For those who are wondering, I do not have a Twitter, Facebook or any other social media account, or followers, or likes nor do I follow anyone. If likes and followers, and fame is your measure of someone’s worth... Our entire civilization’s (intellectual or not) conversation has been reduced to the level of thought that goes into a social media post, echoing Jeff Flake, I will not be complicit. If you have something interesting to say, send me an e-mail written in thoughtful, complete sentences and I may respond in kind; if I send you an e-mail and it is read by an undergrad or employee who doesn’t care because it’s just a paycheck, or isn’t read, or is blocked or dumped into a spam e-mail box, or is not responded to – well, that’s why I sign my e-mails ‘nemo.’ Your loss, and mine. We have a curious phenomenon of public intellectuals who do not want to talk to the public, who hide behind electronic castle walls, unless they are selling a book or documentary or being paid for a television appearance. And a public who doesn’t want to read anything more than 140 characters before compulsively responding from twitchy minds. Nothing is being sold here, GGDM only requires your thought and time. You decide what that's worth.

October 2022 Entry – Happy Halloween from Earth!

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Boo!

It’s that time of the year again – the time of choreographed dancing zombies (of Michael Jackson “Thriller” (1983) fame). I guess that means that the zombies are happy, though I cannot imagine why; I cannot imagine that Lazarus of Bethany, who was presumably in heaven, was happy to be called forth from his crypt by Jesus (Probate Attorney to Jesus: “Do you have any idea the tax mess you just created!?”).

1. I did not consent to be born, to our knowledge, no one has ever consented to be born.

a. To consent to being born implies either knowledge that we do not have, or it requires the creation of absurdities and implies in either case, a fraud by omission (in that a potential being, fully informed of the harm of life on Earth might well choose not to be born).

b. No religion I have ever encountered claims that anyone consented to be born, the absurdity of it is even too much for religion. Rather, any religion that has a creation story implies exactly the opposite; Adam and Eve certainly didn’t consent to being made (e.g., “Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay, To mould me Man, did I sollicite thee, From darkness to promote me, or here place?” – John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book 10, 743-745) and probably even Jesus and The Buddha didn’t consent to being born. In fact, every religion I can think of, including those originating in the Indian subcontinent and featuring ‘reincarnation’ or ‘cycling’, have as their goal, an escape from life on Earth (Saṃsāra); Christianity as I have pointed out features a cheapened one-shot version that skips reincarnation (go figure that?). The Levant was the cross-roads where Hellenism met Buddhism via the Silk Road.

c. Christianity doesn’t even try to argue that Jesus consented to be born (though it might be teased out of some of their beliefs), even though they argue a heavenly host of other assertions they can’t prove – rather, being often characterized as a bizarre ‘death cult’ underpinning Western civilization (ask yourself, has Christ ever been blamed for the suicide of a Christian?) – Christianity focuses almost entirely on the other end of the process, claiming that Jesus died for us and by us and secured the afterlife of the believers. That is, the death of Jesus, in the minds of Christianity, closed the Abrahamic circle, where Abraham was stopped by an angel from sacrificing his infant son to prove his faith and love of the parental God, God apparently sacrificed his adult son to prove his parental faith in and love of man! And we talked ourselves into believing it because it's a good story.

2. I do not consent to be here, I do not consent to my continued existence.

a. You may consider that a subjective position – which is just a way that empiricist pat us nicely on the head and say, “Ok whatever,” – but it is a fact known to me every day of my life.

b. Happiness can (and should be) defined as the extent to which each of us consent to our current existence at any given moment; happiness is always subjective (compare to the similar concept of utility in economics), I have never seen anyone argue for objective happiness.

3. I am not allowed to decide to have never existed because the universe has this idiotic mechanism called ‘causality’ that makes it a paradox: To choose to have never existed implies existence. And that paradox is our life in prison.

a. Non-existence should not be confused with death, no, it is like a nothingness which is nothingness and like nothing else (e.g., “Nothing is not quantum anything. It is nothing. Nonbeing. This, not empty space, is what ‘nothing’ signifies for Plato and Aquinas and Heidegger....” – Michael Robbins, “Atheists Used to Take the Idea of God Seriously. That’s Why They Mattered.” Slate Magazine, July 8, 2014); it is a winking out or unraveling of our personal “timeline” to nothingness.

At least 1 and 3 above are axiomatic, undeniable facts in the most objective universal sense; to deny them creates absurdities and cognitive dissonance. The fact that undeniable, axiomatic facts lead to paradoxes is exactly a description of the problem of existence.

The problem of human existence requires three additional enhancing factors:

1. Merely for existing, we are subjected to endless nonsense, absurdities, entropy, and plain bullsh*t every day.

a. Put another way, I am offended to be here. I am offended every minute of every day of my existence. If I was not here, I would not be offended.

b. The basic human relationship with the universe is one of righteous indignation.

2. Our intelligence allows us to see that we are unjustly imprisoned (I use “imprisoned” because I am bereft of any better term) and subjected, it causes us to experience the enhanced absurdity of the universe, to see that things don’t need to be as they are and that the ‘design’ of the universe is flawed and we are the victims.

a. We are victims because we could not have done anything about our conception; that is the ultimate selfish act of tyranny of our parents.

b. So we make up stories and absurdities, such as God’s plan or the ‘love of God,’ and talk ourselves into believing it so that we can go on suffering in delusion. We curse and blame some imaginary supreme being and invoke the name in our arguments to add emotional force because logic isn’t convincing enough.

3. By virtue of our reproductive consciousness, we know that each of us is potentially the cause of the next generation’s unconsented existence.

a. No one has experienced non-existence and no one remembers their death, if it were not for reproductive consciousness and human communication, each of us might be justified in believing we had always existed. Animals then may, if they thought of it, assume they have always existed; science-fiction philosophers such as Isaac Asimov, have written short stories on the very proposition of a god or the problem of a god which seeks an end because it has always existed or has no memory of coming into existence (on that latter issue, none of us do – however see the opening scene of the film Lady Hawke (1985) with Matthew Broderick escaping from a supposedly inescapable prison).

b. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity.” – Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

So the purpose of our religion and much of our culture is to promote happiness – not in an ‘engineering consent’ manner, but rather, as an opioid salve and a pair of blinkers (or to wear a cone like your vet puts on your pet after surgery) so that we do not see the Existential Void. I always suspect that people who appear overtly happy lack understanding, are shallow minds living in the moment devoid of critical thought; it is probably no coincidence that fiction and non-fiction stories often begin with such people who suffer horrible events and losses for no apparent reason and then come to some sort of tragic understanding at the end. In short, if you are happy, you do not yet understand, and apparently it is my purpose to make the world unhappier than it already is by spreading enlightenment and through grim nexialism, reminding sociology of basic humanity.

And besides religion, we have our pets, the millennial-long chattel companions of the human mind. Roger Caras has concluded that the relationship between humans and their pets is always infantile. No one thinks that animals experience the universe in the same way that we do – that is the ‘blessing’ called sapience, personhood, e.g. “They [dogs and cats] seem closed off from their own mortality and the peril of it all. That level of comprehension would appear to be ours alone.” – Roger Caras, A Cat is Watching (1989), p. 208. And since it is so easy to make a pet expressively happy, we do so without thought so that they be happy for us, so we can experience in some sense, their simple happiness (absent our understanding), vicariously.

Happy Halloween from Earth.

May 2022 Special Entry – 2-year publishing anniversary - The First Turns of a GGDM Game

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I used to play in a free PBEM (Play-by-Email) fantasy wargame a couple of decades ago. It was called Empire Forge, it was fully computer-moderated and I played about 18 games over a couple of years, won a few, usually placed in the top three in any game. The game could host up to ten players and when enough players had signed up, the game began automatically. Players were sent a computer file that had their starting position on the map, along with their starting units, gold, magic goodies and such; the game was run on a UNIX server, written in Java (I think) and the players had output file display programs on their computers. Because it was a computer game, there was a ‘fog-of-war’ element to it, you can see areas controlled by other players (and their starting location), but not what was in an enemy area (in the sense of military units) unless you had a spy there or were adjacent. Most players started with one providence and the majority of the map was then a big open continent plus islands and sea areas, and the early game was a race to grab as much as you could while conducting diplomacy and feeling out the opposition.

This is normal for multi-player free-for-all type wargames, whether board games (like Risk) or computer games (like Lords of Conquest or Colonial Conquest – I am dating myself), and whether they are fantasy or science fiction or somewhere in-between. I’ve also played in a Diplomacy board game-variant PBEM game that operated in that way, a feudal Japan game setting that operated in that way, and a Stellar Conquest board game PBEM game variant where stars and planets replaced providences, but basically the same set-up and early turn grab-and-feel fests. The ‘early game’ in those types of games ends when there are no ‘neutral’ or unclaimed areas remaining on the map or playing area and then the middle-game becomes a competition between fully-developed player positions in various shifting alliances.

Diplomacy is also a very important part of the early game in multi-player wargames, especially online, as players begin to see who they can cooperate with to their benefit and who will be their competitors. And which players they simply like or dislike; languages can also be an issue. But most importantly, they seek to avoid early accidental conflicts (most players want to wait until they are ready and pick their own fights), but most of all, every player is looking for the player position that is not submitting turns and not responding to diplomacy – that is, a dropped position, a player who signed up but never submitted a turn or played a couple of turns and dropped out. Dropped early positions can really change the game by giving some players an easy route to grabbing a lot of territory very quickly without worrying about conflict (it is an inherent design flaw of such games). So the art of playing the early game is to find out who isn’t playing...

Decisions and choices made early in the game, priorities established without full knowledge of what may happen later (think of Mahjong Solitaire for example) may doom a position to obscurity or extinction – every strategist knows that. Same goes with businesses, technology, countries, entire planets in the ‘real’ universe.

So after I had been playing Empire Forge for about a year, I had probably completed 10 games; I was usually playing in 3-4 games at a time, oftentimes with overlapping players since we were all playing in multiple multiplayer games at once (and yes, I had a full-time professional job too). I was at that point, a well-established and generally feared/respected opponent. At the beginning of one game, I found myself situated on the map near the starting location of the Northern Trolls race. The name of the player was one I did not recognize from our pool of the usual veteran players and so I easily concluded it was a new player. I try generally to be gentle and helpful with new players so I emailed him about where our border should be when our expanding positions met.

I soon received a reply from “Powercow the Destroyer” (most players used their normal given names in the game) that definitely gave the impression that the new player was a young male, maybe a young teen or perhaps as young as 11 or 12 years of age. So I tried to give advice, explain the workings of the game, and help him along because we all want new lifetime members of our hobby. But it became clear that “Powercow the Destroyer” as the player signed his emails, didn’t seem to understand he was in a wargame. Despite all of the magic, dragons, fantasy units, Empire Forge was still basically a wargame. And not a fantasy role-playing game. And he was here for role playing; probably why he picked the Trolls.

I tried to make him understand that while you can role-play a little in e-mails, Empire Forge was not a fantasy role-playing game in any sense; it was a wargame, sort of a turbo-charged fantasy version of the venerable Risk board game. We were 'talking past each other' in the sense of Plato's Republic. Our emails became a back and forth argument with me becoming exasperated, and in the final email, I think I said, “Well, you roleplay and I’ll wargame and we’ll see who has more fun!” At that point, the early game was coming to an end, so I just overran his territories and he was out of the game in a couple of turns because you can’t role play if you have been eliminated from the game for owning no territories! You also can’t wargame from extinction either. Extinction tends to be the finality of all things.

GestaltGenesis/Day Million, a macrosocial simulation game (“GGDM”), is in a sense a multiplayer wargame like those described above, I have never denied it. Anyone who has read the beginning sections of GGDM will immediately see the multiplayer online turn-based wargaming influence in GGDM; I admit in the opening sections that GGDM was designed as a free PBEM game, but that in the intervening years, there may have developed other technologies and platforms which would be better for running GGDM. But however much GGDM reflects my experience with PBEM wargames, I have intentionally designed it to be different in several game-changing ways:

• The set-up process in GGDM is more complex leading to a greater variability of starting positions, they are not pre-boxed or standardized positions with a special ability or two. The set-up process is quite thorough and protracted, consummate with the complexity of the game that follows, and that may not be for some players who want to just jump in and play with a prefabbed position (it is possible players may ‘drop’ during set-up!), but conversely, the complex set-up choices gives players more investment into their starting position. In this sense, it is like ‘rolling up’ a character in a popular role-playing game, a process which is designed explicitly to engage the players in creation of their player character.

• The location of all starting positions is not known to all in the beginning of the game. Certain positions will by choices made by the players, have their starting positions known to all other positions in the game; there is an asymmetry built into the Primal States of the positions, having more industry and population base means everyone knows your starting location, whereas positions that begin with less population and industry may have a slight technological edge and their starting location is not known initially, but they are behind in development of colonies, industry and population.

• Two features of the ‘map’ or starting playing area will significantly change the early game environment, from those based on classic Earth-like maps. First, territory is not exclusive, because the game territories are expressed in planetary systems, it is possible for positions to intermingle and it doesn’t have to be zero-sum unless some xenophobe wants to start a war. Second, the playing area is capable of expanding infinitely with the game; the availability of ‘backyard expansion’ away from the core playing area gives second options reducing the ‘gravity’ of the initial playing area (as opposed to a land-based fantasy game). In this latter sense, there may be no clear demarcation of when the ‘middle game’ begins compared to the one described above for standard multiplayer wargames.

• Diplomacy is usually open in multiplayer wargames from the beginning, the game either provides everyone’s e-mail address or a PM system whereby players can contact each other and exchange e-mail addresses if they like. Some games have tried to vary the system, for example, not providing e-mail addresses until two positions meet on the map; players find ways around this, especially if many players are in multiple games together. It is up to the participants how this is handled in GGDM, but generally it is assumed that diplomatic communication in GGDM will be the same as in other games. GGDM only makes the distinction between ‘gray diplomacy’ – player diplomatic communications that do not involve the Concierge (or Game Master in other games), and First Contact – which begins the ‘official’ diplomatic contact between two ‘races’ in the game.

Early game development and diplomacy is so important... In another game of Empire Forge, we were using the map of Medieval England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (for those familiar with medieval England, let’s say that the game map was an approximation at best). I think I started with the Kingdom of Wessex. Two players started in Ireland. Early in the game, I formed an alliance with the player from Southern Ireland (Munster); I’d not played with this person before, but I understood he had completed a regular game of Empire Forge that I was not in. He decided he had a great plan: He wanted me to give him most of my gold for the first few turns so that he could build a huge army and eliminate the other Irish competitor and later in the game he’d return the favor and support me. Yes, he was serious, or maybe he thought me a chump?

Uh...no. I am sure it was a great plan for him. But not for me, to give away all of my gold to him in the early game would cripple my early game development to the point that by the time he would be able to reciprocate, it would not make a difference. And if he decided to not reciprocate, at that point, what could I have done about it? Agreements in a game like this are enforced with steel, no quarter. I explained that to him, he didn’t seem to get it entirely, and while we remained nominal allies, each of us proceeded to our own wars unable to meaningfully assist the other. He was never able to dominate Ireland, and in fact, another player invaded by sea in the middle game – apparently at the invitation of the Northern Irish player – and it turned into a three-way cage match. For my part, I ended up in a war with Mercia and Northumbria that bottlenecked and stalemated on a narrow front in the middle of England (I think I ran over Kent on the first turn or two, probably a dropped player). I would have preferred to invade France (I can see why the option was historically attractive to the English!), but that wasn’t an option on the game map...

Early game development in GGDM remains just as critical as in any other multiplayer wargame of the type described here, however, it is a much more complex and protracted process due to the number of factors in the game, the extensive set-up process and Interpretations and Interventions. However ill-considered my ally’s plan was in the Empire Forge game, it would be nearly impossible for a position to give away substantial RPs to another position early in a GGDM game, in part because of the vast interstellar distances involved and the mechanics of Cargo Ships.

But the most important difference between something like Empire Forge and GGDM is that Empire Forge was a computer game program and what could be done was limited by what the computer program allowed and was designed to do (barring any glitches). A computer wargame like Empire Forge is like an equation – an equation is never more or less than its parts, when you resolve an algebraic equation in school, you realize that there is nothing in the equation that wasn’t there to begin with, nothing is added by you solving the equation. Absolutely zero; you are not allowed to change the math in the process of solving an algebra test problem.

The designer/programmer of Empire Forge believed in complete automation; his goal was to fully-automate Empire Forge so that it would run on its own, infinitely I guess, without need for intervention from him. I think he was tired of working on the game and running the game; when I started, the game’s magic system was unfinished and he didn’t seem inclined to finish it, or maybe he had run out of ideas, until I wrote proposals to finish the development of the magic system. He implemented them in the program and they became part of the game play from that point forward and I think the game was much improved by it. However, that may have been the final piece for him and he likely felt the game was finished, whereas, I felt there were still a few things to be implemented (I guess you can see that tendency if you read the GGDM text) and the rules text needed to be rewritten and expanded (e.g. I had created a FAQ page that had over 200 FAQ). He also wanted me to take over running the game so that he could work on automation, but I was not interested in being moved to the GM position, I was still having great fun playing the game and socializing with my pool of players, friendly competitors and allies in multiple games at once, while still thinking about my own GGDM project.

So eventually, our relationship soured, I left Empire Forge, and I do not believe it is now running and has not run for many years. Perhaps you can sense how these threads came together in GGDM when viewed strictly as a game design: GGDM, as I pointed out many times, will never be a game program or wargame like Empire Forge, it cannot and is never intended to be fully automated, it is never intended to be a game in a box. This of course means that being the Concierge is a demanding position – I made clear in the text throughout that the Concierge is another ‘position’ in the game – and that will make GGDM unattractive to potential organizers but on the other side of it is the reward of having a game that is not limited by what the computer program will allow, that is and can be greater than the sum of its parts, where humans can introduce things into the game that did not previously exist, as long as their imaginations can find a way to express it within the complex and flexible mechanics of GGDM play.

And lastly, perhaps an ode to “Powercow the Destroyer,” GGDM has the potential for role-playing and is not strictly a multiplayer wargame in the traditional sense. Because the game is emergent narrative and group storytelling, I viewed it as a ‘hybrid’ game and elements were introduced, such as Type 4 Fundamental Realities, Thesis Statements, and Concierge Interventions that could or would encourage moderate role playing and development of position personas.

May 2022 Entry (Thoughts on Souls)

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This month, I turn my thoughts to the concept of the Soul. These are macrosocial thoughts on how we structure the world, I am not here to discuss – nor do I find it useful to do so for my purposes – whether souls exist, are immortal, or any ‘religious’ arguments or implications. It is sufficient for my purposes that the majority of humans who have lived at least for the last several millennia believe they do, have created forms and words to express that belief, and have done this or that historically or in their daily lives in response to that generally unquestioned, culturally-entrenched belief:

As a recent widely-reported example, consider the moment when Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, famously said to his Russian counterpart Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya, “There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador.” Most people ‘got it,’ many found amusement in the comment, and very few required any explanation.

Belief in the soul, without any evidence, is the one truly universal human faith, regardless of the philosophical or theological details attached to the finer points. This belief persists in spite of, and primally separate from the withering human belief in an anthropomorphic supreme being or even a singular supreme being. The belief in the soul is considered axiomatic such that we expect intelligent extraterrestrials to hold the same basic belief without question, even if they do not believe in any supreme being or being that serves as a celestial avatar of their kind.

A tremendous amount of very consequential history depends solely on the common belief in the soul, especially an immortal human soul, for example, the Reformation was about the belief in Purgatory and people’s willingness to part with money (“When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs”) with a little stretching and twisting of official Church doctrine and an extension of Papal authority to Purgatory. Although the causes of the Reformation were mostly political, social and economic, it’s hard to imagine the Reformation without Purgatory. Purgatory was here greater and more consequential to common lives than even the looming threat of the Ottomans creeping up through the Balkans.

At the most basic level, people think of the soul (regardless of other religious beliefs or personal mumbo-jumbo spirituality) as the basic animating force that separates life from inorganic matter (rocks and so forth) and life from that which was living and is now dead – commonly envisioned as the soul having departed the body. And from this latter part, comes the question, well where does the soul go when the body dies, and all of the thought that has flowed from it over tens of thousands of years. Consider that Merriam-Webster online dictionary starts with that very concept at “soul”:

As if that was the single most agreeable meaning of the word that the editors could find, the basic starting point for all of the other jumble of meanings that flow down the page for the lexical entry on “soul.”

But back to the point, the soul as people think most commonly and basically agree, is that which makes the living living, that which separates the inorganic (Prof. Case’s First Order of Natural Phenomenon) from “the vital organic” (Prof. Case’s Second Order of Natural Phenomenon), and even to very arguable extent, is responsible for the other two orders, the “mental organic” and “super organic or social” (the Third and Fourth Orders of Natural Phenomenon).

Moving to the frontiers of science, the soul – depending on how literally the term is taken – is the product of conception and of abiogenesis; abiogenesis is commonly envisioned as matter gets a soul (even if science might quibble with that vision). It is the thing that Frankenstein was somehow given from the mad collection of parts assembled and energized that we cannot create even now by pouring all of the known chemicals and quantities of the human body into a vat and stirring the mess around (à la Carl Sagan’s famous demonstration in Cosmos). Abiogenesis is distinguishable from conception which creates a fetus in that conception (see also Merriam Webster "conception" at 1a) is the reproductive act of two living creatures, whereas abiogenesis is the moment that inanimate matter becomes animate. The ‘soul’ in the most basic meaning was also the starting point of early 20th Century biological theory called Vitalism which has now been shunted aside and is derrided as “alternative medicine” but was very vital in its time (e.g. Professor Case’s “the vital organic,” supra).

But in the end, the soul is the universal symbol that we have created to express the difference between the living and the nonliving, by whatever means bestowed, occurred, or obtained. It has the wonderful advantage of being non-falsifiable, almost axiomatic, and very pliable to interpretation such that it has burrowed to the very center of human culture. It has become the object of the Happiness Meta-Aspect:

Everyone who has sat in a basic philosophy class or more likely any intro Ancient Greek philosophy class, knows about chairs and chairness. And philosophy-classness; you can feel it at about 15 minutes into the lecture... Chairs and chairness are the classic example used in philosophy classes around the world (a part of ‘worldness’ I guess) when Plato’s essences are introduced and to the next generation; –ness seems to be the suffix that English has settled upon to signal the essence concept (a poor cousin of Platonic Forms), consider the Merriam Webster definition at –ness (noun suffix):

As happens so often, what were ‘sort of’ clear and separate concepts, the Platonic Essence and the Soul, have become commonly conflated over time. For example, when an advertisement for a vehicle states that it has the “soul of a sports car” (we’ve all heard them) are they referring to the “deep feeling and core values” (Michael Jawer regarding the soul, supra) of the sports car, or the essence of sports-car-ness, or that the vehicle being advertised is actually a very inept physical manifestation of the Platonic Form of a sports car? Which is to say it isn’t actually a sports car or anything close, but they want you to think it might be, just a little bit like a sports car so you’ll buy it (sort of like the sporty extras package on a minivan).

