Mark Cool,

It may be that book reading is statistically less popular among the current living examples of our species compared to the past. What about those of us who do read, are we less important because we may have dropped down into minoriity status? I may not understand your reply.

Robert Tulip,

I had hoped that the work intended to help move people's thoughts toward a more accurate and productive perspective and away from one that was false and destructive. I may not have understood the quoted words above.

Hi Joe.

Thanks very much for this thread, it has been interesting. I agree with your comment on Bloom's intentions. How do you see my comment above as differing from it? Is it about what counts as conventional thinking? I was using this term to refer to the widespread view that capitalism is evil. Do you view conventional thinking as the idea that capitalism will solve everything? That convention seems to have fallen into some disrepute recently, but I take your point to indicate there are conflicting conventions. I have mentioned some themes Bloom raises on this score in the thread on the Prologue to Genius of the Beast. A big question is that there are conventions within capitalism which are false and destructive, such as the CEO pay scandals and environmental destruction, but Bloom is suggesting these are not sustainable, and that capitalism has inner resources to renew itself as a source of world salvation.

Robert

This isn't exactly true. Some ideas are novel observations of empirical phenomena. Evolution, the Big Bang, Special Relativity are examples of some earlier ideas which arose from observation. Blooms assessment of the process of expansion and consolidation and how it applies to capitalism may have its roots in other sources, I'm not sure. However, his perspective doesn't need other ideas to build upon. Observation seems to be all that's required.

It seems his vision is meant in part to apply an evolutionary perspective to capitalism. Through that vision, depressions aren't seen as 'bad', but simply part of the process. Conventional thinking is that such things as depressions and corporate immorality are the 'bad' of capitalism and that we may need another less 'evil' system. However, seen through Bloom's perspective, these are the tendrils of the secular genesis machine going through it's cycle. Corporate immorality is a bit different than depressions. But you touched on that in saying that such practices aren't sustainable. During the 'consolidation' or 'repurposing' phases of the cycle, such acts will be purged as new systems are put into place.

Hi Interbane. Thanks. I don't agree with your comment. Take your examples of the Big Bang and relativity. These are ideas with a memetic provenance, dependent on the earlier work of Newton etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_o ... _of_giants is a very interesting and relevant wiki page, citing Isaac Newton's famous statement to Hooke: "What Descartes did was a good step... If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." By analogy, the giants are the memes, while the dwarf on their shoulders is the mutation. The mutation, as I said, does not come from nothing, but depends on the meme, just as the dwarf depends on the giant to see further. Observation does not occur in a memetic vacuum. The memetic provenance does not contain the new idea in utero, in as much as our bacterial ancestors did not contain us in utero, but it does provide the necessary conditions for the new idea to evolve. Of course there is a difference with biology, in that different memetic phylla can mix. However, this difference does not affect the fact that ideas evolve by similar causal processes as biological evolution.

Robert,

The use of the words “myth” and “capitalism’ in the following sentences may offer a way to convey an accurate answer to the question asked:



How can something be “for” (or against) capitalism? Capitalism is not a being, a person, a responsible entity, and something that can accept something, gain something, use something, and employ it, like a tool or a “myth” for construction or destruction.

I have the same problem when reading Blooms work; where ideas are “said” to have taken on human being capabilities.

It may just be a “way with words”, and I may just be misunderstanding the use of the words as they are intended to be used.

Thank you too for the topic, without human beings offering text driven by their ideas, or their interests, this would be a monolog, and much less powerful, as a tool to employ in the work of thinking – perceiving.

I’m going to ramble on at the risk of being unreadable, with the intent of hashing out a more detailed, or more accurate, answer to the question asked – concerning my confusion on the two expressed viewpoints:

A. Bloom is inventing new memes to establish a constructive myth for capitalism. His concepts such as secular genesis and messianic capitalism are intended to confront conventional thinking through a positive and practical cosmology

B. I had hoped that the work intended to help move people's thoughts toward a more accurate and productive perspective and away from one that was false and destructive.

