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RIGHT IS MIGHT: WAR IS THE ULTIMATE TEST OF MENTALITIES

December 5, 2025

CLASH OF MENTALITIES, NOT CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Abstract: “Being right” is probably the most important human notion: on this, pretty much all mentalities agree. “Right, by opposition to wrong” has been the driver of human evolution (the moral space, “right” as moral right, is just a subset of truth in general, and a frail one at that). Yes, the one with the science that is less wrong, the one who is more right, will tend to win wars.

Mentalities—collective cognitive-cultural software—change faster, and more deeply under the pressure of war. War is the ultimate selection mechanism for superior mindsets (as the Kremlin will find out to its sorrow). War forces reality checks that refute delusions. War is the ultimate confrontation with reality, it makes mentalities falsifiable (this is a generalization of what makes scientific sense possible according to Karl Popper).

Humanity progresses by throwing out the old software, and embracing newer ones. That process works “ONE FUNERAL AT A TIME” as Max Planck, the discoverer of the Quantum (E = hf) put it. [0]

War is the best way to get a lot of funerals, and thus to change mentalities in a hurry.

Putin seems to have killed at least half a million Russian soldiers trying to conquer Ukraine from 2014 to 2025. That may not be enough to change Russian mentalities. It was only after around ten million Germans died in World War Two, and around 5% of humanity worldwide, that Germany was ready for a serious re-examination of its once victorious mentality (it’s not completed yet).

Let’s explore some of the most recent mentalities at play today, and how they relate to war.

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MAKE AVARICE GREAT AGAIN (MAGA); US Policy Repeatedly Prioritized US Advantage Over Civilizational Solidarity:.

The entire planet can see the debasing spectacle of the US leadership trying to make money out of the invasion of Ukraine, sending billionaires to chew the fat with the Kremlin tyrants, as the US Deep Plutocratic State did after World War One and during World War Two … This is an allusion to the new 2025 Trump policy of SELLING US weapons to Europeans who then pass the weapons to Ukraine… Instead of the prior policy of giving weapons to Ukraine; even then, 90% of the US spending returned to the US Defense Industrial Base, which then acted like a subsidy for US weapon manufacturers [1]) .

Except, this time, people are finally noticing this new version of MAGA. Turning war into a money machine is the mentality of the US Deep Plutocratic State, Major General Butler had already observed this, a century ago [2]. Much of US infrastructure, such as railroads and canals, had been built in the 19th century, on European credit (yes, even the Erie canal, financed by the state… using European capital).

The USA transitioned from an indebted nation to the world’s largest creditor after WWI (by the elegant maneuver of charging the French for every single bullet…This fact is NOT hyperbole although it may appear to be so to those with too noble an idea of US governance…)

Just as now, December 2025, thanks to Trump, all the US weapons sent to Ukraine are charged to European taxpayers: MAGA, Make Avarice Great Again!

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US NEFARIOUSNESS HIDING BELOW ACADEMIC LIES IN HOW THE US EMPIRE APPEARED:

It is often argued by US academia (which is mostly financed by US plutocracy, both directly and indirectly) that the grand old USA had no “nefarious” intent in breaking France and Britain economically and financially by using World War One as an instrument of financial ruin. It is of course impossible to believe this as Washington had been begged by Paris and London to stop evading the blockade of Germany, as early as 1914 (with the blockade on, Germany would have quickly lost the war). So, clearly the USA had evil intent, ignoring the fight for survival of France and Britain for years, knowing full well that, the longer World War One, the wealthier those invited to the White House would be, and the mightier the USA.

Want more proof of nefariousness? The US seized German property, and distributed it to US plutocrats. The U.S. seized a wide range of German-owned properties after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which empowered the Alien Property Custodian (A. Mitchell Palmer) to take control of assets deemed potentially supportive of the enemy, amassing roughly by war’s end the equivalent of the pre-war US federal budget!.

Starting in 1919, Wall Street was put, de facto, in charge of Germany. U.S. banks and investors earned interest and fees on large German and European loans (avarice again), while U.S. policy insisted that European Allies still repay in full their war debts to the United States, creating a circular and fragile system where German reparations were indirectly recycled to pay the Allies’ debts… (This explains why some French properties destroyed by the German army in 1914-1918 have still not been rebuilt)

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KREMLIN’S MENTALITY: STRAIGHT FROM THE CONQUERING MONGOLS:

Facing those gory clowns from the US Deep Plutocratic Stater, are the Kremlin lunatics who apparently feel that the entire planet is all invading Mongols, not to say Mongolians, invading 4/7/365, all of them Nazis.

See “The Genesis Of The Kremlin’s Base Mentality” for the 800 years old context, starting with Aspasia’s quote: “A polity is a thing which nurtures men, good men when it is noble, bad men when it is base.”

The Muscovite state was built on Mongol administrative, fiscal, military, and terror practices. Could it have been different? Possibly, as Novgorod and Pskov developed republics, even under Mongol overlordship. Yet, a succession of Kremlin tyrants were highly successful (Ivan III in 1480 CE, Ivan IV, etc.) And this mentality has been solidly ingrained in Russian culture, depicting those who opposed the Tsar as traitors, and Ukraine is now reevaluating some classical Russian literature (Pushkin, Gogol, etc.).

After 1478 CE (capture of prosperous republican Novgorod to Tsar Ivan III the Great) and 1480 CE (end of the Great Stand on the Ugra, when the “Tatar yoke” became history), Muscovy retained Mongol governance logics: patrimonial autocracy, servitor nobility (pomest’e), terror as policy, frontier warfare mentality.

A conquest mentality reproduces and reinforces conquest mentalities. In 1654 CE, Ukrainian Cossacks signed an alliance, the Treaty of Pereyaslav with Moscow (against Poland-Lithuania), which the Kremlin decided to interpret as a treaty of submission. This brought continual encroachment on the Kremlin’s part, including the abolition of the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775 (under husband killer Tsarina Catherine The Great)

The Treaty of Pereyaslavt illustrates a clash of mentalities: the Ukrainian Cossacks viewed it as a temporary military alliance, while the Kremlin (operating on the Mongol “submission” software) viewed it as eternal subjugation. This specific historical misunderstanding is still playing out in the 21st century.

Conveniently the Kremlin forgot that it used to be allied to Hitler and this is how the Nazis invaded Europe, East and West (or at least the parts which the Kremlin had not already invaded like the Baltic countries, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.) .

The Nazi tanks advancing through France, and the planes of the Blitz bombing Britain burned Kremlin oil. The Kremlin did not just give massive Soviet exports in oil, grain, manganese, rubber to the Nazis, but also rare elements necessary for modern alloys, food… bypassing the Allied (Franco-British-Commonwealth) blockade. Once the rare element pipeline from the Kremlin, in particular chromium, got cut off by the stupid Nazis themselves, they found out to their dismay that their jet engines melted… And the dreamed science fiction Wunderwaffen thereafter melted on the tarmac…

The Kremlin alliance with Nazism was crucial. Consider simply oil: in 1944-1945, Germany ran out of oil. Germany couldn’t train its pilots anymore (that would have used oil necessary for combat). Jet fighters were dragged in position on the runways, pulled by oxen. So, seriously, Nazi tanks would not have invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France without Russian oil. The Great Reich in its greatest expression was greatly a Kremlin masterpiece, because, without the alliance with Stalin, Germany would have been stuck into what it truly was: a weak power..

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EUROPE COLONIZED BY ITS EX-COLONIES:

Colonial inversion is a real historical phenomenon (see Rome’s fall to Germanic elites, Persians taking control of the Damas Caliphate in 750 CE, Abbasid dependency on peripheral Turkic Mamluks, China’s repeated conquests by many steppe groups, Portugal becoming a province of Brazil, etc…)

So on the left the US Deep Plutocratic State, on the right, the Kremlin mentality. Under foot, Europe. Seen on the greatest historical scale, this is the case of the master civilization being occupied by its ex-colonies (“Rus” initially designated an ethnicity of Sweden).

That the colonizer ended up being colonized shouldn’t surprise anybody: the present North American population exists because the preceding American population was mostly exterminated. Profiting from a shared genocide forges a community.

Similarly, if at some point Russia extended over 24 million square kilometers, nearly a quarter of the ice free, non barren land on Earth, that was thanks to many a genocide and scorched earth policies (what is happening in Ukraine at the Kremlin’s claws is much less horrendous than the conquest of the North Caucasus in the 19th century when even forests got exterminated).

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VIOLENCE CAN SET MENTALITIES, FOR BETTER OR WORSE, FOR CENTURIES:

When a civilization practices genocide for centuries and as a strategy, the civilization becomes genocidal. Reciprocally the rise of Europe can be traced to the Frankish strategy of dismantling Christian terror (inaugurated by emperor Constantine), practicing openness, and then outlawing slavery (launch of Francia, 481 CE-657 CE)

The road to hell or heavens can be taken after a couple of battles: the Frankish regime of refoundation of Rome the right way, was mostly the fruit of two battles: in the first one Clovis, representing legitimate Roman power, destroyed Syagrus’ rogue, illegal dynastic regime (486 CE). The other crucial battle was Clovis’ destruction of the Goths, ejecting them from Gallia (507 CE; the Goths had beaten the Romans for 250 years…).

The example of the Aztecs is revealing: they enjoyed war for war’s sake (“flower wars”), it fed the gods and also stomachs with proteins… But when the Conquistadores appeared, they couldn’t change mentalities on a dime, and instead ate some Conquistadores… Big mistake… Cortez’s army may have had 82,000 soldiers, 80,000 of them local enemies of the Aztecs. Also many cities produced weapons for the Conquistadores, especially bolts for crossbows.

One speaks of Aztec civilization. Yes, the Aztec had a civilization, but it was recent and fragile. As far as their neighbors were concerned, Aztecs were basically savages, with a savage mentality, who had conquered their predecessors who had made all the discoveries. After settling a few differences, Cortez and his Native Mayan wife-princess interpreter found easy common ground, and an alliance was born. The Aztecs were more a derivative civilization, not creators like the Toltecs and the Maya.

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OUTLAWING SLAVERY: NOT JUST A MORAL TRIUMPH BUT A TECHNOLOGICAL CATALYST. QUEEN BATHILDE’S STRATEGIC RESTRUCTURING OF FRANCO-ROMAN CIVILIZATION:

Bathilde was probably the Princess of Kent, thus very knowledgeable, self-assured, domineering and valuable. Captured by corsairs, she was sold to the Mayor of the palace (the French equivalent of what would be a Shogun in Japan 800 years later), She refused to marry him, escaped and then instead persuaded the Frankish Prince, only 14 years old, to marry her, ten years his senior. The king then died, and Bathilde was queen. Bathilde soon led the Imperium Francorum on her own, while having five children. In 657 CE her husband died, and the once enslaved queen exacted vengeance on slavery. Queen Bathilde outlawed child trafficking and the slave trade (within the Frankish empire). That abolition was not just a moral choice, it incentivized:

free peasants,
military service,
technological substitution for slave labor.

This is the most spectacular example of a CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRESSIVE SHATTERING OF INFERIOR MENTALITIES. That was a DRASTIC departure from the Greco-Roman civilizational model, which depended upon slavery (as Aristotle pointed out). Bathilde also funded 5 monasteries which were, at the time, the equivalent of universities.. Because the Franks encouraged, and then mandated, the teaching of secular knowledge by religious establishments. When, 400 years later, in the 12th century, the Christians evolved the lunatic idea of requiring celibacy for clerics, professors rebelled, and the Cathedral Schools, which were the wealthiest schools were transmogrified into universities…

The first Franks/Europeans who visited China, a few centuries later, were amazed to see hundreds of Chinese lifting a single large trunk, a task which, in Francia, would have used few people, but lots of mechanical leverage (thus knowledge of the science of mechanics) and strong, large domesticated animals (labor horses or oxen made bigger, stronger and more docile by careful breeding).

Queen Bathilde was extremely fierce. She was advised by some friendly bishops, and that came in handy, because she had to execute many hostile bishops (typically from very wealthy families with hundreds of slaves), who depended upon slavery to achieve the good life which Aristotle had lauded and explicitly related to slavery…Bathilde was made a saint two centuries after her death… So even the Vatican recognized that many bishops had to be eliminated…And that Aristotle had to be contradicted.

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ELEMENTS OF MENTALITY:

Colonies tend to be derivative in mentality and more simplistic, as their main energy consists in implementing their survivability… Colonies did not use genocides always: trade was another model; Greek colonies in Southern France were in excellent terms with the Native Celts).

Authors have pondered the clash of mentalities since before Caesar’s time. Actually Caesar used the psychological analysis of his enemy’s mentalities to gain advantage in battle: such is the core of his books. Much of the Roman army’s mentality was extremely refined, literate, disciplined, yet innovative and provided a crucial advantage in combat.

There are elements of mentalities, and they travel around like pieces of genetic code. When a combination of some of them starts to win, it becomes dominant, and gets to be called a “civilization”, “religion” or an “ideology”, or a way of life (Romanitas, Graecitas).

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WARS ARE MOST EFFICIENT IN CHANGING MENTALITIES:

Islam is the poster boy of how to change mentalities through conquest: Islam’s sword swept through the Middle East and adjoining areas in a few years of spectacular battles, and has been there ever since. However, Islam has been far from a monolith: many variants have evolved… Generally one battle at a time (the “Battle of the Camel”, lost by Aisha may have been the most important, turning Islam into something sexist not intended by the Prophet).

Traditional thinkers deep in their academic burrows will pontificate that mentalities instead change through reflection, meditation and the haughty wisdom of the elite which they aspire to join (when they don’t belong to it already). That’s not supported by the facts.

Some will whine that believing that more primeval forces contribute more to the advancement of thinking, sounds a bit like Hitlerism, advocating for the selection of the fittest and the strongest. Indeed, except, applied to mentalities: Fittest and strongest, mentalities.. .

It’s not deep German thinking from academic ivory towers which demonstrated that Nazism was weak and not mentally fit. Instead a world war which killed around 100 million people, 5% of humanity, exterminated Nazism. Here is a detailed case:

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The Case Of Max Planck: Enlightenment Through Mayhem:

Other German intellectuals besides Nietzsche saw Germany for what it had become.Einstein and his family fled to Italy, and Einstein studied in Switzerland to escape Germany’s “barracks mentality”. However, sponsored by Planck, Einstein ended up in Berlin at the pinnacle of German physics, served and helped by many top minds (like the mathematician Hilbert who helped Einstein with General Relativity). Interestingly, Max Planck was, in complete contrast with Einstein, a German nationalist (which explains their little plot pretending that Einstein discovered Relativity, the theory of Poincare’, Lorentz and others).

War can act in the most devious ways to enlighten even intellectuals. In the first days of the world war that Germany launched on August 1, 1914, the world media related the deliberate killing of Belgian civilians, and even small children, the burning of libraries, etc. Major General Ludendorff had given the orders. Max Planck, head of the Prussian and Imperial Academy, was among the 93 famous German nationalistic intellectuals who signed a letter, the “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three” denying that German soldiers invading neutral Belgium had committed atrocities in 1914. That was completely impossible: Planck and his fellow 92 super intellectuals firmly believed the Germans to be intrinsically good.