Whatever is meant is actually very abstract and virtually meaningless in any concrete sense, but are things to which we have long been culturally attuned, such that they have become the cognitive schema, the core and essence of our culture:

Plato in all his weirdness, was simply being a human, nothing more, nothing less; such dignitas and gravitas are attached to the name that it is sometimes difficult to think of Plato as a human being, we can hardly recognize instances when he was trying to be comedic. Plato’s forms simply indicate that to humans, ideas are as real as the physical world – a Kantian inspired theme that runs throughout GGDM’s macrosociology. They are equal, each in its own sphere, the facts of the physical world and the facts of the cultural-cognitive world (see argument in 2 Culture,, Aspects of Sociology) and the error of the 20th Century was to treat ideas as less than real. But I digress ... in the matter at hand, the soul, without any supporting empirical evidence, is not only the one true universal faith of humanity, but it is equally real in our culture, in human civilization, as any physical reality. And that goes a long way toward explaining much of human action throughout history.

Now, if one adds to this the seemingly modern (but actually very old), Western egocentric notion that each human (or each individual creature, pet, if you are willing to go that far) is unique, and will never be duplicated exactly in the history of the universe – then it easily becomes apparent that the soul of that person is the Platonic Essence of that person’s individuality or persona – the sum total of the experiences, history, thoughts, life impressions of that person.

Thus, in theory, as Philosophy professors like to quip, there is out there a Platonic Form of Platonicness or that Plato’s soul would be the Platonic Form of Plato. And each of us would be the Platonic essence of ‘you-ness’ or ‘me-ness’ as our individual forms, and somewhere out there is a Platonic form of “Jennifer Wilber-ness” (Owlcation quote, supra) which would be effectively the same as her soul. Thus the esteem which we hold for Platonic form (and for ideas and abstract concepts generally, of all sorts) – as a second equally-real set of facts in the human world, becomes the esteem to which we hold our own souls, to which our physical existence seems then a mere frail inconvenient and poorly-formed manifestation in the ‘real’ universe – our bodies age, but Platonic Form or our souls, by definition, cannot change for being as they are, perfect essences of whatever we think we are (thus, we think of souls as immortal).

Can you feel the philosophy-classness yet?

Sometime in 1985 or 1986, I was at the ‘rifle range’ for our regular Marine Corps marksmanship qualifications; I have always thought that this incident probably occurred in boot camp on Parris Island in 1985, but I cannot be certain. At the rifle range, Marines are divided into two groups, one group goes down to the ‘bunker’ or ‘pit’ and pulls targets for the other group who shoots in the morning, and then they switch places in the afternoon (most prefer to shoot in the morning because it’s freak’n hot out there).

The ‘bunker’ is a hillside facing the shooting lines, carved into the backside of the embankment is a concrete wall, overhead, and cat walkway, and on the backside of the walkway is a line of metal target frames that can be raised and lowered. The targets are put on the frames and run up so that they appear over the top of the embankment and the shooters fire at the targets. When the Marines manning the target hear the telltale snap of a round hitting the target, the target is pulled down and the new bullet hole is marked with a spotter and the target run back up so that the shooter can see where their shot hit on the target. Sometimes rounds hit the metal carriages and ricochet back into the bunker, sometimes rounds hit the concrete berm and spray concrete into the bunker.

Behind the line of target carriages is usually another hill on which the rounds that punch through the targets impact. It is a necessary backstop. I looked up for a moment during live firing and was shocked to notice a dog – a stray dog – running around on the hillside backstop where the rounds were hitting, seemingly oblivious to the danger. My partner on the target, a 17 year old Southern white boy as I recall, said to me ‘it’s ok to kill a dog because they have no soul.’

I was absolutely flabbergasted, gobsmacked when I heard that. It was entirely contrary to whatever I had been raised to believe and I pushed back questioning how he could believe such a thing. I could not believe that a modern person was saying this to me; it seemed so backward, so reactionary, like something I might hear from the Middle Ages. I am not implying here that Ms. Dy would agree with the assertion boldly made by that young Marine, but I can see them co-existing within the spectrum of the same idea that animals don’t have souls, and I have wondered many times since that day how many dogs have been killed by that – to me patently absurd – belief? Humans, dogs, horses, all other life seems to be killed as a consequence of human beliefs and the same is always the case in any and every religious end-of-times (as in God believes that certain humans are ‘evil’ and condemns them to hell) and alien – as in intelligent, technologically advanced extraterrestrials who often serve as a sci-fi proxy for God’s judgment of humanity – invasion movies.

The young Marine’s statement speaks to a different view of the soul, one which I think conflates “personhood” with having a soul. It takes some work to get to that point because it does not seem that such is implied in the common understanding of ‘soul’ in our civilization; and besides, there is a difference between distinguishing human (sapient/sentient) souls from other creatures (a distinction that I do not think holds well) and saying that only humans possess souls. Even Thomas Aquinas would not go that far:

So, like the concept of Purgatory (leading to the Reformation), apparently once some people have the concept of Heaven and Hell (which I have characterized previously is a cheapened version of saṃsāra), then animals cannot have souls in their view, lacking ‘free will’ or ‘consciousness’ (by which is probably meant “extended self-awareness and autobiographical memory” in the words of Prof. Damasio). As suggested by my own upbringing, there are various views on this, most people don’t even consider the issue and assume that animals have souls because ‘anima’ is one of the base concepts of the soul and so, easily one things that any living creature has a ‘soul’ (especially those that can feel hurt or mirror human emotion) without differentiation. One could even go further and argue that this view was given new life by the notable influx of Eastern beliefs during the ‘counter-culture’ movement:

I do not know or recall whether my mother or my family ever explicitly said that animals have souls, or that I ever asked (or thought to ask as a child, which suggests to me that the view expressed in Christianity.com originates with insecure religious adults who are overthinking the issue), but as part of the wholehearted compassion, sentimentality, and sensitivity toward animals that I learned (especially our pets), that animals have souls like ours was just an unthinking, unquestioned assumption.

And he probably hadn’t given much thought to what he said to me that day in the bunker (not to mention the ‘thou shalt not kill’ part when he was in the Marines whose job it is to kill and they do it very well). So we have here two 17-year olds from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum of late Cold War America, meeting in the bunker and inadvertently exchanging views related to one of the most consequential questions of human civilization. This effect of disparate contact between peoples is well-known to explorers, migrating tribesmen, sophists, historians, movie-makers, and cultural intellectuals and is a well-known effect of nationalized military conscription and offered here as a corollary to the discussion of hegemonic empires in GGDM section 4 Order.

April 2022 Entry (On Gangs and Governments)

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While viewing the MSNBC report on the El Salvador government’s crackdown on MS-13 and 18th Street gangs (YouTube, March 29, 2022), it occurred to me (probably not for the first time) that from the point of view of the gangs, the government – especially of a country like El Salvador – is just another rival gang, bigger, better armed, and blessed with legitimacy, but another gang nonetheless.

This is not far from the arguments I made regarding the possible origins of sovereignty throughout, for example inGGDM section 3 Government Titles and this view is humorously portrayed in the original Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action” (ST:OS 1968). It certainly seems to be implied in Martin Luther’s Disputations (the “95 Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”) of 1517 that the Church had become another gang of fraudsters (e.g. John Tetzel, Pope Alexander VI Borgia):

82. To wit:—“Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial.”

84. Again:—“What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure love's sake?”

86. Again:—“Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

For his ‘disputations,’ (points of debate about the Church) Martin Luther, an ordained Catholic priest, was excommunicated in 1521 after refusing to withdraw about a third of his disputations. And any gang of thieves, mercenaries, or a criminal fraud organization (or ‘robber baron’ or local Prince) in that time period could be excused for thinking more coarsely, along the same vein, that the Church and the hereditary authority they legitimized was simply a more lucrative racket. And certainly the Nuremburg tribunal — four centuries later — concluded that the Nazi regime of Germany was the 20th Century’s criminal enterprise of the gravest proportions.

Or to put it more simply in modern terms, same problem, different time and facade:

Viewing the government – legitimate government – of any country as ‘just another gang’, bigger and better armed than rival criminal organizations, is both profoundly insightful, and profoundly shallow and self-serving at the same moment. The two are connected in and the view is buttressed by Max Weber’s classic definition of the State (1918) on the notion of the application of physical force:

The key conceptual difference between a government and a gang is the concept of legitimacy. It is a line that is both simple and stark, the division is as stark as the division between mainstream film-making and porn (see discussion of the evolution of the movie Caligula in GGDM section 5 Taxation & Census). To be legitimate implies a sense of moral obligation, a state of rightness:

To put it quite simply, the power of gangs is not considered legitimate, even if the difference between a gang and a government is perceived as cosmetic, dogmatic, or the result of mass social programing (through religion, public education, media). For example, taxation:

Legitimacy is (in the view of so many) the sole defining difference between criminal enterprise and legitimate government authority, and that is what we call politics; politics might precisely be defined as the art of creating legitimacy. Not merely maintaining legitimacy, but creating it over and over again, anew each time, and that is the trap, that is what the politics of the current time has forgotten in their quest for normalcy and stability, they merely focus on maintaining the status quo of legitimacy.

Authoritarianism and authoritarian tendencies, which always appeal to the Supra-Legitimacy (security) concerns of a segment of the population, naturally veer closest to the argument that the government is just another bigger, better armed gang. Supra-legitimacy holds that security concerns, protection against external and internal threats (including violent criminals and government actors), is the most primal legitimacy requirement in all times, places and ages, that trumps all others of the moment. This expectation at the root of legitimacy is not merely a momentary concept of personal physical security, but extends to all spheres – financial, residences, chattels – and into the future, it is tied to both production and reproduction (in the Marx macrosociology) and is most powerful when applied to the future of our children (generativity and the Census Power in GGDM):

Authoritarianism has never and will never go away because of Supra-legitimacy; as long as there is fear of the natural world, of humanity, and ultimately of the existential void (for example, being randomly killed while being robbed by a violent criminal or just for walking down the street), there will be authoritarian tendencies and institutions. Even the existence of other states can lend to authoritarian tendencies within a human community or state. If you want to rid the world of authoritarianism, rid the world of wealth, inequitable distribution of resources, fear, violent crime, and most of all, states.

And because virtue, rightness, prestige are culturally-inherited interpretations, they can be bent to some extent to the purposes of legitimizing authoritarianism or authoritarian tendencies, especially when in the moment, people fear for their security or wealth, or the future of their children (generativity). Thus, the human concept of government, rising from the primal Neolithic world, has a necessary ‘authoritarian tendency’; bluntly, sovereignty cannot exist without authoritarian tendencies and this is perhaps why the mace (bludgeon) became a popular sovereign symbol and political power is often referred to as bludgeoning the opposition into concession or acceptance. All of this, I believe, is consistent with the views expressed in GGDM regarding hegemonic empires, the origins of sovereignty and the separation of police and military.

As an aside before moving on, a quick search of Google on April 4, 2022 shows that Google has no idea about the term ‘supra-legitimacy’; I have noted previously that Google is an unreliable source to find real knowledge, it skews heavily toward whatever is shallow and popular at the moment. However, Merriam Webster Dictionary Online doesn’t know the term either; I do not believe I invented ‘supra-legitimacy’ as a term, I heard it somewhere and my mind grabbed onto it, but I am sure I invented the companion term in GGDM, ‘Meta-Aspect.’ Both concepts are central to the macrosocial philosophy of GGDM.

The Writs of Habeas Corpus and Amparo are tripwires to take the ‘gang’ out of the government, governments that are really gangs will trip over them and fall. Habeas Corpus begins when accountability becomes an expected part of legitimacy and arbitrary, corrupt, and petty abuses of power are no longer accepted, even if they are ‘legal’ or ‘customary’; this is not a new concept, in about 1620, Francis Bacon was sacked from his position as Lord Chancellor for taking bribes, even though such was arguably ‘customary’ in that time. The extent to which demands for accountability have existed and been enforceable have varied over time (humorously, see ‘the annoying peasant’ in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975), but they have always been there on some level (e.g., hence Juvenal and Cicero bemoaned “bread and circuses”), and Habeas Corpus is the unique English law development from the period that put a permanent legal stamp on accountability in the exercise of arrests and detention.

Habeas Corpus requires conceptually that the government be willing to honestly place its sovereign acts (or the acts of individuals within its jurisdiction, in the case of Somerset) for judicious, reasoned, fact-based mortal review by a semi-independent judiciary and to accept the results. This in turn requires an acceptance that the State is neither absolute in power nor infallible or even ill-advised (e.g. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. PA 2005)) and that it must be a self-amending system (à la Peter Suber's Nomic game) to survive in the long term; conversely, states which have viewed the judiciary as another part of the State’s monopoly on the use of physical violence within its geographic bounds have not long survived that delusion, recent infamous examples being the People’s Court of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and perhaps, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. Other countries have gone through such periods but have been forced eventually to another course, possible examples might include the Reign of Terror in France and the Red Guards period in modern China.

Most people think of Habeas Corpus only in terms of freeing prisoners wrongly held by the government, but one of the most famous Habeas Corpus cases was brought regarding a negro slave who was held in chains on a ship in port in England by a private citizen for the purpose of being transported to Jamaica to be sold. In Somerset v Stewart (98 ER 499, 1772 A.D.), the English bench reasoned that no natural law existed that permitted one man to keep another as a slave (or to do the acts that were the subject of the case) and as such, slavery could only be created by positive law. The Court followed then that no such law existed in England and while such law may exist in other places, it would not be enforceable in England, and ordered that the slave must be freed. I have argued in GGDM section, 1 Writs, that the Somerset case was precisely the reason why slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution; the case would have been well known to the founders and including negro slavery in the Constitution would create positive law of the highest order (and you know already how that issue was resolved).

Habeas Corpus was created to set the king straight and to restrain the acts of the king and later, of Parliament and other government bodies whose excesses threatened the legitimacy of the government. The Somerset case, while involving only an individual holding another in chains, shares the same concept; Habeas Corpus and generally, the entire judiciary system always in some sense involves review and application of the State’s monopoly on the use of physical force – this is no less true of the mechanisms for collecting a civil judgment, for example, in Pennsylvania, Plaintiff can have the Sheriff serve Judgement Interrogatories or even sell real estate and chattels at a Sheriff Sale – than it is of reviewing challenges to the government’s arrest power (the monopoly in its rawest form), criminal prosecution, property seizure and restraint, and even judicial review of legislative acts.

This self-amending concept is precisely the argument for an ‘independent judiciary’ – which means a judiciary that does not serve as a ‘show’ organ legitimizing the State’s monopoly on the use of force to protect the current political and economic elite. The test for El Salvador in the next year will be the same rawest test as every other State faces: Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus was created for exactly the purpose of curbing the ‘authoritarian’ tendencies of political power and their wealthy backers or a supporting populist extremism.

March 2022 Entry (Into the Dark Forest - Liu Cixin's 'Cosmic Sociology')

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I encountered Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy for the first time recently by a video from Quinn’s Ideas YouTube Channel titled, “The Ultimate Weapon of The Trisolarans | Three Body Problem Series,” and posted on March 6, 2022 and all quotes here are courtesy of Quinn’s video as I have not personally read the series but have read secondary sources describing the series in addition to viewing Quinn’s video.

The trilogy is a play in three acts, the first book, The Three Body Problem (2008), describes the various crisis that humanity goes through after discovering that a hostile alien warfleet is en route and will arrive in two centuries to exterminate humanity and furthermore that they have already attacked us in ways we can barely comprehend so as to retard human technological progress. Humanity nearly perishes from the frenzied fear, civilization collapses and then recovers, and going into the second book, The Dark Forest (2008), which is the crisis point, humanity has finally reached a level where it feels it can face the Trisolarian fleet. The final book, Death’s End (2010), resolves the series in truly cosmic scale with the last human survivors arriving at the end of the universe via hibernation and relativist time dilation, micro-universes and other gimmicks; as Quinn offers in the video, the scale of the series is enormous in a way that, as I pointed out in GGDM, is not compelling because it is simply beyond human comprehension: How compelling is it that Andromeda Galaxy will “collide” with the Milky Way Galaxy in 2.5 to 4 billion years?

It is said that a fish is always drowning and never drowning. To move through space at any meaningful speed – in this case, 120g acceleration – humans had to learn to breathe deep-sea acceleration fluid. Humans had to learn to drown and not drown at the same time. There was no hint in Quinn’s video review that this involved genetic engineering of the type described in Frederick Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966), rather, it seemed to be a near-mystic discipline obtained by practice in the manner of the various disciplines described in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). In GGDM terms, this is a good example of the sort of idea that could be described in the Stimmung of a Stardrive Patent (see GGDM section 2 Stardrive).

In GGDM terms, this is approximately a First Contact situation between a Major Race Homeworld position (the Trisolarans) and a technologically-advanced near 1st Era Minor Race (Humanity), with a few science-fiction twists. The Trisolarans were alarmed to find a Minor Race so close to their homeworld and so close to becoming a 1st Era Major Race (all of this in GGDM terms). They found us before we found them, but in GGDM terms, since both had looked and found the other, there was little practical difference except that the Trisolarans were moving first and had advanced surveillance capabilities.

The humans who went to meet the ‘probe’ – presumably the most ‘enlightened’ of our species, officers, fleet scientists and diplomats – were mesmerized by its perfection and beauty and the language used to describe is clearly intended to convey that effect. Likewise, humanity was relieved and enthused by the idea that the Trisolarans might be like us, or might respect us enough to send an emissary instead of a warship. It was so beautiful and perfect they never suspected it was anything harmful until it destroyed the ship that had captured and docked it and accelerated toward the Earthfleet that had come out to meet it....

This is, as discussed in GGDM section 7 Combat, the science-fiction execution of an open-space Hannibal-esque ambush hidden behind ideas (paraphrasing Lynn Montross). Because it wasn’t the facts before them that excited humanity, it was the ideas – in GGDM terms, the Ideological and Symbolic Constructural Elements, perhaps in Kantian terms, the ‘is and the ought’ – behind which the ambush was hidden.

GGDM section 6 Combat (“For the Babylon Bobs”) discussed the concept of ramming in ship combat in space. GGDM, and most intelligent people who understand, takes a dim view of ship ramming in space combat in the classic sense seen in video science fiction (e.g. Star Wars, Babylon 5), but I do have to admit that Mr. Cixin’s description of the destruction of 1,000 city-sized Earth warships in just 13 minutes led me to rethink the issue: There is no indication that the probe is occupied by a biological crew, it seems to be a very advanced, intelligent drone of some sort. While AI warships are discussed in GGDM (and AI Scouts are discussed in First Contact), the two concepts of AI and ramming never quite come together in GGDM’s main text like Mr. Cixin so ably described here.

Another issue to revisit is the discussion of tactical speed in ship combat. Thinking in terms of the amount of time that might be represented by a Regular Turn or Combat Round in GGDM (stretching the scale as Mr. Cixin also does), GGDM section 2 Movement (“Interplanetary Movement”) allows that in-system movement is instantaneous and that a ship in a starsystem may be considered at any time to be anywhere in the system for game purposes because of the amount of time that might be represented by a turn, and the advanced technology represented in the game.

From this I concluded and expressed in GGDM section 3 Combat (“Go Speed Racer!”) that differences in tactical speed were mostly generic in game terms unless the players could introduce elements into the game that could make substantial differences expressible in concrete game mechanical terms. All of that is to say that Mr. Cixin here describes a situation where great tactical speed makes a huge difference because the human sensors and computers were too slow to track the movement of the probe and reached the incorrect conclusion regarding their attacker.

But is this really a tactical speed problem? No, the core technology is the teardrop, the super dense material it is made from, that makes the incredible speed count in combat. Anything less would have simply obliterated itself when it rammed the first ship! So, as in most science fiction, and as is also true of GGDM, the technology (in the form of the GGDM Patent interpretation) precedes concepts such as tactical speed.

So, Mr. Cixin’s scene makes a case for ramming combat in space that does not involve dramatic self-sacrifice or even the loss of the ramming vessel, and secondarily, a case potentially for attaching more importance to tactical speed in GGDM combat. However, to achieve the Trafalgar-like phenomenal massacre of 1,000 lumbering city-sized Earth warships in 13 minutes by ramming, the Earth ships were very unrealistically presented as being in a stationary formation of three lines, like set-up dominos – almost reminiscent of the pilot episode of the original Battlestar Galactica in 1978. Mr. Cixin’s devise of three lines of close order warships is perhaps an example of taking literary liberties to the point of destroying suspension of disbelief to make a point; he wanted to tell the reader that humans create orderly lines and no matter what, the cosmos will destroy them?

Stationary and/or linear formations are certainly not the assumption in GGDM combat formations and are only rarely seen even in the worst video sci-fi, for example, the success of the “Starflower” beast mode in The Last Starfighter (1984) required the enemy fighters to be seen approaching in a close order line formation.

Liu Cixin, like H.P. Lovecraft, is first and foremost a literary figure, and his works are filled with literary allusions, symbols, metaphors and allegory – for example, the perfect cosmic teardrop that becomes the raging unstoppable celestial dragon that destroyed the human fleet in 13 minutes. All of his words and literary devices are directed to a point he wants to make and by extrapolation, his interpretation of the world that is foisted upon his willing readers and future generations of uncultured school students who may be required to read the works for a grade. The vision he provides is of a crowded, brutish interstellar jungle teaming with intelligent, willful, hostile alien races possessing advanced technology who preemptively seek to exterminate all competitors, especially minor races, with all survivors eventually retreating to perfect paradise micro-universes of their own making to wait for the end of the cosmic cycle. I mention Lovecraft here because Mr. Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth Past seems to have roots in Lovecraft Cosmicism (not to be confused with Russian Cosmism), but the alien races are much more science fiction and practical for the story he wanted to tell than Lovecraftian entities would have been.

“Ye Wenjie proposes two axioms of cosmic sociology: ‘First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter of the universe remains constant.” – from Wikipedia article, “Remembrance of Earth's Past.”

This is foreshadowed during the Crisis Era by the collapse of human civilization and the widespread barbarism and human cannibalism that follows, and in the second and third book is extended to the galaxy and universe as a whole. The only deterrent is mutually-assured destruction (M.A.D.) – the humans obtained détente by threatening to broadcast the location of the Trisolaran homeworld to all of the other races in the universe but by doing so, they would also expose their own position and the two species would face annihilation in a hostile universe. This in fact, the humans did do; a weapon is useless if you not willing to pull the trigger even if it means your own demise and that pretty much assures that M.A.D. will eventually happen, because someone is going to call a bluff. Humanity on Earth and the Trisolarians of Alpha Centauri both perished alone in the universe.