If there was a “thing” that helps “capitalism” be more productive (something capitalism is incapable of doing, but I’m assuming that the words are stylish or “meant to stand in place of more accurate words”), then that thing would be some-thing called “competition”.

How do our two perspectives compete?

What do our two expressions intend to accomplish?

Do our two communications accomplish the same thing; do they mean the same thing?

A more competitive myth could conceivably out-do a less competitive myth within a social connection where the people consider themselves “capitalists” and then the less competitive myth withers while the new competitive myth thrives?

And I see my own words wandering from what I am used to perceiving. People thrive. Living beings thrive. Myths are tools used by people who create them, and people who maintain them, and people who employ them, for the things that people want to accomplish with them.

Will the new myth be used by the people who use myths to accomplish something worth accomplishing?

If your viewpoint, with your use of words, ends up asking that question above, then our viewpoints are the same, arriving at the same place from different places.

If everyone thought this way, there would be a natural monopoly. One built upon a natural tendency for ectropy – and that may be difficult to understand if you didn’t get here along my path.

I can elaborate in much greater detail.

Anyway, the question asked may or may not now be answered sufficiently – I am not often successful holding up my end of written conversations – often things degenerate into arguments.

I am roughly 50% responsible for what happens in a conversation – it seems to me.



I am much more inclined to simplify my perspective in such a way as to allow any thinking person, even a child of perhaps 5 years old (I helped raise two children), to understand what I see when I look at what I call “The Problem”, and the problem can’t be blamed on capitalism, or socialism – not even Hegelism (thesis – anti-thesis = synthesis).

People are responsible – isms are not responsible.

A. Criminals
B. Not A

That is a simple way to look at the people who are responsible for the problem. The simple viewpoint is complicated when introducing innocent victims into the reality of the physical world.

If the criminals call themselves capitalist or socialists, communists, fascists, etc. and in reality they are criminals, easily seen as criminals, by what they do, not what they say, so obviously criminal are these criminals that a child could see that they are criminals, then the ism involved is perhaps false-ism, or deception-ism, or plain old lying.

Capitalism, as far as I’ve uncovered to date, is (at its core) a pricing method. The pricing method isn’t responsible for torture and mass murder, no more than the pricing method is responsible for all the good in the western world (whatever “western” means).

Capitalism evolved significantly (as a pricing method) at around the same time that socialism evolved significantly (as a social science) around the mid 1800’s, when people like Karl Menger and Karl Marx were offering their perspectives in competition to anyone who would listen.

Criminals listened to both new ideas, and they ran with them, used them, morphed them, and gained at the expense of their hapless victims.

I have more than one source to back up my viewpoint on that history.

If a CEO plans on and then executes the plan to injure innocent people by deception, by fraud (legalese), then the CEO label is inaccurate. Why not call a criminal by the accurate label?

Are the victims held responsible for their victimization?

A. Roughly 50% responsible
B. 100% responsible the second time around (no longer innocent)

Complicated crimes are complicated for a reason and the reasoning isn’t often confessed by the inventive criminals who employ their minds in the work of satisfying their interests.

Why call a criminal by the false label: CEO?

Why dilute the meaning of the perspective, who does it serve to disguise the responsible people?

Have I wandered well off the subject?

If the next thing to happen, as a statistical measure, after many people read Howard’s book is a decline in crime and an increase in producing all the things people must have to ensure survival of the species, more food to feed people, more power to survive, and that trend catapults our species out onto other planets, colonizing them, because our power was no longer wasted on efforts to destroy each other, profit at each other’s expense, then my guess is that Howard’s goal will have been realized.

If not, then his efforts may either fail or even back-fire.

