Figure 0.1. The Adventures of Dasein:
From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West
I
|
the New Deal
This page is meant as a quick view of
what this site is getting at. The work on the New Deal=UAW + Keynesian
Elite was done in the mid-1970s; the work on the two-party system as
the resultant of elite competition led first, to a conceptualization of
the Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity, which is relatively
straightforward (the GOP is not known for its intellectual subtlety
these days); and, necessarily, to the depressive position and the
nihilism of the Democratic Party. Some Arrestees from the January 6,
2021 Assault on the Capitol was done in the months after that attack.
Strikingly, marxists
don't seem to be interested in actually existing
configurations of capital, nor are marxists open to the reality of
elite competition in an electoral environment, and the way in which
that can produce outcomes not reducible to "class interests". No
one seems to have any idea of where the New Deal came from, what it
was, and what happened to it. Relatedly, no one seems to have a
clue that "Trump", in terms of American politics, and geneologically
speaking, is a moment in the unfolding of Thermidor.
11 Nations
|
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Bildung and Literacy: On Reading as a Transformative Process
|
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
|
|
|
II
|
History without philosophy
History
without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths
of our time. Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian
myth--the ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its
associated rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive,
ideology, and interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a
priori, of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency,
intentionality, habitus, action networks and networks of power, and
context.
This site began as an attempt to advance an analysis of the historical
trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump, but the events of the second
decade of the 21st century, when viewed through the lens provided by The Social Origins of Language,
forced me to see that there was a bigger picture. This bigger
picture is represented by Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the
End of Print Literacy in the United States.
"Trump"
forces us to face the question of our primate heritage (and its
corrolary, patrimonialism), on the one hand, and the fragility of
print-based civilization, on the other.
|
|
III
|
the disintegration of
the biocultural niche of modernity
Cognitive
performativity is a context-dependent, biocultural historical
phenomenon, not explicable within a discursive field shaped by the
Cartesian synthetic a priori.
The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator of the disintegration of cognitive performativities.
Taking into account
the major perspectives on the development of
language and cognition, and applying these results and methodologies to
the cognitive-discursive performativities of "school", "politics", and
the "media," we are led to a chilling conclusion: we are now
living through the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive
performativities associated with the biocultural niche of
modernity. As catastrophes go, this one--the disintegration of
the biocultural niche of modernity--is a whole order of magnitude
greater than the catastrophe known as the Great Depression of 1929-1941.
What
is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current
popular and much scholarly thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its
metaphysical presuppositions.
*" UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet" ( Inside Higher Ed, Nov. 12, 2025)
"Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad For Students," New York Times Oct. 29, 2025
" 350 Teachers on How Screens Take Over Classrooms, as Early as Kindergarten", New York Times, Nov. 12, 2025
" The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education," New York Times Nov. 16, 2025
|
|
This site is a rhizome.
This site is a rhizome.
Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.
It uses figurative elements, including graphs, tables, charts,
and maps:
It assembles phenomenological bundles (the phenomenological bundle named fascism, for example) and identifies elementary particles (example: the elementary particle named Lacan-Atwater signifying chain).
|
from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (Pluto Press, 1998)
Deleuze and Guatarri
argue that the book . . . has been seen as an organic unit, which is
both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the world. In
contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor organic. It only
ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is a method of
experimenting with the real: and it is always an open system, with
multiple exits and entrances. In short, the rhizome is an
'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always 'in the
middle'. p 45
from Inka Mülder-Bach, "Introduction" to Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty amd Distraction in Weimar Germany (Verso, 1998), p. 15.
.
. . now theory forfeits its hierarchically privileged position in
relation to empirical material. It infiltrates the surface, so to
speak, manifesting itself in the way the tessera of the 'mosaic' are
cut and in the interstices left between them. . . . this
conceptual language misses precisely what matters crucially to
Kracauer: the details of the situations, their complexity, the
perspectives of their agents . . . His investigation, therefore,
refrains from formulating its insight in a conceptual language removed
from its material. . . Knowledge of the material's significance
becomes the principle of its textual representation, so that the
representation itself articulates the theory.
|
|
In the beginning . . .
from The Social Origins of
Language (p. 5, 23)
Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire
human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and
non-material, that is symbolic in nature. . . . The cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have
extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided
new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more
cognitively plastic.
from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 51/B 75) p. 107 (Hackett Publishing Co., 1996):
Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)
.
. . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands
“the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one
common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining
certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding
certain others).
To make concepts out
of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to
abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are
the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every
concept whatsoever.
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462):
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.
In place of "society," the culture complex . . .
|
|
the disintegration of
the biocultural niche of modernity--what
is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current
popular and much scholarly thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its
metaphysical presuppositions.
|
|
|
American Exceptionalism
The dramatic divergence in cognitive performativity, as seen in PISA Math Scores, between the United States and the modern nations included in the
PISA reports, is in part the result of the enormous
success of the Right in undermining the very conditions for the
development of modern, educated citizens. The subversion of cognitive
development in the United States is the great achievement of the
right-wing in America. The attacks on teachers, etc. are really
attacks on the biocultural niche of modernity. These attacks have
been wildly successful, as PISA Math Scores and the collapse of literacy
are now major events.
Instead of a cognitively homogeneous citizenry, there is a
developmental divergence and fundamental differences in cognitive
functioning among different historically and sociologically defined
subgroups of the population. These subgroups can be defined by the
nature of their cognitive-linguistic practice, including inventories of
basic expressions and rhetorical maneuvers, such as are seen in the
Youtube videos of the Palin and McCain rallies, Tea Party protests, and
the mass of political ads produced for TV, as well as videos of talk
show interviews. (this was written in 2009)
Even though the scientific frame of mind (and this includes formal
operational competence) is a recent development (Donald, Flynn)--a mere blip in
the short span of recorded history--it represents an enormous
developmental leap in cognitive complexity accomplished only in the
last several centuries. This leap into cognitive complexity
involved the emergence of the formal operational cognitive modality
that is the inner logic of scientific culture. While this may
have been achieved by a few among the literate elites ancient
civilizations, this revolution of the mind took on a social and
therefore political form with the Enlightenment, which, though confined
at first to the salons and publishing houses of the enlightened
aristocracy and the new middle class, soon captured "all the literate
public that then existed" (Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: and Why It Still Matters, Random House, 2013, p. xv).
|
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PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2015: 25 Nations
OECD (2016), PISA 2015 Results (Volume I), p. 177
Southeast Asian nations
are in light blue; Scandinavian nations + Switzerland in dark blue;
Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in
green; Italy,
Portugal and Spain in red; the United States in yellow.
Asia: C & C-S (Cities and city-
states): Shanghai, Singapore, Hong
Kong, and Tapei. These are the advanced capitalist
nations (some have
been
omitted for the sake visual clarity).
|
racism and the question of intelligence (self-discipline, attention span, motivation)
|
|
|
Ken Richardson, Understanding Intelligence (Cambridge, 2022)
SOOL
On the Edge
Getting Paid
|
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Hegel and the biocultural niche of modernity
|
from Marina F. Bykova, "Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung," in The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (palgrave macmillan, 2020)
Hegel portrays Bildung as an on-going dialectical
(contradiction-ridden) process, a series of achievements that
contribute to the individual’s self-making. Yet this process of
self-formation is not a purely individual undertaking; it is a social
enterprise that takes place in the historical and social world (the
world of spirit) through various interactions with other individuals. .
