“Know thyself” is a most fundamental axiom of Greek philosophy that has been repeated into cliche in philosophy and religious studies classrooms around the world. And yet it is a concept that many seem to forget. To ignore our fundamental presuppositions and the grounding of our beliefs is foolish and to unwittingly seek to undercut them is ideological suicide.
These thoughts follow my reading of Polly Toynbee’s recent article in the Guardian which seeks to essentially de-Christianise the Christmas celebrations and throws around the terms ‘cultural Christianity’ and ‘humanism’ as a way to legitimise her thoroughly anti-Christian position as some kind of reasonable middle ground/self-critique. A contradiction for sure, as she lampoons the foundations of Christian belief and excoriates the actions of early Christians. If we attached power cables to Friedrich Nietzsche’s grave, his rolling would probably solve the present energy crisis our country is currently undergoing.
Cultural Christianity, at the very least, demands an adoption of Christian morality and admiration for Christian tradition and history that is ridiculous to maintain in lieu of actual religious belief and makes me wonder why one doesn’t go all the way to believe in God too. Perhaps we consider the morality of ‘love thy neighbour’ as not necessarily an exclusively Christian belief but the very mindset that the European and American lives in are framed by Christianity – from the Protestant work ethic to our preference for monogamous relationships. Believing in the morality, mindset and general worldview of Christianity without its origin and basis, the teachings of Christ and the existence of God is vapid and naive. Why is marriage a sacred, inviolable contract if its primary advocate is not even real? (or dead).
This mindset is ultimately pointless and shallow and seeks to provide its own moral foundation with an appeal to some kind of tradition, popularity, or history – merely copying a greater tradition than itself. Ms Toynbee’s self-critical cultural Christianity is further called into question as nothing more than a veneer in her decidedly un-historical diagnosis of Christianity as anti-philosophical, anti-mathematical and anti-intellectual. The church is aware of its failings as a human institution, our own doctrine expects this and our scripture reminds us to be constantly vigilant against sin and our nature. Unfortunately, examples in history can be dragged into scrutiny to illustrate the failures of our forefathers. Maybe certain Popes and church leaders resisted the progress of science, or maybe the condemnations of 1277 sought to strangle ‘heretical’ elements of Aristotelianism out of medieval philosophy, but it isn’t appropriate to attribute particular mistakes by fallible humans to the wider religion. To do so is to be blinkered to what Christianity has provided and what it stands for.
Many of the greatest leaps in mathematics and science were accomplished by monotheists, algebra was pioneered and beautifully developed during the Golden Age of Islam and much of modern science owes its exposition and articulation to Christianity: Newtonian physics, Mendelian genetics and even the Big Bang Theory originate from Christian scholars. As for philosophy, while the discipline in the medieval period did develop in partnership with theology, the enlightenment saw the emergence of important secular thought among many Christian thinkers. For one example, Immanuel Kant, the father of modern philosophy, sought to use God to justify human freedom and escape relativism and nihilism; providing a philosophical framework that has shaped the European zeitgeist. There is a good case to be made that most Anglo-American philosophy that traces back to Hume is essentially a secularisation of the work of William of Occam; a Franciscan monk. Yes, certain Christians supported the barbaric practice of slavery but subsequent Christians spearheaded the abolitionist cause and rebuked their forebears. To accuse Christianity of being backwards because some nuns teaching children attempted to use theological themes to encourage good behaviour is intellectually immature. Ms Toynbee can chase caricatures and mistakes by certain people in order to try and hurry Christianity out the door as much as she wants but her arguments are largely rebutted by a cursory reading of history. There is no real correlation between Christianity and intellectual stagnation.
A point that is interestingly used to drive her case forward is to complain about the largely ceremonial title of Fidei Defensor, which our monarchs adopted as an ironic jest at the Papacy. It is a somewhat nickel and dime point to analyse the declaration of the Anglican church’s independence – remember that the monarch is also the (ceremonial) Supreme Governor of the CofE: a broadly ceremonial title. Surely then, in an institution that is allegedly racist and backward, we should be welcoming Charles’ declaration to defend all the faiths of all of his subjects even if he is styled with a ceremonial, historic title? Dwelling on the ‘the’ seems to be counter-productive. These nickel-and-dime points come across as the bread and butter of this article – We can see another example of these snipes in her discussion of assisted suicide. To say that life is sacred and that assisted suicide is a slippery slope somehow makes our elected officials dangerous radicals that are out of touch with the electorate. This polemic move is extremely dishonest. See the advancement of medically assisted suicide in Canada as an example of the practical risks associated with this policy.