I don’t particularly like the way the book appears to apologize for crimes committed by criminals, as if “capitalism” made them do it. That may be my miss-reading and my misperception of the book, and I’ve put the book down for awhile, while I unravel some of the confusions I have in my head since I began reading the book.

I’m also reading an unabridged version of Don Quixote, and that one is also opening doors for me to step into and wander around, looking for a new, and better path out.

Some books are to be chewed on.

Thanks for that (and the effort to get there),

A very good illustration of what that quote above may actually mean, in real physical terms, is something called The Federal Reserve System.

If that “System” is going through a cycle itself (not being used to engineer cycles, not causing them) and it is (as Donald Trump might say) being “fired” (“you’re fired”), then what is going to be the newer, and better version of it?

What is going to be the measure of its improvement?

My understanding is such that the power to monopolize legal money is shifting to China, where capital flight is flying toward, and the newer and better “system” will be a Chinese design.

That is unless the people here in this land are inventive enough to resume control over our own power to produce – legal money or anything else.

I agree with you. Checking my previous thoughts, I think the part where I had a problem was on the weighting between observation and previous ideas. Our understanding of things may be held up by the scaffolding of previous ideas, but it is novel observation that catalyzes the emergence of new ideas. Evolution, for example, required a basic understanding of reproduction and classifications of species in order for the theory to emerge. But it was Darwin's observations that caused the new idea to emerge, and not a recombination of the old ideas.



Perhaps the sentence would be better read as "Bloom is inventing new memes to establish a constructive myth for [understanding] capitalism."

But that's Robert's sentence to disambiguate.

Capitalism may not have it's evil's as we know the word. I think as a system people use in transferring power, it should be weighted against other systems in it's ability to minimize crime while maximizing benefits for those under the umbrella of the system. Though individuals are responsible for crimes committed, we can't sit back and simply expect people to behave morally. That's not how people work. Whatever system of commerce we have, there should be penalties for immoral behavior. Detection of crime and scandal may very well need to be a part of any such system to catch people attempting to fly under the radar.

To put the problem of corporate scandal into Bloom's perspective; I think such scandals should be seen as an inevitable result of the cosmic search engine. If it's possible, people will do it. Such scandals are 'failed' strategies(bees that have returned from an unproductive pollen trip). The behavior is then discouraged(restricted). We can react to this failed strategy by putting better systems of checks and balances into place. In this sense, I wouldn't say these actions are apologized for, but merely explained in the context of the system.

Thanks Interbane. I think it is fair to say that Darwin's theory of evolution was a memetic evolutionary step in human thought. In memetic terms, his rejection of Paley's Watchmaker and Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics involved a new mutation, not just a synthesis of existing memes. Of course, the meme of Genesis sat as an awkward elephant in the room, giving rise to creationism, fundamentalism and other strategies for continuity of pre-existing Christian doctrine. The catalytic book itself, the Origin of Species, is like the dwarf on the giant's shoulders, and in time it has grown to be a giant today with wide shoulders of its own, enabling memetic influence on later thought.Myths are stories that give meaning to our lives. Within capitalism, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations contains a wealth of parables which contribute to the mythic meaning of the capitalist world view, as does Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For example, Smith observes that the butcher, baker and brewer (or was that the candlestick maker) slaughter meat, bake bread and mash hops (not rotten potatos) for sale to serve their own interest in making a living, not as a benevolent act, although the benefit of the customer provides the driving incentive for commercial success. As well, in the pin factory Smith shows the dramatic productivity of capitalist economies of scale and division of labour. We are not accustomed to thinking of these stories as parables or myths, although they do have a similar didactic intent as mythic stories from Jesus such as the talents and the mustard seed. Bloom's concern is not to understand capitalism by mythic methods, but rather to identify the stories which make capitalism meaningful as a narrative for progress and redemption. These stories are the myths of capitalism. Hence his idolising of JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller, seeking to say that America has buried assets in its culture.
Yes, here we see Bloom's main myth of the cosmic search engine in practice. This cosmology of expansion and contraction is a central idea for Bloom, from the evolution of stars to the lives of bees to the global financial crisis. I love his story about how cells put out feelers and only the successful survive, turning from pioneers into homesteaders. His approach is to use the central ideas of science as a framework for meaning.

