergence, of the side-effects of the rationality of Western-Modernity with the rationality of science and the rationality of power societies, is annihilating the habitat of life on earth, and without habitat to live in, Homo-Sapiens will not be left the time to realize their dream of transhumanism

4.2. Rationality of Western-Modernity + science → great convergence of side-effects

The rationality of Western-Modernity is economic in nature. It is the rationality that is being impulsed by “The reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money, + the transformation of speculative debt + “the transformation of the gamble on nature, into a dynamic process of capital accumulation”.

The rationality of Western-Modernity has transformed everything that was on its way in its own image : — from the rush, by nearly 95% of the population, out of agriculture to occupy blue and white collar industrial jobs — to consumerism and hyper-individualism — from traditional knowledge formation and their shared worldviews that boosted the cohesion of societies to the rationalism of Western-Modernity that killed shared worldviews and left people on their own to solve their unanswered existential questions — from the slow life of small, cohesive communities, to the mad rush of large, atomized societies, awaiting collapse — and so on and on.

Science is no stranger to this transformation. The owners of capital who have converted to the paradigm of modernity feel obliged to invest in the design, production and sale of new products. In doing so, they own companies and control public institutions that recruit scientists to provide them with the necessary know-how. And scientists invent the necessary knowledge, based on snippets of reality, that drive the technological development of new products and services. In the process, they specialize and sink ever deeper into their silos of abstractions, while their increasingly complex hardware and software are used to manufacture ever-new products. Finally, they devise strategies to sell as many of these products as possible to unsuspecting consumers.

But the fact is that scientists don't care for a second about the damage their inventions will eventually inflict on the habitat of life and on life itself. They're not paid to care about this, and if they did, they'd be at the mercy of the capital-holders' manager-servants, who'd fire them.

In the eyes of Western younger generations, who are observing the withering of their chances to thrive as adults, and in the eyes of non-Western nations that have been forced to live through the holocaust inflicted on them, over the last 9 centuries by Western-societies, the scientists and capital holders have to assume the full responsibility for :

4.2.1. The holocaust Western nations have inflicted to non-Western-societies over the last 9 centuries needs reparation

The success of China in climbing to the top echelon, of the economy-world under Western-Modernity, instilled the hope of TIDAA in the minds of the citizens of non-Western-countries that there is an alternative to Western hegemony and that there is a better future awaiting them. So their countries awakened to the possibility of rejecting any further Western hegemony. This fostered a profound desire to leave poverty behind for the production of an equitable economic development.

This dream naturally implies a juster world order that protects their territorial integrity, their fundamental right to implement the mode of development and the form of governance of their own choosing, as well as win-win international rules of the game that allow them a chance to procure a better future to their populations.

Assuring, that non-Western-countries have a better future, is the smallest compensation that Western countries should be held accountable for their past holocaust. It is their moral duty to let non-Western-countries develop economically while they revise their own model of development to levels of consumption that are sustainable.

Only those countries that have reached the advanced stage of Western modernity should feel obliged to fight against the side-effects of this mode of development. Countries still in the early or intermediate stages of Western modernity's mode of development should feel encouraged to develop their economies as quickly as possible. And if the daily cultures of Western societies call for immediate action by all nations on the planet, their countries should be obligated to offer, free of charge to the South, the technologies suited to a cleaner development.

What I mean to say here is that, for the whole world to willingly engage in a restructuring of its ways of life, the consumption of the South has first to increase, while the consumption of the North has to decrease. As long as there are privileged countries and poor countries a common restructuring of their ways of life will remain unfeasible.

Humanity’s target is to avoid the extinction of the species. And the best strategy, to realize this objective, is to balance National consumption averages in a far narrower band than today while ensuring that these national consumption averages are sustainable for life in the habitat procured by the earth.

4.2.2. The refusal by the USA to accept the shift of the center of gravity of Western-Modernity to Beijing hampers a valid answer, by the international community, to the great convergence

Younger generations in the West and non-Western countries have a common interest in implementing remedies to make the homo-sapiens’ way of life sustainable with the resources generated by the Earth. This is not an ideological statement. It is the evidence imposed to our individual intelligence by a world that annually consumes more resources than those that the earth can generated !

Humanity is consuming today the seeds that should supply tomorrow’s resources to its children. In other words each year humanity is eating a part of its natural capital which implies that the resources available tomorrow will be less than in the present ! Our species better awakens to its absurd behavior !

