Deadly Diad
Ukraine and Russia quietly go mad
For the “study” aspect of economics, I use the symbol or neologism or word ECONO. It stands for “economics” of course.
ECONO is not some innocent game. Nations rise and fall based on it. It is not a math puzzle either.
It is not clean like that because it is humanistic. Low-down dirty. The academic subject field is the filthy, dirty destruction of creative thought.
How did this happen? How did the thinking of Quesnay and Smith end up as this? Such a colossal failure of the human mind. A failure of the mind.
Cultural anthropology may be helpful here, as it provides us an explanation of how huma beings create myth. Humans never changed. People understand little, but will believe — anything. No rationalist every succeeded in overcoming this aspect of the human mind. Plato never said he could stop everyone from irrational thinking, he only wanted to cultivate the highest sort, the “gold” category as I understand it. Plato had gold, silver, and brass as symbols for three kinds or levels of human. The French, in 1750 - 1786, also wanted to create a more rational sort of person. But neither the Greeks nor the members of the French salons succeeded in overcoming this characteristic of persons. Persons will believe anything.
Oh give us a better Greek myth, we beg of you.
The myth factory, artist loft — creativity goes into action in every age, every era. Only to be crushed, squashed flat, destroyed by wars and civilizational collapses, Aristotle lay dormant for 500 years, until the Arabs recovered the texts. They lacked the hard drive storage space, is what I guess it was. …too few abacuses.
Which myth do you want to go by this era?
We need something new; we need something space age.
Of course, Putin never lost at anything. I think it was in 1991 that he became powerful in Russia, moving from Leningrad, St. Petersburg, to Moscow.
He amassed power and began killing enemies of State. Behold. He has tried to attack the Ukrainians.
Now, thirty years later, new enemies. There are always enemies. He never loses. He will kill you. You do not kill him.
After all the success it is difficult for him to believe he can lose. He will never accept it. It is a foreign idea to him. You die. Yesterday, 1,000 Russian soldiers died. One day.
This does not seem to disturb him much. Does he place no value on anyone’s life? And neither do his soldiers seem to always place any value on the lives of others. What kind of persons run Russia, serve in the Russian military? What kind of fate does the U. S. have in store for them? We are looking for some aversion to war and all we are seeing is a fondness for it.
If there is no method of government, the nation will be governed by thugs.
Ah, but the U. S. has a method: capitalism. The method of the Soviet Union was socialism or at any rate another way of organizing a society. Why did that upset the Americans? What did the U. S. care, if some other country wanted socialism? Then there were the two camps, the capitalists and the socialists. It’s like some kind of a cartoon. One side against the other. What is this—? ~ funs and games? The current Russia is not even socialist. It has no method at all. Everybody pays homage to the head thug.
What do I care if they have Donetsk and Luhansk? The subjection of the minority to the majority has not ended. Persons in Donetsk can serve either master, as far as I go. Governments lose their polish. The people always suffer.
Big companies make profits every year, but they destroy the world. The era of capitalism has ended.
I agree. People have always been like this. Then why, you might ask, did people like Aristotle, Buddha, Martin Luther King and Henry David Thoreau even try? Weren’t they just butting their heads against a stone wall?
They tried because within each of us, sometimes deeply repressed and other times not, there lives a desire, a need, not only for make sense of life but to give it purpose. It’s what gives us a reason to live.
An acquaintance from Iran once said to me about Americans, "the bigger the lie the more they will believe it." He would tell people he was Chinese and many believed him.