Ye Wenjie’s Second Axiom parallels what I learned in Real Estate class in business college: The amount of land on Earth is finite (and will shrink if the sea level rises) while the human population keeps expanding; thus real estate will continuously rise in value as there is less and less land for each person (as a general matter, barring any of the special circumstances you might imagine). Similarly the Paleolithic nature of interstellar settings was noted in GGDM section 6 Diplomacy (“Interstellar Paleolithic Culture”) (as well as comparing far-flung colonies to Polynesian Island cultures in GGDM section 4 Expansion) and however much the Paleolithic world of our ancestors might resemble the interstellar setting created by Mr. Cixin, Joseph Tainter noted in an appearance on Peak Prosperity (June 26, 2017) that conflict avoidance by migration to other unoccupied areas is the first response and that wars only happened when there were too many people and nowhere to migrate without coming into conflict with people already living there. So Mr. Cixin’s cosmos teaming with hostile intelligent aggressive and technologically-advanced aliens is something beyond the merely Paleolithic (and it reminds me of the Cosmic Encounter and Chaosmos board games).

But we must also note that despite all, when the world became crowded and the wars began, somehow something emergent came from the process, and as I argued in GGDM section 4 Order (“Hegemonic Empires”): that is the paradox of humanity. But that does not seem to be an assumption or Earth-history parallel Mr. Cixin allowed in his story setting – that Humanity and Trisolarans would combine for survival and something emergent in interstellar culture would come of it; such would be contrary to the brutish, M.A.D. point Mr. Cixin was trying to make.

February 2022 Entry (The Great Rupty Gupty - Cosmicism in GGDM)

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The Blue Fleet commander was very concerned as they approached the destination starsystem; a vast piece of cosmic darkness had been following and gaining on them at faster-than-light speed for several days. And since ships moving between stars are effectively faster than light missiles, there was nothing she could do to avoid the approaching pursuer who seemed timed to arrive in the destination system with the Blue Fleet.

It was time, the combat crew was awakened from their long slumber and plugged into their battle stations. A crack in the universe opened and the Blue Fleet spilled into the destination system moving toward the target Red Colony. They were met almost immediately by two large Red Fleet Carriers moving to intercept, when suddenly, the living darkness caught them and passing the Blue Fleet, it inhaled the two Red Carriers. The self-destruct on one of the Red Carriers exploded in a flash of light a moment before it disappeared into the Great Rupty Gupty.

The Blue Fleet evaded and turned to port as sensors showed the gross creature moving directly toward the Red Colony which was the target of the Blue Fleet’s combat movement. The commanders and combat crew watched in helpless horror as the Great Rupty Gupty slowly enveloped the colony planet, consuming it, while the Blue Fleet took up position for what would probably be a futile defense of the Blue Colony in the system, should the creature desire a dessert after its meal.

The Great Rupty Gupty rested contentedly in the light of a sun that its kind had never visited. It watched with amusement as the orbital configuration of the system descended into chaos in the absence of two former colonized planets and the gravitational effect of its’ great body mass. As it rested, drifting in and out of awareness, the Great Rupty Gupty re-dreamt of how it was sent into the wilderness, alone from its own kind, because the priests of its kind feared that the Rupty Gupty was so attractive to others of its kind that it would cause others to commit inproprieties of trespass. Yet, for all their imposturing, none followed Rupty into exile on account of attractiveness.

Tiny creatures of the sort which inhabited the planets Gupty had consumed were unknown to Rupty’s kin – they didn’t get out much in the universe, being tightly woven around the One and Only to which they were bound and borne. The discovery of the tiny creatures and their ships would alone make Gupty an extraordinary explorer among its kind, to be remembered long after the asinine Priests had been consumed by the One and Only, forgotten. Yet Rupty was trapped in this system and growing restless; something about this system prevented Gupty from opening an escape to the next star.

Generations later, a Green Scout Ship opened a rift arriving in search of the fate of the isolated and long-lost to orbital-disintegraton chaos Green Colony located on a small planet that Rupty thought was not consumable. The Scout Ship was destroyed as it was rudely shoved aside by Gupty’s frenzied escape from the system.

I do not know how the Rupty story ends, I dreamt it or it occurred to me in a semi-conscious state while I was quarantined at home due to COVID. But the story does not need an ending, perhaps none know how it ends. It is offered here as an example of what a Concierge might be able to do with Intervention Potentials to inject something weird into a game that is perhaps dragging. Hopefully the Concierge of that game is a much more gifted writer than I, who tend to be rather plain and direct.

Why is Gupty called great, praytell? Listen to Megadeth:

The players won’t be happy about it, but Gupty doesn’t need their permission! In fact, doesn’t even care or comprehend. And neither did the Concierge; players must allow that bad things – sometimes really big bad things – must happen in the game to make a story as discussed at length throughout GGDM. This might be a Pull or Prose Intervention if the Concierge wants to tell a story of something past, create a background and a looming threat or mystery in the game. This story might also be applied through the use of several Poke Interventions (timing is key, depending on the order of Red, Blue and Green’s turns in the cycle and whether the ships in question are actually en route or arriving) to interrupt the potential combat, and create the destruction of two colony planets (the game’s Starlog will need to be adjusted as well).

There is a thread of cosmicism winding through GGDM (along with anti-natalism and terror management theory) and certainly could seep into a game depending on the mood and preferences of the participants; GGDM provides plenty of playspace for whatever may come. It would be truly strange and horrifying if I were somehow a ‘reincarnation’ of H.P. Lovecraft, but GGDM in both gameplay and macrosociology (or macrosocial philosophy if you like), seems to have situated at some point between Ludwig Mises’ axiomatic approach and methodological dualism (via Prof. Clarence Marsh Case) and Lovecraftian comsicism in macrosocially describing human reality.

Oddly, I was never a Lovecraft fan; in my youth, I am sure that I read one or two Lovecraft stories, but I don’t particularly remember any of them. I never went looking for them, the horror or weird tales genre never appealed to me; contrast this with, for example, the way I consumed Bradbury, Asimov, May, Sheckley, Smith (Cordwainer or George Oliver, take your pick), Heinlein, Bear and even Donaldson in my youth. Attending a STEM-oriented high school (we had a planetarium and a botanical garden!), I was a first-order science-fiction nerd of humanist, science-centered Golden Age and New Wave sci-fi, captained by Isaac Asimov (who allegedly disliked Lovecraft stories) and Void Piloted by Norman Spinrad through a human-centric, human-comprehensible universe. I frequently remember science fiction stories I have read, but do not specifically recall any Lovecraft stories I read, I remember Stephen King stories even (Lovecraft 'dumbed down' perhaps), and did I mention that I read most of Bradbury’s works? While I liked Bradbury’s science-fiction short stories very much, I tended to not like or understand ('get' in my teen years) Bradbury's more surreal stories such as Dandelion Wine (1957).

Most of my exposure to Lovecraft came haphazardly through hobby tabletop gaming which has an endless faux fascination with Lovecraftian Horror. I know I have played the Arkham Horror board game many times, though it is not one of my favorites, I recognize it as the advant-guarde of cooperative board game mechanics. Rarely however, do hobby tabletop games really approach Cosmicism which is rather inconsistent on several points with the general ‘empowerment’ premise of hobby tabletop gaming but is uniquely suited for cooperative game mechanics.

Whatever the intellectual lineage or spectrum between Lovecraft and GGDM, he and I seem to have arrived at the same place by different routes perhaps; Lovecraft was a literary writer and not a philosopher or sociologist, while I took the more ‘scientific’ approach of applying the Existential Void to a science-fiction setting simulation of human macrosocial processes.

Continuing Thoughts March 2022:

Although Cosmism and Cosmicism are opposite philosophies (or maybe call them ‘interpretations’ in a generic sense), in terms of optimism vs. pessimism for example, they are not mutually exclusive in an operational sense: It could both be true that humans are insignificant and limited in a vast and strange cosmos, and that humans can continue evolving perhaps to an ‘angelic’ state occupying a place on the sidereal stage (cosmism is an ancestor of transhumanism) where we will be the Cthulhu to some other creatures (are we not already to lower animals in Earth?). The contrast in interstellar, space-opera terms between Cosmism and Cosmicism would the seed for great emergent science fiction in the right (write) hands.

Regarding the evolution of the story of Rupty Gupty as a COVID-inspired feverish dream that became the vehicle for the discussion of Cosmicism in GGDM, a religions person might be inspired to comment, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ Rubbish it is to attribute the emergent result of a proximate set of events to some clever, mysterious scheme by the Abrahamic God! Like when an alleged dark conspiracy upon investigation is revealed to be a combination of circumstances and profound human ignorance and carelessness without conscious collusion or thought, perhaps spurred by our basest desires and fondest wishful thinking.

January 2022 Entry (The GGDM Wholism Project)

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This month I have completed what I termed the “GGDM Wholism Project” – an adjunct to Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million’s main text. You can find the GGDM Wholism Project Document in PDF here.

Wanna Play!? This document is not a ‘GGDM for Dummies’ document, there are no ‘dummies’ in GGDM, GGDM is not to be ‘dumbed-down’ for anyone. Rather, GGDM is a wholism – or, more accurately, manages to be several things at once (at a length of 1,590 pages!) – and the GGDM game rules themselves are intended as a demonstration of the axiomatic macrosocial structural arguments and approach of GGDM. Ok, that aside, because I don’t want to go there in this document, the GGDM wholism project is a bullet outline of the GGDM rules – sans extensive commentary – for those who just want the rules. The comparative size of this document to the full GGDM text is an admission that approximately 75% of the original GGDM text (not including appendices and tables) consists of quotes, commentaries and asides, a cardinal sin in game-rules writing but wholly (or ‘holy’ maybe) necessary to what GGDM is...

But why would I not include the commentaries and quotes and asides? Consider for a moment the entire 30-year adjunct industry of game-hobby magazines filled in part by designer notes and commentaries, articles on every topic imaginable; consider the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) – which I recall being something in excess of 300 pages long and consider the sometimes quite voluminous play example booklets that accompany complex modern hobby board games. But GGDM was not that sort of enterprise – it was free to mankind and alienkind alike and even catkind if they jumped out of their cardboard boxes – and GGDM wasn’t strictly or narrowly a game even, so why not let the commentaries fly and spin through the work? I am mortal also.

A reader may or may not be surprised to find that the combat rules in GGDM are quite extensive. The reason for this is debatable, it may be that the game designer started as a wargamer in the early 1980s, it may be attributable to the military dominance of simulation gaming for so long, it may also be an expected consequence of the prevalence of militant-power-domination fantasy in science fiction and fantasy literature (à la Spinrad). It may be that any faithful simulation of civilization (at least human civilization) must include war-making mechanics. But GGDM is not a ‘wargame’ – it is at the least a ‘wargame plus’ (sort of like ‘apostasy plus’ in the rules); wholism is at the core of GGDM, the game development was a rebellion against wargaming and the non-wargame parts of GGDM are more impressive and greater than the wargame parts. Like civilization.

In some cases, I found it necessary to slightly rearrange the presentation of the rules here because this outline format demands a different flow than the original text (or more likely, my original presentation of the rules was suboptimal). The corollary of this outline is that it is not the full thing, detail and commentary were sacrificed for brevity in many places; when in doubt, gobsmacked or wonderstruck, consult the full GGDM text!

Extraction and reduction are the poison to wholism – that one, in reading these rules, would regard GGDM as ‘just a silly space game’ to which the remaining 80% of GGDM is ‘just commentary’ is the risk I take here.

This outline is sort of writing GGDM backwards, this outline is how GGDM would have been written if I had written it without commentary! But that would not have been possible because the thinking-commentary shaped the rules, the process cannot be segregated moving in a forward direction; like history, that only works in hindsight. The point remains that whatever you think of my sociological and philosophical arguments, GGDM is a game, a simulation, with rules, procedures, player positions, scarcity of means, a definite beginning and ending condition, and the rules are original to a large extent, filled with surprising organic-grown developments such as Reformations, Constructural Elements, Kairotic Moments, and Exposeˊ, and the like of which you will find nowhere else on Earth. It would, on its own merits as a dynamic game, be fascinating to play.

I have debated throughout whether GGDM as a whole constitutes a treatise? But the first question is a treatise on what? The same could be asked of the Bible. I am not objectively capable of answering, I suspect that my contemplations of the question are an exercise in self-puffery more than anything else. Like genius, the answer to that question will be determined by the audience, not the author. But also, I note that the definition of ‘treatise’ seems to be a fuzzy concept; we know what it is, but the more it is defined, the less useful it is conceptually.

Raise your hand if you are an overachiever! There was a fellow at the game club, I think he was an IT professional, who wanted to design a game. He was fascinated with board games, owned well over a thousand board games, so naturally the game that he designed and that I played probably twice at the game club, was a board game. If I recall, it was about travelling across the country and collecting license plates from every state; he was very into the mathematical structure of the game. It was a straightforward board game for commercial publication someday, it had no meaning or thought outside the game rules and game board and the underlying math structure, and the pieces he and his spouse handmade... It was just for play and was engaging to the extent it was amusing while being played.

Yours truly, however, started to design an extension to a published board game (that is, the 1970s game Stellar Conquest) in the early 1990s, and almost 30 years later emerged with a macrostructural or macrosocial theory, wrapped in a game which had morphed into some sort of internet and computer game, which I have struggled to unwrap for any potential readers. I have nothing against the fellow at the game club and by most practical measures, he is a better game designer than I will ever be – it would be fair to say in game design terms that I way overdid it, that I went way over the top in GGDM as a game design, to the point perhaps of incomprehensibility as a game design. I do not feel my game is incomprehensible, though most wouldn’t even try to read it, but in my latest effort to ‘unwrap’ the game, I have extracted just the rules sans commentary, into a new supplementary document that I have titled The Wholism.

December 2021 Entry (on Proficiency & Farce in three acts)

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This is a real-world example for GGDM game play of how the incompetence or carelessness of individuals doing a job can turn an attempt at improved social proficiency into farce.

The City of Pittsburgh collects household trash every week from residential areas; every other week, they collect both regular trash and recycling. This is accomplished by residents setting their refuse out on the curb at night and the garbage collection trucks come along around 6 a.m. and pick it up. The regular trash trucks are white, and the trucks that pick up recycling are blue; usually the blue truck comes first so that the following regular trash truck picks up whatever the recycling truck doesn’t take. There is nothing startling about this, it is a very common refuse collection procedure in most urban settings.

On October 6, 2021, I set out my recycling and included with it a large plastic brown trashcan full of metal cans, the can had no lid or cover. As I got ready for work, I looked out and saw the blue recycling truck pick up the recycling and leave the brown trash can that was very obviously filled with recyclable metal cans. A short time later, the white regular truck followed, picked up the brown trash can full of metal cans and dumped it into their truck. So my metal cans recycling for October 6, 2021, ended up in a landfill instead of being recycled.

On October 20, 2021, I set out the same brown trash can filled to the top with metal cans, and I put a sign on it that said it was recycling. It was placed with the rest of my recycling. This time, as I got ready for work, I looked out to see that the white regular trash truck had come first, and they picked up the brown trash can full to the top with metal cans and with a recycling sign on top of it, and dumped it into the regular garbage truck. They did not pick up any of the rest of the recycling, leaving it properly for the blue recycling garbage truck to collect. So once again, my trashcan full of sorted metal cans ended up in the landfill instead of being properly recycled.

One of the intense memories of my childhood was that in the vicinity of any payphone (remember those?) – and payphones were everywhere – mom-and-pop corner grocery stores (remember those?), laundromats, bars, subshops, and pizza shops the area would be littered with a carpet of cigarette butts and match packs, teardrop-shaped pop can tabs, soda and beer bottle crown lids, and of course, an ocean of used chew tobacco and spit. Some things change (e.g., about 25% of adults smoke now), but more often, they just morph into something else: I put out more recycling than my home would normally merit because I pick up recyclable litter, and my neighborhood has a plentiful supply of it. So my total recycling is twice or three times what it would normally be for a household like mine because others don’t; they’d rather toss it out the car window or whatever.

There is an interesting dynamic there: People who pick up trash, don’t litter, because once you pick up other people’s trash, why would you be a litterbug? And people who litter, of course, would never be bothered to pick up trash. It’s like a toggle switch, a divide in humanity. When you ‘get it’ you don’t litter, when you don’t ‘get it’ apparently you feel free to litter – I cannot testify to the latter because I was raised to never litter, if we had a soda can or an empty container or candy wrapper, we had a bag in the car, or you put it in your pocket and took care of it later.

Have you ever seen the people who go to Dollar General or Shop ‘n Save, buy one thing, the clerk bags it, they get outside, take it out of the bag, start consuming it, and toss the bag on the ground? If you know that is what you are going to do when you get outside, why not tell the clerk you don’t need a bag?

The same toggle switch seems to work for smoking tobacco, drinking and driving, exaggeration and lying, and other human bad habits and fallacies – those who ‘get it’ would never even think of doing it – maybe that is what passes for Enlightenment – and those who don't do it without care or thought.

It requires just two seconds of attention to look at a trashcan and determine that it is full of recyclable metal cans. I did not put out this trashcan full of metal cans on a non-recycling day. The people who collect the garbage in my neighborhood should not be driving a garbage truck, or driving anything that has wheels because the amount of intelligence and comprehension required to determine a trashcan if full of cans for recycling is the same amount of cognition required to understand what a stop sign means while driving. These people should not even be allowed to eat without adult supervision, because they might mistake the food for trash and throw it away and mistake the wrapper for food and try to eat it!

Regardless of the social or political intent of the City of Pittsburgh’s refuse recycling program, or the global conservation objectives of our civilization, the entire thing is reduced to farce if the person collecting the trash cannot take two seconds to distinguish a can full of sorted recyclable metal cans from a can of regular trash. That the City of Pittsburgh uses taxpayer money to pay these low-wattage idiots is sickening and infuriating, that such people are being employed to implement our larger conservation policies is disheartening. This is an example of how, within GGDM game terminology, Proficiency can clash with failure of Enlightenments (obviously, the City of Pittsburgh didn’t choose the brightest lights in our local civilization to implement this important policy); there are no rerolls when the trashcan full of metal cans is dumped out into the wrong truck by someone who cannot give two seconds of attention to what they are doing for a living.

November 2021 Entry (on Lebanon's Power Grid Collapse)

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First, of course, it is a jolting reminder of what we take for granted, of our inheritance. Lebanon has not had reliable electricity or 24-hour electricity for decades. And now it has none, again. It does not take much to imagine the political consequences if something like that happened in the West, we only need to look to the 2021 Texas Power Grid failure of last winter for a minor example. And with a little more imagination we might project some of the societal effects were this to become the norm, as was predicted in my youth when they said the oil would run out, or in post-nuclear war movies:

But more to our subject, it struck me that one of the reasons we have such a difficult time engaging the public in discussions of social dynamics or sociological thought generally is precisely because of our enormous prosperity. We have to look to other countries’ massive failures for dramatic examples to use in dynamics discussions, or we go find historical examples. Joseph Tainter uses only well-studied and distant – intellectually- and politically-safe – ancient civilizations for his examples to avoid having his theoretical discussion being upended by current politics (this was as true in 1988 as it is today, I was there in 1988). Maybe examples like Lebanon work because we like to look down at other countries, maybe they work because they are a foreign place and relate to foreign policy issues rather than anything internal or political in our society. But they do work as objective dramatic examples of failure for those who are attuned to sociological macrostructural thought.

I also find in thinking about Tainter’s collapse and relating it to Lebanon that though couched in ancient civilization terms, his theories work amazingly well in the modern context. For example, the article describes that the United States and the World Bank are trying to work a deal for Lebanon to get oil from Egypt and electricity from Jordan. That reminded me of his final principle that collapse only occurs in a vacuum and that when surrounded by other complex civilizations, a complex civilization will not be allowed to collapse.

Professor Tainter wrote at the end of the Cold War:

Now in ancient times and – oh heck, up to the early 20th Century – the situation in Lebanon might have resulted in a Tainter-like foreign takeover of the country. However, in the modern situation, overt military aggression and direct territorial gain by the major world powers is risky, cost prohibitive (Winston Churchill as foreign secretary complained about the negative cost-benefit of occupying Iraq in the early 20th Century), and no longer practical (for example, the United States was not trying to annex Afghanistan, we never tried to make it ‘produce’ for us in the way described by Pacification Theory). Yet, for their own selfish reasons (for example, anti-terrorism), the global community or at least the United States and the World Bank are acting in a Tainter-like way to prevent the final collapse of Lebanon!

I am not confusing the collapse of Lebanon’s power grid with Tainter’s collapse; rather the collapse of the Lebanese power grid is fully symbolic of the sort of collapse of complex societies described by Tainter: Decades ago, Lebanon had reliable 24-hour electricity and now has electricity for only a few hours a day and sometimes not at all. This alone might be taken as ‘just’ a technical or logistics problem (both of which are serious issues by themselves) but coupled with the collapse of the currency in 2019, the Beiruit dock explosion in 2020 and the litany of other problems and the sum of it points in a rapid, generational decrease in the sociopolitical complexity of Lebanon (compare current Lebanon for example, to Lebanon before the Israeli invasion in 1982) that will have long-term stunting consequences on that society and its place in the world.

In the previous section, I suggested that emerging global civilization had or would prevent the major powers from direct territorial gain over territories undergoing a collapse (for example, as would have happened in the 19th Century). That certainly is an important factor in the emergence of global civilization, perhaps one of the definitions that might be offered.

However, it may also be alternately or equally true that an emerging global civilization or at least one in our current milieu, will simply not allow a vacuum to exist. This then becomes a primary organic function of global civilization. Now, one might argue that has always been the case – hence the territorial gain by major powers over ‘leaderless population’ – but that is not the case, for if it were so, then Tainter would never have been able to identify societal collapse (Tainter in fact, points to Western Europe of the 5th Century as a prime example of complete collapse).

So in any such situation in the current world, the application of Tainter’s final principle of collapse (power vacuum) can be expressed as follows: Either or both of the following could be true:

1) The current global civilization prevents direct territorial expansion by major powers in filling a power vacuum due to cost, risk and other considerations and/or

2) The emerging global civilization will act organically to prevent a local or regional power vacuum (horror vacui).

So we’ve come back around to the point that a collapse will not occur if the power is surrounded by other complex societies. But in this case, it is in the selfish best interest of the world powers and emerging global civilization, that the problem be ‘constructively’ fixed in ways that do not involve direct territorial expansion of a major world power over Lebanon (in this case, the US and the World Bank, Egypt and Jordon).

October 2021 Entry (on the Human Condition)

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1. I did not consent to be here, you did not consent to be here. The bacteria in your pants didn’t consent to be here, the squirrel in your backyard did not consent to be here. Nobody and nothing consented to being here. It is logically impossible to have consented to being here, based on what we currently know. Through reproductive drive, parents are ‘tricked’ into doing the universe’s ‘dirty work’ in placing a new generation here without their consent (and you are not allowed to sue your parents for it!).

