On the neighborhood oriented website, “Nextdoor”, one can easily read abundant posts by very clever (though not very cosmopolitan or widely read) petty bourgeois homeowners stumbling on what they imagine to be a profound and novel realization: that our society still does not yet strictly follow the logic of Social Darwinism, but for which they are sure their neighborhoods would be much tidier and more pleasant. Afterall, providing free social services of any description “enables” the continued survival of unsightly elements of the population who, whether or not they are willfully so, or merely cannot hack capitalism due to some combination of bad luck and genetic defects, eventually would surely either “shape up”, move away, or simply perish, much to the relief of their somewhat more affluent fellow citizens.

In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse’s fanciful retelling of the Buddha’s life, he dubs the urban sophisticates whose lives the protagonist momentarily immerses himself in following his encounter and affair with the courtesan Kamala as “Kindermenschen”, or “childlike people”. These latter are noteworthy for their intense seriousness and industriousness, for coveting and building elaborate houses and “pleasure gardens” in their city, and for winning and losing immense fortunes in the course of a few hours of dice and like games of chance, even while Siddartha attained his supreme realization in the course of aimlessly walking on foot through an immense wilderness, in the company of penniless monks and the occasional salt-of-the-earth boatman.

As the economic, military, and political citadel of the global bourgeoisie, the US has always had quite a bizarre, not to say schizophrenic, attitude towards foreign lands and peoples. From the very beginning of the US nation state, it has never been able to achieve a level of purely internal population growth that would allow it to mobilize enough workers, skilled and unskilled, to fully exploit the immense resources of the vast continent that fell under its control.

German historian Karl Jaspers is credited with coining the highly influential phrase, “the Axial Age”, to describe the historical epoch of approximately five to seven hundred years that witnessed the rise of most of the world’s great religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, etc). This period also witnessed the rise of large, urbanized civilizations and empires, hitherto unparalleled in extent and power, and a great intellectual and religious ferment. But alongside them, numerous other seers and religious visionaries, in the same times and places as the founders of these still extant world religions, were also active, on multiple continents, the vast majority of whom are little known today.

After some exposure to the thinking spotlighted at “Money on the Left” blog and associated podcasts (especially, “Superstructure”), I’ve begun warming lately to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). One parallel that really struck me with MMT was the critique I’ve seen of various leftist advocates of much stiffer taxes on the wealthy, pointing out how, for example, Jeff Bezos has a “net worth” of such-and-such amount, and how, if you just forced him to sign over X% of it towards goal Y, goal Y could be fully achieved, while still leaving Mr.

A lot of fundamental principles are potentially “wrong”, depending on our precise definitions of certain words, but can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. A slogan like “all men are created equal” of the American Declaration of Independence (today, we’d say, “all people”) is not a statement of fact so much as an ethical principle for organizing society. The latter principle is so foundational, it’s counted among the three cornerstones of the French Revolution: “liberty, equality, fraternity”.

On a certain provisional timeline, rightwingers are “right” about most things. The adage that rightwing intellectuals are engaged in man’s oldest pastime, “disguising naked self-interest as personal or political virtue” rings true. Such a pastime depends on numerous methods, rhetorical and otherwise: distraction (aka, “whataboutism”), deliberate ignorance of history, moralizing that converts all systemic characteristics into personal anecdotes, etc. And once again, provided you restrict your timeline to a limited window of history and the prospective future, you can often maximize or optimize your own self-interest with impunity – and even win over sometimes sceptical audiences to the virtues of your approach.

John D. Rockefeller famously extolled capitalism as “creative destruction”. And, indeed, Marx would have agreed with him on that. Marx, too, famously remarked on capitalism’s “continual revolutions” in production, drawing the whole world into its orbit. He even praised its resulting “civilizing effects”, and clearly thought it heralded great potential progress for humanity. The problem, of course, is that these “continual revolutions”, this “creative destruction”, has no constraints imposed on it by default, and left thus unbridled, alongside all the marvels it can produce, the chaos and torment it can inflict on the lives of ordinary people are also equally astonishing and perilous.

“Can we escape this boring dystopia?” goes the title of an interesting recent video by Doug Lain, the online media content creator (formerly of Zero Books, the small, independent publishing imprint). For the sake of maximal honesty, I will say upfront that I am not yet addressing the “can we” part – and, if so, how we can – of the title. For the moment, I just want to draw attention to the existing, peculiar patterns it points out.

“Crime doesn’t pay”, goes the saying. But what if it does? Obviously, not all criminals are caught, and though it’s rarely discussed in any detail, the fact is, there is always a tradeoff between costs and benefits of controlling crime. Ideally, there would never be any crime, but in practice, the costs of creating an enforcement and legal apparatus completely airtight against ANY crime is usually too high, and we have to settle for a degree of trust, occasional “exemplary punishment”, and the hope that deterrents are strong enough to dissuade most would-be criminals, as well as the occasional criminal being caught long after the act.