In light of this the West's current temper-tantrum is unwelcome, to say the least. The U.S. imposed its model of world order after World-War2. It goes without saying that it was a flawed order. But the fact is that all the countries of the world became members of the United Nations. To short-circuit the natural evolution of Western modernity, with the shift of its center of gravity to Beijing, the US is now sabotage the order it created and leaving the world in turmoil.

The fact is that China's economic development is an integral part of Western modernity. The rush by the U.S. to use all means at its disposal, including war, to prevent China's access to the top economic spot is simply morally unacceptable. And it is so much more unacceptable now that humanity has to urgently face the prospect of irreparable damages by the great convergence of the numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity !

4.3. rationality of power-societies + the great convergence → mass-extinction

Taken individually science, the rationality of Western-Modernity and our present model of societal organization in the form of power-societies, have each the capability to damage individual life but they do not yet have the capability to eradicate life from the ensemble earth.

The convergence of the rationality of Western-Modernity, and the rationality of science, render both of them pathological. And left unchecked the great convergence will annihilate many species on earth. This pathology is already destabilizing fragile human complex systems and will terminate them if we don’t break its chain of causality.

But when the convergence, of the rationality of Western-Modernity with science, converge with the pathology of power-societies, in the form of the US’s rejection of its own world order, we assist at an abrupt acceleration of the process of mass-extinction that veers into a potential mass-annihilation.

Mass-extinction is the consequence of the convergence and interaction between — the economic rationality of Western-Modernity — and the rationality of science. But the convergence of mass-extinction with the pathology of power societies threatens an abrupt mass annihilation :

4.3.1. The rationality of Western-Modernity

The nature of the rationality of Western-Modernity resides in its societal paradigm that fixes the ontology of the system of logic of its societies.

An ontology is a vision about the working of reality while a societal paradigm is the choice of one specific ontology among the multiple visions that are theoretically accessible. But in practice humanity does not really choose a paradigm. A societal paradigm is forced upon it at the end of a long process of changing contextual settings, that are no longer suitable for the old societal paradigm and its system of societal logic, impulse a transition to a new societal paradigm.

When the archetypal model of tribal societies became in-operational in the TCA this model was rejected and a transitional period was initiated that after 5,000 to 6,000 years resulted in the archetypal model of Power-societies.

The length of this transition was primarily due to infighting among men of power that challenged any successful institutional reproduction. The sharing of a religious foundational worldview boosted the trust of the individuals among each others and increased the cohesion of their societal groups. And at a certain threshold of societal cohesion their institutions started to reproduce over the long haul of many generations.

The rationality of these early power societies continued to focus on the primacy of their reproduction to the detriment of greater complexity. One particularly striking example of this primacy of reproduction, to the detriment of greater complexity, was the custom of canceling debt when a new king was crowned. Contemporary economists have unfortunately captured this process of debt cancellation to justify their unrealistic proposals for solving the present systematic over-indebtment of the societal actors.

By the end of the 11th century a chain of causes and effects had metastasized, in the territory of the Franks, that put the propitious context of pre-Modernity on fire. This context was the political ambition of Western Christianity which wanted Rome to have have full authority over Eastern Christianity while having primacy over Western-European secular power.

This led to the East–West Schism of 1054, between Eastern-Christianity and Western-Christianity, and Pope Urban II’s call for a 1st crusade to liberate Jerusalem. Urban II was a descendant of a Frankish noble family and the participants to the 1st crusade were mostly Frank aristocrats, their knights, and serfs.

The 1st crusade resulted in a profound cultural shock, in the minds of the Western European aristocracy, that fostered a demand to local Frank merchants for luxury goods from the Eastern Mediterranean. The satisfaction of this demand forced Frank local merchants to practice long distance trade and during this practice their minds were blown away by an illumination. They had suddenly discovered “the reason that is at work in the transformation of their sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation”. And their religious like conversion to this “reason” procured them fortunes that popularized “the reason” with their fellow-citizens. As I mentioned earlier, by reconciling this secular reason with God’s revealed truth, Thomas Acquinas’ humanism initiated a half a millennium long peaceful coexistence between Western Christianity and the commercial capitalism of Early-Modernity that never got interrupted until the Enlightenment. By the time of the Enlightenment “the reason” had expanded to everything under the sun thus assuring the triumph of philosophic rationalism and science and their competition with religion for believing minds.

But as we discovered, along the 20th century, “the reason” initiated a separation of knowledge into specialized knowings that got completely detached from each other and from the big picture of “the First Principles of Life”. In their detachment, from what really counts in life, Western nations’ industrialized by externalizing all kinds of costs which were absorbed by the habitat and the species living in it. We discovered recently that this absorption came at the cost of side-effects that have initiated a mass-extinction of life on earth !