. . It is this complex process of the formation of the universal
subjects of thought, will, and action historically and socially
developed within the cultural forms of the manifest (world) spirit that
Hegel describes as “path of Bildung.” (426)
The modern, Enlightenment-based idea of education defines its main aim
as providing support for individual development toward maturity.
From this perspective, education is a finite process.
Furthermore, education focuses on the individual, considering his
growth toward maturity as primarily an individual cognitive process,
without taking into account this individual’s social interactions and
practical engagement with the historical-cultural world. Yet
Bildung for Hegel is the formative self-development of spirit (in both
its “forms—as individual human and and world spirit) regarded as a social
and historical process. Cognitive advancement is only one of the
dimensions of Bildung, but this, too, is treated as a historical-social
phenomenon. (430)
. . . Bildung is employed in the Phenomenology not merely to
delineate the process of the individual’s development from the natural,
“uneducated” standpoint to the “educated” position of modern science,
but also to conceptualize the on-gong process of world history.
However, the focus here is still on one single historical epoch, the
epoch of emerging modernity, which is described as the world of
Bildung. (432)
Bildung functions in Hegel's system not only as the driving force
forming self-conscious individual subjects but also as the engine of
the historical development of human societies and of the
historical-cultural world itself. (442)
A specific meaning of Bildung, which marks an important legacy of
Hegel’s conceptualizstion of this notion, is the meaning of Bildung as
world-encountering understood as a necessary condition of human
self-development. The core dimension of Bildung is neither the
world as such nor the individual itself, but the specific interplay
between the self and the world. (444)
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|
Why Dasein?
| What is modernity when seen in the framework provided by the concept of
biocultural niche? Brain plasticity; developmental
systems theory; bildung; and zone of proximal
development--these concepts and theoretical orientations are at
the heart of this attempt to understand our post-modern catastrophe: the
disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity. |
|
At
issue: the cognitive developmental modalities
that span the entire
history of the tribe hominini
At
issue: the cognitive developmental modalities that span the entire
history of the tribe hominini, which contains the genus homo (the only
extant variety of which is homo sapiens) and the genus pan (this latter
contains chimpanzees and bonobos). Consider the excerpts from the
work of Donald, Wrangham and Wilson, Price and Feinman, Gomez,
Tomasello, Chase, Renfrew, Malafouris, Dunbar, Dupré and others in The Sapient Paradox, regarding the ontologically indeterminate nature of homo sapiens as cultural-historical primate.
Donald observes that contemporary homo sapiens' semiotic behavior
"contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive
evolution." Wrangham and Wilson state that "patterns of
collective violence found among humans include similarities to those
seen among chimpanzees." Gomez writes of "the possibility
that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving
him, on the one hand, a regime of socially controlled attention and
interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more
explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support
to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through
cultural processes of development that change the nature of cognitive
ontogeny." Malafouris and Renfrew, in How Things Shape the Mind,
write that "the human mind exists as a historically situated
actuality—that is, an emergent product of complex ecological
relationships and flexible incorporative forms of material
engagement." And Dupre: "It is . . . clear that recognition of
the variety of factors involved in development makes possible a
diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly defined
populations."
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the communist party in Detroit, Flint and New York, 1930s
. . . temporarily ordered structures, what
we often describe as "things",
in a flux of largely disordered
processes . . .
Saul Wellman (Flint)
Mae Rosen (New York, District Council 65, International Union of Wholesale, Retail, and Department Store Clerks)
Henry Kraus (Heroes . . . ) on CP transformation
|
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. . . temporarily ordered structures, what
we often describe as "things",
in a flux of largely disordered
processes . . .
from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007)
. . . the primary ontological unit is not independent objects
with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather
what Bohr terms 'phenomena.' . . . phenomena do not merely mark
the epistemological inseperability of observer and observed, or the
results of measurement; rather, phenomena are the ontological
inseperability of agentially intra-acting components. . . .
phenomena are not mere laboratory creations but basic units of
reality. The shift from a metaphysics of things to phenomena
makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and
ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues more generally.
33
.
. . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but
phenomena--dynamic topological
reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the
world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but
material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic)
boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency. 141
from John Dupré, The Metaphysics of Biology (Cambridge, 2021)
The reductionists
world is an ordered world. Everything happens for a reason, or at
least a sufficient cause, and explanations of events are good in
proportion to how much of this underlying cause they capture. But
the ordered world is at best an object of faith. The world might
equally well be highly disordered, with the little bits of order that
we encounter, most notably living systems, rare and precious
exceptions. . . . One way of articulating an account of
such a world is as consisting of temporarily ordered structures, what
we often describe as "things", in a flux of largely disordered
processes. p. 15 [history of CPUSA 1932-1941]
from Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré eds. (Oxford, 2018)
What
organisms do is quite unlike what other natural entities do.
Organisms constitute a distinct ontological category. They are a
special kind of processual thing; they are agents. . . .
Methodological vitalism is the view that evolution should be studied
from the perspective of the distinctive role that agents play in
enacting evolution.
|
|
Junious Pruitt (crane hooker)
Herman Burt (
Levi Nelson (
Harris (Truck line)
Kraus
|
|
Midland Steel Work Flow, circa 1936-7
|
The New Deal: the Lower Great Lakes Industrial Region
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed. These
bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural niche of modernity. They were intensely rather that merely
literate. In
this regard they had more in common with the New Deal vanguard of
Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their fellow workers in
the plants. For this reason it was
possible to co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the
interviews that, in another context, could be referred to as the
extended mind of the Unity caucus.
It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action
networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern
UAW in the 1930s. From the standpoint of praxis both the Unity
Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as vanguard
formations within the biocultural field of Progressivism. Hence
the juxtaposition of Figures 1 and 2.
All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen
seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind,
but also by what can only be described as their strength of
character. They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.
|
|
Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
See the entire UAW-New Deal page here
|
The New Deal: the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State
Fig. 1a, The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt
administration circa 1936. This particular social formation
(TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical
role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when
FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as
Figure 1a indicates, the socio-technical infrastructure of the New Deal
state. The work that produced this result can be found here:
"The Origins of the "Welfare State": The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, 1910-1936" (manuscript, 1987)
The figure to the right--the Keynesian Elite in the
New Deal
state--must be the point of departure for understanding the second New
Deal. Notice that it is possible to group the administrative
agencies of the New Deal state into five major groups: infrastructure,
human capital, labor, planning, and credit. Each group was
staffed by a set of Taylor Society "technocrats" and a
Frankfurter-linked lawyer. (See The Brandeis/Frankfurter
Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court
Justices.)
The
Taylor Society emerged
in the course of
the Eastern
Rate Case
(1910), and is the Brandeisian wing of Progressivism: cosmopolitan,
enlightened,
and above all, committed to science.
