Feudalism: a system of governance by reciprocal legal obligations. – Absolute state of #SilverRule. People assumed FREE to sort things out by themselves w/ contractual agreements. – No central coercive power (the powerful naturally dictate the contractual terms)

2/ Neo-feudalism doesn’t mean we”ll dress up with a cloak, tunic & leggings like in Middle Ages. It means concepts like “active citizen” (CENTRAL institutions) & “rule of law” (UNIVERSALISM) are replaced w/ feudal serfdom of private contracts. Example:

3/ One would expect that Taylor Swift would have the upper hand in her own negotiations. In the feudal economic network (bilateral contracts) every seigneur is still a “vassal” under another seigneur. T. Swift is not “sovereign” but partial “suzerain” on her own work.

4/ The constitutional establishment of EU embraces its feudal past. Design for the future: more decentralisation of National powers + more private (contractual) law. In EU directives the word “citizen” is being replaced by “client”. e.g. The Client in the Public Sector.

5/ The lex mercatoria (from the Latin for “merchant law”) was prevalent during the medieval feudal period. The EU celebrates lex mercatoria as the “triumph of private autonomy” (#SilverRule).

More: Private law and state-making in the age of globalisation

Question asked to Benoux: But reciprocal obligations doesn’t mean they are symmetric. If they are not, don’t they break the Silver Rule?

In bilateral agreements (with no God/Universalism in the equation like in Golden Rule) symmetry is a tricky game. T. Swift is asymmetrically disadvantaged? After all “they” created her & she plays a twitter game. From zero to hero, she may owe everything to a handful of people.

In other words, the notion of justice can’t be served when it doesn’t exist in the first place. #SilverRule is chaos of different “justices” (symmetries). And if a universal notion of justice exists, then is translated in central coercive force (Christian nations, #GoldenRule).

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Darwinism is based on a single principle: similar bio structure = same origin. Darwinian *predictions* are confirmed as such: close Darwinian origin = similar function. It hijacks a cyclical thought that similar structures *may* have similar function. No advancement in science.

Example: evol first principles on Weinstein’s podcast. He had an *amazing breakthrough* when he noticed wild rats have different functions that lab rats. That speaks volumes on *similarity comparison* based on function. Same cyclical thought.

Pythagorean “evolution”: all physical numbers are multiplications of number 1. 2 = 1 x 2 3 = 1 x 3 etc. Every mathematician could argue that the only reason they managed to solve any problem was due to “Pythagorean evolution” that gave us the taxonomy of natural numbers.

Let’s say you live in a game simulation. You know that similar guns will have a similar impact (physical laws). Similar players behave similarly & all survived players adapted to the game. Like Aristotle or Cicero would have noticed. No need to assume Darwinism to win the game.

– Alexander the Great: my teacher, we need to create a new sarisa, a long spear about 4–6 metres in length. This will give us an evolutionary advantage to the tribal competition against the Persians, as adaptive Darwinian selection would indicate. – Aristotle: wtf Alex?

Hate to break the news, but the idea of system + emergent properties comes from Aristotle. Interestingly enough, even Jesus defined the ecclesia as a system with emergent properties.

The greeks literally invented the concept of axioms. “Believing” in the minimum number of necessary unproven principles. The Darwinian “Origins” is not a necessary principle for deducting inferences from resemblance. Independent of Gödel (incompleteness)

The main problem is this. Most evolutionary vendors are – to put it lightly – challenged in the domain of deductive reasoning. Here I do *NOT* refute the theory of Origins of Darwin. I claim that it is ridiculously unnecessary to most cases that it is applied.

Imagine a “perfect AI”. Does it need Darwinian hypothesis to draw taxonomic inferences on species? It just needs data from structures / functions / environment. Raw data could come from a simulation (with no Darwinian Origin). Inferences can be made in the dark (deep learning).

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To remove certain genetic diseases → we have to remove heterozygous gene carriers → population vulnerable to certain plagues (reminder: it was Mendel *not* the Darwinists/Eugenicists that established the laws of genetics)

1st Internat. Eugenics Congress: presided by Charles Darwin’s son (L. Darwin) dominated by Darwin’s cousin (Galton). Eugenics was Darwinian family business. In his final address, Darwin’s son presented eugenics as “the practical application of the principle of evolution”.