Maybe this response article is also rising to the nickel and dime bait. The debate could rage forever, as glib anecdotes and controversies are thrown about to illustrate the evil of the ever-vengeful skydaddy and his charlatan prophet. But let’s not forget the message of Christmas in the Gospel – a message of love, hope and the salvation of mankind by God who loves His creation and wants nothing more than to reconcile our broken relationship.
So this Christmas remember that the secular values we associate with it – family, reconciliation, joy, giving and altruism – stem from a message of divine love and peace with a promise to end human suffering. Ms Toynbee’s vision of a secular winter holiday is not possible without the Incarnation.
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If There is Hope, It Lies in the NIMBYs
~ To my good friend Chris, who – despite the best available treatment – continues to suffer with YIMBY brainrot. ~
If there was hope, it must lie in the NIMBYs, because only there in those nonconforming disregarded boomers, ~22 per cent of the population of Britannia, could the force to destroy the regime ever be generated. The regime could not be overthrown from within a newbuild. It is them and them alone who are capable of preventing further mass migration into these isles. Collective animosity to the transformation of our country over the last seventy years can only be galvanised through the emergence of direct and inescapable negative externalities of the immigrant population being here.
The NIMBY’s dug-in heels expose the costs of the unnatural population boom that has been imposed on us, through hospital appointment delays, waiting lists, the lack of available school placements, etc. and through these problems the British are made incapable of following the path of least resistance and fleeing their local ship and scurrying to cheaper houses elsewhere. NIMBYism will push us all against the wall and ensure we confront the real and existential threat facing our people.
Let us suppose we disregard the NIMBYs, fall to the knees of our enemies, and beg them to build more houses regardless of the protestations of white Lib Dem voters: for whom would they really be for? Such housing would only be accessible to the middle class and subsidised immigrants.
Around 80% of the population increase since 2001 has been due to immigration. Many settlements across the country such as Sunderland have seen a population decrease since 2001, yet have had vast newbuild suburbs tacked on around the area, so it has to be stressed that these houses being built are not for those already here.
The goal of house building is instead an attempt to maintain a semblance of stability as our occupation government intends to push immigration each year into the millions. The price of housing can never be brought down under this arrangement. All we can currently control locally in our own communities is how much space is opened up for displacement populations to be moved in. For a country that has had a negative birth-rate for decades, you would think that there would be no seething cries for concreting over the remaining pleasant lands unless there were some unnatural force being pulled forth from abroad artificially ballooning the demand for housing.
Quell your trivial lamentations, for if we are unable to own homes and the rent becomes too high we can always live with our families and they (the potential repopulators) can continue living elsewhere. The gap between rental supply and demand is like a Thermopylaen dam, holding back the forces of change and securing what remains of the villages and towns that we grew up in.
It is worth looking at the impulse towards YIMBYism before continuing on with the defence of NIMBYism. YIMBYs are, basically, a self-interested cohort of deracinated individuals incapable of feeling any sincere communitarian connection to the country they purport to care about. No one who ascribes to YIMBYism in the present could ever truly be right wing, and they are certainly not nationalists by any real definition.
The motivation for YIMBYs is the desire for personal material gain irrespective of the consequences to the wider nation as a whole. You would have to be deeply, spiritually indolent to be aware of the racial dimension to the present struggle yet continue to spend your time focused on pushing for as many things to be constructed as possible (lest the Roman goddess Maia smite you down from her Olympian high-rise building).
This can all be contrasted with NIMBYs, where, on the surface it seems to be primarily a cause wrought from self-interest, yet there is an implicit racialism, or at least communal collectivism, that animates them into spending so much of their time trying to stop the construction of anything near their homes.
There is a subconscious understanding granted to NIMBYs, by their blood and bones, that any and all development is wedded to the immigration issue, even if they do not articulate their reasoning as such. Even if they are outwardly liberal and vote for the uniparty, in one garish form or another, they have still been compelled to try and halt the stampede of construction; compelled by grander tribal considerations beyond their conscious control and far beyond the petty desires of their local area.
