No doubt you've already read some of Ancient Engineers [at powells], History of Childhood, Political Consequences of Child Abuse, Origin of Consciousness, Athens: Government by Jury and Referendum, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, Environmentalism 400 BC, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, How To Get Rich by Jared Diamond.
Or how the Boyar Russians managed to run a nation with complex trade relations with absolutely no money using sheer politics, how Egypt's welfare might be tied to the supplanting of its negative interest currency by the Romans, Mikhail Bakunin's predictions of red and black dictatorships arising which were borne out. And for fun, the fiction of Sylvia Volk. Whichever ones you've read, I highly recommend the others.
You will not have read about any of Deng Xiaoping, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Hugo Chavez Frias; Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, Douglas Engelbart; Sakichi Toyoda, Ricardo Semler. As you have no reason to suspect they are related. Their relation is that each of them tried (and often succeeded) in lifting an entire country up one step on the ladder of Tribal Feudal Industrial Networked society. That is, they tried singlehandedly to alter the history of an entire country in a permanent, irreversible and fundamental way.
No doubt you know that history is not a science as it offers no theories, only narrative. (Anthropology meanwhile is an anti-science.) Well, psychohistory is a science. And some of Jared Diamond's stuff almost qualifies. Economics, sociology, psychology and politics are sciences too, if dismal ones. You will not be able to guess that all of these sciences have as their foundation micro-psychology, in the same way as chemistry and astronomy are both founded on physics. Without micro-psychology, the driving force for progress in psychohistory theory seems random and doesn't really make sense.
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3 comments:
I sometimes wonder what you would say about this book ("Death from a Distance"), which takes an approach similar to Diamond's.
Lame and useless going by the description on Amazon. There have been many, many such books about human uniqueness. All of them were disproved in the current fad for primitivism and animalism. Because every single one of them was totally off track.
These retarded mindless imbecilic creatures who have written that book talk of external observables such as acts, coercion, cooperation, communication and reasoning. But what separates human animals from other animals is their minds. As pathetic and primitive and mindless as human minds are compared to mine.
The authors of these books in other words are totally unable to pin down what makes humans special and different from animals because they are deficient in precisely that quality. They possess limited and deficient minds by my standards.
That is why they talk about "reasoning" rather than introspection and consciousness. Because they don't possess a sufficiently large mind to support introspection and consciousness. And of course, these authors being pathetic gutless wretches, they shy away from talking about the qualities which they don't possess.
Why talk about your own inadequacies, right? Hmm, perhaps because it will be edifying to others, because it educates others, and because it's the fucking truth! But no, these wretches care only about salving their own egos. They don't care about the truth at all.
That's why this book was created. They construed the trend towards animalism as an attack on their egos. Not an attack on the truth, but an attack on their egos. And so they counter-attacked. Is there anything more despicable than this egotistical self-concern?
So, my opinion of Death From A Distance is it's worth less than nothing. Literally, zero minus the value of whatever time you put into it.
If you like biology, I highly recommend In The Blink Of An Eye. It's about the Cambrian Explosion. Not about humanity but at least it's insightful and probably true, rather than puerile, superficial and almost certainly false.
The claim that evolution has something to do with humanity and human specialness is risible and ludicrous.
The claim that
# Death from a Distance comprehensively unifies what it means to be human
is deeply offensive. As even today there is no such unification even remotely possible. What with humanity being heterogeneous and there being at least four entirely separate "human experience"s.
The minds of logical people are not anything like the minds of creative people. And neither are anything like the stultified minds of magical thinkers. And none of those are anything like the sublime minds of analytic-synthetics.
The analytic-synthetic category encompasses freethinkers, iconoclasts and Angels.
There is no species called "humanity". Analytic-synthetics do not breed with the lesser species (logicals and creatives) by choice. They breed with them only due to extreme sexual frustration. The same way a wolf will breed with a dog or a fox, or a lion will breed with a tiger.
There are FOUR humanities. And they mostly despise each other. The lower ones despise their superiors for being superior and showing up their own inadequacies (ie, jealousy). And the higher ones despise their inferiors for masquerading as their equals (ie, blatant lying).
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