The laws of Genetics were discovered by a monk (Mendel) using something rare for Darwinists: math & method. Darwin had ignored or missed Mendels’ work. Now some claim he was a fellow “Darwinist” because he had read the Origins & used Darwinian vocabulary like… “element”.

Mendel taught Math & Greek to an elementary school in Brünn. Proficiency in these subjects had qualified him as a priest at a young age (Augustinian community). He initially failed his exams at the University of Vienna. His lowest marks were scored in… biology & geology.

A moral judgment often implies “I’m better than you”. The anti-theist atheist (Darwinian) moral judgment implies “I’m more evolved than you”. Eugenics is rooted in a progressive ideal of a pure human type, free of weakness & superstition (e.g. religion).

Once again, Darwinism offers the *minimum* possible tools to discover something meaningful (e.g. genetics) and interprets any discovery in the *maximum* in favor of Darwinian validity (a posteriori, after genetics or DNA is appreciated, now considered “proof” for Darwinism).

Eugenics was not *just* a science. It was all sciences combined. Every BS scientific domain pretends to be “over” the other domains by creating a composite (complex) combination of them all. Logo from the 2nd International Eugenics Congress, 1921

Auguste Comte who coined the word “sociologie” had done something similar. The “degree of complexity” (complexity science) naturally puts the new BS domain on top of a hierarchy of sciences (here sociology on top). Also notice a similar devaluation of math (again at the bottom)

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If yes, what can be improved? Link

Very interesting reflections. Some insight:

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica casually quotes greek in articles, without translation. It assumes the reader knows greek.

Back then they didn’t have the load of scientific subjects students have today. They had the time & energy to concentrate on ancient languages. Even atheists knew the contents of the bible very well. Jordan Peterson wouldn’t be able to stand 5 minutes without being called out.

When Harvard was established it had entry exams in only two subjects: Greek and Latin (not even math).

In France, the French Revolution was literally a deep dive inside the Graeco-Roman Psyche. Their texts, legal references, rigor. The Merveilleuses created fashion out of it, high-breasted transparent dresses reminiscent of the Greco-Roman.

Even the French civil code copied the Byzantine Corpus Juris Civilis, and concentrated all liberties around the Roman concept of Pater Familias. Those guys were fixated to resurrect the ancient world, and bring new light to a new world (even a new religion).

How did we end up here? I think new technology & sciences absorbed the brightest students to STEM and nobody sees value in dead languages. We can’t see the foundations of the house we inherited since we weren’t the ones who built the house (Nation States).

Excellent observation. The question is what is the “edge” that classical education offers to a system? And how is it restored?

The central message of our heritage is ἄτη (blindness) & αμαρτια (sin) not only in religious terms but also in political, philosophical

Modern examples of ἄτη (blindness):
i. promote bottom-up local actions blind to the fact that this builds a top-down dictatorship (e.g. ANTIFA, Lenin-style grassroots, mafia)
ii. promote “free market capitalism” blind to the fact that it strangles the market (corporatism)

ἄτη is a tunnel vision on risks that we have to face. To avoid a single risk, we take action. Our action becomes our death trap.
ἄτη = invisible risk-risk tradeoffs, blinded by loud proximate causes while distant causes remain silent (physics vs. meta-physics).

Example: The Roman Empire faced the risk of Christianity. Diocletianic Persecution (303–312), was the bloodiest official persecution of Christianity.
Just one generation later, the Christians had taken over the Empire (Greek language, once again, took over).

Diocletian is an interesting fellow since, until today, is considered a reasonable Emperor. Only a few notice that whatever he did, was turned against its original purpose.

Printed money for his soldiers… inflation.
United state & religion… state became Christian.