2. Since we didn’t consent to being here, we should be able to choose to have never existed. But that is a logical impossibility because of irreversible causality (i.e. the arrow of time). But if I never existed, then I could not be offended at being here against my will; my dear grandmother would have said, “Ah, don’t think like that!” – she said that to me several times in my youth. But why not? If it is undeniably true, or would you prefer we just make something up and talk ourselves into believing that instead? Which happens to describe about half of what we call culture.

3. The condition of life then is one of being trapped between two logical impossibilities, the squirrel and the bacteria probably don't know it. The human condition is the sapience, consciousness, cognition, perception, extended self-awareness and autobiographical memory to understand the illogic of the logic trap, to perceive the injustices of it, and the reproductive consciousness understanding. The human condition is the ability to perceive, understand, abstract, and project and to be emergently annoyed and discomfited by it.

4. In addition to being imprisoned by logic, we are assaulted on a daily basis, on a moment by moment basis, with petty stupidity, malfunction, malfeasance in everything we try to do. It is almost impossible to simply do something, to go from A to B, without some intervening stupid event, something falls over, something isn’t right, something doesn’t happen, something takes too long, you trip over this or that; everything takes three times longer and is five times more complicated than it should have been! But unlike the other animals, humans have the sapience, cognition to notice it, and our response is emergent, if not entirely helpful or constructive.

Is there anything that you can think of that is more fundamentally wrong than being placed here without our consent, being kept here against our consent (not being allowed to choose to have never existed), being enticed to do the same to the next generation, and being assulted and insulted by the universe on a daily basis? All for no particular reason, but also then, given the intelligence to know it for what it is?

Happy Halloween from Earth!

September 2021 Entry - The Babble-on Project

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Well, I finally completed this little project; it took much longer than it should have, which is what happens when you are only SQ+13. My little Babble-on Project (download here) is an exploratory adjunct (as in Google Dictionary: “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part”) collection of quotes with citations and GGDM commentaries relating them to the rules and themes of the game. Like all of my other projects, it is eternally free to download and enjoy – as long as there is an internet, which is something like saying, ‘the center of infinity.’

This project is a merger of the two major elements of GGDM. GGDM is a game by any reasonable standard or definition, and I am an old gamer, a lot of effort was put into creating a new set of interesting game mechanics that was capable of producing an emergent variety of game universes and situations (e.g., Constructral Elements, Power Activations, Fuzzy Groups, News Events). You will not see it’s like anywhere else, GGDM is cranked to the theoretical max of human simulation gaming (as Spinrad might say). GGDM is also a running commentary on human civilization and a heterodox form of macrosociology, with the game structures acting as a practical demonstration. In the end, GGDM is the kenophobia of space-opera, interstellar sci-fi simulation gaming, just as I am the Henri Darger (1892-1973) of simulation game design.

The following sections offer a few of my favorite examples found inside the Babble-on Project document:

GGDM Commentary: The purpose of this entry is not to argue about Nietzsche, for one, I haven’t the expertise. A Philosophy Stack Exchange user suggested this is similar to Kant’s ‘we can’t know the noumenon, we only know the phenomena.’ Ok?

No, instead, part of this quote was offered in the Wikipedia article on Social Constructionism, and it then occurred to me that first, GGDM contains elements of social constructionism (e.g., interpretations, Constructural Elements even!) and might be mistaken for a work in social constructionism, and second, that if anyone in France ever read it, it is possible that GGDM might be slightly more popular in France than in the Anglosphere (cross-culture popularity with local obscurity is not an unknown phenomenon in popular music, art, performance, and literary fiction).

I do not consider GGDM a social constructionist work, though it has elements which I arrived at either by my own thinking or by absorption from late Cold War and millennial cultural milieu. I stake my territory out in Spaces, et seq., 4 Beginnings, where I state that reality to humans is a compromise between the objective (empirical) and subjective (mental, cultural) realities, and this is the reason for Galactic Space and Public Space duality representing civilization in the game.

Further, in Flavors of Fact and Five Types of Fact, 1 Dreamtime, while introducing Interpretations into the game, I simultaneously reinforce empirical fact and offer a category breakdown of the spectrum of facts that straddles between empirical, repeatable facts and facts which are simply facts because they are agreed upon. This is precisely consistent with the stance taken in 4 Beginnings and the duality carries through the rest of the game, where positions are defined by hard, empirical, objective reality of their place in Galactic Space and just as much by what is on the Public Space representing the collective culture, consciousness of civilization.

GGDM Commentary: We were all put here against our will, there is no argument that can or has ever been made that somehow we consented to being here. This is the essence of religion, even though most people who practice, believe, preach their religion don’t understand that this is in fact, the sole issue of religion. Religion must address the fundamental unfairness, wrongness of us having been ‘placed’ here against our will and having to endure the annoyance and harms of life in this universe, including death and loss. To do this, religions construct grand cosmic schemes, creation stories, God’s plan, incorporating ethical and moral structures, community beliefs and rituals, the afterlife, and so forth, all to create a balm and buffer against the Existential Void so that their followers are happy. That is the fundamental and essence of the happiness meta-aspect of humanity as a counter against our sprawling consciousness.

I personally refuse to accept that there is any grand or beneficent purpose to having been placed here against my will or that there is any grand scheme to the petty annoyances and pain of my life. I refuse to pretend that I am happy, and I am sure that is evident in GGDM. Would the world be better, would humanity be better, if we refused to pretend to be happy, if we took off the blinkers? That is the rhetorical question of GGDM.

GGDM Commentary: It is the final sentence of the preceding quote in which he advances another argument for equality of sociology and the physical sciences: Consistent common experience of history is the same as any empirical law of physics. It is notable that history is considered in most places to be an ‘empirical science’ and Jared Diamond described it in terms of ‘natural experiments’ (see Jared Diamond quote, 3 Constructural Elements, p. 210) and J.B. Bury insisted on it in 1930:

• “I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.” – J. B. Bury, “The Science of History,” Selected Essays, 1930 (text available on Google Books).

• Notice that in the paragraph above, Professor Case uses the term, ‘social selection,’ demonstrating that by 1921, the concepts of evolutionary natural selection had already been ported to sociology – where social forces select for or against developments to solve problems – a process now known as social dynamics. Professors Jonathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn have subsequently divided social selection forces and processes into Durkheimian, Marxian, and Spencerian selection forces and noted that religion has the ability to cut across all classes, stratifications and corporate units.

Thus, Clarence Marsh Case insists that sociology is the equal of any science when it notes historical experience. And since, as he, Jared Diamond, and Ludwig von Mises argued, human experiences are not repeatable like lab experiments, history must in most cases be the basis of sociology.

GGDM Commentary: GGDM does a very poor job of separating praxeology generally from Ludwig von Mises’ ‘praxilogical economics.’ Id. I have surveyed about a half dozen articles in April 2021 on the subject of ‘what is praxeology’ and I felt that the encyclopedia.com article was the most comprehensive and the best; putting everything (including Mises) in proper places within the praxeology framework and not placing the emphasis too much on the Austrian School (as many other sites do).

But I also found the approach to explaining ‘what is praxeology’ to be widely variable, for example, I thought the opening sentence of “What the Hell is Praxeology” from praxeology.net contained an important point (this emphasizes the analytic category outlined by Broome, above): • “Praxeology is the study of those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori; in other words, it is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means-end schemes, and so forth.”

Note the emphasis on ‘a priori’ instead of a posteriori, libertarianism.org notes in its praxeology article:

• “There is a sense in which Misesian praxeology was a definitive, if delayed, solution to the 19th‐century Methodenstreit between Austrian economists, principally Carl Menger, and the Prussian Historical School. Proponents of historicism, according to Mises, ‘tried to deny the value and usefulness of economic theory. Historicism aimed at replacing it by economic history.’”

While finally, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy praxeology article, written by Bengt Molander, seems to be a complete outlier in placing praxeology origins in Scandinavia rather than farther south:

• “Praxeology started in Norway and Denmark and is still strongest in the Scandinavian philosophical community, though it has also had a considerable influence in the German speaking world. It began in the 1960s as a discursive, analytical practice in the circle around the Norwegian philosopher Jakob Meløe (1927-), which later, in the 1970s, came to be known as ‘praxeology.’”

Meløe is not mentioned in any other article on the origin or definition of praxeology.

• I thought it notable that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no entry for praxeology; it is possible that they do not consider it properly a philosophic subject, or it is more likely that they don’t know what to call it and no one has volunteered to write an article on it that is acceptable to the encyclopedia board.

The second aspect of GGDM and praxeology is that GGDM parallels Misesian praxeology in that the Axiom of Human Meaning – humans need meaning – is the starting point of ‘reconstruction’ of macrosociology in GGDM from which all else flows (e.g., the Existential Void, culture, interpretations, fuzzy groups), while in Austrian Economics, the Axiom of Human Action (“One of the implications that can be logically deduced from the irrefutably true axiom of human action is that human action is purposeful (or conscious) action – action that is directed at attaining certain ends.” – Thorsten Polleit, Mises Institute, 2011) is the font from which Mises reconstructed economics “as a formal-logical science.” Id.

It is thus that while GGDM (and me personally) do not reject empiricism per se, it is important to understand the attempt that is made by GGDM to construct a single axiomatic basis for human society, culture, and civilization. Possibly I am in error in classifying the axiomatic approach I have taken as ‘macrosociology’ but I don’t think anyone has invented a different term and I don’t have any better right now either.

GGDM Commentary: GGDM does not directly engage with selection forces in the same way as Professors Turner and Abrutyn do in their work on social dynamics, but selection forces are ‘indirectly’ simulated in the game in the form of, for example, inactivation of Constructural Elements, conflict checks for and changing of Government Titles, isolation and drift mechanics, and Writs and Fuzzy Group activations. Participants may, however, consider selection forces identified here (and in other works by other authors) as part of weighing changes to civilizations in the game.

GGDM Commentary: The issue of corporate (and elite) social responsibility and activism certainly is not a new creature in our time and corporate boards have always insisted that their only responsibility is the make a profit for the shareholders (of which they are, incidentally, usually the majority shareholders – a conundrum that drives liberal activists to fits), but the events of recent years have raised a new clamor and there seems to be a feeling that the ground is shifting slightly (a process described in Artifice, 2 Constructural Elements) and expectations are changing with a new generation (GGDM addresses generational turnover in a couple of different ways). The peculiar way that GGDM treats Corporations and MegaCorporations (via Special Writs) makes them very much entwined with their civilization and not separate from it, and the conversation above is offered as an example for GGDM participants to consider.

• In an interview with Poppy Harlow on CNN on April 9, 2021, Levi & Strauss CEO, Chip Berg also cited the diversity of stakeholders as another reason why his company is engaging on social issues. When asked, however, about Levi & Strauss’ relationship with China and China’s ‘genocide’ of the Uighurs, he danced around the question, but gave a reasonable satisfactory answer: He minimized the importance of China as a market and supplier for his company (3% he said at one point) and said they don’t do business with that province (to avoid the possibility of forced labor in their products).

The final comment by Marty Schenker about how corporations are the ‘third party’ in our political system epitomizes the Estate Government Title, in this sense, ‘corporate America’ could be called an Estate Government Title in GGDM terms to the extent that they actively – whether under the old Milton Friedman de-regulation model or the new ‘woke’ model – cohesively act to assert their positional power over their civilization. If corporate America suddenly displays great cohesion in the new woke model, or there is a marked long-term change in how it addresses social issues, does the Estate Title of the Milton Friedman model morph into a Social Title instead? Questions for GGDM participants to consider.

GGDM Commentary: I could not help but to wonder what is it that would allow us to describe human civilization in terms comparable to (but not the same as, because that can never happen) the way mathematics describes the universe? I really have no idea, and my head nearly explodes trying to catch even a momentary glimpse of it. Apparently our understanding of human civilization (the social sciences, history) is comparable currently to something less than Ancient Greek or Babylonian mathematics. It may also be that my attempt to reorient macrosociology along axiomatic terms may be a doomed distraction.

I suppose that if I were more artful and literary, I could make a compelling story outlining this idea, but that’s not my style, I tend to be rather plainly blunt about it. It seems to me again to be some vague sort of parallel, our mastery of physics and mathematics of the first order of natural phenomenon (physics, inorganic matter in the words of Clarence Marsh Case), along with increasing mastery of the second order (biology, organic matter), along with the beginnings of or an inkling of third order (mental organic, psychology) and fourth order (social, super-organic) suggests that ‘advancing’ sapient civilizations move along the lines of mastering the four orders of natural phenomena. That said then, we might reach a level of development or understanding in psychology and sociology concurrent with our current level of understanding in physics in maybe two to five centuries hence. What that looks like, nobody knows, but it’s not post-human or transhuman, it’s not what transhumanist are really discussing at all. As a corollary, this suggests a serious shortcoming in future and alien contact sci-fi films which usually just show us (or alien versions of us) with more technology, but basically unchanged (or as Norman Spinrad noted, very little of science fiction shows a better humanity in the future, a better future).

GGDM Commentary: I agree with Chomsky’s above statements about the truth and that certainly applies to GGDM. The nuance here is that people will mistake GGDM’s axiomatic approach to macrosocial-civilization-whatever, for ‘pessimism of the intellect.’ That is, the Axiom of Human Meaning (‘humans need meaning’) carried through the GGDM simulation to its logical conclusions, will be called pessimistic if you are feeling kind, otherwise, many will call it nihilistic. Push aside the veils, take another view.

August 2021 Entry (on Afghanistan)

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Did we need to succeed, did we need to do anything? Here’s a prediction for the future: Someday in two or three generations, the people of Afghanistan will look out their tiny windows and realize that we are on Mars, the Moon, on our way to inhabiting the outer solar system, and they were left behind living in a quasi-medieval religious fantasy that their grandparents imposed on them. They will then either decide that they like where they are and stay, or they will feel they are being left behind, living historical artifacts.

The situation with the Taliban overthrow of Afghanistan in 2021 dovetails very nicely with several issues in GGDM – Conversion, Pacification Combat, Occupation, Morale in GGDM (will to fight), logistics, Eras, mission creep – the most immediate being modernity vs. resistant indigenous populations and the loading and transport of populations discussed in 3 Expansion – imagine if we had tried to remove the population of Afghanistan to colony ships for transport to another place? And who are the people crowding the Kabul airport seeking escape? Likely they represent a more skilled, educated, the Westernized class from the capital who fear what they see coming – i.e. a poltically-driven brain-drain in action. The Taliban are letting them go to reduce resistance to their regime and to gain a favorable nod from the world community (remember, these are the guys who destroyed ancient Buddhist statues with explosives, refusing an offer from several countries to simply remove them from Afghanistan for free).

The lack of “will to fight” echoes the same situation with the Iraqi forces in the face of ISIL, which is discussed as part of morale in GGDM. All of the best equipment in the world did not inspire them to stand and deliver (as in "To stand firm and perform one's duties to the best of one's abilities"), the collapse of the Afghan army parallels in its entirely the infamous collapse of the Iraqi army. There are many lessons here for GGDM play, for starters, do not falsely equate higher Era technology with performance if there is no will. The president of Afghanistan fled the country (after assuring President Biden that the Afghan army would fight), and when he resurfaced, he said that he fled to avoid being hanged. Like the Iraqi commanders who fled, the Afghan president was not willing to die for his county, not willing to be a martyr for the cause of the democracy of which he was elected President; how can you expect the soldiers to fight and die for one who with the smallest provocation, fled the country to avoid death for being the duly elected President of Afghanistan?

And like the army’s lack of will to fight, democracy and modernity would not stand in Afghanistan (or any county) where the people lacked the will for it. The will toward democracy is exactly the distinguishing characteristic (aspect?) of the American Revolutionary-era populations vs. concurrent European monarchial subjects; the process did eventually filter back to Europe in fits and starts, for example, the French Revolution flop or the Unification of Italy (expelling the French and Austrians). After more than two centuries, it finally took hold firmly in Western Europe in the early 20th Century after the disasters of WWI and WWII and has a tenuous existance in Eastern Europe after the Revolutions of 1989. Thus, absent a pre-existing condition favorable to modernity and democracy, we could not expect in 20 years to create a will to democracy in Afghanistan or Vietnam or Iraq while simultaneously fighting a fanatical religious- inspired insurgency.

Like ISIL, the news media noted that the Taliban had captured an enormous amount of U.S. equipment (the stuff we gave to the Afghan army and air forces, noted by President Biden) and the media asked if the Taliban would ever really be able to use it. Furthermore, you can count on the fact that they are not going to receive much training on the more sophisticated items, and they are not going to receive replacement parts or upgrades. These items are then ‘novelty tech’ items as discussed in 5 Culture, EN 11, p. 432 and once again goes to the issue of logistics ("Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk logistics."), training, and Era differentials as discussed extensively in GGDM. All history and current events are story material for GGDM games, just as it is for television dramas, movies, and fiction or semi-historical literature (you know, the “inspired by true events” stuff); it just depends on the group’s creativity, story direction, and how ‘realistic’ the participants want their game to be.

Meanwhile on the domestic politics side of the story, President Biden notes how much treasure we spent in Afghanistan (which for example, could have been spent on infrastructure), which parallels with various RPs and supplies discussions in GGDM. And the media noted that it was President Trump who made the deal for the withdrawal and dumped it on the next president to execute the deal and own the consequences (hmmm, while he stands at his golf resort and criticizes President Biden); Gen. McMaster went so far as to say Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. As President Biden noted, his choice was either to honor the agreement or to break it – an issue discussed in GGDM diplomacy in enforcing diplomatic agreements, breaking treaties.

In the larger experience of the Afghan nation, it is very odd that in 2001 the Taliban rulers invited yet another invasion of their country by antagonizing a foreign global power. The cost of that head-shaking decision (and I was as perplexed at that time as the rest of the world was and as I am now) was a generation of the Afghan people who grew up during the military occupation (and let's call it what it was really...). Decisions have consequences and the world always has to learn from hard regrettable experience instead of common sense, decency and basic reason. This situation is not likely to be exactly repeated in the remainder of this century as the fate of Afghanistan will serve as a pragmatic historical caution to any other nation considering a similar course of action. The United States should, however, be careful not to be too smug in this historical ‘power’ and learn our lessons on mission drift (or mission creep), politics and the limits of conventional occupation vs. fanatical insurgencies using asymmetric warfare. But we probably won’t.

In an odd way, the Taliban achieved exactly the opposite of their stated aims: Keeping their culture in a medieval religious thrall requires keeping other world powers – especially the secular and technological kind – out. Not booting them out after they have been there for 20 years – and make no mistake, the Taliban did not ‘drive’ us out of Afghanistan (though their propaganda will make that claim), we left on our own. The cultural result of the American occupation of Afghanistan on the Afghan people can be viewed on many levels and in many ways, but here are two that I can think of instantly: 1) The Afghan people, through contact with American citizens (and equipment), will have absorbed some Western ideas (i.e. enculturation), a process furthered in some small measure by the ‘democratic’ Afghan government (whether you consider it truly democratic or just an American puppet regime) that the Taliban just overthrew (again) and 2) Some will not want to crawl back into the religious-isolationist cocoon (mmm... noting again that the former Taliban leadership in harboring Al Queda in 2001 did just the opposite of isolationism), back to a medieval religious fantasy – the genie is out of the bottle and will not go back – and the express of this is the secondary effect of the brain-drain currently in process at Kabul Airport as thousands of the likely more-educated and secular, ‘exposed’ parts of the urban population seek to leave the country for the U.S. and Qatar, who has been assisting by providing a non-Western alternative for Afghans to migrate from the country. And those who leave now will be able to help others leave Afghanistan later...

July 2021 Entry (on the Axiom of Perpetual Instability)

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I find little odd bits in interesting places. I was reading about the Battle of Fishguard – a diversionary landing in Wales in a failed French revolutionary invasion of Ireland (on the theory of my enemy's enemy is my friend) in 1797 – when I saw this interesting bit. I have become increasingly fascinated by the process where gold standard was replaced by banknotes which morphed into the concept of paper money that we have now. I have increasingly regarded economics as reflective of and the agents of change of macrodynamic social selection forces (in the sense used by Professors Jonathan Turner and Seth Abrutyn, 2017). One might even define economics as the agency of social selection forces operating at any given time.

At any rate, the situation above strikes one as inherently unstable, the value of the banknotes in circulation was twice that of the gold reserve, and one could reasonably expect this event to occur. So there are a lot of interesting questions there, how did it get that way, was it a conscious decision, did the government simply print more banknotes to pay bills, did anyone see this coming? I am sure there is a great deal of erudite literature on the economic history of currency in the modern era which I have not read. This situation also provides another historical window into the forces propelling European drive to colonize, monopolize, and control the resources of the world via oceangoing sailing ships - politicians, businessmen, economist and monarchs knew they were inhabiting the House of Usher, and needed to keep a constant global influx of economic filling to prevent it from cracking too much!

But the point here is the instability of the system. The inherent instability of the human systems. The inherent instability of evolved life. The inherent instability of the universe which apparently gives rise to life, consciousness, and the Big Bang, etc. And at the bottom of all of it is time, “time is unity” as Lucy said in the 2014 movie, or as Aristotle said, “...not only do we measure change by time, but time by change, because they are defined by one another,” and “(time is) a number of change in respect of the before and after” (Aristotle, Physics, Book IV).

Now, all of this is belaboring the obvious in the modern view, we have increasingly come to recognize time as the inevitable, unstoppable quantifier of reality – but it was new once, it had to be ‘discovered.’ The changeless society, unending perfection is what we call utopia or paradise, which as discussed in GGDM, implies that nothing can be changed (e.g. getting tossed from the Garden of Eden) or else it is no longer utopia or paradise (a bit of identity theory from philosophy, e.g. The Ship of Theseus); I discussed this point in Entropy is Not Constant and The Devil’s Argument, 1 Entropy, pp. 214-215 (in game design terms, this is an important discussion to keep the game churning).

So perpetual instability seems to be an underlying theme of the universe running through all four of the identified orders of natural phenomenon (inorganic, organic, mental, and social, Clarence Marsh Case, 1924) and of course the agent is time. We all know that, of course, and it’s mostly an unstated and undeniable principle of science, math, and our entire concept of reality, but since we can identify it and identity is useful in cognition (that’s why nouns were invented), we ought to call it an axiom (because to deny the truth of it would create an insoluble cognitive dissonance – which is basically why utopia and paradise fail to be convincing ideals, see discussion in The Devil's Argument 2 Entropy); I will call it the Axiom of Perpetual Instability.