4.3.2. The rationality of science

A case study, of the responsibility of science in the economic production of side-effects, is given by the pathologies resulting from the intrusion of nano-particles in the biology of life.

Chemists discovered the process to produce plastic materials, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. This scientific discovery led to their massive production. It has been observed over the last 2 decades, that by the end of their life, these materials fragment into ever smaller particles.

Environmentalists observed how nano-particles of these materials have been spreading to the farthest reaches of the world and that water anywhere on earth has been contaminated. This means that these particles are now inevitably being absorbed by all living species on earth including humans.

This conclusion has been rushing biologists, over the last few years, to study what happens with these particles after their absorption in the human body. And the news is not good. These particles have been observed in each organ of the body. Even worse they have been observed sipping in the cells of newborns ! Biologists are still studying the impact this will have on human life in the future but one thing is already certain. Life will be negatively impacted !

This plastics case-study shows us how science, and the economic rationality of Modernity, share the responsibility of what is already known to end up in an inevitable catastrophe for life on earth. But until now this responsibility does not lead to any coherent societal corrective path.

4.3.3. The rationality of power-societies

The rationality, of the archetypal model of power-societies, rests on the will of a small minority to impose, with all means at it disposal, their appropriation of privileges at the detriment of the large majority of citizens which results in a two tier societal order that procures richness and luxury to a small minority while procuring poverty to the large majority.

The minority invariably protects its privileges and the means at the disposal consist in the mental manipulation of the large majority of citizens, by submitting them to an unrelenting onslaught of propaganda that normalizes the idea of the reproduction of its power institutions over the long haul of many generations. And in the rare cases, when the propaganda does not succeed to assuage the large majority of individuals, brute force is used to constrain them into submission.

Force implies the physical force of professional units in charge of the implementation of law and order while mental manipulation implies propaganda peddling the ideology of the men of power that is codified by their servant men of knowledge.

In early power-societies the ideology consisted in a religious narrative like in the TCA, or in an animistic narrative like in East-Asia, that was peddled by men of knowledge. In the TCA the men of knowledge were subservient to the men of power while in China, or Tibet for that matter, they were exercising power by themselves.

In the present late-Modernity of Western societies traditional worldviews have atrophied and the individuals are left on their own to answer their existential questions. As a result their trust in each other, and in their society, has vanished which caused their separation from one another and from their societies. Isolated individuals soon succumbed to loneliness that they tried to escape by absorbing mind altering substances like alcohol or drugs.

The epidemic of loneliness has furthermore been compounded, over the last decades, by social media platforms that riveted the individuals in front of their screens where their loneliness exploded in an unhinged hyper-individualism that viscerally rejects any orders by powers that be and any truth by knowledge authorities.

The individuals’ rejection of the diktats of the traditional protagonists of power-societies, that are the men of power and the men of knowledge, atomized Western societies and, as a result, they have lost the ability to successfully undertake any large scale national project — like fighting an epidemic — like answering peoples’ social needs during natural catastrophes — or like winning a world war for that matter !

Societal atomization implies that the rationality, of the archetypal model of Western power-societies, has been squandered which questions what is their path forward :

4.3.3.1. Or societal collapse and a new path from chaos to order

The present political dysfunction could continue unabated and an increasing social inequality could force an ever greater reduction of life expectancy which would further destabilize the working of societal institutions. The fact is that dysfunction and rot are sweeping inexorably throughout the societal body and one day something, that in normal circumstances would have been seen as banal, will act as the catalyst of a social explosion that opportunists will rapidly try to lead in order to satisfy their own ambitions or interests.

Such explosions will most probably lead to the collapse of societies and their partition in smaller polities that will fight among themselves for resources. In this scenario a future of chaos inevitably awaits Western societies and their citizens.

4.3.3.2. Or totalitarianism and order

Or the real authorities, that hide behind their professional servants at the steering wheel of public decision-making, decide that enough is enough and force the citizens to submit to a new form of totalitarianism embedded in the large scale deployment of the new digital technologies that today make the titles of the media.

I’m afraid that such a Neo-totalitarianism would succeed to put to shame all its preceding forms. The combination of the following factors implies total surveillance of the individuals : — cameras registering the presence of individuals in all places — A.I. scrutinizing these videos for “out of normality” individuals whose information is stored in their databases — the transmission of the information, that is relevant to the protection of the exiting order, to policing servants.