Just wondering, does it almost make Murphy's Law, whatever can go wrong will go wrong, into a real scientific statement about the nature of the evolution in the universe? If things haven't gone wrong is that evidence that they can't? And similarly, given that mutation occurs at a statistically predictable rate (or did), we know what can go wrong (in this case the replicative infidelity of genes) will continue to go wrong at a predictable rate. But, all genes suddenly mutating is an example of something that cannot go wrong and won't go wrong. Following Murphy, miracles can't happen - they involve things that can't go wrong.

Interbane,

To say that specific actions are not apologized for, and they are merely explained in context of the system, and to be specific about those published events, in print, are two different things.

To be less than exact (not using quotes) in illustrating my viewpoint on apologies for crime, I point toward The Federal Reserve System, and the cycles of boom and bust that have occurred since the people who invented that system, produced that system, employ that system, maintain that system, protect that system, and perpetuate that system, have done so.

If I take my reading of Howard’s book on that system to be true, then it is merely a natural occurrence that booms and busts occur under that system – despite every possible effort to avoid booms and busts, to the dismay of the caring efforts made by the operators of the system.

That is one of the apologies I read into the book, conveyed without quotes. I’m not being as specific as possible.

It seems to me that our current lack of power (power to purchase, power to defend ourselves against crime, power to prosper, power to be innocent of accessory to crime, power to be at liberty to think, act, and be caring human beings, etc.) is an inverse measure of someone else’s power, criminal power. I may be wrong, but I’ve been looking for data that can control my hypothesis, to sway it, to challenge it, to refute it, etc., without success.

The data I get, so far, is either inconclusive (like “global warming”, “peak oil”, finding the guilty one’s responsible for 911, and other contentious flows of data) or the data is supportive of the perspective where our (non criminals) power is inversely proportional to the power wielded by criminals, and from such a hypothetical perspective (a part of it) the book appears to apologize for things that are well proven as factual crimes - more power swings in favor of crime.

That all appears to steer things back to The Federal Reserve System, as a focal point, and I would prefer to avoid such myopic focus since the perspective misses the mark.

I prefer to point to a more obvious focal point, that being falsehood, and its rival – the competition.

The competition, it seems to me, is accurate currency. If capitalism has something worth anything, it is an ability to convey the benefits found in competition. If something is much worse, why use it? If two things are on the shelf and one is much better than the other, why use the poor version?

The answer may not be readily confessed, and that is an answer.

Why use such things (one of many examples) as The Federal Reserve System?

Why use aggressive wars for profit, if the idea is to “spread democracy”?

What is the point? Why apologize for such bad choices, mal-investments, and bungled economic and political enterprises?

Perhaps they aren’t bungled at all?

My guess is that Howard Bloom is isolated within a social network whereby certain things are not questioned, not dared to be questioned, and hence they are not questioned, rather they are ignored, deliberately.

Such a way of perceiving is not accurate and to expect products that flow from such a perspective to be shining examples of accurate currency is, perhaps, expecting too much. And then there are words written within the whole of it where my mind is sent reeling, as if the brilliance and simplicity of the idea transferring to me contained the power to upset my entire stack of symbols, or some less ambiguous occurrence in time and space, as I read the book.

Perhaps I am the one trapped in a bubble of preferred ignorance? I don’t apologize for torture and mass murder, and I said as much when I ran for congress back in 1996. I ran on the “it isn’t right to torture and murder for profit” ticket. It was common for people to pull me aside and say “I agree with you, but….” – and when I challenged the “buts” the conversation ended. That was before I spent day after day trying to challenge my own conclusions on what I call “The Problem” – since then – and even before then, before “running” for congress.