However as the war went on, Planck discovered progressively that this was not the case: neither the Belgians nor the French wanted to be conquered at all, and Great Britain agreed with them. One of Planck’s sons was made prisoner by the French, Planck could see Germany introducing chemical warfare, etc.

After Hitler became Chancellor, Planck went to talk to him about the disaster that the mistreatment of Jews brought to Germany. Over an hour, Planck explained to the “Guide” that his university had been destroyed by Nazi policies. To his dismay, Planck realized that Hitler was in his own world, and nobody could reach him there.

In 1944 Planck’s other son was arrested by the Nazis for acts of resistance and executed in 1945 (when the Nazis were certain to lose the war they felt the urgency to kill as many of their enemies as possible, and that included plenty of Germans)..

Planck died in 1947. Planck’s shift mirrors a national cognitive shift. Counting round one and two, it had taken more than 12 million German funerals for most of the remaining Germans to realize the errors of their ways. .

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EUROPEAN DEFEATISM IS THE DOMINANT MENTALITY IN EUROPE:

Europe got severely defeated in the Twentieth Century. The Germans, who had just been unified by Prussia, embraced the latter racist, anti-Jewish, militaristic and imperialistic ways, and that well before committing a genocide in Namibia or launching a world war to subdue Europe (“1914”). Read Nietzsche why he hated Germans and why I am a good European instead of a German.

After Bismarck’s victory in 1871, Nietzsche saw the new German Reich as a triumph of militarism, nationalism, anti-Judaism, and beer-hall philistinism. He famously wrote in 1888:

“The Germans are now boring; they used to be merely uncultivated.”

(Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever” §4).

Nietzsche, self-declared “good European”, believed the Reich turned Germans into obedient, sheep-like “good citizens” who worshipped power and success instead of greatness, and would bring the greatest wars and devastation to Europe in the 20th Century, and they did. Nietzsche thought German anti-Semitism was “the basest of all tastes.”

“The Germans – once they were called a people of thinkers: do they still think at all today? Germans now find thinking boring… I fear the Germans will soon have lost even their sense for music.” (Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack” §2)

“Good Germans, bad Germans – today there are only bad Germans.” (letter, late 1888)

Nietzsche was unfortunately right. It all came crashing down on August 2, 1914, when, without even bothering with a declaration of war, the Kaiserreich launched murderous war parties inside the French Republic. In the next four weeks, Germany would commit hundreds of war crimes in neutral Belgium, only to come to near annihilation when the French launched a successful, devastating counterattack east of Paris.(First Battle of the Marne).

France and Britain won World War One militarily. But economically, financially, diplomatically and in the realm of the crafty stabbing in the back, the US Deep Plutocratic State won. France and Britain, especially Britain, did not understand what had hit them. They should have resisted the USDPS: that was the only way to prevent round two, World War Two.

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CEASEFIRE IN 1918, VICTORY DELAYED TO 1945, OR HOW US BECAME DOMINANT:

The Trump administration has pushed for a hasty ceasefire in Ukraine, giving Putin what he wants the most at this point, disarming Ukraine enough to ensure a Kremlin victory. We have seen that movie before, in 1918, when the USA flew to the rescue of Franco-British victory against the German tyranny and the USA established the US peace order, Pax Americana: Europe pays, US triumphs.

THE RIGHT MENTALITY IN 1918-1919 OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN TO EXTIRPATE WHAT BECAME NAZISM:

Plotting and executing a World War, as Germany did in 1914, is the ULTIMATE WAR CRIME (this is not just my words, but exactly, word for word, what the Nuremberg Trial wrote in 1945 when judging the Nazis). Ideally war criminals such as Ludendorff (chief of the German army) should have been arrested, tried and executed (he had personally ordered horrendous war crimes against civilians in August 1914 in Belgium, a neutral country deliberately attacked).

This way, after being hanged as he deserved to be, Ludendorff could not have founded the Nazi Party… It should have been for representative democracies France and Britain to remake Germany in 1919, as it was remade after 1945. Only that way could WW2 have been avoided. WW2 happened because WW1 got to a ceasefire… Not to a victory.

The US attitude in 1918-1919 was transparent: US president Wilson’s insistence on a “peace without victory” said it all. It could only be explained by Wilson’s racism (and thus his pro-German attitude).

Wilson, the most racist US president, could only be sympathetic to German racism. So France and Britain should have kept on going with the war, slow and steady, trying to take as few losses as possible, because the German army was done for, and the Southern Europe offensive, led by the French, had cut off Germany from food: one could count on the Serbs making sure it would stay that way.

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If You Do Not Eradicate Destructive Mentalities, They Reconstitute Themselves:

Instead of finishing WW1 with a victory, the mentality in power at the time was peace at any cost and France and Britain ingratiating themselves to their creditors, the USA (which had as much empathy as an oven at Auschwitz; not a haphazard image: Auschwitz is what US policy brought). The ceasefire preserved German elites, and they had caused the war, it enabled the Dolchstosslegende, and incubated Nazism by preserving the very mindset which had brought WW1.The defeated German army retreated under its banners, as if it had won, and the survival of many hard core hyper nationalists soldiers and officers made the core of the Freikorps, and, within a couple of years, of the SA and the Nazi Party.

The stab-in-the-back legend explained the loss of the war, not the fact that Germany had been incredibly wrong to have started that enormous mayhem, for an incredibly long list of wrong reasons..

Retrospectively, France and Britain ought to have refused to become the financial slaves of the USA, and informed the decomposing German government and its melting armed forces that they were requesting surrender without conditions.

By then the USA had nearly two million soldiers in Europe (the Americans had brought the “Spanish” flu, and most of them had not approached the front). If they had refused to join France and Britain, the latter two would have an excellent ground to refuse US financial extortion. France in particular could argue that not one bullet made in France was ever paid by the US for the war of independence (most “US” bullets were French in the beginning of the WOI).

Marshal Foch, chief of all Allied forces, himself later said: “If they had not accepted the Armistice, three months later I would have been in Berlin.” The German army was retreating in panic up to 20 kilometers a day, was starved of food and ammunition, and the Kriegsmarine had rebelled…

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But the right mentality was not proposed, the moment passed, and immediately thereafter, the US became the stealth master of Europe, with US giants like Henry Ford financing the Nazi Party and its little army (to the point that in 1923, Hitler had a gigantic portrait of Henry Ford behind his desk in Munich in the sumptuous Nazi headquarters which distributed for free Ford’s book, “The International Jew”).

Wall Street intervened three times in the 1920s alone, to reconfigure German finances (the first intervention was putting an acolyte of JP Morgan as German Central Banker, with the practical effect of refusing to help reconstruct what the Germans had just destroyed in France and Belgium…)

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Nietzsche despised any mass mentality, not just the “German” Herd mentality. Nietzsche thought that any herd mentality would degrade thought—including modern egalitarianism. The reason for that is simple: if everybody thinks the same, there can only be that many ideas around, and no debate to foster more of them.

Thus mentalities that suppress individuality are brittle under war’s selective pressure…. Simply because they produce fewer ideas, especially prevent the evolution of superior ideas, and thus are more stupid as societies and as elites.

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EUROPE’S BEATEN DOG MENTALITY:

Mentalities shaped by trauma become inflexible; trauma from 1914–1945 added to effective defeat of the victorious righteous ones, France and Britain, produced an allergy to force, accentuated by the fact that the USA and its barking dogs insisted upon the monstrosity of European “colonialism” (those fierce canids were mostly the French existentialists and pseudo-leftists many of whom started their career by playing for Stalin or his Nazi friends, Sartre and De Beauvoir being the poster critters of this sorry show).

So WW1 and WW2 turned into Pyrrhic victories for the European democracies: the more they won, the more enslaved to an ever wealthier USA they became… And a powerful dictatorship in Russia was also helped by US plutocrats: Baku Oil Fields, offshore…In 1940, the USA refused to help the French Republic fighting the Nazis to death. In 1941, the US flew to the rescue of the Kremlin tyranny… after the Kremlin spent half the year being allied to Hitler: does that sound familiar? One must conclude that Washington viewed Moscow as an ally and Paris as a rival…

Thus Europe got severely defeated in the Twentieth Century by its ex-colony, the USA. After charging the French for every single bullet, the U.S. financed post-WWI reconstruction on its terms (Dawes Plan changing reparations; later the Young plan); WWII Lend-Lease led to Bretton Woods dominance… The US delegation did not hesitate to substitute a document for another, turning around the resistance of the famous UK economist, Lord Keynes (presiding) that way….

The US Plutocratic Deep State was able to exploit Europe’s divisions… And this is still going on: one can see it in weapons’ procurement in 2025: Most Europeans prefer to buy US rather than say, French, and the reasons rolled out to justify that are generally vile lies (how could they explain that they have been bought?… They would go to prison…).

Europe has developed a deep-seated fear of power, a sort of allergy, caused by the horrors of the 20th century. So Europe tries to reduce power, its own power, as much as possible, a bit like a penitent of the Middle Ages, in a cold room open to icy winds, wearing a hair shirt, and embracing a religion the ancestors fought for 13 centuries. Verily, real morality is the opposite: only a power mentality will bring solutions, including to the various pollution crises, in particular the CO2 exponentiation and its incoming Jurassic climate. Militarily, refusing European power has just fabricated Putin, made China aggressive and now brought what looks increasingly like the collapse of civilization in (much of) Africa.

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IF YOU WANT CIVILIZATION, FIGHT FOR IT:

As the millennia passed by, civilization has progressed. Not surprisingly, the most advanced mentalities evolved in the parts where there was the most traffic (Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East is at the junction of Africa and Eurasia). Eurasia had three poles of industrial and mental creation: China, India and Europe.

Europe contributed more than the rest, because the Celts had the best metallurgy, hence the best swords and ploughs. Christianism, the religion of the sheep, brought quasi immediate disaster, showing to the Frankish leaders what NOT to do.

In particular the divisiveness caused by Christian Fundamentalists contributed twice to the fall of North Africa (so-called “Donatists” and others had been viewed as “heretics”, so North Africa was in a state of religious war, and fell first to the Vandals and then to the Muslims)

The Franks thus reestablished a relaxed mentality in religious matters, and made military preparedness second to none (by fighting everything in sight, and themselves too). Result? Western Europe has been unconquered since the Fifth Century.

Thus it is war which created Europe. And Europe was extremely bellicose until the 20th century. The German tragedy 1853-1945 was a consequence of this bellicose mentality, but in a case of bellicose overstretched (it had happened before, in 843 CE during an horrendous civil war between the Franks; the result was a century of attempted invasions after that from Viking Magyar, etc…)

(Both France and Germany are drifting in 2025 towards bringing back the draft.)

The case of Asia is interesting: Buddhism once dominated India, for many generations. Meanwhile in China, Confucianism became all too often prominent. Buddhism has, in common with Christianism, a pacifism at all cost, turn the other cheek attitude. Confucianism, while allowing war against unjust rulers (as many Christian rulers did), is not very bellicose, either.

Arguably, the result was that India and China were repeatedly invaded. Not so much Korea, and not at all Japan. The latter two, like Europe, were ruled by ferocious military aristocracies whose effective task was the defense of the realm. In Vietnam, military leaders related to the Tran emperors formed private armies that repelled three Mongol invasions (while China succumbed to the first one).

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US OPPORTUNISM EXPLOITED EUROPEAN SLUMBER:

Figuring out the greed, deception and back stabbing which enabled the US Deep Plutocratic State to take advantage of Europe is not anti-American… It’s just figuring out how blind and unaware Europe could be… Although that may be mostly the fruit from the eagerness of European elites to join their mightier US peers.

The USA moved into a European slumber which has other consequences, for example with European pseudo-ecology (“Paris Accord”), which make Europe ever more powerless (literally) and the all too real deindustrialization which it helps foster.

But then of course, mentalities have long discovered that they compete with each other. The plutocratic main mentality is to foster itself, …because plutocracy is unnatural to human psychobiology… To do that, the fundamental trick is to depower the Plebs, thus deprive it of employment.

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SI BIS REPETITA PLACENT: ONE MUST REPEAT THE FRANKS’ STRATEGY:

Propped by Bathilde’s outlawing of slavery, Western Europe led by a military aristocracy, went for developing science, technology and machines. By 1000 CE the Franks’ “Renovated Roman Empire OF Franks And Romans” had surpassed Rome in some important parameters with a great future.

While Europe repelled all invaders for 15 centuries, giving itself the smarts and powers to do so, India and China got repeatedly invaded, and their contributions to civilization, although formidable (the zero and perfecting Greek numerals for India, gunpowder for China) were episodic, and overall added for much less than Europe, to the point they adopted (most of) European civilization with a vengeance.

Humanity is at many crossroads. We have to choose the better mentalities, and that means the mentalities best able to organize human societies in the most powerful way… And who is the most powerful is determined by war. Thus, this is the age of war.

In particular, Europe must get out of its slumber, stop making the life of its citizens hell through mazes of taxes and ridiculous things, and throw out the defeatist mentality to re-embrace the bellicosity which made it so superior for so long (and yes that means colonizing the Solar System)..

One should rather not advocate bellicosity for bellicosity’s sake…as Putin does, as Caesare Borgia, Cardinal at 18, son of a Pope) or Adolf Hitler (a notoriously deranged imbecile) did (while singing the praises of Islam, a war religion in his opinion). But one must be aware that, as the correct mentalities need to be selected and survive, activities akin to war must be embraced (many felt that way when they gave their vote for Trump). Humanity has progressed towards greater intelligence because the mentalities fostering mental superiority won.

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RIGHT MAKES MIGHT:

Reading the preceding essay, some will sneer that it is not captive of the “purely humanitarian” approach. But that mentality of identifying sheep and human, a species error, derives from an all-too restricted view of “humanism”, “humanitarian” and “humanity”. Yes, humans are carnivorous apes, not perpetually grazing sheep. Reality is where humanity comes from. Intelligence reads between the lines of reality as presented to us by our perception and culture. And the reality is that human intelligence rested, in several ways, on carnivority. Being a predator helped humans being smarter and meat provided more energy and thus time to plot the next strategy. It also means that the human views of “goodness” and happiness are stratified and multidimensional.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ultimately identifies the highest form of eudaimonia with a life of philosophical contemplation… Interestingly, Aristotle was extremely intimate and a mentor of the men who killed the Greek city-states civilization to replace it by dictatorships under the overall label of “Hellenistic Regimes”. So Aristotle was not a good man, and when Athens figured out that the great philosopher was the Macedonian tyranny mastermind, he had to escape arrest and flee for his life.

In other words, insisting that traditional “humanitarianism”, viewed as a form of sleep, an extreme moderation and contemplation, is all the good there is, may mean the exact opposite, accepting the peace and quiet provided by what nHahah Arendt called “the banality of evil”.