Much attention has been paid to the middle class,
professional
character of this wing of progressivism (Otis Grahan Jr. Old
Progressives and New Deal); almost none to the vast array
of
modern firms that constituted the business milieu of Progressivism (Gal is the exception).
Study of these phenomena reveals the advanced capitalist nature
of what is almost
universally misconceived as some kind of coalition of middle class
reformers, workers, and farmers that was anti-business. In fact, a close study of the
Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state shows that not only was the
leading institutional formation of reform not anti-business (they
represented important parts of modern capitalism); and not merely
middle
class reformers (they were part of the emergence of the higher-order
functions of advanced capitalism that transcended the merely localized
praxis of the firm); they were the vanguard of
advanced capitalism. In fact, Morris L. Cooke refered to the Taylor Society as the spearpoint of
modern business (the less clumsy term vanguard was already taken in another context).
|
|
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State
Source: "Membership List, May 1927" in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library,
and The United States Government Manual 1937. Also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix
Nobuo Noda, How Japan Absorbed American Management Methods (Asian Productivity Organization, 1969)
Ordway Tead, "An Interpretative Forecast of the NRA: Is the Trend Toward Fascist or
Socialized Self-Government?" Bulletin of the Taylor Society, August 1933
For context see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
FDR vs. the Slave Power: MEMO July 10, 1935
"Liberal Businessmen" Ezekiel
See the entire KE-NewDeal page here
|
Configurations of Capital
|
Hopper, Sunday
|
the major elites in America history
If
American history means anything it means that Presidents, on the whole,
are the expression of the convergence and conflict of dominant forces .
. . . I hold fast to the proposition that what matters in
politics is the direction to which impetus is given, and what
determines impetus is very largely the direction of the powerful forces
that are enlisted on one side and on the other.*
|
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948, is a synthesis, for purposes of
political analsis, of a number of studies of the structure of the U.S.
economy. Wassily Leonteff's study of the input-output structure
of the U.S. economy, and Charles A. Bliss's work on the structure of
manufacturing production provides essential theoretical and staitical
tools required for the developmen of a concept of sector of
realization.** Leontieff's analysis focuse on transactons between
sectors. Bliss's concept of "character of ultimate use" is
especially important, for it refers not to a particular industry, but
rather to the actual structure of demand. The latter is divided
into four major segments: cnsumption goods, construction materials,
capital equipment, and dproducers' supplies. These are further
broken down into 18 subdividsions. In the present study
"character of ultimate use" is transformed into sector of
realization. In the construction of Figure 1, therefore, there is an
implicit rejection of the kind of approach where a-priori variables such as size or concentration rather
than functionally derived variables such as location within an
input-output matrix shape analysis. In U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948 sectoral
bounaries were determined by grouping firms and segments based on the
nature of their respectve input-output matrices.
*Felix Frankfurter to "friend," September 25, 1936, a copy of which was shown to FDR. Roosevelt and Frankfurter: their correspondence, 1928-1945, annotated by Max Freedman (Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 357-8
**Charles A. Bliss, The Structure of Manufacturing Production: A Cross-Sectional View (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1939);Leontieff,
|
|
Fig. 1a.1. U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1948
input-output matrices: sectors of realization and the two-party system
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
the Big One
|
Biden Booted, Marxists Mum, New York Times Covers Up
I
mentioned earlier that marxists don't seem to be interested in actually
existing configurations of capital. Here's what I mean.
When Joe Biden was forced out of the race for President, the real
workings of power--and the who's who of power--were inadvertently
revealed by the New York Times, but only to the savvy reader with a few
minutes to spare.
|
|
Elites in action: the Democratic Party in Crisis (the July crisis)
Joe Biden's ouster as reported in the New York Times
|
|
Here's what the New York Times left out:
|
|
Future Forward PAC
Contributor
|
Occupation
|
Praxis
|
Amount
|
Michael Bloomberg
|
Bloomberg Inc.
|
privately held financial, software, data, and media company
|
$19,000,000
|
Dustin A. Moskovitz
| Asana
| software
company based in San Francisco whose flagship Asana service is a web
and mobile "work management" platform designed to help teams organize,
track, and manage their work.
| $10,000,000
$10,000,000
$10,000,000
$5,000,000
$5,000,000
$5,000,000
$3,000,000
|
James Simmons
|
Euclidean Capital
|
James Harris Simons (April 25, 1938 – May 10, 2024) was
an American hedge fund manager, investor, mathematician, and
philanthropist. He was the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a
quantitative hedge fund. |
$6,600,000
$2,500,000
|
Reid Hoffman
|
Greylock
|
venture capital firm. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software.
|
$6,000,000
$3,000,000
|
Christian Larsen
|
Ripple
|
Ripple
is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial
services. Send cross-border payments in real-time , engage with
tokenization and digital assets, and meet regulatory compliance
requirements—all in one place.
|
$5,444,975
$2,969,975
|
Jay Robert Pritzker
|
Hyatt Corp.
|
a
founder of the Hyatt Corporation, having purchased the first Hyatt
Hotel in 1957, and responsible for the corporation's evolution into a
multinational hospitality conglomerate.
|
$5,000,000 |
Marc Stad
|
The Dragoneer Investment Group
|
Marc
Stad is a tech investor and the founder of Dragoneer Investment Group,
which manages over $23 billion in assets. He has backed companies like
Airbnb, DoorDash and Uber, and was the youngest Commissioner in San
Francisco's history.
|
$5,000,000
|
Rory John Gates
|
|
|
$3,000,000
|
Sixteen Thirty FundDM
|
dark money
|
Soros et. al.
|
$3,000,000
|
Martha Karsh
|
Oaktree Capital
|
Since
its formation in 1995, Oaktree has become the largest distressed-debt
investor in the world. . . . Oaktree's clientele includes 65 of
the 100 largest U.S. pension plans, 40 state retirement plans in the
United States, over 500 corporations and/or their pension funds, over
275 university, charitable and other endowments and foundations, and 16
sovereign wealth funds.[18][19][20] According to The Wall Street
Journal, Oaktree has "long been considered a stable repository for
pension-fund and endowment money."
|
$3,000,000 |
Fred Eychaner
|
News Web Corp.
|
Newsweb
Corporation is a printer of ethnic and alternative newspapers in the
United States, based in Chicago, Illinois. The company also owns AM 750
WNDZ. Newsweb was founded in 1971 by Chicago entrepreneur, political
activist, and philanthropist Fred Eychaner to continue his printing
business.
|
$3,000,000
$2,000,000
$2,000,000
|
Kenneth Duda
|
Arista Networks Inc.
|
Arista
Networks, Inc. is an American computer networking company headquartered
in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer
network switches to deliver software-defined networking for large
datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and
high-frequency trading environments.
|
$2,000,000
|
Eric Schmidt
|
Alphabet Inc.
|
Alphabet
Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding
company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the
world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Apple, and
one of the world's most valuable companies.[2][3] It was created
through a restructuring of Google, . . . [and] is considered one of the Big Five American
information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and
Microsoft.