Christians took over because, unlike Diocletian, they were not blinded by proximate causes. They knew how existential is the threat of sin (corruption) in assessing risks.
ἄτη → ὕβρις → νέμεσις → τίσις
blindness → hubris → epic mistake (nemesis) → destruction

Blindness → hubris
I’d suggest revisiting the speech of JFK where he claims “Our way of life is under attack”. The press can’t impose self-discipline & resist temptation. Undisciplined freedom (1st amendment) undermines national security (ἄτη).

To summarise: the system is not transferred to the “best intellectuals”, but to those who can collectively resist sinning (Spartans, Athenians, Muslims, Christians etc). This happened multiple times, following huge geopolitical collapse.

Resist sinning, for most people, can only be enforced with external motivation, top-down hierarchies, rigid laws & religious restrictions. It’s easier & more practical. That’s how it still works for most part of the planet.

We’re at 800BC, the first scene of Illiad (Homer) starts directly with a hot debate between kings insulting each other. Achilles actively decided to NOT draw his sword because divine-inspired logos (voice of Athena) is more powerful than brute force. That’s the 1st “edge”.

Homer presents to the Greeks a dream that they had never accomplished in reality: UNITY. He presented an ideal mythical unity (co-existence) between different City-States, different local cultures, different gods, different ruling personalities.

By removing universal truth & logos, you have a division, now branded as “diversity”. Division in morals. Division in culture. Division of identity. The system can survive ONLY by enforcing one opinion over another (no universal values, there is no place of co-existence).

Classics gave the “edge” at Harvard, Oxford, Paris etc. by inspiring respect (internal motivation) to Natural Law & universal Truth. Respect on how nature actually works (natural philosophy). Muslims & Christians could undertake the same education (e.g. Plato, Aristotle).

Well-educated elites were not moral, as a class, but they were not naive. This has radically changed.
Progressivism evolves into “unnatural philosophy”. Views on gender, atheism etc. ignore the fundamentals of human nature & overstate social constructs & randomness.

So, the “edge” of a human system has to do with its “physical properties” as a system. The level of unity (vs. division), fragility, adaptation, humanism etc.
Hardcore STEM education is unable to replace 1000s years of literature on how society actually works.

If this is the scale of the “edge” of the classics, the question is “how” logos is restored?
I can’t see a way out of pain. Cultural pain & shock.
“ὃν οὐ τύπτει λόγος τύπτει ράβδος”
(whenever logos doesn’t work, the stick [punishment] works)

Renaissance was built on the aftermath of a huge cultural shock: the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Muslim world.
Bessarion gathered the first collection of manuscripts in the Republic of Venice, to establish what he called a “Second Byzantium” (alterum Byzantium).

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Intelligence is self-awareness of πιστη (faith, belief, trust).

It is is the ability to understand that belief/trust is the inescapable default position of the mind, and mimicking (those we trust) is the default mode of learning in the animal kingdom.

Self-awareness on belief/faith/trust, creates the most intelligent self-reflection: who/why/what should I trust?
That’s why idiots are so confident. They don’t exercise faith independently & actively (cautiously), but passively (blindly).

I’ve never met a religious idiot researching independently the original meaning of the Bible. They parrot a church leader, a cult, a conspiracy-theory website.
Jesus had (and still has) only a few disciples. The majority, typically, parrot the Pharisees.

Notice that idiots not only blindly follow ideas & beliefs from various masters, they also borrow their vocabulary.
Totally unaware that this vocabulary may be vague, ill-defined & doesn’t even exist as such beyond the narrow world they live in.

Since idiocy is everywhere (political, religious, scientific) wisdom comes w/ age after reflecting on the younger self. For many, this never happens. Why?
Self-criticism is painful. Going against the majority (anti-conformism) without the safety of a cult, even more painful.

The two strongest traps for intelligence:
1. Ego-tripping
2. Social pressure (culture & subculture)

This speaks volumes on why science & math was built upon the Graeco-Christian literature with tons of texts, concepts & vocabulary dealing with those two issues.

When an English or French-speaking scientist created a new term based on Greek or Latin, they didn’t do it just for the aesthetics. Sometimes, it was a way to say “f***k you” to all the rest.

That’s why Cicero introduced the world moralis (morality) by translating Aristotle.