This essay is not a version of the “might makes right” philosophy. It is the exact opposite (the concepts are in common, but the logic is different). The Nazis believed that might make right… But they were not right, and that’s why they didn’t get the might. Although intellectual or moral superiority is ultimately irrelevant without the military power to enforce it or prevent its destruction, it is precisely the certainty of destruction which forces the superiority to become so superior that it is capable to steer superior beings to victory.

Only fools will make the category error of opposing a “Darwinian” selection of mentalities with “morality”… Because all “moralities” have been, themselves, derived that way!

In the world we presently have, most people take orders from higher ups or their institutions. However, for more than 5 million years of gathering humanity, it never could have engaged in that exact opposite of what made it evolve, otherwise we would never have graced the gloomy expanse of a brutal universe….In other words, the present organization of civilization, as any prior civilization, has been in violation of the fundamental metamorality of humanity: “Fais ce que voudras!” ([3]; Rabelais).

But then again, once one lives in cities, doing whatever one wants is not an option anymore. Tragic humanism was already evoked in Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (1933), in which struggle brings metamorphosis. Malraux treats conflict not as a regrettable accident but as the very medium through which consciousness becomes fully human.

Mentalities are how one lives, or, more exactly, how one survives.

At this point, in this age of means of global extermination, we want to find enough of a common mentality for most of us to survive (this is the concept hidden in the etymology of morality and ethos). It is crucial to realize that this will be obtained through conflict… So we shouldn’t shrink from confrontation: debate etymologically means: beating thoroughly.

Let’s debate!

Mentalities do not change through lectures, diplomacy, or moral suasion. Mentalities evolve into more refined and effective forms through the harshest possible feedback loops: humiliation, failure, catastrophe, and war. Europe’s, and the world’s, survival in the 21st century depends on relearning this lesson, that conflict can save, like nothing else can, as soon as possible.

***

Realism in its rawest form is how the universe works. Everybody sometimes dies, the most significant question we can ask is what for.

Delusion is fatal for what most people hold dearest: Whether it’s Aztec flower wars, Nazi race theory, or European pacifism. Hypocrisy can be very profitable: The U.S. world empire thrived by monetizing the conflicts of others, and recent European submission only accentuates this.

Reform is always violent: the French revolutionary wars lasted a quarter of a century and were a bloodbath, but they wrote what is now the world’s consensus on human rights. Mentalities rarely change without the “selection pressure” of war. [4]

Having challenged the all-too comfortable notion that “progress” happens through peaceful debate alone, I shall rest my case and let the bloody facts speak for themselves.

Patrice Ayme

***

[0] Planck’s original statement, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,”

***

[1] ~90% of U.S. aid (~$175B total since 2022, including $60B+ military) stays in the U.S., boosting defense jobs (38 states) and production (e.g., Lockheed Martin orders up). Economic “benefit”: GDP ripple from arms manufacturing, but net cost to U.S. taxpayers is real (~$18–50B in actual value transferred, per Economists for Ukraine). WWI/II parallels hold (e.g., Lend-Lease), but today it’s less “profiteering” than strategic Keynesianism—war as economic stimulus without U.S. boots on the ground.

***

[2] Clash of Mentalities Versus Clash Of Civilizations. Harvard professor Huntington’s core argument, in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, posits that post-Cold War conflicts would increasingly occur along cultural and civilizational lines rather than ideological or national ones. Huntington identified eight or nine major civilizations: Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Orthodox (Eastern Christian), Japanese, African, and possibly Buddhist. He argued that the West would clash most sharply against Islamic and Sinic civilizations.

Huntington confused civilizations and religions, etc. Instead what we see is a dividing line between dictatorships and democracies and a big divide on how information is manipulated, and how to implement progress, and what exactly progress consists of. For example, just within the 100 variants of Islam, some are maximally compatible with the greatest, fastest advancement of civilization while others are the exact opposite…

China has integrated much of “Socialism” originating somewhere between the Rhine and Paris with purely “capitalist” elements (long thought to be “Western”, but actually invented may be even earlier in China). So China incorporated elements of Western European mentality which thrived in 19th century Europe. That way China is much more European now, in the best possible way, than the thoroughly corrupted degenerates in Brussels.

China was never as isolated as it was long imagined to be: extensive contacts with the rest of Eurasia have thrived for the last 10,000 years. China was long and often under “Mandarin” control, an intellectual class of successful exam takers.But Korea next door (and often more than twice the area of all of Korea now) was ruled by a military aristocracy…which pretended to be a bit Buddhist, and a bit Taoist… Just like the one in Japan…

***

[3] “Fais ce que voudras”, parce que les gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnie honnête, ont par nature un instinct et un aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse à accomplir des faits vertueux et les éloigne du vice, aiguillon qu’ils nommaient honneur.”L’abbaye de Thélème, François Rabelais, Gargantua, 1534 CE…

***

[4] In the 17th century, the bloodbath was in England, in a succession of wars and revolutions which established Parliamentary democracy (4% of England population killed, 200,000; up to 20% of Irish population killed in Cromwell’s campaigns). The parallel movement in France, La Fronde, failed because Anne d’Autriche, the Regent, had nerves of steely privilege, and because it was not violent enough (Westminster established the “New Model Army” of 20,000 men to defeat the king).

If the French Queen had been arrested and decapitated, similarly to what happened in England, history would have been very different; instead Anne replied haughtily to the president of the Paris Parliament:in 1648:“Monsieur, nous ne sommes pas en république!”.

Elite mentality: Portrait by Rubens of the 24 year old Black Angel Of Bloody Death, Anne d’ Autriche, Ana Maria Mauricia de Austria;, Reine de France for 51 years. She gave birth to the future Louis XIV 13 years, and 5 still born infants, after the portrait above. She became absolute monarch of what was by far the most powerful country in Europe when she was 42. The Fronde, following the three civil wars in England, started five years later. Anne knew very well what a republic was. But the arrogance of plutocracy has no bounds. “Monsieur, nous ne sommes pas en république!“

Tags:Clash of mentalities, Debate, Defending Civilization, Europe, Franks, Germany, history, Mentalities, Morality, politics, Progress, Queen Bathilde, Russia, Selection of mentalities, slavery, USA, war
Posted in civilization., First World War, Mentality, Progress, Second World War, USA, War | 1 Comment »

HIGHER CIVILIZATION WAS RELAUNCHED IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES AS “EUROPE”, We Need Similar Solutions!

October 15, 2025

Abstract: The rise of “Europe” during the High Middle Ages was a successful “relaunch” of higher civilization achieved through a blend of factors, which current global society should emulate.

	HOW EUROPE RELAUNCHED CIVILIZATION AFTER The ROMAN FAILURE:
Thesis	The rise of North-Western Europe out of Roman ruins, was due to a triad of technological innovation, moral reform, and institutional re-engineering of religion by the Franks (while preserving the Roman legislative core and the principle of an armed peasantry fighting to be free, a crucial mentality that early Romans and Franks had in common).
Technological Boost	Advancements like superior metallurgy, heavy plow, new horse collars, windmills, water mills, harvesters, hydraulic hammers, high protein beans, and three-field rotation enabled an abundance of food and demographic expansion in rich Northern soils.
Moral/Social Reform	The Frankish nobility domesticated the Catholic Church, fostering an environment where intellectualism, pagan ways, and Jews thrived; notably, Queen Bathilde outlawed slavery in 657 CE, which drove the need for machines.
Intellectualism vs. Theocracy	This progress contrasted with the “stupidification” of the late Roman theocracy (begun by Theodosius) and the subsequent Islamic theocracies, which prioritized orthodoxy, conquest, and submission (the *dhimmi* system) over open inquiry.
Frankish Triumph	The Franks (first destroying the Huns, then the Goths after Theodoric’s paranoia) enforced a system where the Church was an instrument for secular education (e.g., Charlemagne’s *Admonitio Generalis* required schools to teach secularly).
The “Europe” Identity	*The terms “Europa” and “Europeans” emerged from the Frankish wars against Muslim invaders, with the “Empire of the Franks” consciously declaring itself the “Roman Empire” (Renovatio Imperii Romanorum***).
The Oriental Contrast	The Islamic world’s submissive mentality allowed it to be repeatedly overrun by Central Asian nomads (Seljuks, Mongols, Ottomans), unlike Europe, which remained unconquered. Same problem in China: repeated conquests broke the virtuous spiral of freedom of inquiry defending civilization and instead accentuated deference to superior invaders (Neo-Confucianism of the imperial examination system).
Modern Application	Today’s global civilization faces a similar crisis and needs a comparable relaunch through a triad of science, social justice, and redistribution of power from the “ownership elite” to “We The People”.

***

The rise to power of North-Western Europe was greatly due to better metallurgy and stronger and deeper ploughs to handle the rich soils of NW Europe… Abundance of food enabled a demographic expansion.

I will show (1) the material/technological foundations; (2) the institutional/educational reforms; (3) the reconfiguration of religion as a civic instrument — and then draw three lessons for 21st-century institutional relaunch.” That battle plan should help readers follow the complex narrative.

The horrendous Christian terror and the theocratic suppression of thought was enforced by Theodosius I decrees making “heresy” a Roman state capital crime (380-381 CE). ChatGPT, the AI, told me NOT to use such terms, as they will shock readers and “invite moralistic pushback“. ChatGPT should learn that reality is shocking especially to lemmings, and that we are here to educate lemmings about reality: the river is cold and wide, actually it’s a fjord with a strong current… Under the revered Roman emperor Constantine, a sadistic paranoiac brute and excellent general who invented and imposed Catholicism, an entire household could be executed if the book of some bishop (Arius) was found inside the house. That certainly qualifies as horrendous terror… Notice that Arius was Christian and this was a quarrel about the “Trinity”. Imagine what happened to non-Christians: executions of intellectual and libraries, genocide of Samaritans, etc.

This stupidification enabled the Roman military dictatorship to survive in one piece until the death of Theodosius I (395 CE). After that came the regency of the semi-Vandal Stilicho, while truly the “Founding Fathers of the Church” (bishops leading from Milan) and Constantinople pulled the strings: the anti-theocratic forces had been physically exterminated (Battle of Frigidus, September 394 CE).

Around 400 CE, the Roman government was a thoroughly corrupt, God crazed plutocracy anxious to make deals with savage tribes, not just the Goths, even the Huns.

This degeneracy was beaten back by the Franks: they destroyed the Huns (Catalaunian Plains, 451 CE), and then the Goths (507 CE, Vouille). For a while, the one-man Gothic superstate led by Theodoric, busy rebuilding Roman splendor, looked poised for great civilization revival. But it is likely that this was mostly due to the great thinker and head of the Senate, Boethius, from an ancient prestigious Roman family. The paranoiac Theodoric had philosopher Boethius condemned and horribly executed in 524 CE, and the Goths were thereafter doomed, as all could see that Theodoric, after all, was just a stupid savage.

Meanwhile up north, having defeated the Burgonds, the military power of the Franks enabled them to domesticate and reengineer the Catholic Church according to basic common sense and elementary decency: Asked about the execution of Christ, Clovis replied that it would not have happened if he and his Franks had been there. Sly religious tolerance became the norm in the next SIX centuries (except for the conquest of Saxony, finished by Charlemagne in a 32 year war; for that conquest, Christianism was used as a philosophical and civilizational battering ram, while the Saxons were dealt with more harshly than Israel dealt with Hamas; interestingly the Saxons became the fully dedicated head of the empire 150 years later… demonstrating that forced integration can work, if forceful enough…).

Charlemagne’s Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae (785 CE) made certain pagan practices, like the burning of bodies or killing someone believed to be a “witch” (striga), punishable by death. While these were capital offenses rooted in Christianizing the empire, they were directed against paganism/superstition and not internal Christian theological dissent (heresy) as later defined.

After the execution of the Spanish bishop Priscillian and a few followers for heresy in Roman Gaul in 385 CE—an act that was widely condemned by leading Church figures like Martin of Tours and Ambrose of Milan—executions for purely doctrinal heresy virtually ceased in Western Europe for over six centuries. This period covers the entire reign of the Merovingian and Carolingian Franks… It went on until 1022 CE, when a conflict between the king Robert II of the Franks in Paris and some feeudal lords in Orléans brought the execution by fire of a number of religious figures. (So the resumption of heresy as a capital crime was directly related to the rise of the Feudal System, a type of plutocracy, characterized by a ruling hyper militarized aristocracy.)

***

The mitigation of the Church, which was the government in the early 400s and became a subject under king and Consul Clovis fostered freedom of thought. Thus intellectualism, much of it through monasteries, Pagan ways and the Jews could thrive, as in old times before the rise of Roman theocracy. Converting to Judaism was legal, and frequent. An English philosopher, Alcuin, would become Charlemagne’s Prime Minister.

The general mood of progress enabled Queen Bathilde of the Merovingian Franks, an ex-slave from Kent, to outlaw slavery and child trafficking in 657 CE, dispatching on her merry and saintly way a dozen wealthy bishops owning thousands of slaves, thus earning the qualificative of a new Jezebel (the queen of Israel who replaced the God of Judaism, Yaweh/Dus/Allah by the cult Baalll)…Beside some sad bishops, no more slavery meant more science, tech, and machines to compensate (as Aristotle had pointed out, one would have to replace slaves by machines… Aristotle talked, but the Franks did it).

So new breeds of beasts of burden (enormous labor horses… equipped with new horse collars), windmills, water mills, mechanical advantage, mechanical harvesters, three fields rotation, new cultivars of beans (proteins), coal, and ever more metallurgy (much of it on weapons initially, but hydraulic hammers would enable to forge giant ironworks needed for Cathedrals)…. All of this brought what became European superiority.

European relative superiority was helped by the rise of Islam, a newer, stronger theocracy which fostered more brawns and less brains, imposing on the Orient a submissive mentality while the Franks developed full body armor (hence metallurgy, light and stronger, someday to be turned into watches, glasses and other delicate machinery). The polite way to put it is: Islamic political order increasingly prioritized conquest and orthodoxy over inquiry and introspection with an open mind. (That the rise of Islam isolated Europe, creating both crisis and opportunity is known as the thesis of the Belgian historian Pirenne.)

Islam treated non-Muslims, the Jews and Christians of the Orient as inferior creatures submitted to special taxes, clothes, and an arsenal of laws rewarding the wrong sort of attitude, or romance with the death penalty. Also insulting the “Prophets” brought death. This “dhimmi” system was applied initially to 99% of the population (the initial Arab Muslim army numbered less than 50,000!)

The Roman Orient, the world’s wealthiest region immediately prior to Islamic conquest, started to wind down economically. A city like Antioch had more than 400,000 inhabitants under Rome; its hippodrome seated 80,000; its walls with 360 towers, measured 12 kilometers. However, under Muslim occupation, its population, still in majority Judeo-Christian, had fallen down to 40,000, less than a tenth of what it used to be, when a Frankish army showed up below its walls (the Muslim ruler had expelled all Christian males from Antioch).

The early Abbasid period (8th–10th c.) was intellectually vibrant and crucial in preserving (some) Greek science (which had taken refuge in… Persia, from Roman theocratic terror… Before Persia got invaded by the Islamized Arabs… The end result being that the Muslims found themselves with a lot of Greco-Roman intellectual works…). The long-term theocratic stasis came later, but the early symptoms and diagnosis were clear.