Total surveillance, in turn, implies complete conformity to the new normality ! But our behemoth technology corporations will not be the real power-holders in this Neo-totalitarianism. The real power-holders will be a small number of very big capital holders whose ownership confers them the control of the corporations and state institutions, that control the working of the societal connection nodes, that are strategic to impulse the movement of humanity in the direction that is most profitable to their interests.

I honestly don’t see how Western societies, in their present state of atomization, could reform out of the hole they have been digging for themselves over the last half a century. So whatever is the outcome of the present dysfunction of Western societies the fact is that their citizens will soon be confronted with the complete control over all their movements, all their actions, and most probably all their thoughts by a pervasive Neo-totalitarianism that serves the interests of a few families.

In the eyes of these few families, and their civil servants and private employees, the greatest enemy is not their anesthetized population, who will eventually be provided drugs and free games as a distraction, but Chinese state capital that threatens their hegemony over 85+% of the world population in non-Western countries.

The struggle for hegemonic control of the minds of almost every citizen on earth is the great monopoly game of the 21st century. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to constrain, in any way, the small minorities in charge of the levers of power on both sides of this great game.

Could the fact, that they know to have no responsibility to any societal actor, unhinge their actions to the point of ordering their servants to push on the button to start the distribution of nuclear missiles on their adversaries ? Those who follow the daily news assiduously will certainly not be reassured. In their separation from human societal realities the power minorities could indeed push on the button at any moment.

Note that this would terminate the cycle of societal evolution and open the path of a new cycle of biological evolution.

Logically the responsibility of science in the generation of side-effects should engender calls for it to address the damages that the application of its research and production caused to the individuals and their habitat. But the rationality of Western-Modernity is so strongly ingrained in the minds, as the contemporary normality, that its questioning does not even arise to individual awareness.

But what if peak resources terminates the industrial dream of continue to live as we have lived over the last decades ? And what about human sperm counts reaching zero a few decades down the road as some scientists believe will be the case ? Or what if societal atomization terminates with the atrophy of the societies attaining the last stage of Late-Western-Modernity as I myself suggest ? We could continue to enumerate a litany of other side-effects that science initiated in light of its loss of the traditional knowledge about the precautionary principle that wants the preservation of the habitat of future o generations.

Knowing that one single such side-effects could possibly result in the degradation of the habitat of life, a few decades down the road, we would think that their convergence and interactions, which are de-multiplying the risks of degradation that could cause the collapse of societies, would lead us to take radical actions to preserve the life of future generations. But this is not what we observe.

4.3.3.3. Humanity's predicament or the Great convergence

The rationality of science and the rationality of Western-Modernity are incontestably the root of humanity’s predicament in this Late-Western-Modernity. But before our species comes to its senses, and takes the necessary corrective measures, today’s normality of plenty could be gone and people’s minds could be dragged into another ‘cu-de-sac’ of a normality that leaves little available food.

It could thus be argued that humanity no longer disposes of the necessary time-frame to reach a sufficient conscious awareness to find the right answers to counter the predicament that Western-Modernity has force on the whole of mankind.

This just shows that shifting away, from an existing societal normality, is not a given. Systems of societal logic are logical derivations from societal paradigms. But these are buried so deeply in the historical past, or in our subconscious minds, that they do not normally surface in human awareness. The long haul history, of our species, indicates that the emergence and adherence to new knowledge and societal paradigms, that privilege the reproduction of the species over the future long haul, was always the consequence of a dramatic destabilization of the existing model of society.

This was the case with the destabilization, of the small band model of societal organization, by the Eamian abrupt climate heating that occurred some 130,000 years ago. The normality of stable high temperatures, over the next 15,000 years, eventually resulted in the emergence of a model of society that could accommodate larger quantities of individuals while letting them self-organize around the principle of decision-making at the unanimity.

A burst of knowledge formation must have been at the origin of the sudden abundance and richness observed in the archaeological remnants of African tribal societies dating from the millennia following the Eamian. This burst of knowledge formation played a determinant role in the chain of events that led to the emergence of the archetypal model of tribal-societies. But in matter of fact this role had gotten ‘subcontracted’ by late small-bands to specialized (wo)men who were supplied the goods necessary for their daily life in exchange for their knowledge services to the group.

Here after follows a sketch of what I think animates the coming rejection of the rationality of Western-Modernity and mathematics which acts as its most potent instrument.

4.4. The West is rejecting the natural evolution of Western modernity !

The archetypal model of "power-societies" emerged some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in the TCA. This model was adopted by the Roman empire and, starting in the 2nd part of the 5th century directly after the fall of the Roman empire the Franks inherited it with the help of the Western Christian church. The Franks’ origination, of the archetypal model of power-societies, imprinted a mental framework of exceptionalism in the minds of the inhabitants of Western-Europe who viewed “the difference of the other” as an unacceptable danger to themselves and their god.