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$1,600,000
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Reed Hastings
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Netflix
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Netflix
is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming
service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films
and television shows from various genres, and it is available
internationally in multiple languages.
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$1,000,000
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Jeffrey Lawson
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Twilio
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Twilio
Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San
Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools
for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text
messages, and performing other communication functions using its web
service APIs.
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$1,000,000
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Erica Lawson
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U. of Cal. SF
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$1,000,000
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llll
This is an update of U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910-1948. |
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Strategic Elites: Institutions and Individuals
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Sectors of Realization/ Configurations of Capital
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Firms & Functions
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See Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brans Trust: from Depression to New Deal
Belmont, Baruch, Brookings, Lovett, Harriman (Columbia, 1977) for 1932 list
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Commodities in International Trade
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Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar, Corn, Wheat, Copper, Oil
Shipping
Legal Services
Financial Services
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National Civic Federation
See Other People's Money, Pujo Committee, TNEC
Morgan
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Securities Bloc
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Securities & Finance
Legal Services
Infrastructure (Railroads, Telephones, Electric Power, Urban Transportation)
Primary Materials (Iron & Steel, Coal)
Captive Capital Goods
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Pollak Foundation
The Taylor Society: elite non-manufacturing firms
Filene's, Macy's, Bowery Savings Bank, Dennison Manufacturing
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Mass Consumption I:
Mass Distribution & Mass Housing
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Mass Retailers
Producer Services
Real Estate
Construction?
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The Taylor Society: manufacturing firms | Mass Consumption II:
Captive Production Inputs
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Twentieth Century Fund
(founded by E. A. Filene)
Committee for Economic Development
CED Fed Reserve
Hiss List
see Mark Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite (Harvard, 2013)
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Modern Machinery & Continuous Process Multinationals
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Stanback, Complex of Corporate Activities
Thomas M. Stanback,
-The Economic Transformation of American Cities (1983)
-The Transforming Metropolitan Economy (2002)
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Clinton Foundation
(2001)
Democratic Leadership Council (1992)
Priorities USA Action: Contributors, 2016 cycle, $100,000 and above
Future Forward USA 2024
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Post-modern Capitalism:
1. the Production of Subjectivities
2. the Financialization of Everything
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| Provincial Elites |
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Mayberry Machiavellis
The Price of Loyalty
Arno Mayer, The persistence of the Old Regime : Europe to the Great War
Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right, 1980; The Kansas Experiment, New York Times August 5, 2015
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Provincial Capital Formations
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Local Chambers of Commerce
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Sodalities
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Republican Gomorrah
Seymour Hersch on Chicago p.d.
Rita Johnson
Bill Jenkins on Pontiac
Ferguson, Mo. PD
Staten Island D.A.
Jackie Presser
Barney Kluck on 1933 T&D strike
| Sodalities/Patrimonialism
ethnic, racial, religious, occupational
| Police, Fire, Local Gov't, Local Services, Skilled Trades, Construction?
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Patrimonial "Capitalism"?
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Coers, Trump, Koch, Lind
Piketty, Krugman, Adams, Weber, Randall
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Patrimonialism/Sodalities
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the grand Herd is a coalition of little herds;the mob (pogrom/lynching?): electorates, constituencies, markets, hotels, casinos
extractive industries (coal, oil, copper, etc. )
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Only
one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to
be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late.
Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality
has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History
thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the
maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real,
apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an
intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form
of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated,
but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the
shades of night are gathering.
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today's Democratic Party is built on the carcass of the New Deal
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The Two-Party System
the two-party system as a cognitive discursive black hole
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the reality of
elite competition in an electoral environment,
and the way in which
that can produce outcomes not
reducible to "class interests"
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the Deep Structure of the Two-Party System: political configurations
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from Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48-52
What
were the elements of this emergent right wing vision? The
fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a
preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the
valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract
rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a
strategic alliance between throne and altar . . . Even more
fundamental was a Manichean readiness to divide the word in two:
bewtween good and evil, right and wrong, Right and Left.
Yet to say
that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological function is
not to assert that it offered a fully developed political
platform. Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which
to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of
"authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be
grasped.
By invoking
this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed signs of a
romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social unity that
would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years to
come.
Reactive,
reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy, perhaps, for
its particulars than for its general form. It was precisely this
tendency to view society as a battleground between opposing camps that
stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left model of politics so
fundamental to subsequent European history. . . . Dividing the
world between good and evil, between the pious and the profane,
anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in which the winners
would take all.
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The Two-Party System (Semiotic Regimes): Elites and their Masses
MSNBC/CNN/
New York
Times/Washington Post
NIHILISM (Liberalism)
BILDUNG (Progressivism)
Commercial republicanism Civic republicanism
concrete-operational
and
formal-operational and
pre-operational
concrete operational
Fox News
RESSENTIMENT
Fascism
pre-operational and gestural
rentier sectors; provincial capitals; patrimonial
and predatory businesses and racist political ecologies
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the Deep Structure of the Two-Party System: emotional configurations
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
We are changing, of course,
but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing. Combined
with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private
lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest
in psychic disorders. It can be heard from all quarters, and it
takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and
tranquility. Today, many of our socials tensions have been
expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse or, in a
similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence, rage, the search
for new sensations. pp. 185-6
As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the
drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack
of feeling. Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a
canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the
displacement of the hard task of being healthy. In a context in
which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these
pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.
Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and
individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to
act. p. 232
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The Two-Party System (Semiotic Regimes ):
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations
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LEFT*
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RIGHT
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Topology
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depressive
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paranoid-schizoid
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Political style
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progressive
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proto-Dorian
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Cognitive mode
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concrete & pre-op
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pre-op and gestural
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Regime type
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rational-bureaucratic
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patrimonial
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Thermidor and the Two-Party System
This article provided by Cliff Williams (Pontiac, GM
Truck and Bus, UAW local 159) is
an eye-opener. It pulls the rug out from under the Enlightenment
phantasies that saw in the Flint sit-down strike the fulfillment of the
social democratic hopes of yesteryear. I will deal with this
throughout this site. (see fascism in GM, Ford, and Packard)
Cliff Williams Page.
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Fascism in Flint and Pontiac, 1937
Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text
"Lynching" in Fisher Body press room, June 10, 1937, Pontiac
"Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" Detroit News 12-10-37
Travis reports
Bud Simons on Bert Harris and the Black Legion
Addes Report April to June 1939 (Zaremba, box 6, Reuther Archives)
Geiger-Case-Mortimer-Addes Report
(Henry Kraus Collection, Reuther Archives)
March, September 1938; January 1939)
The Harry Elder Report, September 2, 1939 (Detroit Regional Office, NLRB, in Smith Committee Files, National Archives, Washington, D.C.)
Interviews, Cliff Williams, Pontiac Yellow Truck: January to December, 1974
Interviews re. Roscoe vanZandt (Jones, Bully, Kraus/Leighton)
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the enigma
from Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins, 2006)
Why did
people tolerate these displays of "unmitigated selfishness" and raise
monuments to those "peculiarly American virtues" such as "audacity,
push, unscrupulousness, and brazen disregard of others' rights. . . .