NIMBYs, God bless them, sit atop the large ball and chain shackled to the YIMBY bug man that is desperately trying to claw the nation towards total multiracial capitalist dystopia, under the guise of it being ‘based’ someday.
The NIMBYs, by their actions, are making it as difficult as possible for those in power to bring about their desired thousand-year panopticonic hell of global technocratic control. They exclaim with righteous fury ‘the character of the area will change’ and, with this implicitly reactionary rallying cry, they proclaim a stand is being taken in defence of what our ancestors left for us; in defence of what is ours, in defence of what we must dutifully preserve for those that will come after us. If you oppose these sentiments and side with the YIMBY cause of pro-building you are anti-white.
Who else is deserving of praise when these issues are discussed in our circles but the late great Richard Beeching, without whose cuts to our rail infrastructure we would be deprived of rural Britain in its frozen primordial state. This is the power of Levelling Down, the inadvertent preservation of what really matters, of what we conjure in our mind’s eyes when we hear the word ‘England’.
What would the demography and texture of life of rural areas look like had those arterial transport lines not been severed by the British Railways Board at that moment in time? Those geniuses of bureaucracy looked only at immediate cost-saving measures yet ensured much of Britain would progress far slower than the urban warts in the fore, much like how Eastern Bloc states were shielded from decades of societal and cultural degeneration occurring in the west.
This has already played itself out before in our past. In Victorian Britain, Peterborough and Swindon were enlarged and urbanised due to their status as railway towns, and in contrast, towns such as Frome and Kendal remained intact due to being bypassed by the main lines. What could be argued to have been unfortunate then has been insulating for rural areas affected in the same way now.
It is far harder to displace local economies and people when there is simply no infrastructure to enable newcomers moving in, and those in power know this. Even in official government reports, our overlords lament how the rural areas of our country continue to be white spaces (in contrast to our grey polyglot citadels to nowhere), which has only been possible because of our inefficient and underdeveloped infrastructure.
Even setting aside the more esoteric takes on NIMBYism, NIMBYs have plenty of legitimate reasons to be opposed to construction in the areas they live in. Villages and towns throughout the country are under threat of being subsumed into a mass of soulless commuter zones around the nearest city. Everything is set to be absorbed into a blob of suburban prison cells without community or belonging, all to line the pockets of parasitic housing companies and give ascent to the ethnic machinations of our destructors.
People who live in these places know that expansion means that everything outside of their front door will look and feel more like London and they correctly reject it. People instinctively recoil at the efficiency with which 5G towers were pockmarked across our landscape during the Covid ‘Lockdowns’ and people are right to be repelled by all of the slick technological wonders of ‘smart homes’ sold to us by our masters. None of these things are congruent with how anyone deep-down wants Britain to be.
YIMBYism is deceptive in its overall presentation as being the sensible or reasonable option, in contrast to the supposed extreme positions of many NIMBYs (which is a self-own in its own right), but YIMBYs do not actually care about real development of this country. Most, if not all, of the real solutions that would give us good-quality, affordable housing would be contrary to a policy of deregulating the economy and doing whatever international finance asks of us to be done to our land and people.
Such solutions would likely be decried as socialism or communism and with it the YIMBY would expose himself as but a pawn of the oligarchs, no longer a Briton in character or spirit. These points though are a distraction away from what really matters and such policy debates can only be relevant in a post-regime world without the albatross of near-imminent demographic erasure around our neck. The elephant in the room is quickly forgotten about if you even momentarily entertain the notion of house prices mattering beyond any other silly partisan issue discussed in Parliament.
But it is not just housing that is in contention. All forms of expansion and growth are, in the long-term, detrimental to our people whilst we are occupied. Everything done freely in our liberal, capitalist country in the last 50 or so years has been to the detriment of the people our economy is meant to be built around. Every power plant built or maintained allows Amazon warehouses to keep their lights on. Every railway built or maintained ensures employers can reasonably expect you to submit to the Norman Tebbit mindset for how we are to live and work. Every new motorway has facilitated increased population mobility and with it the new motley generation of white collar serfs defend their creators, scuttling across Britain’s surface unable to understand why the older, whiter parts of the country might have deep-rooted connections to the places they live.