I offer that to aid in seeing where I am coming from, I’m no “tea-bagger”, I am an individual, someone responsible for specific thoughts, ideas, and the choices, and the actions that naturally follow.

I can state again, on topic, that Howard’s work (three books I have now), to me, is much like being a player in the middle board during 3 way chess and having a teammate hand me a second queen.

It has become rare for anything I read where my interpretation challenges my thinking on political economy. I’ve done my homework.



If the system in place happens to cause injuries to innocent victims on a regular basis, it may not be a failure of the system, and the people who happen to benefit from injuries to the innocent victims may not readily confess their interest in preserving that specific system for that specific reason.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it works really, really good, don't let anyone fix it, absolutely not.

Robert,

Capitalism is, or isn’t, what I say it is, or your version, or Howard’s, or JD Rockefeller’s, but there are ways of measuring physical and now even psychological reality. The label merely points to the thing being labeled, it isn’t the thing being labeled, and my point of all this matter of fact stuff is to focus on the specific connection between the label in view and the thing in view, so as to measure the connection for accuracy.

Is your version of capitalism interchangeable with JD Rockefeller’s? If not, what is different?

A. Your version
B. An example provided by someone who defines capitalism in a more powerful way

My version of capitalism rarely exists; I prefer not to employ that pricing method. I have a hard time figuring out what is capitalism from anyone else’s perspective, no one confesses.

Here are two links that may or may not be examples of accurate currency (measurably true communications of actual reality):

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/index.html

http://www.reformation.org/wall-st-hitler.html

Those links are twins for a reason. The reasoning may not be readily obvious or believable if the reasoning becomes obvious. The work in the link, from my view, exemplifies the process called research.

I point to those links as examples of “capitalism” as defined by “capitalists”, and if that doesn’t illustrate capitalism, as you know it to be, then I think it may help to find an example that does illustrate capitalism as you know it to be.

To say that capitalism is suffering from a misperception, and to suggest, perhaps, that the mud on capitalism is unjustly stuck there, if that is suggested, is an odd way of seeing reality to me.

On the other hand, competition will increase the quality of production and reduce the cost of production to a point where the highest possible quality is reached at the lowest possible cost in reality, because that is how competition works.

Then, with two hands in view, my process of resolving the conflicts between the conflicting versions of “capitalism” arrives at two solutions.

A. Crime
B. Not A

There are many version of each of those two. Version A has one very specific and very obvious method by which it proceeds under the direction of its proponents, not obvious from the perspective of the innocent victims. It, or more precisely it’s operators, destroy competition.

So there is now this:

A. Crime (destroy competition)
B. Not A (competition)

Which capitalism is worth saving, and who has an interest in saving capitalism?

Why save it?

If the idea is to help move our species from a certain death that will occur when the earth dies, to bad for us, rather, if we are to move to a species saving move elsewhere, then my thinking is such that option A must become less powerful relative to option B.

If the criminals call themselves capitalist today, socialists tomorrow, and then fascists for a few years, then back to liberals, then over to conservatives, then to whatever is fashionable next year, whatever works best, and the victims fail to notice, then that is one thing.

On the other hand, the victims may catch on, and join in on the doom day parade, because failing to do so moves their buts further up in line, and at that point, it seems to me, the people in that line are not going to like having someone remind them of where they are, exactly.

I may be wandering well off the topic.

When the thing being used is obviously torturing and mass murdering, by law no less, it may be time to repurpose, and the labels attached to that process are important in proportion to their ability to aid in that process.

If, on the other hand, the labels used by the people who genuinely seek to avoid being even remotely associated with option A (crime) are set against each other because the labels are mislabeled, confused, misdirecting, false, deceptive, or otherwise not accurate, then how do the proponents of option B (not crime) transfer necessary data among themselves accurately?

Why, for example, are people who suggest that the official version of events makes no sense, are summarily titled as “conspiracy theorists”?