I have wondered quite far afield here, so what does this have to do with our long-running GGDM conversation? The Axiom I have expressed here is the starting point for social dynamics and social selection forces, that human civilization is perpetually unstable – a point that is rather proven by the identifiable existence of social selection forces and dynamics (it is the reason we survived the Cold War, see Inherent Failure, 2 Disruption, p. 268). That is, we often talk about things without consciously stating their starting point, and so we float around a bit like a boat without anchor down. It is also the reason for human interpretation, which is a major element in my proposed system of macrosocial thought expressed in GGDM.

Aside from the discussion of money (or paper banknotes), this little nugget provides an example for GGDM game play of how the Concierge might use Interventions to create story events that might or might not be considered connected to in-game events caused by the players – e.g., notice that while it is not directly stated that the Battle of Fishguard caused the run on the Bank of England, the temporal proximity and possible causal relationship of the first occasion to the battle is noted as is the government’s response. There may in fact be dozens of factors leading to the run on the Bank of England – I am sure there are books and articles out there exploring this issue – but possibly the Battle of Fishguard is a trigger event.

Continuing Thoughts on the Axiom of Perpetual Instability (September 2021):

I argue in 1 Entropy that we never get an answer to ‘why’ and most of the time when we ask ‘why?’, the answer we give is really ‘how’ (e.g., a mechanical description), for example, ‘gravity caused it to fall’ is not an answer to why it happened, it only describes ‘how’ it happened. Because we almost never get a ‘why’ answer or anything close, we have become confused on the issue, and often or usually accept ‘how’ answers as ‘why’ answers without thinking about it too much. It’s a lazy intellectual habit of our civilization or humanity.

In the modern sense, I believe this is an enhanced result of the scientific revolution and empiricism. Michael Robbins points out (above) that for science to do its job, free of metaphysical pretense, it must strictly deal in ontic description and leave ontology to philosophy and religion. While humans may have a tendency to accept ‘how’ answers to ‘why’ questions in the larger sense, certainly science and empiricism, which regards the ‘why’ ultimately as beyond the scope of science, has made ‘how’ answers almost universal in our current civilization. We’ve stopped asking why or expecting an answer to why because it makes us nuts.

Yet, I think we are so much poorer for it; it has robbed us of our humanity. We already know humanity is nuts, Erasmus knew it too:

Now, in concrete terms, I have offered in the above entry that my Axiom of Perpetual Instability is the starting point for all of the social selection forces and social dynamics. It is at least a partial ‘why’ sort of answer to the ‘how’ of social dynamics (or maybe a ‘how’ to a ‘how’ – we all get confused on that point too). And in this, I suggest that an axiom approach to macrosociology as I have envisioned it (and recall that I have argued that sociology is more related to philosophy and religion than it likes to admit) is capable of adding a ‘why’ to the ‘how’ (not the ultimate ‘why’ but a few millimeters closer) of macrosocial theory. It’s the missing glue.

June 2021 Entry (on mea culpa to superstition)

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Just after midnight about 12:05 a.m. on June 5, 2021, I was closing-up the house getting ready to go to bed. I heard a car going up the street then heard a strange thump or thud, and thought, what the heck did he hit? I went out on my front porch and saw an adult, pretty big back cat laying in the street directly under the street light across the street from my house (the same place two kittens were killed in 2018, as I mentioned in GGDM). Anyone who has read GGDM knows by now that I am a cat person and I immediately intuitively concluded that that cat had just been hit by the vehicle that went up the street.

I went out to the street and the cat was laying on its side, but with the head up and I could see the creature was still breathing. It did not seem to be alert and oriented (thanks Dr. Accad!) and I thought the cat might expire in a few minutes. I was hesitant to touch the cat by myself because I do not know the cat, did not know the extent of its injuries and do not know if it is feral or semi-feral. I didn’t see any blood on the ground, but there was a spray spot of what I thought was saliva.

I talked to the cat from a few feet away and after a minute or two, it got up and started trying to walk. A vehicle came up the street and I put my hand up to stop the vehicle. The cat walked around dazed in a circle in the middle of the street a few times, almost walked into my leg twice, I was glad to see the animal up and moving, but concluded that it was stunned and confused. I had seen this before, when I was about 9 years old, our dog was hit by a car on Rt. 14 and walked around in a circle confused and yelping until my mother scooped her up. Other than being confused, the cat seemed to be physically uninjured and walked normally, if unsteadily.

The approaching vehicle was a mid-sized pickup truck with big square headlights. I could not see the vehicle clearly because I was blinded by the headlights. I yelled to the driver, “This cat was hit by a car, he’s stunned and confused!” I was at that moment intensely watching the cat walk around in circles in the middle of the street. Then the driver (a male) leaned out and yelled back something very strange:

“I am very superstitious! That cat is all black!” Then, I think he added something like “What was I supposed to do?” or “What did you want me to do?” I was not really engaged in the conversation, I was focused on the cat, which I petted gingerly trying to reassure him as he staggered around in a circle. I repeated my previous and I think the driver again repeated back that he was ‘very superstitious.’ But in another part, my mind went, huh? So what? WTF does that have to do with anything? It didn’t make any sense just then and seemed incredibly irrelevant.

By that point, the cat was starting to get its bearings back and went over toward the curbside and flopped down next to the curb under the big bushes that cover the abandoned, condemned house across the street from mine. I followed the cat and when we were no longer in the street, the truck pulled around to the left, passed me and went up the street. Another car came up and also slowed and then skirted around me. I also had to shoo my colony cats away from approaching the injured cat who was lying next to the curb and that distracted me for a minute or two as I had to literally chase them away.

I talked to the cat and tried to pet it but the cat eventually got up and walked into the thick overgrown bushes and disappeared. I hope the cat is ok, but I am very concerned for its head injuries, I thought I saw a piece of a broken tooth sticking out which suggests that the animal might have an injured jaw. But throughout I was hesitant in trying to grab the cat; maybe I should have grabbed him, but I didn’t have a carrier or cage handy or even a blanket or towel to avoid being bitten or clawed, or any help.

Later in the early morning hours I thought about what the driver said to me, and thought, was that the person who hit the cat? Mea culpa? Did he come back around to finish the job? I am not a naïve person, but it is absolutely stunning to me that any modern person could be so superstitious and incredibly ignorant enough to deliberately hit a cat with a motor vehicle because its fur is black and it crossed your path. The cat was hit right under the street lamp, the driver had to have seen the cat very clearly unless the driver can’t see (in which case they shouldn’t be driving anything). Absolutely bonkers, as coo-coo as a Swiss clock, and legally driving (I assume) a pickup truck and loose on the streets. Do you hit somebody with your vehicle because you don’t like the color of their skin?

As argued in GGDM (see The Other Hole In Your Head, 1 Order), what people do to animals they would do to people if they could get away with it; animals are the victims because they can’t talk and nobody cares enough to do anything about it; the criminal abuse laws for animals are very light compared to injuries to persons, pets are considered personal property or chattels in almost every place. Well, some persons anyways, because this is the same week in which the remains of 215 missing indigenous resident children were discovered buried under the long closed Church-run, Canadian Government residential Kamloops School for Indigenous Children in British Columbia, Canada...

I took a bucket of water out and dumped it where the cat had been hit, I had to again shoo away my colony cats who seemed intent on sniffing the street where the other cat had lain and/or going into the bush (I certainly didn’t just then want them loitering in the middle of the street considering what had just happened). I was very upset that I was unable to really help the cat, but in hindsight, I may have prevented it from being killed by the same or another vehicle. A few minutes later I was still standing out there and heard caterwauling coming from the bushes, I immediately thought one of my colony cats was in the bush trying to fight with the injured cat. But then I realized it was only one cat making the sound and re-interpreted it as possibly the injured cat crying out in pain or confusion. I never saw the cat again in any case, in the morning I went out and looked into the bushes and didn’t see the black cat anywhere around so it must have moved off under its own power.

Epilogues:

I was playing Mahjongg solitaire on my phone – something that I started only very recently – and of course, there is an advertisement between every two games. Most of the game adverts look just absolutely dumb (and are obviously aimed the juvenile audience or adults seeking mindless distraction or just mindless adults filling empty time), others have very impressive graphics quality though I am not interested in the games per se. But one advert in particular surprised me: The advert featured a car driving up in the rain on a street, and tossing a cat out of the car which then sped away, the cute cartoon cat left looking very sad in the rainy night. The next scene shows a woman (it was apparently later, perhaps in the morning), carrying a cat-ears umbrella (signaling a cat lover) encountering the cat who was tossed out of the car, now nursing a litter of kittens on the street (in the same apparent spot, not very realistic since a mother cat would seek a den or shelter, but anyway...). The game then asks whether to adopt a kitten or not, and the pointer finger clicks yes, and the next scene is a happy little tuxedo kitten in a big house. Why didn’t the game ask about adopting the mother and other kittens? What happens to them? That didn’t appear to be an option.

I believe the advertisement was for Kitten Match-Mansion & Pet Makeover. I am not naïve in the least, I know damned well this is exactly what happens: I have a young female cat with two healthy, scrappy kittens (now nearly 2 months old) who was probably tossed out on the street in exactly the same way, for the same reason: She was pregnant. It’s disgusting in a visceral way, and this discussion is then a sort of epilogue to the May 2021 entry where I described adopting Gaia, the pretty grey tiger mamma cat. I am sure the intent of the advertisement was to raise awareness – it is rather brutally shocking for a game advert – and obviously aimed at a younger sentimental audience, and cat lovers, but I had to wonder afterward whether it was effective or not? I wonder if because it’s in a game, if the actual effect is to normalize the behavior or to numb young minds to the horror of it? I guess it’s the same question as has been directed to first-person shooters and crime games, such as Grand Theft Auto (and the 45th POTUS’s infamous Tweets), and the story of Abraham’s attempted infanticide (of his son Isaac) in the name of God (see discussion in Religious Recitals, 2 Disruption); the removal of shock value by commercial exploitation and repetition. I similarly noted in 3 Order that we have become numb to the horrors of WWII or slavery in the American South by repeated airings of brutality in films and historical photos which reduce them to cartoonish impressions on our consciousness. Or as Robert Plant said of Led Zeppelin's most famous song "Stairway to Heaven" (1971):

Late-May 2021 Entry - 1st Year Publication Anniversary Special (on the axiomatic approach to macrosociology)

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It is first important to understand what Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (GGDM for short) is and how it developed: GGDM is a simulation game of civilization in an interstellar science fiction setting. It is space opera. It is also a vehicle for thinking, in that during the process of designing the game, I learned and thought and learned and thought, and wrote and rewrote, as an approach to macrosociology and macrostructures grew within the game. Thus, the game and the macrosociology approach are two different, but very intertwined entities. I have recently come to think of it as being like a Cylon Raider in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series: an organic thing grown inside a metal shell:

Now that sounds pretty sad, it doesn’t seem that Cylon Raiders had much of a social life! The question of the first anniversary of publication of GGDM (pub. May 2020), is whether or not the heterodox macrosocial approach of GGDM can survive outside its “shell.” Shall we see?

When you think of economics, what do you see? Numbers. People think of economists as calculating costs and benefits, collecting data, predicting market valuation, predicting economic futures, and trying to work out economic laws that are expressed in equations. Basically... numbers. In doing so, economists must treat people and masses of ‘economic beings’ as particles, like physics. They use pseudo-physics terminology sometimes; there was a thrust in the development of the social sciences, and especially pronounced in economics in late 19th and early 20th Century toward becoming a mathematical science like physics.

Some people objected to this, because humans are volitional, whereas, as far as we can determine, particles are not, and overall, the a priori 'predictive value' of economics has been less than satisfactory, rather, economics excels at a posteriori analysis (harkening back perhaps to the late 19th Century argument between Carl Menger and the Prussian School). Among those who objected to the development of economics on a pseudo-physics mathematical model is Ludwig von Mises. Ludwig von Mises proposed ‘methodological dualism’ which says that what works for physics is not appropriate as an approach to studying humans because human ‘experiments’ (basically, history) are non-repeatable. Michael Accad describes it thus:

Dr. Accad concludes:

Thus, he proposed to rework economics from an axiomatic approach based on the axiom of action. This didn’t go over so well with the rest of the economists, and Ludwig von Mises was famously abrasive and pejorative. He eventually emigrated to the United States where his work was funded by patrons and he obtained professorships at universities, wrote books and annoyed the rest of the economist to no end into the mid-20th century, by which time the initial buoyant rush of economic theory had begun to peter out.

Mises wasn’t the only one, some sociologists, notably Professor Clarence Marsh Case (U. Iowa, U. Southern California) in the early 20th century, began to object to the same thing happening in sociology as had happened in economics. Professor Case adopted the ideas of methodological dualism into sociology in his Outlines of Introductory Sociology (1924), a college sociology textbook, couching it within a modified framework of orders of natural phenomenon that he adapted from August Comte, one of the fathers of sociology (which Comte called “social physics” ... see where this begins?). The framework of his four orders of natural phenomenon clearly separated physics, biology, mental, and social phenomenon in such a manner as to demonstrate it ludicrous to attempt to study human society in the same way that one would study planets, stars, or molecules. Professor Case objected to sociology falsely obtaining scientific respectability by imitating the physical sciences, or more precisely, he objected to sociology being excluded from scientific respectability by a parochial definition of science that could only include physics and biology. Professor Case wrote:

Professor Case continued on the next page:

Professor Case died in 1946 and his work was quickly tossed aside and his structure of orders of natural phenomenon forgotten in the later 20th century as sociology continued on its merry path toward pseudo-physical ‘scientific respectability.’ This trend continued in sociology so strongly that Professor Jonathan H. Turner argued against it in 1981, writing:

And Professor Elwell put it more bluntly in 2006:

The differences between Ludwig von Mises and Clarence Marsh Case are twofold. First, Ludwig von Mises really irritated a lot of economists, he was brash and brilliant, both respected and reviled – a prideful intellectual man railing against the collective orthodoxies of other entrenched prideful intellectual men. Such was the fervor of his arguments that his work was formally continued post-mortem by Murry Rothbard who was involved in founding both the Cato Institute and the later Mises Institute. Economics and politics always intersect in a way that politics and sociology rarely do (sociology is a ringside viewer), and the libertarian Cato Institute, perhaps has the unfortunate association with its initial sponsor, billionaire Charles Koch. It is however, precisely because economics and politics intersect so that people get so fervent and riled about economic theory that allowed Mises’ arguments in heterodox economics to continue past his lifetime, as opposed to arguments such as those made by Professor Case even though they share the same underlying basis.

Conversely, Professor Case’s arguments were largely written in sociology articles for the Journal of Religion – he was a school principle, teacher, and a pastor before becoming a sociology professor at University of Iowa and University of Southern California. Despite his impressive rise through academia to finish as a full professor at the University of Southern California, it was thus easy for 20th century sociology to brush him aside after his passing and continue marching onward. But the key difference here is that Professor Case never suggested an axiomatic approach to sociology in the manner of Ludwig von Mises. His framework, the four orders of natural phenomenon expressed in Outlines of Introductory Sociology (1924) are, as I pointed out in GGDM, nearly axiomatic, but this framework is not itself an axiom-based approach to sociology, but rather a demonstration of sociology’s place in the spectrum of natural phenomenon and why sociology cannot be approached like physics, despite Comte’s initial description of it as “social physics.” Notably, the current Wikipedia "Natural Phenomenon" article does not even list mental or social phenomenon as 'natural phenomenon,' instead, restricting the term to physical sciences only!

GGDM’s approach to macrosociology is thus identifiable in this sense: During the design of GGDM, I adopted and used throughout, both Professor Case’s four orders of natural phenomenon on the argument of framework, along with his writing as historical eyewitness to the early struggles of sociology to be recognized as a science, and also I adopted – as best I could in a simulation game format – Ludwig von Mises’ idea of an axiom approach, adapted to macrosociology and expressed as an ‘axiom of human meaning,’ and throughout the simulation, all that naturally flows from the concept. I may be a little abrasive too, like Ludwig, I even suggested a possible axiomatic basis to retrench modern psychological sciences: Let’s start with metaconsciousness.

If the Mises Institute and Austrian School can be called ‘heterodox economics’ then GGDM could by the same measure be called ‘heterodox sociology,’ or at least ‘heterodox macrosociology.’ The essence of the ‘heterodox’ approach to anything – economics, religion, sociology, physics – is to say to the establishment that you are asking the wrong questions (Einstein did this too... but physics operates by empirical rules and so got over it), but if you re-ask the question this way, then these are the answers that flow from it; this is what Mises did and this is what I did. A lot of prideful, professional intellectuals don’t take that well at all. I find the application of ‘heterodox’ suspicious and wonder that any modern, professionalized organized branch of study would resort to using such a term, as it relates directly to blasphemy (there are many who see little difference between heterodoxy and blasphemy), but I guess we can’t think of a better term and those who are called heterodox anything tend to wear their heresy with rebel pride.

Unlike the hostility that apparently existed in economics however, at least on the Austrian School side, I and GGDM do not explicitly reject empirical sociology for whatever it may teach us, whatever we may discover about human civilization by any means is advantageous – perhaps a lingering feeling from my Cold War youth when the world was on the brink – the two approaches are not as oppositional or mutually exclusive as some might claim. But in the same measure, I also reject the notion that empirical sociology is the sole definition of sociology and that we cannot advance or learn by different avenues, and most of all, like my predecessors, I maintain that we should not reduce the study of humans to particles and pseudo-physics or mathematical modeling.

The heterodox approach of GGDM to macrosociology is not brilliant or original, in fact, it is arguably a bit of a knock-off product from the Austrian School. But it is another – powerful I maintain – way of looking at the subject of humanity on a macrostructural level, and a proper introduction of the existential into macrosociology that has long been missing as sociology drifts away from the ‘human’ parts they study. Richard Feynman said very finely, speaking about physics:

May 2021 Entry (on anti-natalism, reproductive consciousness and worldviews)

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On sunny April 26, 2021, I ‘rescued’ a young female cat who rubbed up against my leg outside while I was talking to the neighbor lady’s friend on the sidewalk down the block. A cat rubbing up against my leg is not uncommon either in my house or on my porch so I didn’t at first notice, but then I realized I wasn’t at home and looked down to see a pretty grey tiger cat that I took to be about a year and a half old, rubbing against my leg. I exclaimed in falsetto (my normal ‘cat-talk’ voice), “Where did you come from!?” The lady I was talking to asked, “Is that one of your cats?” “No, I’ve never seen this cat before,” I replied. The cat followed me home (what every kid says when they bring a stray dog home!), but I had to lure her into a cat carrier with food to get her into the house.

I quarantined her from the other cats to let her get used to the house, she was very friendly to me (but not toward my other cats...) and I am sure she was someone’s cat that either got out or that some [you fill in the blank ___] human dumped in the neighborhood. I came to suspect that she was pregnant, this is possibly the reason she was dumped or got out or perhaps it was a result of it. It is also probably the reason she was looking for a human caretaker or pet parent; as a lady friend pointed out to me an hour or two later, female cats become very affectionate and vocal before giving birth. I do not, of course, know her previous name, but that evening, I decided to call her Gaia (I am sure it matters not to her...), as I had recently been reading a selection from Lynn Margulis’ 1998 book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution on Google Books.

I was that evening discussing getting her spayed with an animal rescue friend and I assumed that they wouldn’t spay her if she was pregnant, that they’d check beforehand, but I found out that is not the case. I am not in any way medically trained, I have only the general idea of what they do to spay a female cat or dog, but I was told that if they spayed her they’d have to euthanize her kittens in the process. That provoked a visceral reaction (an issue discussed in 5 Fallen to Earth) from me and stopped the conversation.

So I thought, how does this reconcile with my understanding of reproductive consciousness and my anti-natalist reasoning? There are really two different questions here, or two different levels of the same question. For starters, I am not opposed to contraception for humans who understand reproductive consciousness (however, the worldwide dropping Fertility Replacement Rate may eventually change that conversation again, there are a lot of moving parts, discussed in 4 Taxation & Census) nor do I oppose generally spay/neuter for common domesticated, feral, and semi-feral pet species who do not understand reproductive consciousness. But that’s where I draw the line, I will not be the ‘harm’ that can come to a fetus or a baby animal for being in this world, absent any compelling necessity (the larger moral and legal abortion argument is more nuanced in this respect). One of the things that really riles me is when I hear that a man got a woman pregnant and then asks her to get an abortion. Man-up already! Deal with it, ok? It takes two to tango, you did it. Be a human.

So I would never agree to abort animal fetuses in the process of spaying a female. But certainly, it’s a very thin line because humans who are subjected to involuntary sterilization for racial- or ethnic-cleansing purposes (check the sordid history of this, e.g., Eunuchs of the Chinese Imperial Court) or for other equally immoral and silly reasons (e.g., Castrato opera singers), certainly consider it a ‘harm’ to them that they cannot reproduce. Because, they have reproductive consciousness. While it is not at all clear that animals who are ‘fixed’ understand that they cannot reproduce, or if they would care if they did... which spins off into another question, does ‘harm’ depend on perception and understanding? That is a question I have wondered about before because in psychology, history, and anthropology, one encounters ritualized cultural behaviors that would in our world be instantly considered homosexual and/or pedophilic, criminal – and the ‘victims’ and their culture don’t seem to suffer harm because it is considered normal, honorable, familial, sacred, or ritual, as part of growing up or coming-of-age in their culture. Moving on...

I don’t think therefore that Kantian anti-natalist thought is a license to abortion (or murder or suicide) and I certainly hope that no one has read my comments in that way; I’ve never been an abortion activist either pro or con, I’ve never felt politically motivated by the issue, but certainly some situations force one to reason through ideas and ideals in ways that they might not normally have encountered them previously and to make a sensible tapestry of their views.

As it turns out, the question was mooted; she gave birth in her temporary cat cage home on the night of April 28-29, 2021 and I awoke to find her nursing two finger-sized mewing kittens. Gaia was actually a perfect name for her! She was very friendly, with no hostile reaction to me being around, touching or handling her kittens but was not so toward the other cats who were instinctively curious about the source of the little mewing sounds. I am sure this is her first litter and having only two kittens is consistent with the female being young and/or a first time mother. Nature is kind in that way not to overburden a young female first-time mother, or perhaps nature is cold and calculating in enhancing the likelihood that the young mother and kittens will survive and make more. She will, of course, be spayed after her kittens are weaned and if the kittens survive, that will amount to a fertility replacement rate in her case of 2.0 or zero population growth.

Continuing Thoughts, Late-May 2021:

The subject of testosterone in the development of early-modern humans is discussed in 3 Technology.

While the plural of antocedent is not data, my daily interactions with and observation of the behavioral changes in recently-neutered male colony cats bears out the theory of the effect of decreased testosterone levels in complex mammalian males. They are much calmer (after a week or so), socialable toward both their human caretaker and other cats, and they show evidence of tribal bonding and collective territorial defense against other marauding male cats. They still harass and chase the spayed female cats though...