This new generation, marketed as the ‘Young Voters’ or ‘Young People’, do not really exist in the same way that Boomers and Gen Xers do. Trying to appeal to or identify with this spectral universal generation of youths is to view these issues through an inherently post-racial lens, and by extension, to misunderstand the driving motivations of NIMBYism. The older generations, which are the bulk of those that sympathise with NIMBYism, are the only ones that matter politically and economically and counter-signalling them is implicitly a form of anti-white hatred.
The temporarily-embarrassed plutocrats in our midst are becoming more and more apoplectic when confronted with the reality that the vast majority of the British people want nothing to do with Singapore-style excess capitalism, no matter how desperately they attempt to sell to them the potential material gains and goodies.
We should aspire to be more like Iran, a Tehran-on-Thames, a country that actively restrains the degree to which businesses can expand so that everything stays small and localised. People yearn for flourishing high streets and dignified work local to where they were born, something Iran has succeeded at maintaining with its constitution and system of dominant cooperatives and Bonyads. This is tangential to the NIMBY/YIMBY divide but integral for understanding what is going on.
The British people want the things that they care about protected and secured and valued above the interests of capital or the growth of the economy. Our people have simply had enough of growth, progress and rapid change that they did not vote for, and their views on construction and economics are shaped by that impetus. Brexit Bonyads are inevitable.
If anything is to be conceded to the YIMBYs, it is that their urge to make things more efficient is understandable (natural really for any European man) and a good impulse to have. However, this impulse is being exploited against us, a form of suicide via naivety, where we continue pursuing these instincts in spite of the fruits of said efficiency. My position on nuclear power plants would probably be different if we were the ones in power, or perhaps the small percent chance of something going wrong and having all of Britain’s wildlife poisoned would prevent me from ever endorsing them.
Let us suppose we put pressure on our current regime, a regime similar to the Soviet Union except without any of its upsides, to build a nuclear power plant: can we trust that the diversity hires, rotten civil service and corner-cutting private contractors will not bring about a disaster worse than what occurred at Chernobyl?
Point being, many things which are bad for us now are not bad for us in principle (and vice versa), something atom cultist YIMBYs are incapable of understanding. YIMBYs are equally incapable of understanding why one might be averse to scientific innovations that amount to playing God and making Faustian economic bargains. Money spent on scientific research is better spent on just paying people to leave.
There is an alternative lens to look at everything through though. For those that do not just want to talk all day about nuclear power plants with people that wear polyester suits, for those that have higher values beyond ‘Jee-Dee-Pee’, for those that are capable of having principles they would put before their immediate personal comfort, there is the true way forward.
It is our duty to be revolutionaries, in the vein of Hereward the Wake, villainous rebels resisting the occupation government perched above us. NIMBYism is a successful strategy for a time, this time, in which we have no realistic chance at having power. Frustrating outcomes and disrupting their long march onwards is all we have in our illusory democracy.
Inefficiency is a good thing. We must crave blackouts like houseplants crave sunlight. Our only hope for liberation and true prosperity lies with our regime being as broken as possible. Our people must be pulled from their comfortable position in the warm, crimson-coloured bathwater and alerted to the fragility of their collective mortality. The international clique and their caustic bulldozer of modern progress now have a sputtering engine; it is all grinding to a halt and there lies the hope for our future.
Do not fret! Do not return like a battered housewife to those that wish to destroy us the moment things become inconvenient. Imagine pre-1989 Poles wanting to hold the Soviet Presidium to account, putting pressure on the government to be more efficient, the same government that is occupying their people – that is how ridiculous YIMBYs look to authentic British nationalists and patriots.
Our whole lens must be different if we are to meet the almost-insurmountable forces that tower above us, wishing for our end. As the Book of Job attests, the righteous suffer so as to test their faith in God, to make them more like Him, and to bring Him glory. So too must we be prepared to tolerate personal discomfort if we are to survive as a people, and it is absolutely a question of survival.
Existential threats require recalcitrant attitudes and policy positions and being unable to own a house or having to pay higher rent is a small price to pay to escape the present railroad we have been stuck travelling along since 1948. We all have a collective skin in the game. If the actual issue is not solved (the solution being our regime destroyed and immigration ended) then Britain, as it has existed for more than a millennia, is permanently erased off the map.