Today the economic center of gravity of Late-Western-Modernity is shifting on an evolutionary path that is not acceptable in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxons who inherited the culture of the Franks. And they are refusing the natural evolution of Western-Modernity that is shifting the center of gravity of their economy-world to Beijing that sits at the core of an impregnable East-Asian Regional Economic Block.

In light of this Western elites focused on upsetting a Ukraine red line that Russia would eventually feel necessary to answer. Ukraine is indeed merely one episode in the Western strategy of refusal that the center of gravity of Western-Modernity could be leaving the territorial realm of the Western civilization !

The Russia-China alignment fostered a Western approach to the destabilization of China that focuses on all means available at the exception of kinetic blows which are restricted until presently solely to Russia. In their delusion of exceptionalism Western elites convinced themselves that Russia is no more than a gas station. Destabilizing this gas station appeared like a child's play and they would have destabilized Russia they thought that they would have access to its natural resources thus cutting China's land supply roads.

After one year and a half Russia's military operation has annihilated the Western stock of conventional weapons as well as Ukraine's operational capabilities as a state. In other words Russia has projected, in the minds of the people on this earth, the idea that it has the most formidable and strongest military !

In these conditions the next step, in the conflict on the Ukrainian territory, is :

4.4.1. Or a recognition by the West of Russia's security needs

Russia is presently in an incontestable position of force and only after a last offensive West, giving it control over a larger portion of Ukraine’s territory, could a mediation by China eventually lead to a negotiated settlement that recognizes Russia’s 3 initial demands about — the security of all Ukrainian regions where Russian is spoken — the institutional obligation of Ukraine to denazify — the guarantee that Ukraine will not become a NATO member.

But the million dollar question is if the USA and the EU will ever consent to a Russian win. It will take all the patience and finesse of the Chinese to craft a proposal that is acceptable by all parties but that gives Russia satisfaction on its 3 original demands.

But the most difficult will be to ascertain the flawless implementation of this agreement. Russia will indeed want strong guarantees that the implementation goes as is written on the paper. The recognition by both Merkel and Hollande that the Minsk agreement was merely a delaying tactic, to allow the weaponization of Ukraine by NATO, undoubtedly justifies Russia’s hesitancy about recognizing the validity of Western signatures. The implementation guarantee by neutral parties will thus be a must to convince Russia to trust the words printed on the paper.

4.4.2. Or the West pushes the conflict further in new territory

The West will in all probability want to delay as long as possible its recognition of a Russian win and it will thus try to extend the conflict to other regions. But the further the conflict expands the higher becomes the risk of a nuclear exchange.

Now that Poland refuses to continue arming Ukraine an extension of the conflict in Eastern Europe appears less feasible.

But a new area of tensions is emerging in Armenia and Azerbaijan that the US and the EU are cajoling in a process of integration into NATO and the EU. Russia and Iran will inevitably oppose this Western stratagem and it certainly does not please China. But China’s red line in central Asia, against any affiliation with the Western block, has not been made public as of now. It is nevertheless evident that the country will not accept the presence of NATO or the EU on its Western border. So it is only a question of time before China will take sides.

Another area of tension is the Taiwan strait and the South China Sea. The next election in Taiwan, in the spring of 2024, will supply a fresh outlook on Taiwan’s willingness to soldier on the front line of America’s conflict with China.

A territorial expansion of the conflict will inevitably sketch the first lines of a worldwide positioning of forces that will fragilize the accommodation of a neutral stance by Southern observing countries. But the more time passes the more the health of Western societies will become an inevitable factor in any equation that tables a conflict between the West and the triangle Russia-Iran-China. The atomization of Western societies is never talked about but its resulting societal dysfunction is more and more apparent mostly in the USA and in France where poverty, hyper-individualism, loneliness and the rejection of all authorities is crippling the normal working of state institutions. The men of power are trying to contain this societal rot by justifying the curtailing of free speech and by hardening the totalitarian character of their institutions of power which becomes a further justification for their rejection by their citizens.

All in all it becomes apparent that the strength of Western societies is weakening while the strength, of Russia and most importantly of China, is continuing to grow albeit at a slower pace than over the decades preceding the Covid epidemic. The health of the protagonists is thus becoming a determinant parameter in the outcome of their conflicts. The probability of a financial and economic collapse of the EU and of the USA is also increasing dramatically and this could radically change the balance of power.