It is striking indeed that, as long as Islam was the religion of a small aristocratic warrior class, ruling over non Islamic masses, civilization advanced in some ways… That was the “Golden Age of Islam”.. Muslim scholars like Al-Khwarizmi (mathematics/algebra; Uzbek.Turkmenistan, died 850 CE), Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (medicine/philosophy; Uzbek peripatetic philosopher struggling to reconcile Islam and Greek though, died 1037 CE), Al-Biruni (astronomy/geography; Uzbek, died 1050 CE), and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (optics; died 1040 CE, Persian from Basra) didn’t just preserve knowledge; they built upon it…. They were all Persians, though, and Persia is one of the oldest civilizations… A civilization several millennia old already when Islam was invented. One may suspect that all this thinking is related to the Islamic paintings later to thrive in the same place, with see-through tops for the pretty ladies… in the sense that the Qur’an was very far from being interpreted literally

Islamic terror promoted war and submission, with the result that the empire conquered by the Arabs was promptly conquered in turn, first by Islamized Persians, then Mongols, then the Turks. Indeed, most of the Oriental Roman empire not conquered by Islamized Arabs was soon conquered by the Seljukid Turks (who, being nomadic and war-like, were delighted to embrace Islam, in 985 CE, a religion where fighting in the name of Allah guaranteed Allah’s patronage in the Afterlife!)…

So, thanks to Islam’s submissive mentality, the Middle East got overrun several times by Central Asian nomads (Mongols, Seljuks, Ottomans) whose relationship with scholarship was at best tenuous. This did not happen in Europe, which stayed unconquered (except for Russia, and Putin is the result). Just as Islam, and also because of too much submission (Confucianism), China kept being invaded.. and it was a vicious circle, because the best way to survive invaders was to lay low and not make waves…. the exact opposite of the most towering genius mentality.

***

Meanwhile in Europe, the monastery culture was morphed legally as the new secular education system, even before the birth of Charlemagne: religious establishments were forced to teach children. That was pounded in by Charlemagne.

Charlemagne’s famous decree, the Admonitio Generalis of 789 CE was a royal command that:
1. Required every religious establishment of note, synagogue, monastery and cathedral, to establish a school.
2. Explicitly included teaching “boys”, reviving and standardizing the Roman educational system, complete with Trivium and Quadrivium…

Pope Gregory “The Great” heard that Desiderius, archbishop of Vienna, organized teaching on grammar and poetry to others, which in this context meant teaching the Pagan Latin Classics (like Virgil, Cicero, and Livy).. Gregory famously wrote (Register III, Letter 31 (or 3.37), from 595 CE)., “The same mouth cannot sing the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ.“

Desiderius, and his colleagues, bishops of Gaul, were wealthy aristocrats, may of them retired generals, who, after a three weeks course to become bishops, saw themselves as inheritors of the late Roman tradition. Such bishops were nominated by bishops approved by, and often part of, the Frankish government. under the leadership of Queen Brunehild, a well-known patron of Roman intellectuals, who had brought Gregory of Tours (bishop and historian), Fortunat (Italian intellectual and poet) to court… The Frankish bishops were fully supported by the Frankish government and the implicit menace by the Pope was silly, Instead Popes ended begging the Franks to intervene against the Lombards (the Franks took nearly two centuries to do this…)

***

This may look superficially like the sort of theocracy ruling Islam or the Late Roman Empire. But actually, it was the Frankish nobility which governed, and Catholicism was just an instrument… to teach secularism!

The words “Europa” and Europeans were introduced by the Franks when fighting the invading Muslims before Charlemagne’s birth. Let’s point out that the “Imperium Francorum” did not call itself “Frankish Empire” anymore, starting in 800 CE, but insisted it was the “Roman Empire” or “Empire of the Romans and the Franks”, or “RENOVATIO IMPERII ROMANORUM”. That made sense: the government spoke Latin, and wrote orders in Latin, the law was the (Justinian revised) Roman Law, people spoke (bastardized) Latin… For more than two centuries, the Frankish armies were officially Roman armies, under the authority of the original Roman state. Charles the Great also, beside Latin, spoke Frankish and understood Greek. Constantinople only formally recognized Charlemagne’s “ROMAN EMPEROR” title in 812… But the point is, it did. The situation was delicate: Constantinople did NOT have an emperor at the time, so Charlemagne was the sole Roman emperor… A stunning humiliation for Constantinople which had long been the formal superior of the Frankish empire…

Carlus Magnus had the “Roman Emperor” title… from Constantinople, not just the Pope in Rome… The “Carolingian” Empire was not “dissolved” thereafter (and was called the Roman Empire, once again). … Instead Western Francia broke up in 60 jurisdictions…all recognizing the king/emperor in Paris… The rest of the Renovated Roman empire underwent a similar process, although not as extreme…

***

The Oriental Part (Pars Orientalis) of the Roman Empire would collapse in the late Eleventh Century after the Emperor (“Basileus”) unwisely asked those nomads, the Seljukid Turks, to help him out against some rebels. The Turks obliged and, exploiting the divisions of the Roman army, took over most of Anatolia after the disastrous Roman defeat at Manzikert (1071 CE), next to Lake Van in present day easternmost Turkey. The defeat was caused in large part by the use of Turkic mercenaries (who switched sides)… and that in turn was caused by lack of democracy in the Oriental Roman empire (thus no large drafted army… Soon the Basileus drafted, instead of his own population… The Franks!)

Then two things happened: the Turks massacred many thousands of Frankish pilgrims to Jerusalem, and the Basileus asked the Pope and Franks to come to the rescue of the Oriental Roman empire, his very capital being on the verge of invasion, and the Turks having made Nikea, with ten kilometers of walls, just south, their capital.

The Verdun treaty of 843 CE introduced a partition among actors, but those partitions were not expected to last. The real break was that Western Francia took its own military matters in its own hands in the Tenth Century, because Paris felt it was poorly defended by the empire (which was not keen to battle the Vikings).

Thus as the Parisians and other western Franks instituted a gradual assertion of sovereign militarization, they became indifferent to the rest of the empire, and did not bother with the election of Otto I, the first Roman emperor of Saxon origin, and a mighty one who put an end to the Magyars Otto defeated those raiders who had gone as far as the Rhone, at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 CE.

The (successful) autonomous militarization of West Francia brought domestication of the Vikings and led ultimately to the election of Hughes Capet as ling… But “Emperor in his own kingdom”… So not subject to Roman Imperial authority. A quasi millennium of wars started after Western Francia (re)conquered England, in the name of Romanitas, and extended its dominion to much of Italy, all the way to Sicily (freed from Muslims). Western Francia seeked to recover better borders (the mountains and the River… Rhine).

***

Just as the Franks rebuilt civilization by combining technological innovation, moral reform, and partial re-domestication of religion, our present global civilization will need to relaunch itself through a similar triad: science, social justice, and institutional re-engineering of power.

The present world is in a similar situation with a similar possible optimal exit through more science, technology and the whole thing facilitated by outlawing many of the abuses of the ownership elite…

The ownership elite has all the power, and has an interest to get bad advice for society at large, so it can keep all the power to itself. This is nothing new and it is how most civilizations collapsed. However the present situation is much worse: there is just one civilization, civilization A. In the past there were often conflicts where civilization B destroyed civilization A. For example, the Mongols genocidally destroyed the Western Xia (1225-27 CE), quasi-genocidized the Khwarazmian Empire, and destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate, Kievan Rus… But the Mongols themselves were a civilization! What we are facing now is different, and the degree of destruction may make it impossible for civilization to raise again.

So the power of the elite has to be redistributed to We The People, and this absurd concentration of decision making has to be replaced by FEROCIOUS and EXHAUSTIVE DEBATE. This is today’s NECESSARY moral advance: we have been slaves mentally to the few who control all the media. Yes, in a way we are all MENTAL slaves of the few. And they have taken terrible decisions, not just because they did not know better, but also because they had interest to do so [1].

Civilizations rise and collapse all the time… But collapsing the present world civilization has to be avoided at all cost. Thus it’s important to study European civilization, which spawned the present one and has proven most resilient. Here is the main lesson for the present times: ETHICS IS AN ENGINE! But the Franks created a new ethical system, and that means that we need to do the same: after much critical analysis and debate, some ways and means, in particular concerning the presentation of knowledge, we consider legal and moral at this point have to be rendered illegal and amoral… And Constitutions have to be changed accordingly.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1]. Look for example at the immense subsidies in electric cars: if we had spent the same money on several nuclear technologies, including fission, we would have them now. But electric cars, as a method to mitigate the CO2 crisis, are pretty much useless (I drive a rechargeable hybrid, an excellent type of car which, in its stupidity the European Commission tried to outlaw… Just because they could, and wanted to show they could…)

Related and even worse: making, like the Netherlands, the economy fully dependent upon wind and sun: what happens when there is neither? Such a case can last months… Moreover the grid can’t handle it… The Dutch are already asked to use as little energy as possible later in the day…

Tags:Bible, Charlemagne, Christianity, Ethics, Europe, European Superiority, Franks, High Middle Ages, history, Jesus, plutocracy, Progress, Queen Bathilde, Religion, Renovatio Imperii Romanorumn, slavery, Tech progress, Theocracy, war
Posted in Christianism, Europe, European History, Frankish History, Inequality, Islam, Middle Ages, Military History, Plutocracy, Plutocratic Stupidification, Plutocratization, Political System, politics, religion, Theory of Plutocracy, Violence | 7 Comments »

HOW COME ALL THE REFORMERS OF ANTIQUITY WERE LEGALLY HARASSED Or Destroyed?

January 17, 2025

It’s a neurological question, it turns out….

Antiquity shows no serious reformers who were not legally prosecuted at some point [1]. The reason is extremely deep, it’s a struggle between the intrinsically democratic nature of humanity and its fascist instinct put on steroids by the increasing power of civilization itself.

The most famous case is Socrates. According to Socrates himself, he was a “gadfly” who pointed out malfunctioning characteristics of Athens. And it is true that, while in a powerful political position at some point, he refused to obey the vicious orders of tyrants he knew all too well. Socrates was judged by 500 citizens. He provoked them, and was condemned to death. Socrates pointed out that one could elect leaders who were unqualified to lead, but one would not go to a shoemaker who had no experience with shoes. “Democratic Institutions” which teach at the highest level and qualify on merit (guilds of workers, orders in law, medicine, architecture, et.)

Plato and Aristotle were nearly executed – Aristotle especially was a puppet master, a mastermind of the Macedonian leadership. A consequence; Demosthene, prominent philosopher and statesman, was suicided…In a case similar to Boethius (president of the Roman Senate), nearly 900 years later.

Archimedes, creator of the first piece of calculus, was executed by a Roman soldier (supposedly disobeying explicit orders not to). Epictetus, top stoicism philosopher was exiled. Helvidius Priscus the Younger, a Stoic and outspoken critic of imperial autocracy, was executed by Domitian. His father, Helvidius Priscus the Elder, had also been executed earlier by Emperor Vespasian, father of Domitian… and an apparent hater of technology… Not just philosophy… I am deliberately ignoring Seneca (suicided by Nero)… Because Seneca, de facto emperor of Rome for 5 years, was very far from clean to the point that it’s hard to see which positive contribution he brought, except for interesting assassinations…

There are of course very good reasons for entrenched interests to kill progressives, because, by definition the progressives have to grab back what the plutocrats stole…

The earliest case is Servius Tullius, an extreme reformer, the king of Rome who reigned 578–535 BCE, making Rome into a de facto republic [2]. His assassination ultimately brought the revolution against his assassin, itself the plutocratic descendant of the king Tullius had succeeded. (Similarly complicated coups happened in Babylonia-Persia… but those civilizations never progressed to the point that they became republics, as happened in Rome, and Athens… And this is why they are so much less important.

Indeed, the republican achievement is why the present world political system descends from Rome and Athens, not Syracuse, Sparta, Persia, Aksum or whatever regimes adorned South Asia or East Asia: none of these regimes constituted a republic. Besides the Greco-Romans the most legally minded, and a proclaimer of isonomia (=equality of the law) was the state of Qin, which unified China in 200 BCE. It is logical to see that the two most legally minded regimes, Rome and Qin, founded the two giant empires: Western civilization, and China.

The same phenomenon, a state ruled by law was already the core of Hammurabi’s Empire. Hammurabi (1792–1750 BCE), was a prominent king of the First Babylonian Dynasty. The legal Code of Hammurabi contained 282 laws covering a wide range of topics, including trade, property, marriage, crime, and labor. The famous phrase “an eye for an eye” comes from this code, reflecting its principle of proportional justice. It was inscribed on large stone steles and placed in various public views. This contribution to civilization had a marking effect. Those who grumble about the influence of the West, may be forgetting that neither Persia not China had republics before the Twentieth Century… 25 centuries after Athens and Rome. Whereas, Roman law is the core of today’s world legal system, and that happened because the Franks adopted the refurbished law from Justinian, mid Sixth Century, immediately after its creation, as part of their drive to conquer and create what they called “Europe”.

Some of the most famous progressives who were legally prosecuted: Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Pericles’ son, one the great victorious generals who was executed… for winning a crucial battle… the Gracchi brothers and their prestigious allies, were not only prosecuted, but assassinated, Marius (six times Consul, yet prosecuted and condemned to death), Caesar…

I am not talking here of the two Catos, or Cicero, who made lots of noise, full of hate, but no progressive reforms…Cicero was actually injurious to due process, hence to the Republic, a young Senator Julius Caesar pointed out during the Conspiracy of Cataline…So the famous Cicero, an Optimate was, like all Optimates, a regressive.

Indeed, this observation highlights a fascinating pattern in antiquity: many of the great reformers, leaders, and innovators who challenged the status quo or wielded extraordinary influence were eventually prosecuted, exiled, assassinated, or executed. This tendency reflects the volatile nature of ancient societies, where power struggles, shifting political alliances, and the threat of tyranny often led to the persecution of prominent figures.

But not only that. The only emperor who is known to have been technologically minded was condemned to death by the Senate. Nero, was, no doubt problematic… But his mentors, Seneca and his mother Agrippina, were the ones pulling the strings for most of his reign. Tellingly, Nero’s high tech revolving restaurant motorized by hydraulic power was destroyed deliberately after Nero killed himself. Around that time in Egypt a revolving steam motor capable of 1.500 revolutions per minute, was engineered. Hero, an older contemporary of Nero incvented the first coin operated holly water dispenser (temples found that very useful). It is easy to imagine Nero putting the invention of the steam engine to spectacular use… But it is a fact that none of Nero’s tyrannic successors exhibited any sort of desire for advancing tech (contrarily to Nero!)

Let’s briefly examine some of the individuals and movements that I mentioned… it is the failure of ENOUGH progress, no Nero for Hero, which caused the decline and fall of the Roman state, and thus antiquity…

1. Solon (c. 630–560 BCE)

Reforms: Instituted wide-ranging social and economic reforms in Athens, including the abolition of debt slavery and the reorganization of political power.
Prosecution: Although Solon was not formally prosecuted, his reforms were controversial and faced backlash from both elites and commoners. He voluntarily left Athens for ten years to avoid the political fallout from his reforms, recognizing the potential danger to himself.