The inability to ‘live it up’ as a young voter in the supposed Gerontocracy is not something deserving of any hand-wringing, much less wall-to-wall tweets discussing housing and pensions every day. Some things, most things, matter more than housing being unaffordable and energy bills being costly.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. Every wrench in the system creates another ripple, another scenario where the masses have their eyes opened to what has happened to their country and what is intended to be done with it in the future.
What lies before us is a task seldom asked even of our ancestors, it is a task of securing our existence before the brink, of pulling everything out from the abyss before it is brought to a state of total oblivion. There are no mechanical little fixes to any of this, civilisation does not work like that and all of the Poundburys and HS2s in the world will not improve our lot in this current epoch. The finest of McTrad housing estates will never be more beautiful than God’s raw, untouched nature.
NIMBYs instinctively know they are in a death battle and understand what really matters in this world. YIMBYs, on the other hand, think this is all algebra that requires university-brained midwits to solve. Damn the YIMBYs. Go forth thy NIMBY warriors, heroes of the fields and hedgerows, paragons of Arthurian legend; lead Britain back to its pre-modern, Arcadian state!
To conclude, a simplistic allegory will be provided: we are farm animals, farm animals on a big gay tax farm. If more barns and cottages are built things will not improve for the animals. More generators will just allow the farmer to expand the slaughterhouse. The solution is not more generators or more buildings on the farm. The solution is to shoot the farmer.
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Technology Is Synonymous With Civilisation
I am declaring a fatwa on anti-tech and anti-civilisational attitudes. In truth, there is no real distinction between the two positions: technology is synonymous with civilisation.
What made the Romans an empire and the Gauls a disorganised mass of tribals, united only by their reactionary fear of the march of civilisation at their doorstep, was technology. Where the Romans had minted currency, aqueducts, and concrete so effective we marvel on how to recreate it, the Gauls fought amongst one another about land they never developed beyond basic tribal living. They stayed small, separated, and never innovated, even with a whole world of innovation at their doorstep to copy.
There is always a temptation to look towards smaller-scale living, see its virtues, and argue that we can recreate the smaller-scale living within the larger scale societies we inhabit. This is as naïve as believing that one could retain all the heartfelt personalisation of a hand-written letter, and have it delivered as fast as a text message. The scale is the advantage. The speed is the advantage. The efficiency of new modes of organisation is the advantage.
Smaller scale living in the era of technology necessarily must go the way of the hand-written letter in the era of text messaging: something reserved for special occasions, and made all the more meaningful for it.
However, no-one would take seriously someone who tries to argue that written correspondence is a valid alternative to digital communication. Equally, there is no reason to take seriously someone who considers smaller-scale settlements a viable alternative to big cities.
Inevitably, there will be those who mistake this as going along with the modern trend of GDP maximalism, but the situation in modern Britain could not be closer to the opposite. There is only one place generating wealth currently: the South-East. Everywhere else in the country is a net negative to Britain’s economic prosperity. Devolution, levelling up, and ‘empowering local communities’ has been akin to Rome handing power over to the tribals to decide how to run the Republic: it has empowered tribal thinking over civilisational thinking.
The consequence of this has not been to return to smaller-scale ways of life, but instead to rest on the laurels of Britain’s last civilisational thinkers: the Victorians.
Go and visit Hammersmith, and see the bridge built by Joseph Bazalgette. It has been boarded up for four years, and the local council spends its time bickering with the central government over whose responsibility it is to fix the bridge for cars to cross it. This is, of course, not a pressing issue in London’s affairs, as the Vercingetorix of the tribals, Sadiq Khan, is hard at work making sure cars can’t go anywhere in London, let alone across a bridge.
Bazalgette, in contrast to Khan, is one of the few people keeping London running today. Alongside Hammersmith Bridge, Bazalgette designed the sewage system of London. Much of the brickward is marked with his initials, and he produced thousands of papers going over each junction, and pipe.
Bazalgette reportedly doubled the pipes diameters remarking “we are only going to do this once, and there is always the possibility of the unforeseen”. This decision prevented the sewers from overflowing in 1960.
Bazalgette’s genius saved countless lives from cholera, disease, and the general third-world condition of living among open excrement. There is no hope today of a Bazalgette. His plans to change the very structure of the Thames would be Illegal and Unworkable to those with power, and the headlines proposing such a feat (that ancient civilisations achieved) would be met with one million image macros declaring it a “manmade horror beyond their comprehension.”