April 2021 Entry (on Survival & Ethical Dilemmas)

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In 1835, displaced Māori living in Wellington, New Zealand, hijacked a ship, the brig Lord Rodney and used it to invade the Chatham Islands which were occupied by the pacifistic hunter-gatherer Moriori culture. The Māori were ferocious, perpetually warlike and armed with clubs, axes, and with muskets that they had bought from the Europeans; they were organized for warfare.

The Moriori were distantly related to the Māori, but had migrated long ago to the Chatham Islands which were abundant in resources, but also cooler and harsher than their original home in New Zealand. To avoid overpopulation, they engaged in limited ritual castration of infants; to avoid destructive warfare, they had developed a system of ritual conflict attributed to their chief Nunuku-whenua in which men thrashed each other in single combat with rods no more than a thumb thickness and arm length, but were required to stop upon infliction of any abrasion or sign of blood. The Māori had no such compunctions, they killed with glee:

Tapata and Torea choose for their people to die for cultural pacifism. Where they confused? Because modern cultural and environmental analysis concludes that pacifism developed in Moriori culture precisely as a survival strategy. Just as warfare developed among the Māori precisely as a survival strategy on a more abundant and crowded island. But after dozens of generations, Moriori pacifism had arched to a ‘moral imperative’ greater than survival and self-determination in the face of warlike invaders.

By 1862, 95% of the Moriori population had been killed. The Māori had done to the Moriori the very same that the British had just done to the Aboriginal Tasmanians during the Black War three years earlier or the Spanish had done to the Mesoamerican population centuries earlier. Doubtless this was of great interest during the Cold War; in a nuclear war, would one side refuse to retaliate, refuse M.A.D., and accept annihilation, martyrdom that humanity may survive in a relatively uncontaminated half of the Earth? Doubtless, this is also the seed of many a sci-fi story either promoting or warning against pacifism, or trying to make a greater philosophical point about survival vs. moral imperatives, or how moral imperatives disappear in the existential threat.

Naturalist author Loren Eiseley, clearly warning against nuclear weapons, concluded in “The Hidden Teacher” (1969) that “... nature is full of traps for the beast that cannot learn” (see fuller quote, 1 Disruption, p. 255). Oddly, perhaps ironically however, this observation applies equally to the leadership of the Moriori on the Chatham Islands facing a vicious Māori invasion; the trap being perhaps confusing a culturally codified ritualized pacifistic conflict resolution system for survival with an overriding, enlightened moral imperative.

March 2021 Entry (on Proficiencies, Capital Colonies and Money in GGDM)

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There are two possible ways to view Proficiencies in GGDM that relate to the timeless debates of philosophy. One way is to determine the proficiency of a civilization in an area by comparing it to some mythical standard of perfection; sort of a Platonic Essentialism. Thus, each Proficiency placed on the Public Space will move the position toward that level of perfection by small percentages (sort of like approaching the speed of light), and the level is judged by the number of each Proficiency currently on the Public Space. I don’t think this is a winner because how many of a particular Proficiency is required to reach the mythical standard of perfection? An infinite number? This is not dissimilar to the criticisms of Platonic Essentialism and modern variants.

Rather, I view the placement of Proficiencies as being relative to the immediately-prior condition. Not relative to nothing, and not relative to the baseline of pre-interstellar civilization at the beginning of the game, both because it is meaningless and because it is equally mythical and problematic. Placing Proficiencies is a form of ‘looking’ in the sense that civilization has chosen to ‘solve’ that problem or some related set of problems resulting in placing the Proficiency Piece on the Public Space (see Whac-a-Mole discussions in 4 Culture, p. 404 and Bottle Spin Whac-a-Mole, 2 Eras, pp. 768-769).

The rules for Capital Colonies in GGDM straddle the line between the idea of an officially-declared de jure capital and the idea that of the de facto capital, as in times and places where a monarch ruled (see Moving the Swamp, 2 Order, p. 536). However, on the de facto side of the argument, 2 Order cites the example of the Avignon Papacy where seven French Popes refused to move to Rome and ruled from the Avignon Papal Enclave in southern France. Further, it is mentioned in 4 Combat, p. 989 that the Roman Emperor resided in the frontier colony of Carnuntum for three years making it the de facto capital of the Roman Empire (consistent with the statements in 2 Order) while also being the de jure capital of Pannonia Superior. During this time, roads to Carnuntum would have been more travelled, Vinobona (modern day Vienna) would have taken on expanded importance and political prestige, and while this may have receded slightly after the departure of the Emperor from Carnuntum, some of it would have remained permanently (thus Vinobona become Vienna).

Finally, in the fifth century, while Rome may have remained the de jure capital of the Western Roman Empire, the fact is that Milan and then Ravenna were the actual capitals of the Roman Empire, and the latter is in fact where the last Roman Emperor abdicated the throne after being defeated by Odoacer at the Battle of Ravenna in 476 A.D., who was then declared by the post-classical Roman Senate to be King of Italy (see discussion, Inside the Hyperspace Bypass, 2 Order, pp. 533-534).

Thus, moving and establishing capitals is treated in a ‘fuzzy’ way in GGDM and is a point of potential for drama and storytelling. The Concierge may need to make judgments about, for example, access to the Diplomatic Spaces between potentially competing de jure and de facto capitals, while on the other hand, the default is the declared capital (see Capitol Declaration, 2 Order, p. 533) per the game rules if players want to keep it simple and clear.

Many of those who would criticize GGDM’s interpretation mechanics and the ‘looking laws’ discussion as ‘unrealistic’ casually accept that “God said let there be light, and there was light.”

On Thanksgiving Day 2020, I watched a 46-minute 2017 documentary titled “Pizzaro: The Blood of the Sun God” which discussed in some detail how the Incas who called their state Tawantinsuyu,considered gold to be ‘the blood of the sun god’ and used it only for religious purposes, with the Sapa Inca being the only one who could wear gold ornaments because of his status as a god (his throne was also gold). The Inca did not use gold as a form of currency. This seemed to be somewhat similar to ancient Egyptian beliefs about gold which they also associated with the sun and eternity, and their Pharaoh was considered a god on Earth like the Sapa Inca:

So I wondered at what point and by what process did gold become a currency? According to what I could find, the first gold coins were minted about 600 BC in Lydia, Anatolia. Then I remembered the tomb robbers of Ancient Egypt who were caught and executed by impaling (The Amherst Papyrus, 1100 BC) and that tomb robbing was a huge problem for ancient Egypt (literally a policing and maintenance nightmare); obviously the robbers were not impressed with the divinity claims of deceased (or living) Pharaohs and thus to them, the unused, unguarded gold laying around was simply a precious item to be bartered for food, goods, wives, animals, weapons, services and land. It is thus surprising that it may have taken another half millennia for gold to be minted into coins and become money, functioning as an exchangeable storage unit of economic value:

Through subsequent history, there has been an intertwining of competing concepts of gold as a form of currency (until the triumph of paper money in the late 19th Century) – gold still serves as a stable storage of economic value – and gold as religious meaning, in the form of crowns worn by personal sovereigns (and thrones, e.g., the Golden Stool of the Ashanti of Africa, cause of a silly war with the British in 1900) and gold crosses, cups (e.g., the Holy Grail, Vaphio Cups), plates and utensils (e.g., the Mormon Golden Plates), privilege, championship and ultimate standards, death masks, and other religious artifacts, as well as for personal ornamentation and religious expression (e.g., gold cross necklaces, wedding rings). But generally the secular side of gold has been slowly winning over the centuries (in parallel with decline of religion to which it is tied).

Now, from the point of view of social selection forces the story of gold creates a sort of historical hierarchy of needs if we assume that gold was adapted to uses as part of the social selection process. Perhaps this could be characterized as somewhat like Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ in which case, historically, society first adapted gold to fulfill mystical needs (the need to connect the heavens to Earth in an understandable way; the Incas recognized also its personal ornamentation value, but restricted it for political-religious reasons) and thereafter, as commerce and population pressure overwhelmed barter systems, gold became the solution as a form of portable wealth and storage of economic value, followed by coins of lesser metals. But at the very same instant, they became also a matter of sovereignty, most coins, from the oldest we have found, being stamped on at least one side with sovereign symbols, suggesting that the two were intertwined from the beginning, perhaps coins were invented because the king needed a way to pay debts (sovereignty, especially personal sovereignty, has always been associated with wealth, which in the extreme was the downfall of the Western Roman Empire).

The spread of gold to a wide range of symbolic meanings and secular applications, while retaining its original mystical element, suggests the migration of the hierarchy of needs. This inconstancy is not inconsistent, even Maslow’s hierarchy of needs changes situationally, for example, if you are freezing, warmth becomes more important at that moment than food or water or even morality. Continuing the analogy, the migration of meanings from original mystical to symbolic and secular (partly through social selection forces) is a ‘self-actualization’ or better, ‘social actualization’ of a social object.

February 2021 Entry (on the 'macrosociology' of GGDM)

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The key question on the subject of whether GGDM is a work of sociology theory is whether I am, in the words of Prof. Jonathan H. Turner in 1981, a “poor philosopher” attempting to “usurp [sociological] theoretical activity.” Or perhaps whether my project, GGDM, even merits the status of poor philosophy masquerading as sociological simulation? Or in the later words of Professor Turner, is the sociology of GGDM “caught in a vortex of relativism, solipsism, and cynicism” and “just another genre in the humanities”? Or finally, in still other words from Professor Turner, is GGDM “in essence, empirical descriptions rather than theories”? Necessarily so, because it is a simulation.

There are about a half dozen elements that form GGDM’s approach (assertions if you like) to macrostructure or macrosociology:

1. The base axiom, “Humans need meaning” which was inspired by The Austrian School (a/k/a Praxeology’s) base axiom “Humans act intentionally” (the Axiom of Human Action). The concept of the existential void was already developing a couple of years before I formulated the Axiom of Human Meaning, but exposure to praxeology solidified the idea into a base starting axiom.

a. Corollary to this is the idea that meaning shields us from the existential void, which we can see because of our intelligence, even if we don’t want to look.

2. Near axiomatic and structural embrace of Clarence Marsh Case’s “four orders of natural phenomena” to explain the struggles of sociology to be recognized as a science, the false equivalency placed upon it to the physical science standards (the ‘epistemological fraud’) and the equivalence of objective reality and subjective reality to humanity (that humanity creates its own subset of realities via interpretation which cannot be directly adverse to physical or biological reality).

a. I have been able to trace Clarence Marsh Case’s four orders of natural phenomenon back to Aguste Comte, one of the fathers of sociology, however, I reject the charge of strict empiricism in sociology (that is, the ‘social physics’ of Comte) and maintain that there remains a strong philosophical element in sociology (see, ‘sociology is more related to philosophy than it wants to admit’ 2 Constructural Elements, p. 199 and 3 Fallen to Earth, p. 1530).

3. Axiomatic embrace of security (safety, boundary control, in loco parentis) as the ‘supra-legitimacy’ of sovereignty and legitimacy, and ‘happiness’ as the meta-aspect of humanity that is addressed by religion mainly (but also pets vicariously and philosophy), that acts to shield us from the Existential Void, death, and the Kantian guilt of reproduction (the ‘rational anti-natalist argument’).

4. Holism and nesting levels of systems as a continuity and as the proper way to understand human civilizations; to me, it always depends on what height you are looking from (“View from a Height” as Isaac Asimov titled one of his books on physics) and you will see the same processes repeat and slowly morph at each level. Compare this to more empirical, structural, mainstream views of macrosociology. I don’t think that this is a thought unsupported by science generally, for example, biology and physics must necessarily be understood holistically at some level by systems dynamic interaction and systems within systems.

a. Fuzzy Concepts as a necessary element to understanding both human beliefs (internally), ideology, and human social structures that act to cause change.

5. Civilization as a constant emergent and Gestalt Structure, and Gestalt Structure as the machine of emergence.

a. This cycles metaphysically back to the idea of the Existential Void, that a Gestalt Structure is the only shield against the Existential Void and is the “human thing.”

6. The “looking” power of humans to locally affect the universe (in a sense, technology, but that is only the current form), which we do not fully understand yet (the effect is exaggerated by certain necessary game mechanics which I acknowledge as unrealistic), which preserves humanity as the top of the local heap, having a special relationship with the universe by nature of the ‘fractured universe.’

a. This dovetails somewhat into the idea that human civilization is necessarily a gestalt structure.

7. A sense of parallelism of the greater trends of global maturation of human civilization, understanding, awareness, and thought with the way in which a human child grows and matures (this is sort of a transhumanist argument).

Another thought, I don’t know where this fits exactly: There were people who at one time insisted on their authority that God would not create the Earth as an imperfect sphere, and thus there must be huge continents in the Southern Hemisphere (terra incognita) to balance the great land mass in the Northern Hemisphere. This is quite odd (hypocritically inconsistent) when all the while they insisted that God created all of the creatures and created man to rule over the Earth, but that man is imperfect and subject to sin and needed to be ‘saved.’

My embrace of fuzzy groups, fuzzy concepts in GGDM is not a sign of genius. Far from it. Somewhere in the most Euclidian part of the universe, Rudolf E. Kálmán is heartily laughing and eternally scowling at me at the same moment (Mr. Kálmán would not venture into a black hole, for instance, where physics becomes ‘fuzzy’). For those who may disagree with my characterization of Rudolf Kálmán, I remind you that he comes through history as a scowling, authoritarian type whose ‘protected hunting preserve’ (in the words of Loren Eiseley, see 1 Technology, p. 684) has been invaded by fuzziness.

I state in 4 Culture, p. 404 that the more a fuzzy concept is defined, the less useful it is, and that is true in politics and religion as well as human macrostructures. There is a signpost on the road up ahead... Yet, fuzziness is a fact within the third- and fourth-orders of natural phenomena (à la Clarence Marsh Case) – it allows for interpretation – in fact, it is the defining fact in the latter orders of natural phenomenon with which we have been most concerned through history. Fuzziness is the ability to both hold a view of the universe that is profoundly wrong in historical hindsight while also imagining states of the universe that are no longer apparent from the data, imagining parts of the universe that we cannot see, and bringing into existence a phenomenon (or appearance) which does not derive from empirical facts (à la Kant, see ‘is & ought’ discussion, 1 Constructural Elements, p. 179). How do we reconcile that?

As these things go... I received a solicitation e-mail from Amazon for a free Kindle book in mid-September 2020. One of the books shown was by Yuval Noah Harari, whose name I recognized because I quoted him once in GGDM on the subject of the Turing Test. Regardless of what is said about him by academia, and I admit that I have not read his book, I believed then and I believe now that his quote used in GGDM is a useful contribution to discussion of the subject, and thus, it stood on its own merit (this is the same argument I make about Wikipedia quotes). Harari has been savagely criticized by an eminent professor and thus destroyed within academia, and it is precisely the same criticism I expected when I wrote GGDM (see various ‘silly space game’ and ‘pretentiousness’ commentaries, 2 Expansion, pp. 890-891, 3 Colleges, p. 499 and Silly Space Game Fallacy, 2 Fallen to Earth, p. 1519, and Fallacy of Pretentiousness, 3 Fallen to Earth, p. 1546). The ‘Professor Hallpikes’ of the world will insure that GGDM has no redeeming intellectual value and will never be considered anything more than a silly space game.

But from reading about Mr. Harari in Wikipedia, I discovered the new or emerging discipline of “Big History” and realized that GGDM had wandered unknowingly (since I never heard of it before) in to Big History. They had to use the term Big History because ‘macrohistory’ was already taken and so was ‘cosmic history.’ Anyway, I feel that my fractured universe-emergence argument would fit at least within the first third of a Big History course. It may in fact be a key intellectual development in that field, but likely no one will ever read it or see it, or realize it.

This implies that those who write things on a ‘grander scale’ are moral inferiors who are concerned about buttressing their enduring legacy. That all intellectual writing should focus on the trivial details of the day (noting that Machiavelli is difficult to read for that very reason, The Prince is loaded with trivial details of Italian politics known to his contemporary audience, for which he goes on for pages), aim for political change, and play dodgeball with daily lies. This, by extension, makes GGDM a morally-inferior work in the Chomskian world, as it seeks to live above the politics of here and now, and to discuss in a view from a height, human civilization.

I did choose the subject of GGDM – I began with an idea of creating a simulation of human civilizations that raised ‘population’ to some status above being ‘factors’ or ‘money’ in the game. In doing so, I followed it wherever it (and my life) went – into phenomenology, macrohistory, macrosociology. In GGDM, I have spoken truths which will be unpopular if anyone ever reads it, which according to Chomsky’s classic definition, is what an intellectual is supposed to do. Are you an intellectual if no one ever reads your writings? I keep coming back to this point.

Did I write ‘for ego’? I think that GGDM makes clear my stance on that point. In fact, Chomsky’s vigorous and emotionally-charged defenses of his works (that is, he was offended by contemporary criticisms and responded from that posture) in the various controversies, makes clear that he had ego as much as or more than any (with some to spare), and is, completely opposite the stance explicitly taken in GGDM regarding criticism of it.

Noam Chomsky was clearly concerned with buttressing his legacy by answering the criticisms while he is still alive, as a record for posterity (because others, inferiors, must speak for you after you are dead). As Avi Sion said in Paradoxes and Their Resolutions: A Thematic Compilation, p. 209: “To pretend making no claim, even as one plainly makes one, is a breach of the law of identity: it is denying that a fact is a fact.” This is not to suggest that answering contemporary criticisms is a crime of ego per se, but rather, in opposition to Norman Finkelstein’s claim that Chomsky didn’t write ‘grander’ things because he wasn’t concerned with buttressing his legacy, it is clearly evident that he was so concerned, as much as any other public intellectual.

January 2021 Entry (on something a little different)

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Well, January 2021 became February 2, 2021; I am a little late for the January 2021 post! I am sure nobody noticed, no one is waiting eagerly for my next posting, I am sure no one really cares. But during the month of January 2021, I designed and published four free ‘pencil ‘n eraser’ games derived from GGDM, shadows of GGDM concepts. All four games are linked below next to the PDF thumbnail.

The challenge of designing 'pencil 'n eraser' games is that there are no board spaces, no iconography, no cards, so no board movement or placement, no card draw or discard mechanics; the entire game is contained in a set of concepts on ten or so pages of print, with a set of dice acting as the randomizer. Nor is information contained on pieces as in most games, no numbers, color codes, sizes or shapes to convey important game information or imagery; there are no pieces at all, the entire game has to fit on what players can write on a sheet of paper and the vision they keep in their mind's eye.

CUBES! A GGDM ‘dream shadow’ Game (13 pages), was an austere beginning, completed on January 4, 2021, a resource game about competition for hypercubes (Carl Sagan explains Tresserects excellently in Cosmos - YouTube video) and extinction. SPHERES! A GGDM ‘cosmic cultural crisis’ Game (13 pages), completed on January 11, 2021, is a crisis management game that used a different mechanic from CUBES!; it was built with cascading power activations. The two games were combined and expanded into a comprehensive third game, TURNs! A GGDM ‘transcension unity reality nodes’ Game (7 pages), completed on January 18, 2021. TURNs! unified CUBES! and SPHERES! into a true hyper-dimensional game (mmm... this is in relation to hypercubes and hyperspheres, not Richard Hoagland - just thought I'd clarify that point!). A complete series of games was designed and published in three weeks.

One last GGDM shadow game ... LEGACIES! A GGDM ‘civilization custodians’ Game (23 pages) was completed and published on February 1, 2021. SPHERES! was more complex than CUBES!, and TURNs! is a highly complex game. LEGACIES! uses a different, third mechanic than the others, an experimental ‘imperative actions’ mechanic – an idea I woke up with on January 22, 2021, but that took several days before I could find a proper term to describe it. All four games are recognizable to anyone (if anyone is) familiar with GGDM’s mechanics, they share the same mechanical core of the vital powers and activations, and most of the main concepts of GGDM appear somewhere in the four games – though the implementation necessarily had to change and the presentation is ‘dumbed-down’ as compared to the more extended and nuanced concept discussion in GGDM.

So here we are on Groundhog Day 2021. I hope that my absence is excused, I certainly have not abandoned my lifetime project, GGDM. It is my hope that people will find, read, play and enjoy these games, and someone could even write a computer program for them. All games that you play in the tabletop gaming hobby begin exactly as these have, as pencil ‘n eraser games. The difference between what I have designed here and what you might play at the local game club or FLGS (‘friendly local game store’) is money: exciting art, cardboard, wooden cubes, plastic pieces made in China, advertising, manufacturing, distribution, shrink-wrap. This is one reason why most game manufacturers publish their rules in PDF for free download on the internet.

Because everything in our civilization begins in one person’s mind.

Mid-December 2020 Entry - 28th Anniversary Special

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A month without epigraph; design retrospective straight from the horses (ass’s) mouth!

December 2020 is the 28th Anniversary of when I began working on the ancestor (“Advanced Stellar Conquest” along with playing hundreds of hours of 8-bit Time Bandit on my Atari 1040 ST) that evolved into GGDM. There was a lot of living and learning and some personal sacrifices along the way from December 1992 to the copyright and publication date in May 2020. I thus approach the subject from a much different direction than if it had been written as a book or an article for a learned journal by someone with a Ph.D. in sociology (or anything really); much different than would have been written by Professors Frank Elwell, Jonathan H. Turner, or Mary Jo Deegan. And radically different than anything Professor Noam Chomsky would have written (except perhaps Exposeˊ News Events). Likely, none would have even thought of a macrosocial simulation game.

I did it because I was in love (or obsessed) with the macrosocial simulation that I was developing and I didn’t know anyone else whom I thought would even begin to understand what I was working on (and I wasn’t wrong on that). I have been married to GGDM for 28 years. Self-publication became the key; you as the reader, now have the advantage of beginning at the beginning, reading section by section that which was written in a swirling lurching sorta backwards manner, coming to understand both the simulation game and the wholism and the proposed macrosocial or macrostructural theory (which will be addressed next month). As Carl Sagan would say, my voice is now in your head echoing across the years.

In the post-publication perspective of just a few months, I recognized there are at least two points that will ‘trip-me-up’ on the way to the forum preventing GGDM from being considered as any sort of serious macrostructural theory:

1) First, I wrote it while still learning, especially while still learning macrosociology. For example, I had not previously heard of Prof. Jonathan Turner’s macrodynamics discussions in macro-theory of sociology before publication; for example, Aspects, the odd animal of Cultural Traits, struggled because it is a meso-dynamic expressed in the macrosocial level. Nor had I previously read The Responsibility of Intellectuals (2019 or even the original 1967 article), and so forth. This is in contrast to the idea, perhaps fallacious, that had I a fresh Ph.D. in sociology, I would have been a more ‘finished product’ with knowledge and understanding of all of these things, before writing GGDM. Fallacious or not, that will be what people assume.

