Adjust your compass. If you think the captions make it hard to work out which place lies beneath it, you're right.
Evolution
To understand where we're headed, its a waste of time looking at economics, news, history and architecture and the deeds of important people.
The only ones that have the real understanding of what makes society tick are the Marketing, PR, Advertising peeps. But their power lies in not divesting this knowledge and their contempt for the fools that unwittingly do their bidding is tempered only by their astounding ability to deceive themselves.
Journalists and economists, the ones who formulate the "consensus reality" - offer little in the way of help. The first are in the pocket of the lot above and the economist is lost outside the realms of the measurable.
Here's a perfect example of how Economics is so backward, hamstrung by the ideological framework of the Standard Model:
in 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton and Amos Tversky of Stanford published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," a breakthrough paper on how people handle uncertain rewards and risks. In the ensuing decades, it became one of the most widely cited papers in economics. The authors argued that the ways in which alternatives are framed - not simply their relative value - heavily influence the decisions people make. This was a seminal paper in behavioral economics; its rigorous equations pierced a core assumption of the standard model-that the actual value of alternatives was all that mattered, not the mode of their presentation ("framing").
To me this illustrates how painfully slow and backwards Economic thinking is and how shifting its crude paradigms takes an eternity. Discoveries made long ago in other spheres become revelations to economists, once encased in the pseudo-scientific language and methodologies familiar to them.
Meanwhile, if you pick up Edward Bernays' Propaganda - a little tome first published in 1928 - that lays out the basic strategies of PR in a clear and concise fashion, you will see how very little has changed over the last hundred years in the West. Despite all the developments in fashions and appliances - it has been business as usual with little but an ever-evolving narrative masking a stagnancy, perhaps even a regression in people's consciousness.
The only ones that have the real understanding of what makes society tick are the Marketing, PR, Advertising peeps. But their power lies in not divesting this knowledge and their contempt for the fools that unwittingly do their bidding is tempered only by their astounding ability to deceive themselves.
Journalists and economists, the ones who formulate the "consensus reality" - offer little in the way of help. The first are in the pocket of the lot above and the economist is lost outside the realms of the measurable.
Here's a perfect example of how Economics is so backward, hamstrung by the ideological framework of the Standard Model:
in 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton and Amos Tversky of Stanford published "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," a breakthrough paper on how people handle uncertain rewards and risks. In the ensuing decades, it became one of the most widely cited papers in economics. The authors argued that the ways in which alternatives are framed - not simply their relative value - heavily influence the decisions people make. This was a seminal paper in behavioral economics; its rigorous equations pierced a core assumption of the standard model-that the actual value of alternatives was all that mattered, not the mode of their presentation ("framing").
To me this illustrates how painfully slow and backwards Economic thinking is and how shifting its crude paradigms takes an eternity. Discoveries made long ago in other spheres become revelations to economists, once encased in the pseudo-scientific language and methodologies familiar to them.
Meanwhile, if you pick up Edward Bernays' Propaganda - a little tome first published in 1928 - that lays out the basic strategies of PR in a clear and concise fashion, you will see how very little has changed over the last hundred years in the West. Despite all the developments in fashions and appliances - it has been business as usual with little but an ever-evolving narrative masking a stagnancy, perhaps even a regression in people's consciousness.
The concept of evolution is very misleading. Most people seem to take it for granted that we are naturally evolving in the right direction. Possibly this is true on a scale of 100s of thousands of years. But certainly within the last 2000 years one should be very weary of seeing any evolution in mankind. All that has evolved is man's dependency on various systems. On the whole, as a being increasingly dependent on huge indifferent hierarchies, he is not necessarily evolving in the right direction. Furthermore, division of labour, one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model, has created millions of "fachidioten": people who can only look beyond the little corner of the vast, terrible hierarchy known as the 'free market' quite timidly (since their consciousness is so tied to it) and who only have in common with other men what is handed down to them by the peeps mentioned towards the beginning of this piece.
Economism
Economism is a moral and social posture "which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth".
It's incredibly pervasive. As the evening winds down, to show how clever they are, someone will invariably flare their nostrils, put on a solemn face and start going all macro. Within a few minutes the whole table is infected, carping on about national debt, budget cuts and currency fluctuation. Hopefully one day it will be recognised as a mental illness and there'll be a 10 step programme to wean people off it.
"Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored of its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer."
Albert Jay Nock
I'd say that sums it up perfectly and the "despairingly consenting" bit is upon us now! It is hardly suprising that economism creates such a world since in essence, it systematically elevates the nastiest most ruthless people possible, those cunning enough to know how to observe the letter of the law whilst having total disdain for the spirit of it. It forces us all to develop that most horrible side of ourselves unless we`re already taking protection under the umbrella of others who individually or collectively fit that description.
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