This fundamentally is the issue: growth, positive development, and a future worth living in is simply outside the scope of their narrow comprehension.
This train of thought, having gone unopposed for too long, has even found its way into the minds of people who typically have thorough, coherent, and well-thought-out views. In speaking to one friend, they referred to the current ruling classes of this country as “tech-obsessed”.
Where is the tech-obsession in this country? Is it found in the current government buying 3000 GPUs for AI, which is less than some hedge funds have to calculate their potential stocks? Or is it found in the opposition, who believe we don’t need people learning to code because “AI will do it”?
The whole political establishment is anti-tech, whether crushing independent forums and communities via the Online Harms Bill, to our supposed commitment to be a ‘world leader in AI regulation’ – effectively declaring ourselves to be the worlds schoolmarm, nagging away as the US, China, and the rest of the world get to play with the good toys.
Cummings relays multiple horror stories about the tech in No. 10. Listening to COVID figures down the phone, getting more figures on scraps of paper, using the calculator on his iPhone and writing them on a Whiteboard. Fretting over provincial procurement rules over a paltry 500k to get real-time data on a developing pandemic. He may well have been the only person in recent years serious about technology.
The Brexit campaign was won by bringing in scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, and leveraging their numeracy (listen to this to get an idea of what went on) with the latest technology to campaign to people in a way that had not been done before. Technology, science, and innovation gave us Brexit because it allowed people to be organised on a scale and in ways they never were before. It was only through a novel use of statistics, mathematical models, and Facebook advertising that the campaign reached so many people. The establishment lost on Brexit because they did not embrace new modes of thinking and new technologies. They settled for basic polling of 1-10 thousand people and rudimentary mathematics.
Meanwhile the Brexit campaign reached thousands upon thousands, and applied complex Bayesian statistics to get accurate insights into the electorate. It is those who innovate, evolve, and grow that shape the future. There is no going back to small-scale living. Scale is the advantage. Speed is the advantage. And once it exists, it devours the smaller modes of organisation around it, even smaller modes of organisation have the whole political establishment behind it.
When Cummings got what he wanted injected into the political establishment – a data science team in No. 10 – they were excised like a virus from the body the moment a new PM was installed. Tech has no friends in the political establishment, the speed, scale, and efficiency of the thing is anathema to a system which relies on slow-moving processes to keep a narrow group of incompetents in power for as long as possible. The fierce competition inherent to technology is the complete opposite of the ‘Rolls-Royce civil service’ which simply recycles bad staff around so they don’t bother too many people for too long.
By contrast, in tech, second best is close to last. When you run the most popular service, you get the data from running that service. This allows you to make a better service, outcompete others, which gets you more users, which gets you more data, and it all snowballs from there. Google holds 93.12% of the search engine market share. Amazon owns 48% of eCommerce sales. The iPhone is the most popular email client, at 47.13%. Twitch makes up 66% of all hours of video content watched. Google Chrome makes up 70% of web traffic. There next nearest competitor, Firefox (a measly 8.42%,) is only alive because Google gave them 0.5b to stick around. Each one of these companies is 2-40 times bigger than its next nearest competitor. Just as with civilisation, there is no half-arseing technology. It is build or die.
Nevertheless, there have been many attempts to half-ass technology and civilisation. When cities began to develop, and it became clear they were going to be the future powerhouses of modern economies, theorists attempted to create a ‘city of towns’ model.
Attempting to retain the virtues of small town and community living in a mass-scale settlement, they argued for a model of cities that could be made up of a collection of small towns. Inevitably, this failed.
The simple reason is that the utility of cities is scale. It is the access to the large labour pools that attracts businesses. If cities were to become collections of towns, there would be no functional difference in setting up a business in a city or a town, except perhaps the increased ground rent. The scale is the advantage.
This has been borne out mathematically. When things reach a certain scale, when they become networks of networks (the very thing you’re using, the internet, is one such example) they tend towards a winner-takes-all distribution.
Bowing out of the technological race to engage in some Luddite conquest of modernity, or to exact some grudge against the Enlightenment, is signalling to the world we have no interest in carving out our stake in the future. Any nation serious about competing in the modern world needs to understand the unique problems and advantages of scale, and address them.