. That even during an era of legendary rapaciousness Wall Street
figures could elicit feelings of awe and reverence, that they could
become exemplars of national achievement and prowess, is an enigma. (p.
72) see Zaretsky
A distinctive
vocabulary inscribed these men in urban-industrial legend.
Contemporaries, even critical ones, always described them as "bold,"
and "magnificent of view," full of "verve," capable of absorbing a hard
blow without flinching, as "audacious," "keen," and possessed of that
sangfroid that could stand up to the worst possible news. Often
treated as American primitives, observers marked and often celebrated
their lack of education and refinement; they were profane and uncouth
but endowed with native frankness, self-confidence, and blunt force
personality. The language of masculine virility and plebeian
brashness also signaled their inspiring escape from unprepossessising
origins. (p. 95)
also Wilbur Cash on the proto-Dorian convention (The Mind of the South)
Zalensky on Trump; modern-day patrimonialism
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h
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from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51 Penguin)
To this extent media discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the
most precious realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know
how to "understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language, merely sympomology . . .
from Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom (Fordham University Press, 1966-72) vol. 1, p. 188
As democratic convictions became settled . . . 'the people' emerged
increasingly as the true sovereign, and the conception gained ground
that 'the people' is sane and sound, and its voice, at least to some
extent, is sacred.
and from Nietzsche, Will to Power, § 863
“The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.”
* "moral judgement" in the original
** "Morality" in the original
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below are notes I wrote before and immmediately after
the election of DJT in 2016. They need editing.
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An Ontological Catastrophe:
the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity
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pre-2016 notes: 1
The
sharp decline in the scores of Finland and Sweden, and the significant
decline of the scores of the Anglo-Saxon nations, suggests that the
late twentieth and twenty first centuries are where two lines of
development--sociotechnical advance and cognitive regression--clash.
Capitalism--at least advanced capitalism--requires advanced
minds. Narcissistic regression--the culture of consumption (see Hall
et. al., Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture)--undermines the very possibility of advanced cognitive development.
Thus, PISA Math Scores is about much more than schooling and test scores.
It is about cognitive development as an historical process, about the
Enlightenment as an inflection point in that developmental process, and
about the democratization of the Enlightement in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. And it is also about one of Hegel's most
important concepts: Bildung.
This is the fundamental concept at the core of Activity Theory.
This concept is also central to Marx the Hegelian.* But now this
concept of Bildung is powerfully enhanced by Stephen Rumph's book, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (University of California Press, 2012):
In Enlightenment
anthropology, mastery of signs went hand in hand with human progress,
distinguishing civilized man from the primitive Naturemensch. p. 9
Such a reading treats Mozart's symphony less as an act of communication
and more as a process of cognition . . . the progress of knowledge
toward ever greater distinctness of thought, toward an ever more
refined analysis of our representations, is likewise a progress into
language, a transition from perception and imagination to the
manipulation of arbitrary signs in symbolic cognition . . .
p. 25
The mastery of signs, the manipulation of arbitrary signs in symbolic
cognition--this is what is required of today's students, if they are to
become modern workers in the twenty-first century.
Reason as a force with ontological implications, the mastery of signs
as a new animal power, and as an historical force to be reckoned with.
==
It is already clear that in the U.S. large numbers of unchurched as
well as fundamentalist whites and blacks (and many working class
Catholics) have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now
constitute, by twenty-first century standards, a barely literate mass,
concentrated in central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and rural
areas, and removed in toto from the possibilities of cognitive
development implied by the term "education." (see Wolf below) This is
what we see at Trump rallies. As the old America dies a sociocultural
death, it is being replaced by newer populations capable, for now, of
cognitive development. The "White" portion of old America is Trump
territory.
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Figure 1.
PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2015: 25 Nations
Southeast Asian nations
are in light blue; Scandinavian nations + Switzerland in dark blue;
Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in
green; Italy, Portugal and Spain in red; the United States in yellow.
Asia: C & C-S (Cities and city-states): Shanghai, Singapore, Hong
Kong, and Tapei. These are the advanced capitalist nations (some have
been
omitted for the sake visual clarity).
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pre-2016 notes: 2
Cognitive
performativity is a context-dependent, biocultural historical
phenomenon, not explicable within a discursive field shaped by the
Cartesian synthetic a priori.
The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator of the disintegration of cognitive performativities.
Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex (Donald)
Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification (Zaretsky on Trump)
the paragraphs below were written before the election of 2016
Trump is the apotheosis of the GOP's core performativities. In this
sense there is nothing new. But what is new with the Trump
campaign--and decisively so--is that a non-charismatic demagogue has
hijacked the base of the Republican Party. The genetic ontology of
ressentiment produces a subject. But that subject--the Trump
enthusiasts one sees at rallies and in interviews and focus groups--has
been embedded in the cultural-historical field of the biocultural niche
denoted by "white" supremacy (see The Imus Brouhaha and that which is
called "Racism"). But now the largest affirmative action program in
history--white supremacy--disintegrates under the impact of
globalization and financialization.
Hitherto, an economy of white affirmative action guaranteeing great
masses of "white" folk sole access to those sectors of employment
embedded in local government (police, fire, govt administration,
utilities, transportation, building services, construction, and even
manufacturing). And second, a semioitic regime of ego-reinforcing
symbols (positive and negative identifications). When you add the
election of Barak Obama to the economic consequences of the regime of
neoliberal globalization (which includes declining wages as well as job
losses) you add insult to injury, and one gets a psycho-cultural
crackup of world-historic proportions. This is what Trump exploits.
Until now, the activity of provincial, archaic and traditional elites
(Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime), together with newer firms in
the west and south and newly emergent crony capitalist formations
(Enron, World Com), and a whole new set of predatory financial
institutions played a critical role in the politicization of
ressentiment. (NYT Ch. of Commerce)
The activity of these old and new elites, in aiding and abetting the
construction of the political structures of mass mobilization (Town
Hall meetings), is decisive in determining the political effectiveness
of anti-modern right wing movements, which otherwise might languish in
a populist stew of ineffectual rage. (Dallas 1963, Red Scare; Moore,
The War on Heresy) But they do not call into existence these ontologies
of ressentiment, of the right, of anti-modernism. They merely utilize
and shape them. (See Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era.)
However, this utilization and shaping was mediated by the locally-based
GOP organizational apparatus, which itself was embedded in the
provincial cultures of town and county (new studies of KKK in north).
(Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right, 1980; "The Kansas Experiment", New York Times
August 5, 2015).) This laid the groundwork for the radical shift to the
right--e.g., the debt-ceiling crisis, in which a loathsome babbittry
[Conrad] of ambitious opportunists seized hold of the Atwater-Lacan
signifying chain and intensified its sado-sexual character in a
successful process of self-advancement. This prepared the ground for
the next stage of this process of the mobilization of ressentiment: the
takeover of the so-called base (the herd animal of the right) by a
political outsider who in fact was and is perfectly suited to the task
he accomplished. Donald Trump seized the herd and led it in a rampage
over the political landscape. In so doing he and his relationship to
his herd (which once belonged to the GOP "establishment") embody a new
reality now being investigated by scholars: the patrimonialism of
highly developed post-modern societies (see links at the right.)