I have an answer, my question begs for one.

Accurate currency challenges falsehood, and falsehood must destroy the competition or lose.

If something better is on the shelf next to something worse, who will use the poor product?

A. Crime
B. Not A

What is the product designed to accomplish – exactly?





The book has upset my thinking, so I put the book down for awhile, and the pieces are falling back into place. It seems to me that life must seek at least two things.

1. Power
2. Reproduction

The obvious thing that life must do in our case is to gain the power required to reproduce on other planets. If our species fails, then our species dies out with the Earth. If the whole process starts over again somewhere else in time and space and that competitive form of life doesn’t fail, why doesn’t it fail?

It, if it succeeds, will produce the power required to reproduce new sustainable environments, extra-terrestrial.

All else, from that viewpoint, is academic? We live, now. Our species ends with the Earth unless our species doesn’t end with the Earth – then what?



I’m not following that line of thinking, it is foreign to me. “Wrong”, as in going wrong, must have some frame of reference – no?

Example:

Species survival = right

Species extinction = wrong

?

Hey Joe, fantastic post. Thanks. My version of capitalism I have explained in my threads here at Booktalk on the Spragg Waterbag and the Algae City in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm looking to establish an algae biofuel feedstock industry in the world ocean and would welcome American venture capital interest. The ocean occupies 71% of the planetary surface, and should be the next target for human colonisation, before we start to think about moving to the rest of the solar system. My version of capitalism would collect CO2 in volumes larger than current world emissions using the algae production methods described at my provisional Australian patent, and convert this algae into diesel, fish food, fertiliser, coal-fired power station fuel, plastic, etc to fix and regulate the environment and the climate and provide a large new industry to support economic growth. That way we could leave the valuable old fossil fuels in the ground instead of burning them like there was no tomorrow.

Robert,

Can you link to these places where you have offered your version of capitalism? I looked for a way to contact you privately but failed to find one.

Here is a similar link:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/index.html

If the path forward goes in both centralized and decentralized directions (one doesn’t destroy the other – destroy the competition), then market share will disperse thusly:

Some people will produce home grown food and motor fuel (from algae) in their own private vertical farming modular greenhouses made by themselves because they can afford to do so and because they can’t afford not to do so, and these examples run old gas burning cars on algae fuel.

Some people will buy ready made vertical farming greenhouses from a centralized factory type corporation and make their own food and motor fuel with those modular greenhouses, less decentralized than above.

Some people will buy algae fuel from large and incorporated centralized algae fuel producing business and run their internal combustion engines with that ready supply of competitive priced fuel, where costs are lower including the costs not counted (hidden on purpose) with the petroleum (I don’t sign onto the “fossil” fuel myth) type fuel.

Some people will buy electric cars, solar panels, vertical farming modular units, perhaps even algae fuel electric generators, and perhaps even buy some hydrogen electrolysis (or ‘cracking’) converters to store excess electricity production.

Some people will produce more and more of these new competitive power products in a centralized manner, such as incorporation, new thriving businesses that employ people.

Then there is the factor of "open source" and since I’ve read into Howard’s new work now, again, (and have re-borrowed his brain) my spin on the open source factor has taken off again – in my head – not so much on paper.

If you are involved in the actual work of producing algae fuel then please consider joining a discussion group I have been invited into, here is my e-mail = josf.kelleyATverizon.net (AT out and @ in). I can respond to an e-mail with details, if you are interested, I can’t be sure that you will be invited, it isn’t my group.

Here is a very old (all things are relative) illustration I made concerning my version of how things work in political economy – if you are interested in knowing such trivia.



I can sum up my version of political economy in one sentence:

Power produced into a state of oversupply will reduce the price of power while purchasing power increases because power reduces the cost of production.