Nowhere is this more strongly seen than in Amazon, arguably a company that deals with scale like no other. The sheer scale of co-ordination at a company like Amazon requires novel solutions which make Amazon competitive in a way other companies are not.
For example, Amazon currently owns the market on cloud services (one of the few places where a competitor is near the top, Amazon: 32%, Azure: 23%). Amazon provides data storage services in the cloud with its S3 service. Typically, data storage services have to handle peak times, when the majority of the users are online, or when a particularly onerous service dumps its data. However, Amazon services so many people – its peak demand is broadly flat. This allows Amazon to design its service around balancing a reasonably consistent load, and not handling peaks/troughs. The scale is the advantage.
Amazon warehouses do not have designated storage space, nor do they even have designated boxes for items. Everything is delivered and everything is distributed into boxes broadly at random, and tagged by machines so the machines know where to find it.
One would think this is a terrible way to organise a warehouse. You only know where things are when you go to look for them, how could this possibly be advantageous? The advantage is in the scale, size, and randomness of the whole affair. If things are stored on designated shelves, when those shelves are empty the space is wasted. If someone wants something from one designated shelf on one side of the warehouse, and something from another side of the factory, you waste time going from one side to the other. With randomness, you are more likely to have a desired item close by, as long as you know where that is, and with technology you do. Again, the scale is the advantage.
The chaos and incoherence of modern life, is not a bug but a feature. Just as the death of feudalism called humans to think beyond their glebe, Lord, and locality, the death of legacy media and old forms of communication call humans to think beyond the 9-5, elected representative, and favourite Marvel movie.
In 1999, one year after Amazon began selling music and videos, and two years after going public – Barron’s, a reputable financial magazine created by Dow Jones & Company posted the following cover:
Remember, Barron’s is published by Dow Jones, the same people who run stock indices. If anyone is open to new markets, it’s them. Even they were outmanoeuvred by new technologies because they failed to understand what technophobes always do: scale is the advantage. People will not want to buy from 5 different retailers because they want to buy everything all at once.
Whereas Barron’s could be forgiven for not understanding a new, emerging market such as eCommerce, there should be no sympathy for those who spend most of their lives online decrying growth. Especially as they occupy a place on the largest public square to ever occur in human existence.
Despite claiming they want a small-scale existence, their revealed preference is the same as ours: scale, growth, and the convenience it provides. When faced with a choice between civilisation in the form of technology, and leaving Twitter a lifestyle closer to that of the past, even technology’s biggest enemies choose civilisation.
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On Truth and Democracy
O Tempora, O Mores (L., “Oh the times, Oh the customs”), is an apothegm attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC), a Roman statesman, attorney, philosopher, and scholar. In his First Oration against Catiline (63 BC) that he delivered in the Roman Senate, Cicero deplored the sorry condition of the Roman Republic, and particularly the Roman citizen, Catiline, who had conspired to foment an insurrection, intended to overthrow the Roman government and Cicero himself, who was at that time serving as the Head-of-State.
The perspectives expressed by Cicero could be ascribed to the sorry state of the virulent political climate and the dysfunctional political parties in our society, which have become dystopian and farcical for the following reasons.
First, it and they have devolved into cults of personality (cult, L., cultus, “worship,” “homage,” “devoted attention to a person or thing”) populated by sycophants (Gk., sycophantes, L., sycophanta, “informer,” “slanderer,” “servile flatterer,” “show the fig” [a vulgar gesture]).
Second, fueled by the toxicity of an unbridled social media, the raison d’etre (Fr., “reason for being”) of many politicians has become self-aggrandizement and power, to the determinant of public service and the commonwealth.
Third, rather than deliberate the substance of issues, they rant, demonize their critics, and employ every fallacy of argumentation in their rhetoric, most frequently argumentum ad hominem (L., “argument against the person”).
Fourth, more willingly than seeking common ground and common cause, they resort to demagoguery, contentiousness, mendacity, litigiousness, and extremism.
Fifth, they are barren of any discretion, decorum, propriety, civility, and self-control.