2) Second, I did, perhaps subconsciously, pull a ‘sleight-of-hand’ trick with Constructural Elements for the sake of the simulation. The discussion in 1 Constructural Elements begins with the idea that Constructural Elements are the innate qualities of appearances (which only exist when we are ‘looking’), and in that sense alone, perhaps they are of interest to phenomenologists. However, quickly after that point, Constructural Elements are functionally transformed in the simulation to representing the very generalized worldview of colonies and ship crews, and most specifically, whether that worldview causes them to act in ways different from the way their civilization or at least the government, would have them act or perform. Thus, Constructural Elements functionally within the simulation became a representation of Karl Marx’ famous dictum: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” That is a far cry from Constructural Elements representing the innate qualities of any appearance, though ruling class and ruling ideas are by a stretch, appearances. Any serious thinker will immediately recognize the discontinuity and thereby dismiss my simulation as sloppy in a theoretical sense. That development however, was important to the mission of and rippled through the simulation in representing population as more than just numbers or money or resources.

Finally, there is little doubt that much of professional sociology will regard the philosophical approach of GGDM as “philosophical navel contemplation” (Turner, 1981, 1992) instead of macrostructural or macrosocial theory. Or at least any sort of recognizable sociology argumentation. It depends on the reader, but since no one will read GGDM, especially the older tenured generation (a bit of Thomas Kuhn there), I am left to guess at their likely reaction and this would be strike three against GGDM as a macrosocial work.

GGDM is comparable to team sports in the sense that GGDM could be viewed as an intellectual team sporting event.

1. In any team sporting event involving a singular game object (a ball, puck, birdie, as opposed to Greco-Roman wrestling) the eigenstate of the game is wherever that game object happens to be at that exact moment. That is, in such games scoring, progress is measured by where the ball is at any given moment. This was discussed in terms of dice and card games in GGDM in Eigenstates, 3 Dreamtime, p. 163.

2. Any team sporting event that has referees (i.e. zebras) has three or four basic requirements:

a. The team sport must specify spatial and temporal boundaries that is, a playing surface and time limit, boundary control.

i. As an aside, humans prefer in a timing situation for the clock to tick down, rather than count upward toward some specified time limit (e.g., 30 minutes). This is just a simple cognitive conceit, as it is easier to know that the end is reached when the clock is at zero than to remember and do math on how much time remains on a clock that is counting up, that is, countdown clock does the subtraction automatically.

b. The team sport must specify what sort of behaviors are required, rewarded or discouraged in the sport and appropriate rewards – scoring, advancement, possession – are given for encouraged player behavior and punishments for discouraged behavior include loss of time, possession, man advantage, points, ejection.

i. Team sports feature the possibility of violating rules by their very nature, most are contact sports (though you could violate rules in golf or tennis) with players who have free will, as opposed to a mental, contemplative game such as chess or a card game where someone would need to deliberately cheat in the open to violate the rules, thus forfeiting the right to respect and the game on the spot. In computer-controlled or mediated games, it is impossible to violate the rules because they are written into the structure of the program, when it happens, it is called a ‘bug’ in the software.

c. The team sport must operate in a fairly continuous action manner (even American football which is based on plays from scrimmage, or Rugby football) and scoring and rules violations must be observable and judged in real time (this is a legacy of pre-replay times) by the referees on the field. And their judgment must be the final authority during the course of the game.

3. GGDM play mirrors team sports in its own peculiar ways:

a. The spatial and temporal boundaries of GGDM are decided by the players. The spatial boundaries are the explored Galactic Space and the extant Public and Diplomatic Spaces and players decide as a group how big that will be by their actions in the game (e.g., Looking, Scouting). The temporal boundaries of the game are dual-defined by the Turn Cycle (see Buzzing Lightyears, 4 The Streams of Time) which is set by the Concierge based on group preferences and real-world realities and the length of the game in Regular Turns, which is determined also by the group based on factors discussed in It Was the End of History, 1 Resolution, p. 1456.

i. Because GGDM does not have a predetermined length in turns or time elapsed (and neither does chess in turns, but there are chess clocks to monitor player think time), it does not have a countdown, in fact, in board and card games, there is rarely a turn countdown mechanism unless it fits the theme of the game.

b. For the most part the group (both the players and the Concierge) determines what behavior is appropriate or inappropriate, and the players and game rules determine what constitutes possession and advancement in the game. However the issue of encouragement of appropriate behaviors and punishment for inappropriate behaviors is folded into the storytelling arc of the game, players may retaliate or cooperate, Diplomatic Protests may be lodged for News Event violations, and the Concierge receives Intervention Potentials but is not to use them to ‘punish’ anyone or retaliate or ‘level-up’ the game for or against anyone, but rather, to participate in telling the story.

i. Cheating would be an extraordinary conceit on the part of any player or player-position group, and like computer or board games, GGDM is likely to have a computer program assistant that would make it literally impossible to violate the baseline rules of the game without Concierge permission. GGDM also provides that the Concierge through administrative control mechanisms, can simply deny (as a last resort) player abilities or actions.

c. GGDM is a continuous-action game as described in The Law of Periods, et seq., 2 The Streams of Time, p. 84, 3 Dreamtime, p. 159, et seq. (modification and closing of News Events discussion), in DefCon 1, 1 Combat, p. 946 (Combat Alert discussion) and in Freeze Frame, 2 Information, p. 1341, for example. GGDM is an intellectual form of live team sports, akin to a RTS (real time strategy game) that is actually a strategy game and not a first-person shooter (some first person shooters are called RTS games) but at the same time, GGDM is also a turn-based strategy game. Like live sport referees, the Concierge enforces rules as necessary in real time when processing Regular Turn Orders, Combat Actions, and monitoring the News Events forum and must be the final authority in the game while also participating in the storytelling (a dualistic role, like a Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop role-playing game).

Stripped down to its ugly nakedness, all I managed to do is design a macrostructural simulation. That is all. Nothing revolutionary. From my recent learning, it is clear that my arguments about the future direction of macrosociology are in vain. We are not going to separate out the pseudo-physics and pseudo-biology terminology and replace it with a appropriate sociological terminology. Also, sociology seems to recognize that generally civilization is emergent, and so there is nothing in GGDM and Fallen to Earth that is going to knock their socks off. GGDM has to remain a simulation that is aimed at non-sociologists, the popular science, science fiction, and lay public and philosophically inclined. Like the person who wrote it.

I may be suffering from confirmation bias, but I have not seen anything in Prof. Turner’s works (but I am still reading) or the real world of 2020 that contradicts or directly invalidates what I have written in GGDM. It is ‘confirmation bias’ because, as the author, I am naturally looking for support for GGDM as a simulation and not for criticism. Every page of Turner sheds supporting light on something in GGDM. I am amazed at the fact that I intuitively got so much right in GGDM without the benefit of his macrosociology schema. In fact, as the months have passed, re-reading my own writing, I am ‘impressed’ with the breath, depth, and scope of thought – and I feel guilty about it because I know it is lightweight trash; I know that intellectually and inside, but ‘self-efficacy’ as Professor Turner would say, prevents me from fully ingesting that jagged little pill.

December 2020 Entry (on orders of magnitude)

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So why did place counting (or positional notation) systems triumph? Because I do not have a maths brain, I had to figure out my own elegant answer to that puzzle. To someone educated from youth in a mainstream place counting system, 40 is 4 x 10; it’s easy to see, just place a 0 after the number being multiplied when multiplying by 10. Anyone would instantly see that, and think you are dumb if you do not.

But what is IV times X in the Roman Numeral tally counting (or unary numeral) system? It is XL. And that might mean ‘Xtra large’ (as in headache) because there is nothing intuitive about IV x X = XL. I am sure that they had a system, or that one was retroactively constructed but it’s not obvious even to most of the mathematically-talented brains of our time, for example, John Davidson wrote (see full quote 1 Beginnings, p. 33):

Thus I asked on p. 23 of 1 Beginnings how the Romans would have had the concept of Orders of Magnitude? This is a general example that might be given to apply to many of the things discussed in GGDM, for example, the Uber Alles discussion in 2 Eras, where we could not even have a concept of things that will be obvious to a ‘technologically advanced future,’ in fact, it is argued that even the invention of zero as a numeric operator in math was necessary for computer technology, e.g., in the popular Stargate SG-1 episode “Serpent’s Venom” (2000):

Dr. Daniel Jackson: These are Tobin numbers. This is 1, this is 2, this is 3...
Major Samantha Carter: Wait, wait! What about zero?
Dr. Daniel Jackson: What?
Major Samantha Carter: Zero. Why didn’t you say zero?
Dr. Daniel Jackson: Uh... because there’s no zero in the Phoenician numerical system.
Jacob Carter/Selmak: What if the Tobins added it?
Major Samantha Carter: He’s right! Inventing technology with this level of sophistication would require a zero.
Dr. Daniel Jackson: Why?
Major Samantha Carter: Just trust me. It’s a math thing.

I remember that I once had an argument with a white-haired typing and word processing instructor who said that Roman Numerals were silly and useless and we should stop using them. I was young then and I don’t think I phrased my argument correctly; in my current state, I would say yes, Roman Numerals are useless from a mathematical view (other than history) because no one does math with Roman Numerals now, but they still retain a function in documents, for example, to distinguish levels of an outline.

In the Magnitude of Eras discussion in 2 Combat, p. 952, I assert that the progression of Eras in warships (and colony defenses) is not just slight linear progression, but orders of magnitude. This is not borne out strictly, however, by the increasing chances to hit in terms of base chance to hit and Era Differential Shifts described in 3 Combat, p. 978; that is, a 2nd Era Warship does not have ten times the chance to hit as a 1st Era Warship and a 3rd Era Warship does not have ten times the chance to hit as a 2nd Era Warship. At best, with Era Differential Shifts, a 3rd Era warship has nine times the chance to hit a 1st Era Warship as a 1st Era Warship has to hit a 3rd Era Warship; and thus the difference from 1st Era to 3rd Era is as close as the game comes to a literal order of magnitude difference between warships of different Eras.

- An order of magnitude is the difference between a dime and dollar.
- An order of magnitude is the difference between a century and a millennia.
- Three orders of magnitude each are the difference between a kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte.
- Three orders of magnitude are the difference between the bomb that hit Heroshima and a megaton thermonuclear bomb (in the 1983 movie Threads, England was hit with 210 megatons).

The difference between the conventional weapons of WWII and the new nuclear weapons was measured in orders of magitude (not only in explosive power, but also long-lasting residual effects), a modest nuclear bomb is greater than all of the bombs and shells dropped or fired in WWII; you can find many videos and articles on the "terrifying scale of nuclear weapons" (the title of one such YouTube video). Yet world survival, survival of human civilization and life on Earth, depended on military and civilian leadership of the nuclear powers quickly coming to understand this - you are here reading this today - and horror at the use of nuclear weapons became the 'nuclear firebreak' (surprisingly there is not a Wikipedia article on this critical subject) psychological barrier discussed in 1 Combat:

The threat of the development of 'tactical nuclear weapons' such as the M-29 Davy Crockett or the W79 and W82 nuclear artillery shells threatened the blurring of the distinction as did the fading of the Cold War and certain alarmingly careless political rhetoric in recent years.

Notice the date of the Michael Clare article quoted above? As noted in "Dawning of Horror" in 1 Combat, understanding among the masses developed much more slowly and full realization didn't occur until the mid-1970s at the earliest, spurring a slate of famous 'nuclear message' movies and television events, such as Damnation Alley (I saw this later in the early 80s), The Day After (which I watched when it first aired), Threads (in the UK), Testament, Wargames, The Manhattan Project, the gloomy British animated film When the Wind Blows, World War III miniseries (which I remember watching in 1982) and Special Bulletin as examples.

The Kardashev Scale is built roughly on orders of magnitude and that is what both makes it so impressive, while also being hard to grok and nearly practically useless. On the other hand, the extension of the Karadshev Scale to Type 5 and 6 civilizations, presents a vision of the true power of a 'supreme being' or whatever we think created this mess, in the vein of David Hume and Robert Heinelin.

A system could be constructed that literally demonstrates an order of magnitude difference to hit between Eras, but that might, for example mean a 1st Era warship would have only a 1% chance to hit another 1st Era Warship and no chance to hit anything else; a 1% chance to hit would cause combats to drag out for dozens of rounds just to get a hit and that’s not good for game design purposes. The base chance of a 2nd Era Warship would then be 10% against other 2nd Era Warships and 100% against 1st Era Warships and no chance against 3rd Era Warships, and 3rd Era Warships’ base chance to hit anything would be 100% (there might be other ways to do it, but you get the idea). Generally then, a literal order of magnitude difference in chances to hit in combat would not be fun either in real life or gaming. Such a system has never existed in any game I have seen or played and rarely is reflected even in real word combat outside the naval realm.

Staight warship Era progression will not grant orders of magnitude in military power between competing positions. Instead, the order of magnitude difference between Eras in warships (and even Defense Bases) depends in large part on other concurrent technological developments, and even non-technological abilities such as a Combat College and Doctrinal Templates (see 4 Colleges) and industrial base:

Players fill in the gaps by improving ship speed (see 2 Stardrive), logistics (i.e. Operational Flight Limitations and Operational Supply Limitations, see 3 Movement, pp. 855-856), adding Enhancement technologies, and so forth, with the industrial base to support them. Thus the apparent difference in orders of magnitude between Era warships (and fighters and colony defense bases) is not strictly in the percentage chance to hit in combat, but also in strategic ability and this is reflected in the real world in “what if” comparisons, for example, a WWII Pacific Ocean theatre U.S. Navy carrier group vs. the British or German fleet from the Battle of Jutland, or more popularly, the question of whether the U.S.S. Nimitz in the 1980 film The Final Countdown could have smashed the entire Imperial Japanese Navy task force set to attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The analysis must take into account the differences in speed, propulsion systems, fuel logistics, radar and sonar detection, targeting systems, missiles vs. old naval guns, etc.

Order-of-magnitude progression of warships (and colony defenses) or even just starships is, of course, just the tip of the sword so to speak in a potentially militant space opera science fiction simulation game. To be fully grokked, the scope must be expanded to the entirety of civilization, both technological and non-technological, e.g., the same sort of comparisons could be made in industry, medicine, communications and data, time keeping and time and spatial sense (see discussion in Just Don't Call Me Late for Dinner, 3 Reformation, p. 1403) , government structures and so forth of different eras (or of humans of different ages) and this is the reason that Uber Alles have two parts, one technological and one non-technological. Order-of-magnitude progression goes to the core of whatever macro-sort of argument exists in GGDM's model of civilizations.

Whether order-of-magnitude differences between any two things in successive Eras is achieved in-game is up to the players; not only what they do in the game, but also overall agreed upon preferences and guidelines, some players may want to run with it to the point of endangering the coherent sanity of the game and others may prefer low-tech grind. In a mixed crowd, the likely result will be somewhere in the middle (with the Concierge as the gatekeeper); however, I did note in 1 Patents, p. 728, due to cost and time considerations, each position will have a limited number of opportunities to introduce something new to the game (most of the early Patents are pre-established Existential Patents for the game’s early interstellar setting), “so go for something crazy.”

“Albuquerque divided his forces in two groups, a smaller one under the command of Dom João de Lima and a larger one which he commanded personally. The landing commenced at 2 am. While the Portuguese fleet bombarded enemy positions on shore, the infantry rowed their boats onto the beaches on either side of the city’s bridge. They immediately came under artillery fire from the Malayan stockades, though it was largely ineffective. ...

Protected by steel helmets and breastplates, and with the fidalgos clad in full plate armour in the lead, the Portuguese charged the Malayan defensive positions, shattering any resistance almost immediately. With the stockades overcome, the squadron of Albuquerque pushed the defenders back to the main street and proceeded towards the bridge, where they faced stiff resistance and an attack from the rear. ...

[A day later] Unable to oppose the Portuguese any further, the Sultan gathered his royal treasure and what remained of his forces and finally retreated into the jungle.” – from Wikipedia article, “Capture of Malacca (1511).”

Though I talk in GGDM about how the Incas and Aztecs were overwhelmed and defeated, those are not isolated cases, but rather, the most famous cases that readers will (most likely) readily know, especially in North America. They are not isolated, but rather, repeated phenomenon around the world in the 16th to 19th Centuries, and thus require explanation and exploration.

Another illustrative example I stumbled up on recently was the Portuguese storming of Malacca in 1511; the one thing not present in that example is smallpox or any sort of European-borne plague. There were divisions in Malacca that the Europeans exploited (mainly for information gathering and to keep other elements out of the fight), but in the end, it was still about 1,000 Europeans attacking a city defended by 10,000 native troops. The Europeans did have an effective naval bombardment, but unlike the Aztecs and Incas, the defenders also had muskets and cannon, so that’s a wash, though the European weapons were superior. When a couple of hundred pike-armed Europeans attacked the fortifications near the shoreline, the defenders fled after a few minutes of fighting. So once again, once you have washed everything out, it comes down to the same insane non-technological magnitude problem of a ‘few’ Europeans defeating ‘masses’ (even if only 4,000 of the defenders of Malacca were combat-fit troops) of native defenders in their own fortified place.

And like the Aztecs and Incas, you can’t say much for the leadership of Malacca, the Sultan actually betrayed the Portuguese at the behest of local merchant organizations who wanted to keep the Portuguese competition out of their market, and thus created the pretext for the war that the Portuguese wanted anyway. And the Sultan was ineffective in commanding the defense and fled the capital to wage ultimately futile guerrilla warfare.

Unlike the Spanish Conquistadors’ pure lust for gold, slaves (the Spanish Encomienda system) and governor’s titles, the early 16th Century Portuguese program in the Indian Ocean five hundred years ago was a clear-eyed attempt to both dominate markets and cut Islamic expansion and trade monopolies (à la Jean-Baptiste Colbert, discussed in 2 Commerce, pp. 1195-1197):

November 2020 Entry (on the end of empires)

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What David Frum describes here is reflected in GGDM in the Census Power activations (2 Taxation & Census, also And The Cradle Will Rock, 3 Culture, p. 382, and, but even more directly and on point various proficiencies, e.g., the Regeneration Proficiency, 3 Culture, p. 398, the Education Proficiency, 3 Culture, p. 386, etc.).

I think about things differently than many people; I cannot help but to wonder if we have just seen the zenith of the United States as a nation, a culture, a power. The Roman Empire had periods of good and bad emperors; e.g., the ‘five good emperors’ and the Crisis of the Third Century; every polity does and some don’t survive if it happens early in their history (see also Lynn Montross quote in 3 Carriers & Fighters, top of p. 1077). Rome took centuries to disappear, sometimes had resurgent periods, and so did the Ottoman Empire, and the same would be true for the United States. But steadily, Rome lost important advantages along the way: Moral deterioration, failure of moral authority in the world order, steady decline in leadership, perversion of culture, cult of personality, suppression and censorship, debasement of the currency, embrace of political violence, etc. And the Ottoman Empire came to a standstill and stagnation after the defeat at Vienna in 1683, just a century before the American Revolutionary War. I know this is not something we like to think about, but I am not being unpatriotic in thinking of this, in fact, rather the opposite: If one were building a three-story building, it would be prudent to ask under what circumstances might it fall down?

One of the core conclusions of GGDM is that Rome increasingly failed to answer the Why Not question (initially discussed in 2 Disruption, p. 269) on all levels, both individual and in the meso- and institutional-levels. The Why Not question was an important insight extended into the fall of the Western Roman Empire that is discussed throughout GGDM, and especially in How Isaac Met Hari and Terminal Patients, 3 Disruption, pp. 288-289 and Roman Parley, 1 Expansion, p. 883. Sadly, at least in the last years, this seems to become true of the United States as a whole.

There is a video on YouTube called “Is the United States ‘Hitting Bottom’” (dated July 26, 2020) which is a socially-distanced interview hosted by the venerable Ted Koppel. The video compares 2020 to 1968, another ‘bad year’ in American history. Rome hit rock bottom in the 3rd Century and did seemingly recover somewhat. But it was gone into the wastebasket of history by about 450 A.D. But even Romans knew in the 4th Century that the Roman Empire was but a receding shadow of what it had been in the noonday sun. And that their world was changing.

As stated in GGDM, the United States will not last forever, some “historical accident” (Joseph Tainter) will tip the scales, see discussions in Terminal Patients, 3 Disruption, p. 290 and Shattered States, 5 Government Titles, p. 640. The United States is currently 244 years old and we think it is already an old nation with so much world history behind, but in comparison to the Roman Polity which lasted from about 400 B.C. to 480 A.D. (roughly 800+ years) and the successor rump state, the East Roman or Byzantine Empire which lasted until 1453 A.D. (nearly another thousand years, with some continuity hiccups), the United States is still young.

A background theme running through GGDM is the idea of hegemonic frontier potential (see 4 Order, p. 573 and also Conquest by Entitlements, 5 Culture, p. 430) and the advent of industrial-technological warfare in the 20th century. The historical coincidence that propelled the rise of the United States as a world power in the 20th Century is that the United States reached its hegemonic frontier potential and the end-result of the most significant human population shift in history (see Jared Diamond feature quote 1 Expansion, p. 875) at the same time that industrial economics, and industrial warfare, came to dominance, a role for which the United States was uniquely suited. It is thus that in the 1960s, with the frontier long closed and the potential reached, that America and the West’s enthusiasm for space exploration was a reinstatement of a longing for the lost frontier potential and this was most famously echoed in the original Star Trek television series.

Two factors in common for the decline of polities such as the United States and the Roman Empire (as discussed throughout GGDM) might be summarized as lack of frontier potential (expanding resources) and the Why Not question (social cohesion). Both Rome and the United States were at their vital best when they had a frontier and were expanding; Augustus Caesar sealed the Roman Empire by turning away from expansion and the United States frontiers naturally ended in about 1885 (the American Western Frontier was officially closed by Congress after the 1890 census). The Why Not question takes on even more importance (in both cases) after the frontier is closed, and related to this is, as discussed in GGDM, the Roman acceptance during the Second Triumvirate, of political violence (discussed in GGDM under Bitterness & Murder, 6 Government Titles, p. 657) as the normal course (see also Joseph Addison “Mischiefs of Party Spirit”).

It is thus that circumstances dictate more than any other the happy coincidences of macrohistory that allow powers to rise and fall. One might assume (and probably this is a problem for cliodynamics) that a similar situation existed in the classic world of antiquity that led to the rise of Rome over all other tribes and states – what was the question of the time, what was the happy coincidence of the Roman Republic? Is coincidence in this sense emergent?

Yet we know that the world slowly changed (and Rome didn’t, really) leading to the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire. What macro-historical changes would render the United States obsolete? Because it will happen.

It seems that I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines. A couple of months after I wrote the initial draft of this entry, David Pakman placed a video on YouTube titled “Could the US Fall Like Rome Fell?” (dated October 3, 2020), featuring Edward Watts, Chair of the History Department, UC-San Diego.