2. Themistocles (c. 524–459 BCE)

Achievements: The Athenian general and politician who played a crucial role in arming Athens, and the Greek strategy to victory,,, in particular at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE) against Persia.
Prosecution: Accused of accepting bribes and collaborating with the Persians, Themistocles was ostracized, in part from a Spartan plot, and later faced formal charges of treason. He fled to Persia and lived in exile. Themistocles said he used deception to lure the Persians into a naval battle configuration at Salamis that favored Athens. He was rehabilitated after his death. He was “the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Greece” from the Persian threat, as Plutarch put it.

3. Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE)

Achievements: Athenian statesman who led Athens during its Golden Age, fostering democracy, culture, and the construction of the Parthenon.
Prosecution: Pericles himself faced political attacks and was briefly removed from power during the Peloponnesian War. His partner, and de facto spouse, Aspasia, a first rank philosopher, and his close ally, Phidias, were also prosecuted, likely as indirect attacks on him.

4. Pericles’ Son (Xanthippus)

Prosecution: Pericles’ son from his first marriage, Xanthippus, was a critic of his father and was reportedly involved in the political machinations against him. His political career ended when he was ostracized.

5. A Great General Executed for Winning a Battle

This likely refers to Socrates’ anecdote about the Athenians executing generals who failed to rescue survivors after the naval victory at the Battle of Arginusae (406 BCE):

Context: After winning a critical battle against the Spartans, the Athenian generals were accused of neglecting to recover the bodies of the dead due to a storm.
Execution: Six of the generals were tried en masse and executed the same day—a decision widely regarded as an example of mob justice and disregard for even Athenian due process… A frenzy explainable only as crowd pathology.

6. The Failed Restart of Roman Direct Democracy From Gracchi Brothers and Associates:

Rome became a Republic because its upper Hoplite middle class, in conjunction with enough of its aristocracy, the Patricians of the Senate, threw out Tarquinius Superbus, a vicious tyrant, but talented warrior who got Etruscan help. The Middle Class voted laws directly in the Centuriate Assembly, the Senate advised the Assembly. Very great wealth was taxed 100% above a threshold. Other anti-plutocratic laws outlawed luxury. This system worked well for a couple of centuries. However, in the Second Punic War, most of the best individuals in Rome were killed, and most of the greediest class became immensely wealthy, renting to those who took refuge in fortified cities.

The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, were scions of Rome’s most prestigious family. They saw the problem: the warrior class of Rome, small upper middle class farmers, had won an empire which the hyper wealthy exploited, while themselves “living worse than wild beasts which at least had dens to go to”.(paraphrase). The Gracchi became tribunes to reinstate the old anti-hyper wealth laws, to address economic inequality and the decline of small farmers in the Roman Republic.. The attempts to redistribute land and enact other populist measures met with intense opposition from the Roman Senate by then thoroughly corrupted by plutocrats. Roman globalization across the Mediterranean had created that hyper wealth of oligarchs, because, although the military imperium was global, the law was local, and Rome had typically co-opted local elites… So wealthy Romans could become immensely more wealthy and corrupt without interference with Roman sumptuary and anti-wealth laws. Coming back to Rome, those immense fortunes enabled the Senators to not just corrupt the opposition, but also to raise private armies to kill the partisans of the old, more equitable social order. This created a climate of civil war that lasted a full century, until Augustus gained total control with his military dictatorship resting on a professional army.

In 133 BCE, during his attempt to seek re-election as tribune—a controversial move—violence erupted. A group of senators, led by Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, organized a mob. Tiberius and many of his supporters were beaten to death with clubs and stones. This marked the earliest use of lethal political violence in Roman Republican history.

The younger Gaius pursued broader reforms than his brother, including:

Continued land redistribution.
Establishment of colonies for Roman citizens.
Price controls on grain, and free distribution of grain to the poor, the Lex Frumentaria., 123 BCE, which he passed as tribune. The law was expanded and refined by Saturninus (103 BCE) and later Caesar (44 BCE). The Lex Frumentaria launched the state in managing economic and social affairs, shifting from the earlier, more laissez-faire policies of the (absolute wealth limited) Republic. This was accentuated during the fascist plutocratic empire as the ruling masters learned to buy peace by tipping the People…In 98 CE, Spanish born general and then emperor Trajan would generalize this to a true welfare system, including scholarships for poor students.
Extending citizenship rights to Rome’s Italian allies.

Opposition: The Senate, alarmed by Gaius’ growing influence with We The People, countered his reforms by supporting a rival tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, who proposed alternative measures designed to undercut Gaius’s popularity.

Death: In 121 BCE, violence broke out after Gaius’s supporters clashed with the Senate-backed faction. The Senate declared a senatus consultum ultimum (an emergency decree granting consuls the power to protect the Republic by any means necessary). Gaius and many of his followers were hunted down and killed. Gaius reportedly committed suicide on the Aventine Hill to avoid capture, and five thousands of his allies were executed. Others were exiled.

Fulvius Flaccus – A former consul and strong supporter of Gaius’s reforms, especially his proposal to extend Roman citizenship to Italian allies. Flaccus was killed alongside Gaius during the violent repression in 121 BCE.

Italian Allies (Socii) – Gaius’s push for granting citizenship to Rome’s Italian allies, which constituted much of the power of Rome, won him the support of non-citizen communities, and fierce opposition among Roman wealthy elites.

The tribune Marcus Livius Drusus (91 BCE) proposed granting Roman citizenship to the Italian allies but faced staunch opposition from the Senate. His assassination triggered widespread unrest. Key Italian tribes, including the Marsi, Samnites, and others, formed a confederation to fight against Rome. They established their own capital at Corfinium (renamed Italica) and created a parallel government, complete with its own senate and consuls.

Rome won the war militarily, by agreeing progressively to all the demands of the Allies… So the Gracchi had posthumously won on one of their points: equality of citizenship. But next the war between Populares (Gracchi’s party) and Optimates (Senate based plutocrats) got relaunched:

7. Gaius Marius (157–86 BCE)

Achievements: Professional soldier from outside Rome, Marius rose through the ranks. He leveraged his military fame as a general in North Africa to election as Consul. And would be elected Consul seven times, a completely unprecedented feat. Marius reformed the Roman army in several ways, and gave access to it for the lower classes, by professionalizing it.
Marius defeated several major threats, including Jugurtha, the Cimbri and Teutones, immense Germanic hordes, hell bent in their desire of annihilating Rome. Marius led with military brilliance the last army Rome had, the one he had led in Africa, saving Rome.
Prosecution: Marius faced political persecution during his rivalry with Sulla. After losing a power struggle, Marius was exiled and condemned to death, but he escaped, and returned to Rome during the Marian-Sullan civil war.

8. Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE)

Achievements: Military and political genius who led the Populares. Caesar transformed the Roman Republic into an empire by annexing Gaul (Rome’s formidable old powerful and bellicose frenemy). In 59 BCE, when Caesar was Consul, he succeeded to enact the land redistribution of the Gracchi. Instead of staying prisoner of tradition, Caesar had gone directly to the National Assembly and its tribunes to vote on laws directly. That made clear that Rome was led by We The People… And not by the Senate.
Consul Caesar added one more insult in 59 BCE by releasing to the public the Acta Diurna, the activities of the Senate for the day, turning it into the world’s first daily newspaper…(Caesar also used the first bound books, fostering the brand new tech.)
The Optimates of the Senate never forgave him, and, after his victory in Gaul, accused him of genocide in Gaul. Instead of accepting certain doom, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one legion, and marched on the Senate..
Prosecution: Though not formally prosecuted, Caesar was assassinated by members of the Senate in 44 BCE, who accused him of undermining the Republic and aspiring to kingship (both facts invented).
However, in truth, many plutocrats in the Senate never forgave Caesar for having ignored the Senate, as Caesar had the right to do, when he was Consul in 59 BCE, and got the National Assembly (“Centuriate”) to pass the sort of land distribution law that the Gracchi and their allies tried to pass…

Why Were Reformers Prosecuted?

Threat to the Status Quo:
- Reformers often threatened entrenched elites or traditional power structures, making them targets for political and legal retribution.
Factionalism:
- Ancient societies were rife with factional politics. Reforms often benefited one group at the expense of another, leading to conflict.
Fear of Tyranny:
- In Greek and Roman societies, there was a constant fear that powerful individuals might usurp power and become tyrants, leading to preemptive actions against them.
Public Mistrust:
- Leaders were often scapegoated for societal problems, even when they achieved great successes.For example the Athenian general Miltidiades, who won at Marathon, and was gravely wounded, was prosecuted for “having deceived the Athenians” and heavily fined, as he lay dying…

This previous explanation is traditional, it underscores the precarious nature of leadership in antiquity, where even the most celebrated figures often met tragic ends due to the volatile combination of ambition, power, and political intrigue. I have a much deeper explanation of the harassment of the progressive reformers, from the core of human nature, and it extends to 2025.

Greco-Roman antiquity was conceptually dominated by two direct democracies: Rome and Athens (there were others at some point, like Argos, Thebes and Corinth -Argos was crucial as the pioneer which launched the middle class/hoplite revolution- they were not as successful… Gaul was immensely powerful, but dispersed into 60 nations, it was weakened by the Druid religion’s plutocratic nature, which fostered illiteracy, while Rome was just the opposite… The conquest by Caesar was so right, so progressive, that Gaul would never revolt against Roman rule (contrarily to the divagations of some imbecilitic comics)… Instead Gaul was soon more Roman than Rome, because Gaul did not fall as much to the Latifundia system which ruined the middle class in Italy… Gaul had plenty of medium size farms manned by families.

Direct democracy in Athens was carefully studied by Rome, which was keen not to make the same mistakes. And so created many barriers to impulsive decisions (Senate, Augurs, etc.)

Basically, Athenian direct democracy profited from a very egalitarian society, but was too impulsive and foolhardy. Rome, instead, was very careful in not creating IMPERIAL OVERSTRETCH (and the attached hubris).

However, when the Roman imperial stretching finally happened, as a de facto military NECESSITY, after the Second Punic war, the Imperial Stretch undermined the old egalitarian Roman system. Inside the body of the Roman Republic grew a malignant plutocratic mood and party (the “Best”, the “Optimates”). That plutocratic mood enabled the professionalized army to seize power under Augustus… and to rule thereafter, under the guise of a plutocracy. This explains why Rome never returned to the People Republic system, and why the great invasions succeeded, by which Rome declined and fell, becoming ever more dictatorial, irrational and god obsessed.

***

AFTERMATH: Caesar reformed everything, in all directions. After his assassination, progress in the right direction came to a near complete halt (except for some relaunch under the aggressive Trajan… who should have died later…).

The (ultra violent) Franks succeeded Rome. Contrarily to the Roman tyrants who lived from repression, the Franks lived from seduction, flauting the progress they brought. It was rather easy: many of their early reforms consisted in reversing the damage caused by the last few centuries of Roman tyranny. However, the Franks made considerable reforms in the Seventh and Eight Centuries, going were Rome did not: by then it was easier as the practice of progress was solidly expected.

Queen Bathilde outlawed slavery and child trafficking, implementing what no statesman from Antiquity had even dreamed. Something to be said about stateswoman… Four of her sons became kings and she died in her bed (not so the many bishops which she executed). Anonymous refomers imposed universal scolarity in the Eight Century, and the polyglot Charlemagne, with his philosopher-Prime Minster, Alcuin, went on with the reforms… Around the year 1000 CE, a famous mathematician became Pope.. Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II (reigned 999–1003 CE; natural death), was a renowned scholar, mathematician, and astronomer. He fostered sciences and the Hindu numeral ystem with its zero… So one can see that reformers were much better respected.

However, not so under Islam… Actually Muhammad died screaming he had been poisoned… And it’s rather likely as attempts on his life had been done before…

To return to the Roman Republic, the middle class would have to have been the army. But the small professional army and the related grandees in power would then have lost their privileges. So they never entertained the idea, and preferred to make deals with the barbarians (Goths and even Huns). That worked well, for them, until the invasions caused near complete economic and demographic collapse…. (Often in excess of 90%).

To end the catastrophic theocracy, the Franks grabbed power, but were defeated by the Goths of Theodosius !. In the end, the Franks could keep power only by fostering equality, freedom, tolerance and small farmers. The Franks happened to be small farmers and basically Pagans claiming to be Catholics..

So a weird mixed constitution arose, with two legal systems entangled, Roman law and Lex Salica, and a military elite more tuned to We the People, as the Lex Salica prevented wealth concentration… This went on until the Feudal system arose, a direct consequence of the militarization of society after the great invasion waves over 250 years launched by the Muslims (Toulouse, 721 CE).

The struggle between the Democratic Principle (live as humans evolved to live) and the Plutocratic Principle (using increasing power of civilization to leverage the Fascist Instinct) characterized Antiquity and its aftermath… The aftermath was the civilization the Franks created, calling it “Europe”, which found a way between fascism and democracy, power and freedom, technology (no more slaves!) and laziness. That struggle is far from finished. Why? First, because it has not been understood as the main motor of historical dialectics in the last 26 centuries.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] I define “reformers” as individuals who tried to advance republic or democracy in the sense of progress, according to what we define as progress now, two thousand years later. So I exclude the REGRESSIVES, the anti-progressives, the likes of Sulla, Augustus, Constantine, Theodosius, all of them favorable to more tyranny. In between characters such as Diocletian and Justinian are ignored. So is Marcus Aurelius… who was more into self-hypnotism about his own righteousness than best government (Marcus could have left the throne to at least four individuals, one of them his eldest daughter, already an Augusta, and the other three the top generals and very Republican minded… They would actually mostly die trying to uphold the Republic…Instead Marcus chose the rotten Commodus, whom he had rotten himself…

***

[2] Servius Tullius was assassinated by his son-in-law, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and his own daughter, Tullia Minor, played a role in the conspiracy. The act was a violent coup rather than a legal process. After killing Servius, Tarquinius Superbus declared himself king without seeking the Senate’s approval or holding an election, breaking the traditions of the monarchy.

In later Roman tradition, Servius Tullius was remembered for his significant reforms, including those to the census and social structure, and his murder was viewed as an act of betrayal and tyranny. The Roman people and historians vilified Tarquinius Superbus for his role in this act, contributing to his eventual expulsion and the establishment of the Roman Republic.

Patrice Ayme

Tags:ancient-rome, Athens, Famous reformers, history, Julius Caesar, Legal System, Ostracism, Progress, Republic, Roman Empire, Roman History, Rome
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Rome Collapsed Technologically Starting In 100 CE (Fall of Rome part XI)

March 22, 2024

In the Fourth Century, Rome became farce and tragedy:

Early in the 4th century, emperor Constantine, inventor of “Orthodox Catholicism” killed all the priests of Egypt… because the existence of the guardians of a religion which was more than 2,000 years old “hurt his feelings“. Christianism was an excellent excuse for the tyranny which ruled Rome to become murderously insane.