And sixth, their hypocrisy is unbounded, as they deny any allegations against them and divest themselves of any responsibility or accountability, by assuming a posture of victimization, devoid of any semblance of shame, guilt, remorse, or contrition (“I have done nothing wrong;” “I am innocent;” “It’s politically motivated;” “It’s a witch hunt”).
Collectively, it and they could be described metaphorically as a “ship of fools.”
Das Narrenschiff
Sebastian Brandt (circa 1457-1521) was of Germanic heritage and earned a doctoral degree in canon and civil law from the University of Basel. He served as Imperial Counselor, Judge, and Chancellor under the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459 – 1519). His most famous monograph, written as a humanist and satirist, was entitled Das Narrenschiff (Gr., “ship of fools”) (1494). Allegorically, it railed against the hypocrisies, weaknesses, political intrigues, and vices that were manifest during his lifetime. The author wrote that the ship was laden with and steered by fools. It wandered the ocean aimlessly, but by happenstance sailed to Narragonia, where they encountered Grobian, the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
To paraphrase the motif of the allegory, the author described the shipmates and crew as deranged, demented, frivolous, and oblivious; who were floating with the prevailing winds; and who were unhinged, unanchored, and unmoored. The author argued that they were in desperate need of statesmanship and leadership, to restore the ordinance and rule of reason and the ordinance and rule of law, grounded in truth, virtue, excellence, sound judgment, ethicality, and morality. The allegory is remarkably descriptive and prescient of the contemporaneous political climate and the political parties in our society.
The Past is Prologue
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), an English playwright, poet, and actor extraordinaire, in his tragicomedy The Tempest (1610-1611) wrote:
“Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come,
In yours and my discharge.”
Dialogue between Antonio and Sebastian; Act 2, scene 1, lines 253-4One interpretation of that dialogue is that what had previously happened set the stage for what will follow, and will be the stuff of which our greatness or our fallenness will be made and measured. A cynical interpretation of that dialogue is that we will remain mired in the improprieties, imperfections, misinformation, and disinformation of the past. That notwithstanding, despite the dysfunction, farce, and fantasy that pervades the current political climate and the political parties in our society, both can be mitigated by a courageous, resolute, and willful intent. Consider, in that regard, the Four-Way Test.
The Four-Way Test
The Four-Way Test of the Things We Think. Say, or Do, is an ethical and moral code for personal and professional conduct and relationships. It was composed in 1932 by Mr. Herbert J. Taylor (1893-1978), a business executive and civic leader. It was adopted by Rotary International in 1943, as a standard and a code of conduct by which all communication and interpersonal behavior should be measured and judged.
When we hear or read an assertion in whatever venue, includingsocial media, it must always be analyzed rationally, logically, and skeptically, to discern its validity. The Four-Way Test is applicable in that regard:
- Is it the Truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build good will and better relationships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Common sense, prudence, and temperance dictate that if the assertion violates any of those tenets, that it is invalid; that it must be rejected; and that it must not be repeated, disseminated, or propagated.
Certainly, it may be advisable to research any assertion via other sources to confirm or refute its validity. Certainly, each of us enjoys freedom of speech/opinion, freedom of conscience, and liberty of choice. Nevertheless, those freedoms and choices imply a responsibility and an obligation to ensure that the assertions and our responses to them are truthful and valid. The intent of such an analysis is to preserve the integrity, honesty, veracity, wellness, health, and safety, of ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our commonwealth.
Audent cognoscere veritatem (L., dare to know the truth”).
It is incumbent upon each of us to apply due diligence upon public officials and proper vetting of their assertions. We must critically inquire of and critically analyze the credibility of those individuals and the validity of their assertions. Our allegiance to and support of them must be rational, justifiable, and meritorious (L., meritorious, “deserving of reward,” “worthy of praise or honor”), and not irrational, vacuous, and meretricious (L., meretricious, “pertaining to a harlot,”). Fellow citizens, ubi sumus itiones? (L., “where are we going?”). Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), attorney-at-law, statesman, and the Sixteenth President of the United States of America, at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, paraphrased a citation from Holy Scripture — a house [nation] divided against itself cannot stand. Liberty, freedom, and democracy require a united, virtuous, informed, and engaged citizenry. With resolution and diligence, such citizens could dramatically transform the political climate and the political parties in our society by acceptance and application of the Four-Way Test.
By way of summary, the following quotation is very apropos:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Preface, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