David Pakman begins thus: “So, increasingly I am hearing things from my audience about, listen all great empires have fallen in history, sometimes they fall slowly, the idea of the United States as this permanent empire is ahistorical and you wouldn’t even necessarily know it while it is happening. So maybe as an analogous situation, we can talk a little about Rome...”

Epilogue, March 2021

“Can the U.S. fall like Rome?” is the underbelly of “Make America Great Again” which the November 14, 2019 Atlantic Magazine YouTube video “Will America Fall Like Rome?” shows both Ronald Regan and Donald Trump using in speeches. Regardless of the racism attached to MAGA (e.g., “Make America White Again”) the Roman connection seems to be an intellectual undercurrent, dating back to the founding days of the country where the founders envisioned reestablishing a Roman-like Republic (e.g., Cincinnati, OH was named in 1790 for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a 5th Century B.C. pious, humble, selfless farmer-warrior hero of the Roman Republic). This November 2019 video from the Atlantic predates the October 3, 2020 David Pakman Show segment I used in the entry above, and there is similar video from Vice News titled, “How America Could Fall Like Rome,” dated March 21, 2021!

October 2020 Entry (on moral bankruptcy)

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The fight over whether or not to appoint a replacement for the deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 has brought into sharp focus true political moral bankruptcy. It is well documented that the Republican-controlled Senate refused to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice in 2016 citing the “Biden Rule” that a new Justice should not be confirmed in an election year once the primary season was underway (named for a 1992 speech by Sen. Joe Biden, now the Democratic Party candidate for President, arguing against Republican President Bush choosing a new Supreme Court justice in an election year). The Senate leadership is on tape saying this multiple times in multiple ways in 2016. Of course in 2020, the plan to ram through a Supreme Court Justice confirmation just before the election elicited loud cries of hypocrisy against Senate Republicans and of election manipulation by the Trump administration (I know there is a quibble argument point about 10 months vs. 46 days – set that aside for now).

Political Moral Bankruptcy has two parts:

1. Both sides are hypocrites. Notice that the Democrats wanted the Senate to confirm Obama’s Supreme Court Justice appointee in 2016. But now they are on the opposite side; the parties have switched sides out of political convenience. A CNN host inadvertently – perhaps – pointed out that the Democrats were all for confirming the new Justice chosen by Obama in 2016, despite the “Biden Rule” that the Republican Senators cited in refusing to take up the matter in 2016. This has been mostly lost in the cries of hypocrisy against Mitch and Lindsey and Ted ... Neither side has the moral high ground and that is Part 1 of Moral Bankruptcy.

2. The Democrat caucus has responded by threatening, in the words of Sen. Chuck Schumer, their leader, that if the Republicans do this and the Democrats control the Senate in 2021, “all options will be on the table.” This means that the Democrats are considering expanding the Supreme Court to recover the two appointments they feel they should have been allowed. This has been referred to as a ‘nuclear option’ for the Democrats, not in a parliamentary rules way, but in the sense of hyperbole or an extreme option. I am against expanding the Supreme Court not only for judicial economy and efficiency purposes (e.g., the multiplication of Justice opinions on each case), but because this game has the strong potential to get out of hand, leading to an ballooning and politicized court.

3. But, the Republicans have already used the parliamentary nuclear option in the Senate by changing rules so that only the majority vote is necessary for confirmation and other matters, rather than 60 votes, because they said Democrats were obstructionist. Mitch McConnell has been accused of breaking “the process for naming a new supreme court justice”; I cannot help but to think of Peter Suber’s game “Nomic.” Depending on your leanings, the change from 60 votes to a simple majority can be described variously as either ‘necessary institutional reform’ of the Senate or a ‘decline of institution’ to one-party rule. The only way this can be undone is if Democrats, when they are in control, act against their own interest and change the rules back to 60 votes needed, undoing McConnell. Once power by simple majority is established, do you think any party in control of the Senate will act against their own short-term interests? Not likely.

So now we have a situation where both sides are hypocrites and both sides basically have only nuclear options available, nuclear options are the only viable threats, and one side has already pulled the trigger – this latter is Part 2 of Moral Bankruptcy. Institutional moral bankruptcy occurs when there are only mutual hypocrisy and nuclear options. And in this sense – long before anyone thought of nuclear anything – the controversial Liberum veto of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth legislature (Sejm) can be taken as a pre-modern example of moral bankruptcy contributing to the demise of the Commonwealth.

Now, while some may take the previous discussion as hypocrisy on my part because I stated in 2 Information, p. 1339 that GGDM tries to be as non-political as possible, is not about the now, but is about the future, I regard this discussion as a non-partisan observation of the ongoing ‘natural experiment’ that is called history (see Jared Diamond quote, 3 Constructural Elements, p. 210). I am certain that there is significant literature on the subject of national or civilizational moral and sociopolitical decay that mentions ‘moral bankruptcy’ as a signpost up ahead on the way to the Twilight Zone. Similarly, moral authority is considered in most cases to be necessary for government legitimacy; it has been argued in GGDM section 2 Government Titles, p. 587 that legitimacy by force of arms alone is at best fragile and that true legitimacy is the authority to use force if needed, but that doing so should not be necessary.

(Philosopher's Sidebar: Can one be a hypcrite absent the external world's perception of possessing or attempting to project moral authority? Can one be a hypcrite to themself? Is each of us the moral authority to ourselves? End Sidebar.)

Moral bankruptcy is certainly possible within the play of GGDM; it is possible for positions to become or be seen as hypocritical in News Events, or private grey diplomacy, or actions in the game, or by role-playing their position, or even by secret changes in Social and Estate Titles over the course of the game (see Pool of the Abyss, 4 Government Titles, p. 630). And as the positions are completely free, sovereign actors vested with technological- and game-interpretation power (as ‘universal legislators’), there are plenty of nuclear options in the game. It is the use of game-ruining U.S. Senate-like political nuclear options in official interpretations that is warned against in Keep the Sand in the Sandbox, 2 Dreamtime, p. 147 for News Events and in 3 Patents, p. 749 regarding the physical laws of the game universe. And in the physical game universe, there is Orbital Bombardment instead of normal Conversion or Pacification Combat. And so on.

Moral Bankruptcy is also something the Concierge – representing generally the faceless sapient populations in the game as opposed to the players representing the central powers of interstellar civilizations – may consider and use as a springboard for Concierge Interventions, Collages resulting from Reformations, and so forth. Notably, even Martin Luther came to be seen as a compromised hypocrite (due to the German Peasant’s War in which he supported the magnates against the peasants he had aroused and Philip of Hesse’s bigamy that implicated the Protestant leadership) and was later sidelined by younger, radical Protestant leaders. The Concierge may also find moral bankruptcy (or at least, hypocrisy) in a position’s failure to follow its Fundamental Realities, to whose restrictions the players agreed by choosing them during the game set-up (and by choosing to participate in the game).

The caveat however, is that the Concierge cannot be partisan about it, which is why the Concierge must act from the view of faceless subject populations (whom the participants should not assume are stupid or uninformed) and Fundamental Reality violations and the overall integrity and story arc of the game, leaving the hypocritical tit-for-tat of Regular Turn events to the player-positions in game. The Concierge must avoid if possible, being hypocritical and having available or using only nuclear options (i.e. taking an autocratic or sledgehammer approach) to guiding the game. That is, the Concierge must (like parents) avoid moral bankruptcy.

Epilogue:

I disagree, as argued in 2 and 3 Government Titles, legitimacy is very much about feelings, interpretations of the populace toward the authorities, that is active acceptance, passive acceptance, or rejection of authority and how they act as a result (this is also consistent with the concept of active and inactive Constructural Elements in the game). McConnell is arguing a very procedural, legalistic view of legitimacy: It was done by the rules therefore it is legitimate.

Aside from the real world consequences ... Within GGDM, this goes to the discussion of universal legislators, in-game stare decisis, and the “Keep the Sand in the Sandbox” arguments against using the nuclear option.

Nuclear options have consequences whether in a game of GGDM or in the real world, whether they are using literal nukes (we all grew up with the apocalyptic stories of global thermonuclear war) or of the political sort, or even in breaching contracts in business or crossing lines in a legal proceeding.

September 2020 Entry (on transhumanism)

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GGDM Thoughts on What is Transhumanism by Humanity+:

1. Frederik Pohl's 1966 short story "Day Million" is the quintessinal transhuman fiction. Transhumanism is embedded in GGDM, for example, in 1 Stardrive, p. 783, I opine that FTL travel may not be possible in our current physical form and that we would need to become something else. While transhumanism is never assumed in GGDM – because GGDM follows most of the mainstream space-opera tropes, which have not really embraced transhumanism, and because GGDM is also an adult table conversation of human civilization as the participants know it – it certainly is possible to have transhumanism pre-game or as a story arc in the game (the same being true of the related Technological Singularity, which I also commented in 2 Technology, p. 706, is not assumed to have occurred before the game, and may or may not be played out in-game). There are 'social' parts of GGDM which might be construed, interpreted in a transhuman manner, such as Proficiencies, Fuzzy Groups, Writs and Enlightenments.

a. There are many thoughts in the Humanity+ book What is Transhumanism that I had previously arrived at independently (or absorbed from our cultural milieu and thought I had thought of them) while designing GGDM; I did not know of the existence of this work until many months after GGDM was published. So, once again, I have not thought of anything new, there is nothing original in GGDM, others thought of it all first. But, since I had arrived at the same conclusions on my own, it is easy for me to understand the arguments in What is Transhumanism, a sort of natural cognitive bias because that is what I already believed. Very little of What is Transhumanism was novel or surprising to me, but it was still good to read because of the organized cognitive framework it provided.

2. In one sense, GGDM’s ‘looking laws’ are the ultimate form of humanism (i.e., “that humans matter”). The ‘looking laws’ resulted from my thought attempting to connect humanity to the universe, describing a special relationship (which I necessarily assume exists, as evidenced in the later development of the ‘fractured universe’ theory in GGDM) in terms of a quantum physics interpretation. Conversely, my anti-natalism comments and even possibly the existential void idea against which I project human existence and human civilization are not really aligned with humanism, depending on how you interpret them. One could argue that my anti-natalism and non-existance comments are anti-transhuman, but on the other hand, that the existential void is the ultimate barrier which transhumanism must overcome. In fact, I suggest that is the only meaningful definition and measure of posthumanity.

3. The transhumanist.com webpage argues for the ‘three S’ approach to transhumanism, which they describe as “Superintelligence, Superlongevity, Superhappiness.” The first two are discussed throughout GGDM in the form of SQ (Sentience Quotient), for example, and discussions about human lifespan limits and sleeper ships, but I want here to focus on the last of the three, “Superhappiness.” ‘Happiness’ is identified in 4 Culture as the ‘meta-aspect’ of all human civilizations, societies, relationships, and as the central, core function of religion against the existential void. I also argued in 1 Technology, p. 694, that religion and science must remain separate and that science must not become a religion (keeping the ontic questions separate from the ontological questions); the duality is the core of modern humanity. It is thus that we arrive at the transhumanist goal of “Superhappiness” which one must assume comes through (in their terms) technology and social reform. It seems to suggest that transhumanist think that science and religion will somehow merge or at least that the duality will disappear in a posthuman civilization.

a. Transhumanist.com's ‘Superhappiness’ seems to be contradicted by the words of another transhumanist document: “In some ways, human minds and brains are just not designed to be happy.” – Humanity+, What is Transhumanism (Kindle Location 277). I think more people would agree with this than with the ideal of superhappiness. However transhumanist have already suggested broadly that posthumanity would require a structural change in the human brain, which might mean being "designed to be happy."

4. The posthuman goal to “experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access” connects transhumanism to 1960s ‘drug counter-culture’ (e.g., psychedelic drugs, LSD, hippies, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Ken Kasey) who confused drug-altered consciousness with a form of transcendence, meditation, enlightenment. This concept crept into literary fiction, most famously, the black hole scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the ultimate psychedelic drug-user fiction, Dune. Of course, at this point, with 50 years of bad history behind us, few transhumanist would admit a relationship to or endorse recreational, mind-altering illegal drug use as a form of transhumanity (at least not without caveats).

a. The idea of achieving enlightenment through mind-altering drugs is embedded in our zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture and is usually presented in a satirical, comedic way. I can see why law enforcement and mainstream establishment criticized the LSD studies and spreading practice; it is easy to refute: Alcohol consumption also produces altered states of consciousness and no one in the West has claimed for a very long time that it produces enlightenment. Rather, the opposite.

b. While most transhumanist are normal people who embrace the ideal to a greater or lesser extent (in this way, it mirrors any religion), the early transhumanist (like early religious figures) were eccentric figures and radical thinkers (e.g., FM-2030 who coined the term). This is a necessary paradox of humanity, because ‘normal’ people would not go down those pathways.

5. In the current political climate, if a transhumanist were to speak on television, they would be labeled radical left (i.e., futurist, progressive), though that would be mostly inappropriate (and why does progressive and future-oriented thought make one a radical leftist?) because transhumanism is non-political, beyond the politics of this moment, and not an active force outside of literary fiction and a small part of the intelligentsia. This is very similar to the stand taken in GGDM of trying to be non-political, and not of this moment.

6. Transhumanism depends on an extreme amount of vague extrapolation to reach post-human states, or even to posit the ‘progress’ of the next 50 years or century. At what point does extrapolation become faith? A mild form of sacraficium intellectus to human progress and goodness, to continuation of technology? Because it all requires an underlying faith (which sort of makes them more to the right, right?) – all the while they freely admit they could be dead wrong – to accept their conclusions and predictions. Nonetheless, the reasons behind their inability to truly discuss what would be post human are very similar to the discussion in 1 Eras of GGDM’s inability to describe 2nd and 3rd Era technology.

7. Finally, the discussion of cryonics in the latter part of What is Transhumanism brings to the top the major division of GGDM from transhumanism. Reading the section, I experienced the vague feeling of absurdity; while the assertions of fact and extraopolations are solid, it feels like they are missing the point. Consider two schoolboys in a crowded school hallway, John pushed Peter, Peter shoved John, who fell back and knocked Sharon down and broke her leg. Peter says, "He pushed me first!" but that misses the point. The underlying thread of transhumanism is the nearly unbounded assumption that everyone wants to live longer ("superlongevity" on transhumanist.com) as long as they are healthy ("healthspan") and I don't think that's automatically true for over 95% of the adult population, as evinced by GGDM (for example, that seeking immortaility stories have almost disappeared in sci-fi, 4 Taxation & Census, p. 328). It is an unfounded assumption arising from a confusion: Our civilization may ethically (and because it makes us feel righteous and upstanding) want people to live longer, but that doesn't mean that most adult humans want to live longer. Aging is not just physical, I think that our push to extend life, now regularly reaching the octogenarian age in the West, has reached the limits of human mental and spiritual lifespan as well. And if you think that is a problem, well solve it.

a. I do admit that the Humanity+ authors came somewhat closer to the point in their answer to "Why Do Transhumanist want to live longer?" to which they began, "This is a personal matter, a matter of the heart." It's like they somehow know what it is, but don't want to name it; it is the elephant in the room: The older you get the thinner the veil becomes that blocks your consciousness of the Existential Void. What then of 'superlongevity' when modern Western longevity is already problematic?

b. Ultimately, the concept of "superlongevity" in transhumanism runs almost directly counter to saṃsāra which is embedded in some form in nearly every thought and religious system, including the cheap direct-to-the-afterlife parlor trick version in Christianity, as discussed in 4 Fallen to Earth, pp. 1564-1565. That is, for those who believe in reincarnation as a means to finally exiting this universe (or at least, endless existance on Earth), superlongevity is an artificial delay in the process. Thus, transhumanism will have difficulty in non-Western parts of the world that believe in multiple cycles to reach saṃsāra, but it is not surprising that it developed in the West where Abrahamic religion holds a mostly unstated, unrealized belief in a single cycle to heaven (i.e. saṃsāra); that is, the concept of reincarnation does not occur in the Western thought until contact with India based religions.

August 2020 Entry (on macrostructures)

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What is macrostructural? Here are some examples gleaned from Google Books (free stuff!):

Mauk Mulder’s statements are consistent with Ian Robertson (1989) quotes in the GGDM section 1 Corporations, p. 1239, and thus probably represents a concept of macrostructural thinking that existed in the 1970s and 1980s mainstream intellectualism.

I am still learning my craft, and anyone of any age who claims they are not, is lying or kidding themselves. Despite all of the brave talk about how confidence empowers, every intellectual should always walk in fear that they are an unwitting living exhibit of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (either of classic low-competence or less studied, high competence). And this is my true feeling about my own project, GGDM.

From the first paragraphs of the previously-cited article, I learned that Aguste Comte viewed the then fledgling idea of social science as ‘social physics.’ This was intended merely to provide a conceptual link for the Newtonian audience, but it seems that sociology has not moved much beyond the concept and is still rife (as argued in GGDM) with pseudo-biological and pseudo-physical language, which even I cannot avoid by my own admission.

But more importantly, knowing that Comte called social sciences “social physics” improves my understanding of the origin of sociologist Clarence Marsh Cases’ ‘four orders of natural phenomenon’ which is used widely as a framework throughout GGDM. Prof. Case does mention Comte once in the introduction and it is now clear that is the line he drew from; but it is also a springboard in that by admitting that social phenomenon are a different order of phenomenon than physics or biology, it is implied that the language of physics and biology are not suitable for social sciences. Professor Case referred to those who study social phenomenon as a thing onto itself as "social sociologist." Thus, social sciences, as argued in GGDM, needs to develop a new language.

Now, I don’t think I am going to convince any professors that sociology needs a new language and needs to stop using the language of physics and biology – any passing familiarity with Thomas Khun suggests the futility of trying to convince the old guard. In fact, I received a rather emphatic refutation from one such professor who self-describes as an iconoclast!

Simplicity is relative, but GGDM is clearly designed – macrostructurally – as a game of emergence. It is, as discussed in GGDM section 3 Constructural Elements, intended to generate emergent narrative and group storytelling, and I have maintained that GGDM is itself an emergence.

July 2020 Entry (on pragmatic history)

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From Amapour & Company, June 26, 2020, “How Could a Slaveholder Write ‘All Men Are Created Equal’?

Pragmatic ethics and pragmatic history are discussed in GGDM in various places, most notably, 3 Order, p. 551 and 6 Combat, p. 1032. The Amapour & Company video is available on YouTube. In the terms Prof. Gordon-Reed used, GGDM is my preoccupation, like Thomas Jefferson's own.

Will future historians be as pragmatic about President Trump and global warming as they are being currently about white slaveholders (i.e. Thomas Jefferson) writing 'all men are created equal'? I am questioning the limits of pragmatic history; for example, as we approach the 100th anniversary of a series of events that have been identified as the proximate cause of WW2, it is still very difficult to think of Hitler and his sycophants in a pragmatic way. And why does Western history focus on blaming Germany above all others?

June 2020 Entry (on alienation)

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The military, even from ancient times, has been the greatest source of alienation; the soldier in the ranks must necessarily be alienated from the imagination of the operational commanders. And to suffer the consequences of the vagaries of luck and lack of imagination. I have personal experience in this in the Marines.

World War 1 is considered the first industrial war and the processes of the industrial war pushed the existing alienation described by Marx to the fullest extent, as described by Lynn Montross in War Through the Ages (see quote in GGDM, 5 Combat, p. 1008). Thus, the alienation and sacrifice of the ordinary soldiers in the trenches is the defining aspect of World War 1 historiography. The thread is also there in WW2 histories, but has a different feel, possibly because of the mechanized speed and technological changes in warfare, or because the allies won in such complete fashion (as opposed to the futility of WW1) or because tactics in WW2 had shifted from human wave attack to small unit maneuver warfare which involves the imagination of the soldiers in the execution more so than human wave models.

This alienation has also always been true of crew and passengers on ships, who are at the mercy of the captain and the elements, as discussed in Naval Combat, 5 Combat, p. 1009.

Continuing Thoughts, October 2020

I have heard it often said that Germany’s holocaust of the Jews was an industrial genocide. Most people take this (perhaps rightly) to mean that Germany used the benefits of modern technology (e.g., trains for transport) to commit racial genocide on a scale not seen before in the world. Others may also think of the ‘machinery of state’ (and people like Eichmann) or of the death machine processing extermination camps set up on the Polish-Russian frontier (Operation Reinhard, Sobibor, Trablinka, and Belzec extermination camps) as the industrial genocide of the Jews.

All of that may be a true image, but within Marx’ conflict theory in sociology, another meaning emerges. The industrialization of genocide was the essential alienation of the German nation’s civil and political society from the atrocities, the alienation of each individual soldier, police officer, and civil servant or employee, and their industrialist masters, from the final result of the process (excepting those hand-picked few who directed and/or carried out the actual executions). The essential core of Marxian social theory (according to Professor Elwell), is the alienation of human creation and problem solving (and labor) from the final product, by dividing and subdividing the labor into small repetitive steps, and the alienation of workers from capital ownership and profit of their labor. From this, it can be seen the ‘real’ sense in which the Holocaust was industrialized genocide.

The same can be said of modern war, World War I is commonly referred to as the first industrial war. People commonly imagine this to refer to the enormous national armies, supplied with technological weapons and logistics, backed by the industrialized, mechanized production of a nation (consider for example the appalling amount of ammunition expended). All of this is true, but as armies become larger and command becomes more remote from the combat – the relationship of each participant to the whole, to the operation, to the outcome desired by the creative minds in the command far to the rear, becomes less and less significant, until, as happened in WWI, the soldiers on the front couldn’t see the point of it all, what they were dying for daily (in the words of Lynn Montross quoted 5 Combat, p. 1008, they were being thrust into battle instead of led into battle). This particularly plays into the time element, since in previous centuries, armies lined for battles that were decided in a few hours, but beginning with the latter-part of the American Civil War, the time of combat operations had expanded until labeling a period and geographical location of conflict a ‘battle’ was a convenience of historians, journalist and propagandist later trying to make sense of it all.

May 2020 Entry (on boxing ourselves in)

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Scene from the movie Journey’s End, 2018, the 100th Anniversary of the 1918 Spring Offensive portrayed in the movie:

WWI trenches, German shells are raining down causing havoc with heavy and accurate fire. The British defenders, under the command of Capt. Stanhope, have previously extended their defenses all around the flanks because he didn’t trust the other companies to protect their flanks and they are instructed to not retreat. Mr. Raleigh, Capt. Stanhope’s girlfriend’s younger brother, has been hit.

Capt. Stanhope: [Screaming] “We need to get him down the line.”
Soldier: “We can’t, Sir.”
Capt. Stanhope: “We must!”
Soldier: “We can’t, Sir. We’ve hemmed ourselves in!”

Mr. Raleigh dies a minute or two later, as Capt. Stanhope realizes his error and complicity. Stanhope tries to climb the steps back to the trenches, but is knocked back by a shell explosion. Stunned, he gets back up and in a daze, walks back into the inferno of fire.