The military collapse of Rome can be dated exactly to the invasion of Italy in Spring 395 CE. That was no surprise: in an act of divinely inspired criminal idiocy the Occidental Roman army led by the Frank Arbogastes, had been destroyed in September 394 CE, by fanatical Catholic Theodosius I and his Goths led by their king Alaric. So of course there was no one left to protect the West. On January 17, 395 CE, Theodosius, age 48, dies, and his ally Alaric declares he has no more treaty with the Romans and declares war on Rome and Constantinople, invading Thrace and Greece, including the Peloponnese. Stilicho is a half Vandal who had been nominated protector of the children of Theodosius, and head of the Roman military in Occident. Stilicho counterattacks from Milan, bottles down Alaric…. so Pretorian Prefect Rufinus in Constantinople makes Alaric (!) generallissimo of what he just ravaged and orders Stilicho out. To keep on with the absurdity, Rufinus is assassinated by other Goths, Stilicho executed from jealousy, and Alaric seizes the city of Rome in 410 CE. With the details the situation becomes even more delirious. Emperor Arcadius in 395, formally succeeds is father, but marries Aelia Eudoxa who becomes one of the more powerful empresses, Augusta and dominates her husband. She is the daughter of Flavius Bauto, a Romanised Frank who served as magister militum in the Western Roman army during the 380s… Who had become Consul, but died, and was succeeded in his military office by Arbogastes… who was claimed by John of Antioch to be Bauto’s son… The late Roman empire was an incomparable mess which makes Game of Thrones look simplistic and much more realistic.

Meanwhile, in 406 CE, the Franks, put in charge of the northern frontier by their enemies the ruling bishops and founding fathers of Catholicism… after successfully raiding the Germans in Germania, got surprised by the suddenly frozen Rhine, and were unable to hold the barbarians who galloped across the Rhine, and flooded Gallia, Iberia and soon after… Africa. The invasion had become a tsunami of Germans and even Iranians (Alans).

***

Rome lost control of its destiny by 100 CE:

Indeed, the technical problems of Rome started at least three centuries earlier, when Rome’s metal usage collapsed. That drastic collapse has been known for a while, from lead pollution in Greenland ice. Romans used lead everywhere (in pipes limestone deposits would prevent contamination of the water supply). Now we have similar data, with a much stronger signal, from Mont Blanc ice. Moreover the signal has been extended to Antimony, a semi-metal which makes many metals, including lead and steel, much harder, and was also used by the Romans in glass manufacture (there were claims about unbreakable glass, etc.). The fact that Antimony production went up and down with the lead production shows that indeed Roman manufacture went up and down (other metals show a similar peaking behavior).

Romans used metals for tools, weapons, and construction (ships, roofs and inner structural elements). Metals are no anecdote. By the height of the Roman Empire, metals in use included: silver, zinc, iron, mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, gold, copper, tin. Subtle alloys were ubiquitous and had very different properties from the pure metals (which the Romans knew how to refine). After a disastrous defeat at Carrhae (53 BCE), the Romans progressively adopted an armored cavalry similar to what the Parthians had… But that meant at lot of metal. At Carrhae, Parthian arrows pierced both Roman shields and the arms holding them. The fabrication of massive quantities of steel required to heat an iron mixture for hours at the temperature of lava… One needed an intense approach to metal works which was starting in Gallic areas (like Noricum/Austria)… But which did not interest the Romans… At least Romans from the Mediterranean…

One of the reason of the ascent of the Franks while the Roman state was sputtering, was the introduction by the Franks of very heavy steel or cast iron ploughs which could work at the depth required the heavy rich soils of the northern European plain, and feed a population explosion… in northern Europe. Thus the Roman tech collapse was both absolute and relative (the north collapsed much less).

Any successful civilization ravages its environment: that’s what success means. To persist, the civilization must develop new technology to change from the old, unsustained and unsustainable environment to a better one in which the new tech will allow it to thrive.

Emperor Vespasian, who succeeded Nero, is on the record saying that new machines should not be deployed, lest they augment unemployment. Europe and others, in 2024, have been saying the same about AI. Vespasian was followed by his two sons. That Flavian dynasty lasted nearly thirty years, plenty of time to install an anti-tech mood.

To become an industrial, machine based civilization, Rome needed metal, lots of metal… Instead, Rome stayed mostly a slavery based state. However in Gaul, Gallia, the slave employing giant Latifundia were nearly unknown… And this is precisely where the tech driven society arose.

***

To make machines Rome needed metals:

The Gauls started to use metals crucially in agriculture with heavy ploughs and mechanical harvesters pushed by domesticated donkeys or oxes. The resulting demographic explosion explains why Gallia/Francia became the successor state of Rome in the West in the Sixth Century…. And one can see it in the lead and antimony production graph. Plutocratically owned immense latifundias with armies of slaves in Italy could not use such technology.

Moreover, Rome ran out of metal, precluding a switch to a more industrial state … to give some perspective, Europe and China got into massive pig iron production by the 12th century (and may have communicated about this through the Silk Roads). Rome metal usage peaked under Trajan and then quickly collapsed. One reason was the invasion of Rio Tinto under Marcus Aurelius. But the collapse started earlier and may have been caused by a lack of interest in metal usage. That theory is indicated by the loss of control of Rio Tinto. Had Rio Tinto been perceived as crucial, control would have been kept… the fact it was not is an indication of a deeper rot…

By the 7th Century, the dearth of metal was so great that it prevented the fabrication of weapons such as Grecian Fire flame throwers: the roofs of Rome had to be stripped of metal. The emperor came especially from Constantinople to insure that metal procurement from Rome. Then the Muslims surprised and sank the metal carrying fleet….

If the tech does not follow, civilization will collapse so the wisdom has to adapt to a collapsed, nihilistic state of mind: consider Plotin (died 300 CE)… Plotin’s philosophy is all about surrender to anything material, the wish to evanescence…

***

EMPIRE Started to COLLAPSE AROUND 100 CE! The graph is from Mont Blanc ice. The results are the same as from the many similar measurements in Greenland. TRA is for Trajan, peak of lead extraction under the Roman fascist empire. The collapse of metal production started at the time of the beginning of the Roman Civil War, when the Gracchi were opposed ferociously by the plutocrats.

Simplicius: Isn’t it true that according to Patrice’s own theory, Rome collapsed first in its democracy, under the madness of the Optimates fighting the Gracchi’s judicious reforms, and then politically, thus intellectually, bringing up then a succession of tyrants, starting with Augustus? What does tech have to do with it?

PA: Right. But remember that Rome beat Carthage by imitating and then overtaking its Punic rival once superior naval tech. Similarly in Gaul with the invention of the “corvus”, which enabled to disable Gallic ocean going ships. However, the situation became hard to reverse when the mental fascism got so great that technological innovation was not sufficient to keep the barbarians out of the gates… As had already happened under Marcus Aurelius.

So it’s a cascade in authoritative regimes: the mental fascism gets so great that innovation collapses, even in defense.

Simplicius: What about Putin’s Russia?

PA: In 2023, Putin’s Russia grew more economically (GDP) than any G7 nation (with more than 7% of defense GDP according to The Economist Intelligence Unit). So Putin successfully switched to a militarization of society developing new weapons that were highly successful, such as old steel heavy bombs with navigational and gliding kits. It may well be that Putin is aware of the problem described here.

Simplicius: I am confused by you. Doesn’t that contradict your theory that political fascism brings mental fascism which leads to a lack of innovation?

PA: In general, but not always. If the dictator is really smart, like Caesar or Peter the Great, Or Ivan the Terrible, or the various Kremlin tyrants who fought the Mongols by serving them, a dictator can be civilizationally progressive. Emperor Meiji is an example. Or Queen Bathilde and her outlawing of slavery. Peter the Great for example went to work in Dutch naval shipyards to find out how one made ocean going ships, because he wanted to make Russia into a sea power.

Rome could have survived by maintaining a tech superiority, it din’t. The fascist emperors feared tech change because it brings mental change, hence philosphical change, thus political change, as politics is practical philosophy…

Simplicius: The Franks you are obsessed with do not seem to have such a superiority.

PA: They did. They developed new tech. They kept weapon superiority. The francisque, the two blade throwing ax was a symbol of that. The heavy ploughs were much more important. The Franks were fundamentally peasants (by 600 CE everybody was a Frank). The Franks’ metal usage by 800 CE was equal to Rome’s peak under the Roman Republic. Sure enough, shortly after the metal production in Francia started to exponentiate, Queen Bathilde outlawed slavery, a major break from antiquity.

Simplicius: So you are saying that philosophical, political, economic and technological progress are all related?

PA: Yes, they form a chain: break a link and the chain breaks. One of the failure of Athenian democracy was the horrendous way it could treat adversaries, neutrals (Mellos), allies and even its own heroes (all great Athenian heroes had their names written on ostracizing shards of clay, and most were indeed ostracized or even executed, even the greatest statemen, even the victorious generals and admirals, such as Pericles’ son… for very dubious reasons…)

This Athenian philosophico-ethical failure facilitated military defeat.… And then the collapse of everything. By contrast, Rome was much more careful that way. Caesar was accused of atrocities in Gaul, of all places, and that forced him to cross the Rubicon with a legion… But that unfortunate episode is indicative that ethical treatment of adversaries was a notion in Rome (although it had been violated against Numantia, Carthage, etc.). By the way, Rome used ostracism lightly. Caesar was assassinated by a bunch of ungrateful idiotic plutocratic traitors… Caesar was not ostracized: the people of Rome was all for him. In contrast Athenian democracy ostricized most of its greatest architects… Even Solon left for a decade before he became undesirable (that was two generations before the formal invention of ostracism)…

It’s not just the Romans and Athenians. The Maya, and much of what happened to the Middle Earth, long the forefront of civilization until ecological devastation set in are equally enlightening: tech could have rescued the civilizations but was short of that… The Maya tried to rebound, after a seven centuries hiatus, and then recollapsed, just before the Spaniards showed up… Another drought and no tech to handle it…

Differently from others which, plainly, could not have developed the tech Rome could have made it, transforming itself into an industrial power, if there had been a VERY forceful technological policy in place.

Many of the technologies which were developed massively under the Franks were already available on a small scale, especially in Gaul. However the scale stayed small under Roma enslaving plutocracy. The massive usage of heavy ploughs shifted food production, hence military power, to the north. Neither Rome nor Constantinople were ready to facilitate that with unbounded enthusiasm. And then the outlawing of slavery forced the usage of animals and machines… A fascinating subject to study further is the relationship between the Franks and Constantinople… which lasted more than seven centuries… In the Tenth Century, a military alliance between Constantinople and the Franks extirpated the Muslim piracy state in southern France which was raiding all over Europe….

Simplicius: Lessons for today?

PA: The civilization we have with the present tech, especially of primary energy production, is completely unsustainable. Solar panels can help considerable… But ultimately nuclear technologies have to be developed to the point they can be fully safe and clean. Physics show that it can be done; the rest is technological detail. We need to get really smart. But when a plutocracy start to dominate, its greatest tool is general stupidification. No smarts, no future. An example of this is Europe, which is pushing for extremely stupid policies of “degrowth” and “deindustrialization”… The Roman case study shows that the exact opposite should be done.

Simplicius: And if not? If we are not smart?

PA: Seven billion violently killed. To start with. And, absent easy access to minerals, civilization may well never reappear… Fermi paradox solved…

Simplicius: So what’s the grand conclusion?

PA: That mentalities matter. Mentalities drive civilizations and thus history. With right mentality, the Romans would have pulled hard towards better, and that’s often simply, especially in those times, more powerful tech. Caesar understood this: he even wanted not just to drain the proverbial swamps and the attending malaria, and this he did… Caesar also wanted to divert the Tiber itself…. The port of Rome had to be displaced, so Romans could move mountains… But the Romans had to understand, we all have to understand that the most important mountains are mountains of thoughts….

Patrice Ayme

Tags:Civilization, Fall of Rome, Progress, Technology
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Cultivating Intellectual Humility Is Not Enough: To Understand More, One Must Demolish Certainty…

January 11, 2024

In Oneself Or Others… Neurological Demolition Is How Understanding Progresses…

It’s right to be wrong, as long as one is willing to correct and go deeper. What does going deeper mean? It means under-standing at least one axiom used previously, and previously unchallenged, or an emotion used previously, and previously unsuspected.

This is construction, but on the locale of previous constructions which have therefore to be demolished.

Neurological change requires energy. Literally.

And energy is the ultimate worth.

One trains for physical activity by practicing the activity. Practice enables one to get more active by reinforcing what ones uses. It is the same with mental activity, on an even greater scale (actually physical activity is part of mental, because it requires motor neurons, and also proprioception and equilibrioception, both senses among the eight senses which the ancient had not discovered…) Flexing neural networks instead of muscles. However, muscles already exist, whereas neural networks are not in general genetically given… Those corresponding to language, science, culture are humanly given. Thus genuine progress in understanding requires new neural networks… created ex-nihilo, or through massive reorganization.

“Debate” means, originally, beating completely. Debate is thrilling, but brutal, and thrilling precisely because it’s so brutal. Kindness or a smile can kill, but only rarely. It’s killing with ideas which is common.

Intellectuals, in an old tradition inherited from the most prestigious among them, deny that any of the preceding is true… Out of self-preservation, no doubt. To admit engaging in creative mental activity as a weapon of mass neurological destruction does not feel like having much of a future!… But that creative destruction is how civilization regenerates.

So, if we want higher knowledge, we require not just humility, but beating up completely… Others too, not just ourselves… And finding pleasure in it.

This goes of course completely against an agenda of behaving like snowflakes, and expecting, even ordering others, to respect every single snowflake.

In particular no ideology should be beyond any suspicion, or beyond debate. Blasphemy, in matters intellectual, and to achieve mental progress, is a moral imperative.

There is no higher mental activity than the advancement of understanding. But it rests on the destruction of yesterday’s minds. Far from being cuddly and cute, the advancement of understanding requires brutality and arrogance. (The root of arrogantia, ad-roguare, means to ask forcefully… the PIE root being “reg”, straight line…)

Of course one should be as gentle as possible.

However, the core of mental progress is to demolish old neurology and build new ones. Short of outright physically torturing people, that’s as aggressive as it gets.

This implies that, should it impose gentleness as a sine qua non condition, a civilization will not progress in understanding… and thus will collapse because, as the ecology it stands on evolves, any civilization has to progress in its understanding (remember the Mayan civilization which imploded from mismanaging an ecological crisis it had created).

Now of course, change is growing superexponentially. So, then, must understanding, and, thus the demolition of old neurologies. This is why it is unwise, and not even caring, to take care of the sensitivity of others as if that should be mission number one.

Quite the opposite: sensitivity being one of the reasons to shun the progress of understanding, sensitivity should be bulldozed over, not just by necessity, but also as training, and a matter of principle.

