RESPONDING TO THE RESPONDING

 RESPONDING TO MY RESPONDING

 

A READER WRITES

G'day professor.

Responding to your response...

"Meanwhile, I haven’t heard from a single voice of dissent or confirmation everyone is too anxious consumed with misgivings about when this pandemic will end, wondering if we are on the brink of another Great Depression."

Your readers respond to the issues you raise. We are inundated with Covid commentary. It is the disaster of disasters. The threat is not the virus. It is the ongoing hysterical response to it. A line was crossed in March of 2020. Instead of prevention and treatment, our technocratic leadership claimed they could build walls to stop the virus. They clearly cannot but refuse to see that. They claim they can control the weather too. This will never end. Having done the wrong thing in the beginning they are now doing the wrong thing righter and righter, becoming wronger and wronger in the process. Sound familiar?

I take some exception to your forgiving the WEST with our traditional bugaboo communism and Marxism that Mark Levin currently controls in the marketplace of paranoid ideas with his books and weekly FOX NEWS telecasts of “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

Who is Mark Levin? Ever hear of Jordan Peterson? We are not stuck in our paranoia about communism at all. The radical left is entrenched in schools and universities and TV networks. You are blinded by your predisposition to dismiss warnings of neo-Marxist incursions as a revival of the Communist paranoia of the past. It is not related. This is real. It's happening now. It's alarming. BLM are avowed Marxists. ANTIFA has proclaimed Marxists. Proclaimed Marxists and radical Leftists are mayors of large cities. The cadaver in chief, Biden, is a radical leftist and proving it every day. The Canadian PM is a radical leftist. Defunding the police is neo-Marxist dogma. Denouncing founding colonists is neo-Marxist. Anti-white racism is neo-Marxist, etc.

Armageddon? On the horizon! Suggestion: read 1 book 'Unmasked' by Andy Ngo. Better yet, listen to the audiobook while painting the house. I did. Much easier.

MY RESPONSE

The focus of “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is meant to show, primarily over the past 500 years, yet with references far beyond to include the high jinx of Western man since Christopher Columbus and his three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria crossed the Atlantic Ocean to discover a sophisticated civilization that had had no benefit of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle much less the science of Galileo and Copernicus.

It is my view, and this is the purpose of this book, to show how we continuously muddle through over the ages being preoccupied or paranoid about the interventions of theories, ideas, and movements in conflict with what currently “is.” It happened to Greece, Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, each time because they attempted to remain the same denying their excesses, cruelties, and blatant dishonesties. Each empire or civilization as you might prefer paid the ultimate price of extinction. Capitalism, as you point out, with globalization, while inevitable, given how incredibly small our planet has become, is putting profit over people.

I read Indian author Arundhati Roy’s “CAPITALISM: A Ghost Story” (2014). Roy writes:

From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.

The book is about the first industry of my career, the chemical industry, an industry I saw up and close on four continents, but not India. I witnessed excesses but nothing compared to what Roy writes about.

I am currently reading “The Jungle” (1906, reissued by Barnes & Noble, 2003) by Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) which is about the exploitation of the meatpacking industry of Chicago, being the national headquarters for Nalco Chemical Company where I was a young executive in the 1960s.

Given your comments, and realizing that I don’t disagree with you, but look at things from a different perspective in “The Rise & Fall,” I have added this to the PROLOGUE:

As open systems, organizations survive only so long as they can maintain negentropy (i.e., negative entropy) that is, import in all forms greater amounts of energy than they return to the environment as product. The reason for this is obvious. The energic input into an organization is in part invested directly and objectified as organizational output. But some of the input is absorbed or consumed by the organization. To do the work of transformation, the organization itself must be created, energized, and maintained, and these requirements are reflected in an inevitable energy loss between input and output. The electric transformer is a relatively efficient machine, but it extracts an energetic price (recognizable as heat) in the process of changing alternating current to direct. The vacuum tube must be heated before it can do its work; even the transistor passes on less energy than it receives.

Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations, 1966, pp. 150-151. Daniel Katz (1903 – 1998) and Robert L. Kahn(1918 – 2019) were two of the main investigators of the management systemic approach. A great part of their work was dedicated to the study of organizations as a social system.

“The Rise & Fall of Human Empires” looks at positive and negative entropy as it applies to the open and closed systems of civilizations and the epochs with which these human empires provoke, behavior similar if not the same to that of the negentropy of machines.

Incidentally, American author Jack London called “The Jungle”: "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery."  The book provoked President Theodore Roosevelt to promote legislation that became the FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION ACT (FDA).