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pre-2016 notes: 3
The
herd, psuedo-speciation, The ontologically indeterminate nature of homo
sapiens as cultural-historical primate, the historicity and enormously
complex variability of really existing humans, all of which unfolds in
the post-biological era (Dupre; Nietzsche); or, the Quantum
Heterogeneity of Dasein.
The dramatic divergence in cognitive performativity, as seen in figure
1, between the United States and the modern nations included in the
PISA reports (among which the U.S. can no longer be counted*), is the
signal although unintended result of the enormous success of the Right
in undermining the very conditions for the development of modern,
educated citizens. The subversion of cognitive development in the
United States is the great achievement of the right-wing in
America. The attacks on teachers, etc. are really attacks on the
biocultural niche of modernity. These attacks have been wildly
successful, as PISA Math Scores and the colapse of literacy are now
major events.
I
do not know to what extent this miltidimensional enlightenment
continued in the nations of western Europe. Certainly it seems to have
weakened. But in the United States it has been virtually destroyed, as
the current state of public media, politics, and education will
testify. All the huffing and puffing about our educational crisis
is itself not merely a symptom of that decline; it is also an active
force driving that decline even further (Watch CNN and MSNBC to see
what I mean). One can say with confidence that the
socio-cultural-political forces key to the creation of modern minds,
having developed over two and a half centuries, can hardly be recovered
by some blue ribbon committee, the posturing of a Bill Gates, the
demonization of teachers' unions, the implementing of a punitive regime
of testing, and the predation of financial entrepreneurs in education.
For the United states, the enormous success of reaction in breaking the
backbone of the enlightement as a cultural force BIOCULTURAL NICHE has
just begun to be felt. Figure 1 is prelude, a lagging indicator, of
cognitive decline.
Instead of a cognitively homogeneous citizenry, there is a
developmental divergence and fundamental differences in cognitive
functioning among different historically and sociologially defined
subgroups of the population. These subgroups can be defined by the
nature of their cognitive-linguistic practice, including inventories of
basic expressions and rhetorical maneuvers, such as are seen in the
Youtube videos of the Palin and McCain rallies, Tea Party protests, and
the mass of political ads produced for TV, as well as videos of talk
show interviews. (see theater of ressentiment) SEMIOSPHERE
This rhetorical performance of the right is not only cognitively
primitive. It should be obvious that on the right there are not issues,
but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual
reflex (the inner logic, the generative matrix, of racism). Rage
enacted in a political-media theater of violence (psychologically, the
"issue" of immigration is the script for a generalized lynch-mob): This
is the essence of what is called "Conservative" today. And not only
rage, but political pornography. Sex and violence make up the entirety
of the inner logic, the generative matrix, of populist Republicanism.
These sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if
they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks
(remember Willie Horton?). Language on the threshold of gesture and
reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of
identification, to a politics of patrimonialism.
*Progressivism and liberalism are opposites, not twins. The genetic
ontology of progressivism is bildung and the will to power; The genetic
ontology of liberalism is nihilism. Today's liberalism is referred to
as the left, thus covering over the genetic-ontological transformation
of THERMIDOR the post-war years (see Hall et. al.) The New Deal is not
represented in the above figure and table, The Two-Party System:
Semiotic Regimes. Donald Trump is an effect of this genetic-ontological
transformation of progressivism into nihilism. More on this later.
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Why Dasein Now?
(the now of our becoming)
Because an existential catastrophe, unfolding for the
past five to eight decades, now breaks into public
awareness in the pages of the New York Times,
primarily through the comments of teachers,
librarians, parents, and professors.
These comments have now acheived critical mass.
A new "issue" is born, an "issue" unlike any other, in that
all other issues have taken for granted the existence of the biocultural
niche of modernity without conceptualizing it as such.
Evidence
abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and
cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay
of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, and their contemporary
disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this
site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
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this
society is in the process of blowing its brains out
We
are now engulfed in is the implosion of neo-liberal "society." The
term "society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the
term, an ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this
society is in the process of blowing its brains out, and that along
four axes of ontological catastrophe.
•First, the
disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself:
the "human" side of "capital." News stories to the right --------->
(decognification, disindividuation;
Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the standpoint of literacy
and cognition as contingent not normative; the meeting in the Tank).*
Trump's
Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us
with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this
accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive
performativity. We have a detailed description of this meeting in
A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."* A
close reading of that chapter can be found here. The chapter in its entirety can be found here. The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius,
are the
primitive
cognitive performativity of president Trump, his brutish behavior
toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were
flabergasted by this brutish stupidity. "He's a fucking moron",
said Rex Tillerson. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)
•Second, the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.").
•Third, the
patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions, an assault
on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service. In this regard Trump is more radical than
Hitler. Hitler attempted to "coordinate" these
institutions; Trump is destroying them. (Trump's party has
already destroyed the non-affluent public schools already. Daniel
S. Moak, From the New Deal to the War on Schools (U. of N. Carolina, 2022)
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering
project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power,
generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass
consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the
organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of
individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of
distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the
dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of
effects. DSM-5 as the operating manual of the post-human
ontology. Homo sapiens is now becoming a collection of hapless
blobs of protoplasm gulping down vast quantities of salt, fat, and
sugar; of psychoactive drugs both legal and otherwise; of ego-boosting
and self-forming fashion statements; of life experiences (Viking River
Cruises), all the while wallowing in media-provided concoctions of all
kinds, from Downton Abbey and Housewives of Beverly Hills to the Jerry
Springer Show and Duck Dynasty. This ever-expanding free-wheeling
exercise of corporate power in the creation of the subjectivities of
disindividuation becomes an "issue" unlike any other that homo sapiens
has ever faced before. This infinite differentiability of this
uniquely bio-cultural historical species is what gives capitalism its
"vitality." It is what Marxists, with their obsession with the
crisis of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
characteristically fail to grasp.
It is from this standpoint of the problematic of the infinite
differentiability of contemporary homo sapiens that the question of
human ontology arises in its most urgent form.
It is already
clear that in the U.S. large numbers of unchurched as well as
fundamentalist whites and blacks (and many working class Catholics)
have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now constitute,
by twenty-first century standards, a barely literate mass, concentrated
in central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, and
removed in toto from the possibilities of cognitive development implied
by the term "education." (see Wolf below) This is what we see at Trump
rallies. As the old America dies a sociocultural death, it is being
replaced by newer populations capable, for now, of cognitive
development. The "White" portion of old America is Trump territory. Key terms: attention span, focus, self-discipline as a function of bioculturaal niche of modernity.
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Now read these articles, especially the Comments attached to "American Children's Reading Skills Reach New Lows." see Children's reading Skills, comments. This selection of comments is a phenomenological bundle.
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (NYT October 26, 2018)
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books the Atlantic, October 1, 2024.
