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Stegiel's avatar

Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population."

The Technocrat (1938

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Richard Seager's avatar

I think we should write utopia instead of dystopia. The second gives them too much encouragement.

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Richard Seager's avatar

Interesting take, might do with another read or two. When I said utopia I had in mind that there's no such thing. But better I thought to write towards it rather than away from it.

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Stegiel's avatar

Art too plays a role. Utopia is spiritual in the sense that no material metaphysics can isolate reality. So of course story and maybe very old story told by different people in different times relates by symbol. Maybe the story of the Prodigal Son told forever

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Richard Seager's avatar

Yes but Greek & Egyptian story telling put such a prodigal son in context rather than as a force of one.

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Stegiel's avatar

We see dimly where that got them in the end when my art museum holds grave goods on tour. Rameses the Great. The story is displayed depicted on the 2000 BCE images from the mural ripped by art thieves with chainsaws and sold to the Getty sub Rosa after Setember 11, 2002 by Sultan al-Santani. We tell it different of course not being after life oriented with mausoleums like a Pharaoh.

https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/ramses-great-and-gold-pharaohs

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Richard Seager's avatar

Amazing that such art could turn up in such a place so soon after its reasonably well publicized theft.

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Lookatit's avatar

Do not comply!

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KW NORTON's avatar

You write: "Cannibalism is survival in this land and death has no mercy. Mercy is spiritual" Indeed. Good post..

https://open.spotify.com/track/3LWmMJ9u5fkFKwDRXNLR7E?si=a324fda91ab3459a

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Stegiel's avatar

Spiritual is lost in post-Punk music scene but not lost quite yet to Country and Traditional American music. I even wonder if It's A Beautiful Day could get airtime.

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KW NORTON's avatar

Nothing is really lost, just subsumed under the psychopathology of our times. It will pass, fall of its own enormous hot air.

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Stegiel's avatar

Fallen already. The Golden Age is our great mysterious past of which Valery wrote in 1919:. [ First Letter ]

We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

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KW NORTON's avatar

Beautifully said. All part of the great human story. But we have few stories or history from the ages of humans outside of and/or before the written histories of civilizations. It is our task to learn (over and over again) if need be how to live in the moment. History can be a nightmare as Joyce expressed. It can also be a grand pageant. The age we are in, the age of technocracy, may never be written. All dumped into the grand memory hole of 0’s and 1’s.

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Ray Horvath, "The Source" :)'s avatar

There is no "American decline."

America was hijacked in 1913 and since then, it has been in the grasps of foreign agents, who don't even live around here anymore. Now, they have decided to end the game here.

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Stegiel's avatar

A little yes and an observation.

As you know if you are holding that all was American before, during, or after the Civil War the distinction requires a defense. The claim is that creating the Fed. suddenly created foreign control in the land. The erection of Federal power was the first step in English Neo-Colonialism. Atlantic seaboard wealth accumulation backed Federal power. And the Revolution itself was an aspiration for Empire. By the Civil War tensions between the states had been running high for 30 years. England and France would have intervened for the Confederacy but for Russia. After the Civil War the rise of big business and railroad expansion furthered the investment from abroad in industry. As an American native born free in Ohio I think myself more subject of a Military Government than a citizen. However I am not a Canadian or Mexican and while America since 1789 has gone downhill it is my home country. So I argue in the sense that ab initio foreign agents steered the ship of Federal State and some states. Thus I can pick a period representing time from JFK to today and speak to the sharp decline in both cognitive ability of citizens and the Globalist hands that helped sculpt it. It is a wicked world in all meridians and we live in vectors of speed. Industrial revolutions created new world's. Biotech is the newest.

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Ray Horvath, "The Source" :)'s avatar

You and I could talk about these for months. Alas, all this is not considered "academic" discourse...

Please, write a few articles on some of your statements! They are genuine and helpful!

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Stegiel's avatar

Spontaneous me sang Walt Whitman. Even after Jekyll Island this our hearts could sing booking travel to the far far East.

After Covid this is strongly advised against and direct action by the Global authorities arises in the form of obstacles. We are becoming objects. We are told in objective language we are only unfree objects and man in the necessity of exercising their existential freedom must submit to Total control. Liberty is licensed by established Sanitary Authority. In practice this authority is always tending to the Emergency. The close relationship between Accident and Design in response and agency capture in Bureaucratic governance. Licensed authority took down the Administration of JFK, Hawk. http://evergreenreview.com/read/the-assassination-of-john-fitzgerald-kennedy-considered-as-a-downhill-motor-race/

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Sep 9, 2022
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Stegiel's avatar

Or is it Aliens? Or just extra details from Hunter's lap top. The contemporary farce is bells and whistles and a huge circus distracting everyone from the looming train wreck November 6.

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