***

Make no mistake. The preceding is even more important emotionally than logically. I was just dreaming, I don’t remember the overall motive. It was outside in a vehicle, vivid blue sky. Not a cloud in the sky (It’s snowing outside where I am presently, we have not seen the sun for days…). In the distance in that dream a mountain, shaped like a truncated pyramid, with a glacier perched on top. We were going somewhere. Considering the environment resembled the American north-west. While the dream went on it was clearly defined by a powerful emotional aura: the motive, what moved the dream (which I have now forgotten, but which left a trace, no doubt, to be recovered in the appropriate circumstantial configuration… in another dream…). The point is that the now forgotten emotion drove the logic of the dream. So emotions are fully part of our understanding. Emotions are what stands the most under.

Full under-standing then requires emotional change.

So when Galileo pointed at the shadows of mountains on the Moon, experienced church authorities could feel that if the Moon was just another planet, if the planets then were just like Earth, if indeed moons orbit around Jupiter, four of them, no less, then what was viewed as sure and self-obvious for millennia, the Ptolemaic theory, could be completely wrong. The emotion of what was once certainty, now proven thoroughly wrong, would no doubt extend to give a lethal aura to all the impossible statements of the Catholic church, foundation to all what made the lives of these authorities pleasant or even possible.

That’s why the Catholic authorities kidnapped and then tortured Giordano Bruno for seven years before piercing him here and there and burning him alive.

The Catholic plutocrats knew all too well that the shattering of a pseudo-scientific theory would feed from and provide the same emotional aura to demolish their own pseudo-divine status.

***

Ah, to finish with a joke. Jokes are mental bulldozers… They torpedo old certainties with new perspectives.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and all the other genders that were made up, are from… the Moon.

In other words, they are lunatics (let’s be all too clear!)

Please don’t restrain the applause while I prepare a few jokes on those who believe in Muhammad flying on some sort of horse from Mecca to Jerusalem. To be shot down by the Israeli Iron Dome, or something…

Patrice Ayme

Muhammad, Buraq, the winged horse-like creature with “the beautiful face” and Judeo-Christian archangel Gabriel observe “shameless women” being punished in Hell for showing their hair (that’s why they hang from it). Persian 15th c. The emotion conveyed: women without shame should be half undressed, hanged by their hair, and roasted from below. So better be shameful, girls! You may not like it otherwise. And then Muslim “judges” prepared the appropriate logic, namely Sharia laws.

Similar paintings from the same period represent nude roasting women hung by their tongues for having answered their husbands inappropriately. So girls, learn to stay silent…

P/S:

Tags:Demolition, Neural Networks, Neurology, Progress, Understanding
Posted in Brain, Knowledge, Neurology, Progress, Truth | Leave a Comment »

Survival of civilization depends upon technological progress. Respect to those dying for it.

June 24, 2023

The passengers of the Titan, the submersible visiting the Titanic, died probably because the carbon fiber hull failed. Implosion of such a hull happens at 2400 kilometers an hour, roughly 700 meters per second. However, that doesn’t mean there were no warning signs. Apparently there were, and they would have been probably a significant noise. The rumor has it that the sub dumped its weights. The only way that would be known is if they had informed the surface that they had decided to go for an emergency escape to the surface… No doubt because of loud sounds caused by delamination violently separating the resin-carbon fiber mix into layers…..

Some bemoan the useless loss of life… But it’s not that useless. Let’s call them technology and progress martyrs.

Thus next time someone tries to build a carbon fiber submarine, they, and the authorities, will have to be smarter and more careful about it.

Carbon fiber, if used massively, could help with a sustainable society… Thus save lives, millions of lives, maybe even more.

The problems with carbon fiber though have been numerous: it tends to delaminate, and be sensitive to salt water or oxygen intrusions. Also it tends to fail catastrophically. The most recent planes are mostly built of carbon fiber, and the tech has required metallic meshes within to resist lightning and inform about cracks.

SpaceX planned to make giant tanks out of carbon fiber, to use in their giant rocket, but after building a gigantic carbon fiber, they renounced and went back to steel (NASA had the same problem in the past, abandoning their single stage to orbit craft when carbon fiber tanks failed). Also a Falcon 9 was lost when a carbon fiber tank delaminated and had an oxygen intrusion. It exploded instantaneously.

Some bemoan the cost to society. But the oceans need to be conquered: they make ⅔ of the planet. However, whereas the difference of pressure with the moon is one atmosphere, it’s nearly 400 atmospheres with the wreck of the Titanic. So 400 times harder, in a sense.

Worldwide, hundreds of private subs already operate. Rescue cost was nothing. Even the crew and management of the powerful French Ifremer Atalante, which rushed to the site across the Atlantic, besides the humane factor of maritime solidarity, probably considered this real life exercise to be instructive.

Patrice Ayme

French ship Atalante with its diving robot rushes to the rescue of Titan… It arrived to learn the sub had imploded…

Tags:Atalante, Martyrs, Progress, Tech, Titan
Posted in Progress, Technology | 2 Comments »

We, And Our Pandora Boxes, Are The Dark Side… That’s What Gods Do! Smile!

May 3, 2023

ARE CLIMATE CHANGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PANDORA BOXES? OF COURSE. SO WHAT?

Humanity’s most fundamental production has always been Pandora’s boxes: curiosity, disobedience, and unforeseen consequences guaranteed [1]. Pandora, the first woman, driven by curiosity and disobedience, is our business model, humanity’s true Joan of Arc.

Humanity has been shaping Earth for 5 million years. Bipedal locomotion freed our arms and hands, turning them into tools and weapons platforms. Dogs wish they had hands, but they don’t. Raccoons have hands, but their arms can’t swing. Bipedalism also made fast and far locomotion possible out of the ancestral forests chimpanzees are never free of. Exploiting the savannah brought combat to dath with formidable predators, such as giant baboons…ruthless business rivals who were eliminated a million years ago, or so.

Humanity has always opened pandora boxes, that’s what we do, as we progress, and how we progress: Nous sommes une force qui va (V. Hugo redux). God-like powers have come with the Dark Side of extermination and climate change: all the planet’s megafauna was exterminated, tamed, or driven to near extinction… And this process started a long time ago. Example: the Mayas probably collapsed the climate of Yucatan… by destroying the primary forest which kept it moist (and they had known this should be avoided, for a long time, and had a preliminary collpase into drought… However hybris, blossoming demography and war changed this in the Seventh Century…)

10,000 years ago, much of the megafauna’s mass was made of… lions. Lions can eat rabbits, but also elephants. Humans couldn’t milk lions, so they replaced them with methane belching and farting cattle… Cattle became the largest megafauna in mass, producing a lot of methane, which probably changed the climate, prevented another oscillation into another glacial advance (climate models seem to indicate).

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrosted, real deep (up to a mile!). This is going to melt, expelling gigatons of CO2 and CH4, presenting both disaster and opportunity….

CHAT AI, another pandora box, is an immense opportunity. All it does is connect pieces of disparate, often obscure, knowledge and relate them with logic. This is going to enable tremendous scientific advances, and a democratization and tremendous expansion of knowledge.

Applying CHAT AI to permafrost melt will show to the aghast multitudes that there is a danger of world hypoxia (lowering of oxygen level). The writings and the detailed logic (from yours truly) exist, they have been ignored, CHAT AI will find them.

We, and our pandora boxes, are the dark side… that’s what gods do! Smile! We may as well, when in doubt… L’univers sourit aux audacieux…

Patrice Ayme

***

Pandora’s Box containing all the evils and troubles of the world was part of Zeus’ devious schemes:

Zeus created Pandora, the first woman, as a punishment for Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. (So you see, humans were initially male…) Titan Prometheus was a champion of humans who taught them many important skills, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, mathematics, and writing.

Pandora was given the box as a gift but was told never to open it. However, her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box, releasing all the negative forces into the world.

Pandora’s Box represents the concept of unleashing chaos, destruction, and suffering by indulging in curiosity, and disobedience. The myth claims that once such negative forces are unleashed, they cannot be put back.

Metaphorically, Pandora’s Box refers to situations where someone does something seemingly innocuous but ends up causing a lot of damage or problems. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences, and we should be mindful of the potential repercussions before we act.

North American Arctodus Primus, the huge “short face bear”, could run at 40mph (65 kmh) on its long legs, and was mostly predatory. The idea has been suggested that it long blocked penetration by humans…probably until more advanced hunting techniques such as very fast, efficient poison arrows were invented… Ye spoisoned arrows were another pandora box, but they got rid of most of the dangerous megafaune…. Another North American denizen was Homotherium, a giant saber tooth cat.

In North America, Homotherium first appeared during the Irvingtonian stage, about 1.8 million years ago, and persisted until the end of the Pleistocene, around 10,000 years ago. They were among the largest predators of their time, with an estimated body mass of up to 400 kg (880 lbs). They likely hunted large herbivores such as bison, horses, and camels, and may have also scavenged on the remains of other predators’ kills.

Homotherium is known from numerous fossils found throughout North America. It was clearly eliminated, with most of its prey, which inculded American elephants, by Homo Sapiens…

Tags:Curiosity, Disobedience, Humanity, Pandora Boxes, Progress
Posted in Progress | Leave a Comment »

Progress From Prowess: Flying Boats Fear UFOs

December 11, 2020

Nowadays, some boats fly out of the ocean. And they fly faster than the first planes did, a bit more than a century ago. Foils located below the boats lift them out of the water, and that, in turn reduce friction considerably. Water is one thousand times denser than air. Kinetic energy is ½ mvv, so the energy imparted by an underwater foil, creating lift, will do so with a much smaller surface than a wing [1]. A drastic problem, though, is UFOs. Flying boats go really fast, they can cruise at twenty meters per second (seventy feet). When they encounter an Unidentified Floating Object, it doesn’t work too well. This problem should be fixed for a variety of reasons, from moral to technological, to economic, to, one should say, spiritual.

Technological progress is important: it is the essence of humanity and gave birth to it through a process of artificially natural self-selection. In particular present humanity, with 7.8 billion individuals, using the technologies it had to use to get to its present situation, has put spaceship Earth on an unsustainable course.

There are two ways out of this: either a spectacular regression, through war, famine and collapse, or a spectacular progress into new technologies which will make our integration with the biosphere sustainable again.

Around the World Record Holder: 40 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes. In 2017 [2]. It is presently equipped in 2020 with new foils which enables it to stand more outside of the ocean, just skim the water, and went already half way around the world in less than 20 days

The first around the world sailing record for circumnavigation of the world was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano and the remaining members of Ferdinand Magellan‘s crew who completed their journey in 1522…. After nearly three years of navigation (and only one ship left out of five; 35 circumnavigators survived out of an initial 270… Let it not be said that the global world we now enjoy was obtained cheaply. And as far as “colonialism” is concerned… Magellan died because it took part in a local war in the Philippines; the main aim of Magellan’s expedition was to prove one could circumnavigate, and thus obtain spices such as pepper and cloves from the Maluku Islands more cheaply…)

Sailing while flying from and out of water could be a technology of the future even for the most massive transport of goods and people. The technology uses computers, because electronics is faster than neurology. High flying kites dragging a boat could help too…

Trading goods is a global, essential activity that creates much of the world’s pollution as it is, and it is therefore essential to reduce said pollution, without killing trading (We trade your brawn against our brains!)

Some have whined that boats going at 25 meters per second through the ocean could collide with sea mammals, and fast sailing was, therefore, an unethical activity. Actually the problem of UFOs, unidentified Floating Objects is dramatic for flying sail boats. In the present Vendee Globe, several boats were damaged by impacts with UFOs, and had to hobble into port (not necessarily from damage to just the foils: the boats go so fast that they can be damaged anywhere). In early November a catamaran hit a UFO in the Atlantic, and capsized, killing the pilot (others below deck survived). Many of these UFOs are… containers dropped from giant cargo ships.

The impact on and with sea mammals could probably be reduced precisely because the foils make noise, from cavitation, the formation of bubbles, and should warn sea creatures. Maybe studies could be made to generate a clearer warning, or maybe collisions are mostly with man-made oceanic debris, and that, per se, should be an important object of study leading to diminution thereof. A French company is making devices which scan the sea ahead of the boats. Flying maxi trimarans have also to steer around icebergs (from satellite data), and growlers…(by looking out!)

Other ships collide with sea creatures, but nobody cares as the ships are too large to be affected by the collisions. Hence the high speed collisions of flying maxi-trimarans with UFOs attract attention to this problem, which has been so far ignored. Efforts to avoid collisions, necessary for the maxi flying trimarans, and other flying boats, could then lead to reducing collisions and pollutants in the high seas, both laudable objectives. Thus sailboat flying is morally correct.

So let’s celebrate the efforts to fly on boats around the world in less than 40 days! Such efforts are not just technological and even scientific prowess, but also economic and moral prowess!

Meanwhile Elon Musk’s SpaceX flew its astounding Spaceship, SN8, eight of the name. It landed hard, from low pressure in the “header tank”… and exploded, but the test was nevertheless wildly successful. It demonstrated all sorts of capabilities, including aerosurfaces precision control and the ability to flip the huge vehicle upright just before landing. All this is key to the possibility to use rocketry in all sorts of ways, including going around the world in less than an hour… And we will take off from Mars, after fueling there, because it is apparently possible to make oxygen and methane on the Red Planet, from large quantities of briny water, therein. Why to go there? Will whine the losers… Why to go anywhere?

Some will whine that all these technological prowess, from SpaceX or French flying sailboats, is fundamentally inhuman. Far from it. It is those who condemn technological prowess as both exploit and solution, who have understood nothing to human nature, and are fundamentally inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Why planes fly is not very clear(!) There are many effects to consider. Same thing for boats, thus flying boats have many types of foils/wings.

My own guess is that what is most important is the deflection of energy, in which direction the 1/2mvv can be sent. That explains why under water foils can be so small: if just the Bernoulli Principle applied, foils would have to be as large as 1/1,000 as wings. Besides, the Bernoulli Principle, long considered, I think erroneously, as the main reason why the wings of planes provide lift, does not, cannot apply to sailboat foils; because water is not compressible… (Or, at least, not significantly so!) ,

Actually the world record holder for going around the world, IDEC Sport, a pretty old boat from 2006, established its record in 2017. Then IDEC was fitted with new, more advanced foils, and immediately beat the record of Tea Route, Hong Kong to London. With its new foils, the main part of IDEC just skims on top of the water, it does not outright lift out of the water as more recent boats do. But that is obviously enough to reduce friction considerably. IDEC can cover more than a thousand miles in 24 hours.

Those Flying Boats Fight The CO2 Catastrophe

No improved technology, no progress… What those who don’t want to go back to the Moon forget…

***

[2] This boat changed names, not just technologies, a few times, as its (French) sponsors changed. It was known initially as Groupama 3, and had been made for a particular skipper, frank Cammas.

After two abortive attempts ending in 2008 and 2009, Groupama 3 finally took the Jules Verne Trophy in 2010 with a time of 48 days, 7 hours 44 minutes and 52 seconds. Ten years after her record-breaking Transatlantic dash, and now named Idec Sport, the boat again holds the Jules Verne Trophy after Francis Joyon and his crew took her non-stop around the world in 40 days 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

Tags:CO2, Economy, Flying Sailboats, Progress, Technology, Trade
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Colonization All Over. So Why So Bad?