" American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows" NYT jan 29, 2025
‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence? the Guardian, April 19, 2025
" Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime"
NYT April 10, 2025
A.I. Killed the Math Brain NYT. June 2, 2025
Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs (NYT 6-23-25)
Michael O’Connell, "David Foster Wallace, A.I. and the future of the humanities" (America: the Jesuit Review, 6-27-25)
Trump Doesn't Read. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, June 4, 2025
Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good (NYT July 28, 2025)
Thinking a Lot About Too Little Thinking (NYT Aug. 10, 2025)
There's a Very Good Reason College Students Don't Read Anymore, NY Oct 25, 2025
Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad For Students, NYT Oct. 29, 2025
The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education, NYT Nov. 16, 2025
Taking into account the major perspectives on the
development of language and cognition, and applying these results and
methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativities of "school", "politics", and the "media," we
are led to a chilling conclusion: we are now living through the disintegration of
the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity.
What
is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current
thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its
metaphysical presuppositions. Figure 0. From the Origins of
Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, provides a
framework for conceptualizing what is currently inconceivable.
Short of something similar in scope and depth to the Reformation, our
fate is sealed. We are living through " . . . a perfect storm of
cognitive degradation . . . "1
from A.I. Killed the Math Brain NYT. June 2, 2025
"The worry is that we, as a society, will become innumerate, not just
illiterate. A.I. appears to be exacerbating an alarming trend in which
our basic education is failing our young citizens. And that crisis is
aimed at the most basic elements of that education: reading, writing
and arithmetic."2
1. Earl Miller, quoted in Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2022), p. 42.
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elementary particles
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
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phenomenological bundles
".
. . now theory forfeits its hierarchically privileged position in
relation to empirical material"
| three elementary particles
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I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. (emphasis added)
2. from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
3. from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others
put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have
been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do
that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in
place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal
conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole
cluster.
Questioner:
But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter
and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal
services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you
can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product
of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously
maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if
it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because
obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more
abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract
than "Nigger, nigger."
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a phenomenological bundle
the Mob at the Capitol, January 6, 2021:
This
is part of a larger sample that was the basis for
discussions between PF and RB that led to a series of
reconceptualizations, methodological as well as substantive, and is
provided so that the reader can have some idea of what we were working
with. The
failure of much of local journalism to provide basic facts re.
employment (occupation and industry) led me to cut short my efforts
to do all 212 individuals that I was working with. As it turned
out, this was sufficient material to think about, analyze, and draw
conclusions from.
Regional breakdowns.
This was the second step in arriving at the tables of arrestees from
selected states that became the basis for the comments on this page. Geography matters!
New England
Southeast (north)
Southeast (south)
Mideast
Great Lakes
Plains
Southwest
Rocky Mountain
Far West
As we reviewed these materials, it
became increasingly evident that the analysis out of the University of
Chicago (and mainstream media coverage in general) failed to comprehend the major features of the dataset Arrests Arising out of the Assault on Congress. A summray of our findings appears below.
Summary of findings. A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the respectable
media, which claimed that "the
angry crowd at the Capitol . . . seemed to come
not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence
Main Street backgrounds,"1 what is found instead is a population in the process of
marginalization. The instability in their lives was manifested in
the difficulty of category formation. The standard occupational
and industry classifications2 are inadequate, indeed
misleading. Gyms, bars, tatoo parlors, restaurants, salons, and
gun shops occur regularly in the entire dataset. To view the
individual owners of these establishments solely in terms of their role
as "shop owners" is misleading. What we are really dealing with
is social networks, not Cartesian selves. Very few if any of the
arrestees were connected to mainstream occupations and industries: none
in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern
corporate sector. They could be better characterized as grifters.
This is a challenge to the neat concept of class.
1. from the New York Times (January 26, 2021): "One
striking aspect of the angry crowd at the Capitol was how many of its
members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but
from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real
estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member."
2. North American Industry Classification System (U.S. Census Bureau)
Standard Occupational Classification System (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
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1. the mob at the capitol
has already been introduced. Click on the state links to see how
messy a phenomenological bundle can and must of necessity be.
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity) is
a bundle consisting of three bundles. Read the three telephone
threats to Congressmen. The discursive field of the two-party
system has two approachs to presenting these kinds of materials.
Most commonly such discourse is summarized as racially
insensitive. Or, the offending words are omitted and replaced
with a mix of asterisks and letters (e.g. sh*t instead of shit).
The effect of these maneuvers is to cover-up or ameliorate the sadism
that is at the core of that which is called racism/fascism*.
3. The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity is a collation
of political ads available over the Internet for the period 2008 to
2011. This rhetorical performances of the right are not only
cognitively primitive. In the Trumpean rhetorical field there are
not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same
sado-sexual reflex. Rage enacted in a political theater of
violence (psychologically, the "issue" of immigration is the script for
a generalized lynch-mob): This is the essence of what is called
"Conservative" today. And not only rage, but political
pornography. Sex and violence make up the entirety of the
cognitive-discursive performances of populist Republicanism.
These sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if
they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical
checks. Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex.
Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification, to
a politics of patrimonialism.
4. state of the art scholarship is is a selection of key texts on fascism. Texts are selected based on the Cassirer inclusion rule.
Three key texts** document the evolution of of scholarly thinking on
fascism. That movement is toward a concept of the primordial.
*Robert C. Gordon, “Race,” in R. J. B. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
(Oxford, 2009), p. 315
In this longue durée
perspective, the problems of moving from the specifics of race within
single fascist regimes to a ‘fascist common denominator’ may fade in
comparison with the possibility that racism lies at the core of the
modern nation and modernity itself.
**Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in
Germany, 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013)
Dan Stone, the Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Mariner Books, 2023)
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Fascism as a phenomenological bundle
Approaching Fascism Immanently: Four Phenomenological Bundles
1. the mob at the capitol
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity)
a. The language of these arrestees can be seen here:
b. The theoretical resources re. cognitive-discursive performativity:
c. These resources deployed:
3. The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
4. state of the art scholarship
Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).
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emergence of a new elementary particle, October 29, 2025
Observing the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity in real-time
"Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad for Students," by Anastasia Berg (New York Times, Oct. 29, 2025). Dr. Berg teaches philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.
Last spring, it
became clear to me that over half the students in my large general
education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools,
contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams.
My
situation was hardly unique — rampant A.I. cheating has been reported
all over the country. But I felt a dread I struggled to express until a
colleague articulated the problem in stark terms: “Our students are
about to turn subcognitive,” she said. That was it.
At stake are not just specialized academic skills or refined habits of
mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency. To leave our
students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I.
companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to
develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary
powers of thought.
Yet I have come to see that something far more fundamental is being put
at risk. Developing our linguistic capacities — to master diverse
concepts, to follow an intricate argument, to form judgments, to
communicate those to others — is the development of our capacity to
think.
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For us human beings, using language is not a skill like any other — it
is the way we do almost anything at all. Philosophers have disputed
whether beings could exist that could think despite lacking language,
but it is clear that humans cannot do so.
We grasp the very contours of
our world in and through language. But we are not born with a language.
