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Rising Tides Sink All Cities
A rising tide lifts all boats… this is the collective bargain, the “social contract” so to speak, which justifies the world most of us live in today. That bargain is not only ending, but the very foundations on which it could be proposed are swiftly evaporating. A new report even questions whether humanity will survive…
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Letting Go of the Conquest of Nature- Why New Barons of Industry Won’t Save Us
How do you fix an economic crisis? It’s an interesting question. On its face, it seems like the thing we need to leave to seasoned economists, shrewd businesspeople and well-studied policymakers. Surely the advice of the IMF and the World Bank have guided many a country out of crisis, business-led decisionmaking has provided efficient outcomes,…
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How to Turn the World Upside Down- Without Making it Weird
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy summarises the principle of locality as “the condition that any correlations between distant events be explicable in local terms”. “Outcome Determinism” is defined in the same article as a principle which entails that “outcomes of experiments are predetermined by the complete specification of state”- or in other words, that the…
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Finding the Sociobasis
At the end of Book 16 of the Analects of Confucius, a passage describes how a lord’s wife refers to herself, how she is to be referred to by her subjects, and by subjects abroad.[1] Due to its direct and ritual-focussed nature, apparently many commentators have taken this section as a later addition, taken from…
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The “Ecumenical Method” for Thought- or, How to Start in the Middle
Oftentimes we cannot start from the beginning, for we do not yet know where that lies. At the same time, if we start from the end then we have done very little work indeed, and are not likely to convince another, or even ourselves, in our arguments. Instead, what we often take to is summarising…
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To be the Fountain, to be the Rain
If He makes me a goblet, I become a goblet, If He makes me a dagger, I become a dagger, If He makes me a fountain, then I shall give water, If He makes me rain, I’ll bring forth the harvest, If He makes me a needle, I pierce the body, If He makes me…
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Appreciation and Preparedness
11.26 in the Analects of Confucius tells of a conversation between the master and his pupils, where the former asks what each would do if accorded the proper appreciation. The answers which displease Confucius are ambitious plans for statecraft; what pleases him is Zengxi’s answer, that spend a pleasant Spring afternoon bathing in a river.…
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State Functions and Taxation
The difference between a mafia state and a constructive state is what they do with taxes, whether collected in cash, kind, or labour. A mafia state uses their force to coerce the taxed populace into labour which enriches them further, with three main aims: The production of luxury goods The reproduction of elite sources of…
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Emergence and Relativism
All things have some value inherent in them, particularly if we realise that value is situational, functional. There are contexts within which the valueless becomes valuable, and gems turn to ash. One man’s trash and all that. This clear-minded perspectivism can lead us to think that we must take all viewpoints as equally valuable, as…
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Revisiting the Present
Let’s set the scene. Over the past few centuries, the productive capability of humanity, which we can call our power over nature, has increased dramatically. The traditions grasping the societies that led this advance, and which can (to a certain extent if not entirely) be credited with its emergence and continuation, have spread throughout the…
Leaving Something Behind
New philosophy on persistence, function, and harmony
Leaving something behind 