Katia N > Recent Status Updates

‘A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth’, is how Virginia Woolf put it as she groped for what it was she wanted her writing to show. That, I think, is about as good a summing up of why we write fiction as I can imagine.

On plazas of the city at Christmas
…when the gifts begin to tremble because lovelessness walks through the world, because it snarls at you, barks at you from the snow, and the silver ribbons rip and the tinsel rustles silvery, and the silver and gold, and a golden word comes to you on which you choke because you have been sold and betrayed, and because it does not suffice that for you one is redeemed who once died.

biography is only possible because lives leave traces of their appearance. The biographer gathers up these traces and turns them into a story, narrates them as a whole in order to bring into view the life’s arc, from beginning to end, which seems so hard to grasp or even to glimpse from the inside. This is the artistic or aesthetic element of biography: uncovering a life’s shape, and perhaps its kalon qualities.

Mouth, which slept in my mouth
Eye that guarded my own,
Hand-

and those eyes that drilled through me!
Mouth which spoke the sentence,
Hand, which executed me!

After his experience on te battlefield in WW1, Wittgenstein came to insist that one cannot change society, one can only change oneself.

As for you, she went on, you don’t change. Yes, you are astonishing, you look so young’ a saddening remark, because, however we may look, it only means anything if we in fact grown old.

True books must be product not of chitchat and daylight but of darkness and silence. And as art exactly reconstructs life, an atmosphere of poetry will always hover around the truths that one has reached in oneself, a gentle sense of mystery which is merely the remains of the semi-darkness we have had to pass through, the indication, as precisely marked as on altimeter, of the depth of a work.

But we read the newspapers in the Sam way as we love, blindfold. We do not attempt to understand the facts. We listen to the editor’s soothing words as we listen to the word of our mistress. We are beaten and happy because we think we are victorious, not beaten.

It is curious thing how little not only a person’s expressions but also their thoughts vary.

Whatever else they may have missed about the human condition, the anarchists’ belief in the drive for the dignity and autonomy of small property was a perceptive reading of the popular imaginary. The petty bourgeois dream of independence, though less attainable in practice, did not die with the Industrial Revolution. Rather, it gained a new lease on life.

disillusionment seemed to me to bear out the adage of Mikhail Bakunin: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Kreon:
..if the city sets up a man to rule it I say
that man must be obeyed
in small things and just things and opposite of these anarchy! what greater evil
anarchy is what ruins cities and houses
and battle plans
obedience must be defended
and never never never ourselves be bested by a woman

That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.

“The larger and more authoritarian an organisation (or state), the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds” Kenneth Boulding

Our Palaeolithic emotions are not a curse. The curse is the institutions and arrangements which bring out the worst in us.

This is very old, at least Rousseau’s time argument. I am not sure I’ve read 425 pages to come to this. It is as difficult to argue against as Hobbs’s one about all of all being evil.

I want you to imagine that the decision to detonate the bomb had rested not with betting scientists or the machinations of wartime politicians but with a jury of randomly selected US citizens fully briefed both on the impacts and risks of the bomb/the geopolitical /military situation. Now, ask yourself this: would that jury – with their friends and relatives waiting at home – have taken the same gamble?

Data is fast becoming the latest lootable resource that can be easily seen, captured, transported, and stored. AI is more extractive than artificial: it’s dependent on cheap workers, cheap materials, and stolen information. If we started paying workers fairly and requiring consent and compensation for the use of public data, the development of AI would both slow and become far more controllable.

The Creek (also known as the Muscogee Creek Confederacy), another key slave raider and colonist trader, were later compensated by being recognized as the first Native American group to be ‘civilized’ by the American government. For the Creek and other groups, slaving and aggression was handsomely rewarded.

One of the hardest things to permanently kill is not swords or crops but ideas. Once a legitimized hierarchy is deeply rooted in a culture, it becomes hard to remove. Entire systems for justifying inequality are carried forward for thousands of years. (Cont. in the comment)

Some percentage of a population appears always to harbour authoritarianism, &studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across 8 high-income countries found that around 10–25% ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest) These authoritarians tend to become more politically active&aggressive when they are activated by a social change, most commonly the emergence of a threat.

External threats change our brains in another way. They make us more open to being dominated. Authoritarianism – obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers – increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security.

Experiments with ‘deliberative democracy’ in which a randomly selected group of citizens gather together, are briefed by experts, deliberate, and make policy (either in a small jury of nine to twelve members, or assemblies in the hundreds or thousands) have been shown to reduce political polarization and even aid reconciliation in war-torn countries such as Bosnia. An assemblyeven helped Ireland legalize abortion

Administration trumped intimidation. Emerging kings across the world faced a similar problem in trying to prove they had the right to rule. Human sacrifice was a solution that many converged on and then later dropped. the ability to deal out random violence: It’s an act that puts the ruler above ordinary morality. Polities across the world have all settled on the importance of violence to make rulers legitimate.

Clearly, agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a state.3 Goliath fuel (caged land, lootable resources, and monopolizable weapons) can help explain why states arose in these areas yet not in Japan or New Guinea.

Many of the cases cut against the conventional wisdom that states allowed for the creation of large-scale farming&cities. The logic was that people needed rulers/bureaucracy to create stable food production to sustain a city’s large population. This wasn’t necessary: across the world cities& large-scale irrigation preceded centralized, hierarchical arrangements. They often fell apart once a domineering emerged.

Leaders still existed across North America in the centuries that followed the fall of the Goliaths. Yet these communities tended to be democratic hierarchies with strict checks and balances. Each Cherokee town had both a council of men and a council of women, while family-based clans spread their members across towns as a check against the councils and chiefs. (Cont. in the comment)

The Native Americans didn’t just drop their elites and cities; they organized themselves in such a way as to prevent them from re-emerging.

A small priestly class emerges and begins to boss others around. They display their power, sometimes through innocent means such as feasts and opulent burials, and sometimes through more unsettling methods, such as slavery and human sacrifice. Many archaeologists have pointed to these ‘secret societies’ as being one of the original blueprints for gaining power. (Cont. in the comment)

That wasteful consumption to gain and signal status easily becomes a preoccupation with growth. If you can improve your status through throwing a feast, then an even larger feast with a greater variety and abundance of foods will be even better. If you are competing with another chief, then there is an even stronger compulsion to grow a bigger crop to outdo them.

evolutionary backsliding: Our egalitarianism and counter-dominance shaped our bodies and minds and supercharged our cultural evolution. They made us unique and helped us navigate the Palaeolithic. The move towards Goliath – whether it be through class or patriarchy – made us look more like the harems of patriarchal gorillas and the chimpanzee hierarchies built on violence and politicking.