If that is true, and I think it is, then it becomes even more obvious as to why criminals (legal or otherwise) must destroy the computiton (or leverage them into submission, joining the monopoly), since power produced into a state of abundance removes the power criminals have over their innocent victims.

I can go on, and I can specifically take a religious direction since that is another area where I have problems with Howard’s secular perspective. Howard’s work manages to help bridge gaps. I have to do my part in that effort – it seems.

Excuse me for breaking in here, as I don't have anything to say about Bloom's book, not having started to read it. One thing that interests me about this writer, to whom the word "brilliant" seems to be attached by nearly everyone, is whether he takes into account the social effects of the transformative changes he envisions. If you compare his book to Hedges' "Empire of Illusion" (which I'm also not reading now) or Dick Meyer's 2008 "Why We Hate Us" (which I am), would you have two essentially different views of the challenge facing us? Hedges and Meyers talk about the various types of malaise that rapid social change (which often is fueled by rapid technological change) produces. Their focus might be what is lost as traditional social structures fall, while Bloom's might be (pardon me if this is all wrong) the ways we need to transform our traditions. If this dichotomy is accurate, it wouldn't be a knock against any of these writers, just the indication that each is taking a particular, and partial, viewpoint.

DWill,

I don’t see the view you see. Howard’s work appears to be ambiguous or perhaps the right word is abstract on specifics concerning what will be a better direction. The viewpoint I read into the new book is similar to what a disinterested observer may see when that objective observer views human life passing through history up to this time, and then that viewer forms a hypothesis concerning what is most likely going to happen in the future. Mixed into that scientific measure of view is Howard’s cheerleading for capitalism, it seems to me, and the specifics as to what capitalism is, or isn’t, are not well understood by me, as I read the book.

I get the part, in the book, where the objective observer observes what has happened, and what is most likely to happen, if things go as they have gone, over and over again.

There is no question that human beings, as a species, will adapt or perish – as a species – no question whatsoever, like there is no question as to weather or not an asteroid is on a collision course with the earth, the specific time when these inevitabilities will occur is not certain.

People will re-purpose. If people don’t there is a thing that happens; inevitably.

So that part of the book, if I haven’t read things into it that are not written into it, is clear to me. As to what can be done, specifically, concerning the thoughts and actions of people during the process of repurposing, my confusion as to what is in the book on that subject is almost driving me to open the book back up and resume consumption.

If there is fear concerning a loss of good things during the process of repurposing, as if the baby is thrown out with the bath water, I’m on board with that fear, or that concern.

My background on this type of thinking (history/opportunity) includes reading work by Eric Fromm, and others.

Eric Fromm went very deep into specific thoughts and actions of people during the process of boom and bust, and he remained objective (not cheer-leading any political/economy/cultural/religious “side”). Eric Fromm didn’t go as far back (objectively) to view our species as “just another living organism” (my words) as Howard does, where the perspective measures this cyclic tendency as a natural thing, a specific result of the living process, a genetic instruction perhaps.

If people throw out competition, because people convince themselves that competition is bad, mistaking competition to be dirty bath water, then people will throw out the baby, that will be an error, and a very serious one, as the true, measurably true, dirty bath water is falsehood and aggressive violence for profit against the innocent (crime) – it always has been, and it is very dirty stuff indeed.

Criminals, it seems to me, are in a very good position to profit from a confusion whereby too many people are convinced in the need to throw out competition, out-law it, instead of focusing any defensive attention (any power people control for use in defense) on the real problem i.e. crime. That scenario (out-law competition) is akin to throwing out the baby and keeping the bath-water.

I cannot confirm that my response has anything to do with the quoted words at the beginning of my response. My thinking is that my response does have something to do with the quoted words:



What is the "dichotomy"?



My take on that goes back to the baby and the bathwater analogy. If people fear the loss of security and there is an assumption that security is earned by outlawing competition, by using whatever means possible in that work, then people will wish to conserve that traditional and cultural error.

If that is what is; then those people are doomed.