We have to acquire and develop our linguistic capacities through
immersive practice with other human beings. For hundreds of years, in
advanced societies this has meant cultivating an intimate familiarity
with human writing.
A depleted conceptual reservoir would render our lives crude and our
experience of the world undifferentiated and coarse. Worst of all,
cognitive degradation threatens our claim to self-rule: It is far from
obvious that the denizens of the subcognitive society would be fit to
participate in the democratic processes that determine how we structure
our societies and lives.
Higher education aims to create cognitively mature adults, which in
turn requires us to ensure students learn to read, think and write all
on their own. It is easier than we think: Creating tech-free spaces and
incentivizing students to spend time in them requires no new resources.
All it takes is will. Many of our students still have it. Do their
teachers?
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“Our students are about to turn subcognitive”
We are now engulfed in is the implosion of neo-liberal "society."
We
are now engulfed in is the implosion of neo-liberal "society." The term
"society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the term, an
ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this society is in
the process of blowing its brains out, and that along four axes of
ontological catastrophe.
•First, the
disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself:
the "human" side of "capital." (decognification, disindividuation;
Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the standpoint of literacy
and cognition as contingent not normative).
•Second, the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, the Anatomy of Fascism:
"The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings
us close to the heart of fascism."). the
persistence of the political culture, psychological dispositions and
praxiological modalities of ressentiment (the inner life of fascism).
•Third, the
patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions, an assault
on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service. In this regard Trump goes beyond Hitler.
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering
project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power,
generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass
consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the
organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of
individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of
distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the
dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of
effects. DSM-V as the operating manual of the post-human ontology.
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comments
SSEigen.
This
rhetorical performances of the right are not only cognitively
primitive. In the Trumpean rhetorical field there are not
issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same
sado-sexual reflex. Rage enacted in a political
theater of violence
(psychologically, the "issue" of immigration is the script for a
generalized lynch-mob): This is the essence of what is called
"Conservative" today. And not only rage, but political
pornography. Sex and violence make up the entirety of the
cognitive-discursive performances of populist Republicanism.
These
sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if they
were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks.
Language on the threshold of gesture
and reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of
identification, to a politics of patrimonialism.
c. the return of the repressed: patrimonialism
This ever-expanding free-wheeling exercise of corporate power in the
creation of the subjectivities of disindividuation (Alcorn) becomes an
"issue" unlike any other that homo sapiens has ever faced before. This
infinite differentiability of this uniquely bio-cultural historical
species is what gives capitalism its "vitality." It is what Marxists,
with their obsession with the crisis of capitalism and the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall, characteristically fail to grasp.
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Elementary
particles and associated comments, lists, transcripts, remembrances of
things past (civic republicanism 1933-1943: Bildung + חֻצְפָ),
cognitive regimes, intersubjectivity and shared intentionality,
proximal processes, biocultural niche (Schiller Hall, Fox News, MSNBC),
brain plasticity, cognitive performativity*, paranoid-schizoid position
(the sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities: ressentiment
and the mechanisms of defense), the depressive position ("liberalism":
nihilism, nietzsche, and you), the lynching for rape discourse, herding
primates: semiotic regimes, patrimonialilism and the fundamental
incompetence** of the Trump regime. Why Trump could not possibly have
acted differently re. Covid 19.
Deep structure of ressentiment and the precarious cultural-historical
achievements of “civilization”: defining barbarism (while being mindful
of James C. Scott’s discussion of the “barbarians” in Against the
Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale, 2017)). The
collapse of a civilization in the context of advanced capitalism;
regression to primate; collapse of cognitive performativity across the
board by one order of magnitude* in post-Fordist USA; the journalism of
disintegration (Who Killed the Knapp Family? NYT 1-9-20); hapless
liberalism . . . and more. The show goes on.
Now we are witness to a patrimonial bacchanale and the wholesale
destruction of the rational-bureaucratic organizations of government
that continues unabated.***
Also see Proximal Processes.
** the fundamental incompetence of the Trump regime, a regime of
schmoozers, hucksters, operatives, marginal real estate and gambling,
financial operatives of a preadatory not productive significance.
Modern capitalism's cultural-historical intersubjective discursive
field, the formal-operational systems thinking of modern management
(Keynesian elite, Committee for Economic Development and more), is far
beyond Trump's . . .
***(Marie Yovanovitch says State Department 'being hollowed out from
within' (UPI November 15, 2019). Statement from leader of federal
vaccine agency about his reassignment (April 22, 2020)
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the enigma
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Fascism
Stuff and Manifestations
the primary
semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices
Fascism and anti-communism: opposites or twins? If twins,
identical or fraternal? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: lynching or
pogrom? If neither, then what? McMahon on Thermidor; Lenin on Thermidor
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Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who's the greatest of them all?
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this is the stuff of fascism--that is, the raw, primordial materials that semiotic regimes and political agents work on to produce the manifestations of fascism. Gordon.
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Cruelty
two commentaries on Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257
1.
from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational
behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230
The basic question remains, however:
How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the
result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal
processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional
processes evoked by situational factors?
2. from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225
At the macrosocial level, Nell
greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty. There exist wide
intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific
societies with large intracultural variations and even rapid
transformation of warring societies into peaceful ones.
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Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism," London Review of Books, 18 September 2018. This is essential reading if one is to understand the case histories contained in Defendants Sorted by Region and State. It could be viewed as an update of Gibson's Warrior Dreams (Hill and Wang, 1994). Also: Dick Lehr, White Hot Hate: a True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland
(Mariner Books, 2021). This is an extraordinary, intimate account
by a participant-observer. From the standpoint of transcendental
empiricism it is a must-read.
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toward a concept of fascism: the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performantivty
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the stuff of fascism
Robert C. Gordon, “Race,” in R. J. B. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
(Oxford, 2009), p. 315
In this longue durée
perspective, the problems of moving from the specifics of race within
single fascist regimes to a ‘fascist common denominator’ may fade in
comparison with the possibility that racism lies at the core of the
modern nation and modernity itself.
from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:
Let us add at once that . .
. the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard
of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the
aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine
spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and
the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . .
. gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as
if with him something were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man
were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28
. . . ressentiment is
trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What
“empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused,
but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been
treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in
his place.
from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 6
To
see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. . .
. Without cruelty there is no festival. . . . and in
punishment there is so much that is festive!
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Dowd article, "Cruelty" (J. Brain)
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| Fascism on the molecular level of analysis
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the stuff of fascism manifested (talkin' shit)
(the primary
semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices)
“You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”
I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. (emphasis added)
Trump Details Crime Crackdown For D.C. (Aug 11, 2025 press conference)
“Our capital. city has been overtaken by violent gangs and
bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs
and homeless people, and we're not going to take let it happen any
more. . . . Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets
at all times of the day. They're on ATVs, motorbikes, they travel
pretty well."
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from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others
put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have
been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do
that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in
place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal
conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole
cluster.
Questioner:
But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter
and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal
services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you
can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product
of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously
maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if
it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because
obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more
abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract
than "Nigger, nigger."
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