March 23, 2017

It goes without saying that colonization was a terrible thing, whine those who want to look good to themselves and other whiners. Colonization was a crime, they insist. At least that’s what PC people howl on every roof, as part of their unwitting campaign of rage against civilization. Because civilization, which was not civilized, caused colonization, this evil of evils, they crowe. Right.

We the descendants of the colonized shall howl from every roof what victims we are.

We the descendants of the colonizers, shall howl on every roof what criminals we are.

We the bipolar paranoid schizophrenic stand as accused, and may as well be mowed down by Islam driving SUVs, trucks, jumbo jets, and non sense, all over us.

***

Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, who does not descend from colonialists and colonizers?

All the Americas were colonized.

All of Oceania was colonized (twice at least).

Was the colonization of Australia by aborigines (who are part Denisovans), 50,000 years ago, a bad thing? It killed a lot of marsupials!

Sénégal: Organized, unified, but never really colonized! A very rare case!

Japan was colonized (twice at least). Japanese civilization started for real, when the archipelago was colonized. By the Chinese.

Some will say China was never colonized. Well, there used to be 100 nations with 100 languages in China, as recently as three centuries ago (the emperor himself recognized then, in a very sophisticated intellectual exchange with the Jesuits; and he expressed both his will to respect that, and his incapacity to do otherwise). However, nowadays, Mandarin (just one language) is taking over, all over. And all Chinese are forced to assimilate with the Borg in Beijing. That’s colonization therein. Is it bad? My daughter is learning Chinese, or, more exactly, Mandarin. She will be able to talk all over.

Madagascar was colonized (thrice; from Indonesia, Africa, France). Even Greenland was conquered by the Inuits, who pushed away the Vikings… (On their way, the Inuits had annihilated previous denizens in the northern Canada archipelago…)

Most of Africa was colonized multiple times. By descendants of Neanderthals (!), Bantus, Phoenicians, Greco-Romans, Arabs, etc.

All of Russia is a huge colony, all the way to Kamchatka. “Russ” initially means Eastern Swedes. The Eastern Swedes, Viking style, invaded the huge placid rivers of Eastern Europe, all the way down to the Black Sea (where they could trade with the Romans). In the Tenth Century, Vladimir of Kiev conquered Crimea from the local Khan (Mongols who had themselves conquered centuries earlier the Greeks, who had conquered a millennium prior, etc.)

Even China was momentarily (a few centuries here and there) conquered by Buddhists, Tibetans, Mongols, Mandchous…

Arabia was greatly colonized by Persia, much later Turkey (Ottomans) for centuries.

Europe?

Europe, shortly before Rome rose, was invaded by the Celto-Germans, who covered up the entire continent, all the way to Anatolia. When Caesar invaded, Gaul (“Gallia”) was made of 60 nation-states.

Much of India was invaded, colonized by white men coming from the north, central Asia, four thousand years ago, or more. That’s why India and Europe enjoy the same Indo-European language family.

Egypt was invaded by the Arabs, more exactly by Caliph Omar’s army. Never recovered (whereas Egypt had recovered from colonization by Black Pharaohs, Nubians, Sea People, Libyans, Greeks and Romans). Egyptians themselves had to decolonize the Sahara desert and concentrate on the Nile Valley and adjoining oases.

***

A real question is: which places in the world were not colonized?

Paradoxically, much of West Africa is one of the most pristine, uncolonized places.

West Africa is generally viewed as having been a French, British, Portuguese colony, and that’s superficially true.

West Africa also exported a lot of slaves (to the Americas).

However, West Africa was one of the much untouched places. (Contrarily to whiny repute!)

Not like Europe: all old European languages were wiped out by the Indo-European, Celto-German invasion (or close to it: Basque is a tiny remnant of what once was.)

And don’t brandish southern Europeans as old stock: the Middle Easterners came from the Fertile Crescent, with their futuristic crops (wheat, etc.) and their genes, 9,000 years ago. Another invasion to run over the many Sapiens invasions all over Europe, in the last 100,000 years. Neanderthals made it to North Africa, big time, and their genes to South Africa, but apparently not to West Africa.

***

A real question: when is colonization good, when is it bad?

From the point of view of the invaded, one will guess that colonization is often bad. Yes, but not always. The invasion of Gallia by Caesar would end up creating the strongest part of the Roman empire, Francia, and the Birth of the West. Viewed that way, it was a good thing. And it sure is a good thing if there was no other way to get that good thing. Was it? We don’t know. Was Caesar innocent of the invasion? We don’t really know.

***

“Colonization” in West Africa was mostly a joke, or more exactly, civilizing: ten French officers ordered around 5,000 Senegalese soldiers who, truly, conquered Sénégal. So, in truth, Senegal conquered Senegal under French management. In truth, there were basically no colons in Senegal: the land stayed property of the Senegalese (compare with the USA, where Indian lands were nearly completely distributed by the colonial government in Washington to the European colons!)

A big argument for the “colonization” of Africa was the eradication of slavery, which was endemic, pandemic, chronic, extensive and ubiquitous in Africa (the globalization of African slavery to the Americas, escaping the long arm of European law, has not been properly characterized…)

Here are the national languages of Senegal:

Some of these languages are tonal, some are not (making them a different as latin and Chinese!) It goes without saying that packing such different nations in so tight a space (less than 200,000 square kilometers), result in mayhem, just to keep the population stable. So Senegal has, rightly so, just one national language.

***

Colonization is good when it brings lots of progress, and less mayhem:

This should go without saying. However, the usual interpretation of (hard) multiculturalism is that all cultures are equally worth of respect. This thesis implies that progress does not exist. So we may as well regress, and have plutocracy.

So we see who these proponents of hard multiculturalism were trying to seduce: the powers that be.

By refusing to see when, how colonization has been, and could be, good, they refuse to bring reason to judge destiny. A silly attitude, considering how fast destiny moves these days.

But of course fundamentally hypocritical.

At least, nobody can accuse me to be a hypocrite. I don’t under (hypo) criticize. It’s much more fun, to over-criticize… And criticize all over… Colonization: assess, but don’t deny, its crimes, just as its merits. And remember the fine lines between colonization and immigration.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags:Colonization, Multiculturalism, Progress, Senegal
Posted in Colonization, Modernity, Will To Extermination, Wisdom | 9 Comments »

How Did EUROPE Become So SUPERIOR?

February 19, 2017

MGRA: Make Great Reason Again!

Europe is an emerging phenomenon, now towering over the entire planet, from her possessions, colonies (Africa, Americas, Oceania, much of Eurasia), culture and mental grip (world culture, United Nations, etc.) Hey, don’t flaunt European colonization of the entire planet too loud, that’s not PC! Instead watch with glee the Islamists being crushed in Iraq and Syria by European proxies…

Europe was initially named from a Phoenician princess. (That, per se, is revealing: Europe came from the Middle Earth!) Europe, as a cultural phenomenon articulated by progress, is thousands of years old.

The Romans had long been technology dependent upon the Celts for metallic military equipment (a domination which was to last 3,000 years). When Caesar invaded “Long Haired Gaul”, and reached the Atlantic, he was stunned by the thousands of tall, ocean-going warships that the combined Celtic Navy had mustered (Roman ingenuity devised a specific device, the Corvus to turn the superiority of Celtic tall ships into a way to defeat them).

Circus Maximus, 20 centuries ago. Still the World’s Largest Stadium. On the left side, the Imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (significantly larger than all the palaces of all present Western leaders combined!)

Circus Maximus, 20 centuries ago. Still the World’s Largest Stadium, More than 600 meters long. On the left side, the Imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (significantly larger than all the palaces of all present Western leaders combined!)

Contrarily to the usual myth, European superiority did not start with English superiority in the 1700s (that was mostly the fruit of English and Dutch conspiracies which turned out well, while the female Prime Minister of France overturned all the alliances, insuring French defeat in a seven-year world war!)

But Europe did not emerge by accident, but from culturally inherited moods, thus epigenetics, more than 100,000 years old. Yes, the climate, and the geography played a role, lighted the fire, and keep re-lighting it, from Enlightenment to Enlightenment. The fire of progress.

Unsurprisingly, regressive potentates put into question “Occidental values”, suggesting they are yesterday’s intrinsic evil. Sergey Lavrov, the powerful, long-standing Russian foreign minister declared in February 2017, that the time had come for a “post-Occidental world order”. According to Lavrov, one should wipe up all international institutions and replace them, Trump-like, by negotiations, state to state (as Russia is by far the world’s largest state, with the largest nuclear force, one can see how it would profit from it! The same holds for the USA.) This cannot end well. Russia is fundamentally a European colony (as the USA is). It should not forget how Europe got so rich. It happened through the universalization of advanced values.

Ah yes, because Europe is rich: In territory, Europe, through its (“ex”) colonies, owns much of the world: the Americas, Oceania, and all of North Eurasia are European colonies. Civilizationally, legislatively, Europe owns the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, and the irritant of a few (partly) Muslim Fundamentalist states.

Let me rephrase this, lest it gets misunderstood: the United Nations Charter is basically an improved rewriting of the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. In turn, the French Revolution basic constitution was a writing of practiced established by the Franks, a full millennium earlier (including the outlawing of slavery, mandatory education, and the subservience of religion to state).

How did this happen? How did Europe achieve supremacy?

***

Did the “Protestant Ethics” Make Europe Rich?

This is an opinion Anglo-Saxon supremacists love to claim. It’s mostly BS. First, the “Protestants” introduced only a minority of the inventions which made Europe strong and innovative.

Second, the presence of the easiest to exploit, richest coal beds in the world surfacing in England and North West Germany have nothing to do with “Protestant ethics”, but everything to do with steam-powered industrialization.

Third, one would have to define “Protestant”. Hint: it’s a French word. The “Protestant” movement started shortly after the fascist Christian church tried an encore with the First Crusade (after having nearly collapsed civilization in the Fourth Century already). Thus, the Protestant attitude and ethics is very old, and a reaction to Roman and Christian fascism… but not at all what Anglo-Saxon superiority maniacs have in mind.

The Greco-Romans were number one in trade and work ethics. 10,000 cargo ships plied the waves of the Mediterranean, every day. Later Italian and Alpine republics under the protective umbrella of the Frankish Roman empire invented most of the present “capitalist” set-up, complete with state bonds to finance Florentine armies, etc.

***

Did Colonialism and Slavery Made Civilization Rich As The Haters Of Progress Claim?

The traditional Politically Correct, Europhobic, European hating point of view is that slavery and colonialism made Europe rich: This is, erroneous, even ridiculous, on the face of it: the region of the world, Europe, which outlawed slavery within, 13 centuries ago, would have been made rich from slavery.

However, in energy usage, per capita, Europe was the richest in the world, by 1000 CE. Actually some of the richest parts of Europe had no contact whatsoever with slavery and colonialism, for example, Switzerland (and many parts of France, Germany, italy).

The truth is much simpler, much more human: the exponential of understanding in Europe, and its subsequent mastery of nature, was the engine of European wealth. Europe succeeded better, because it was the part of the world where the essence of humanity, understanding and mastering nature, was able to express itself better.

***

EUROPE BECAME RICHER IN THE LAST MILLENNIUM, BECAUSE EUROPE WAS SMARTER. Institutionally. Spiritually. Thus, Epigenetically:

It started with smarter laws, and the mentality of respecting them (“Dura Lex, Sed Lex” said the Romans; Law Hard, But [it’s the] Law). So institutions and moods were in place for European supremacy, 25 centuries ago. Those characters were the direct cause of the astonishing ascent of the Roman Republic.

Rome got blocked in its eastward expansion by the Greco-Persian empire in the Iranian plateau. Factors in Rome’s failure to conquer Persia: Caesar was killed, the Republic caged (by Augustus and the plutocracy he headed). More importantly, Persia was part of the West, in the deepest sense. Babylonian kings (Hammurabi!) had imposed the notion of universal (republican) law, a full millennium before Roma became a village. Also Mesopotamia had invented and used much of the fundamental alphabet, science and mathematics, which spread westward.

Rome itself was a baby fed, and educated by colonialists: the Etruscans, who had last come from present-day Syria, and the Greeks, who had colonized south Italy, including Naples (a deformation of the term New Town in Greek: Neo-Polis).

Not that all of the inventive mentality of the Occident started only around the Mediterranean, its Fertile Crescent and Egypt: the Indo-European colonizations started from Central Asia, targeting both Europe and India. The Amazons, a most anti-sexist civilization, was part of it, way back (more than 4,000 years ago), and we inherited some of this anti-sexist mentality (which may well have influenced anti-sexist Crete, as Crete was in trade with the Northern Black Sea region, where the Amazons thrived.

India played the crucial role in inventing the modern numeration system. Meanwhile, in the West, the drive to ever more powerful technology had ruled for at least 100,000 years: Neanderthals and Denisovans could only survive in north Eurasia through extensive technology. So they invented pants, dogs, and the usage of fossil fuels (already 80,000 years ago).

***

European Progress Mentality Is At Least 100,000 Years Old:

Cro Magnon men lived in present day France, then a tundra which was fully surrounded by enormous glaciers, and the icy sea. Cro Magnons survived in the same way Neanderthals and Denisovans did before: using the maximal high-tech they could develop. They may have inherited few Neanderthal genes, but they inherited in full the mentality of the Neanderthals.

This is an important point: mentalities, even culture, can pass down the generations, even when genes do not. In particular, the importance given to culture, progress, understanding can live in a landscape, partly from the landscape itself.

The mentality of progress, with the advent of agriculture, became ever more crucial, as the ecologies got ruined, and new ones had to be manufactured.

It is the gigantic scale of severe, yet profligate Eurasia, a demanding, yet technologically rewarding environment, which made the evolution of superlative ideas possible, more than anywhere else, by constant interbreeding of exotic facts and logics.

It is western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle Earth (all the way to India) which provided the best, largest incubator. Therein the Occident, but it is nothing without the mood of progress at nearly any cost.

That mood barely survived Christian fascism. Yet, the Franks were able to found civilization again, on a better basis, within two centuries of the Roman collapse, using superior ideas (no slavery, mandatory education, the church as a tool of the state, elections, etc.)

This was the first Enlightenment, post-Greco-Romans. That superior institutional set-up made the “West’ by the year 1,000 CE, not only richer than Rome, but richer in energy use by inhabitant, than any other place in the world. By then European technology and science was leading (even the invention of “black powder” was a complicated story, where Mongols and Europeans, not just the Chinese, played a role). As Europe became ever more technology dependent, the urge to understand things for sure (“science”) became ever more important.

A succession of “Enlightenments” went on… to this day. The acceleration after 1500 CE was just part of the singularity of understanding we all share into today. in many ways, it just repeated, and re-imposed, constitutional reforms which were made first in the Seventh and Eighth centuries, by the Imperium Francorum (soon to be relabelled “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”).

***

PC Is The Perfect Con Against Humanity:

Right now the core of the machinery of what made civilization progress and be ever more superior is threatened. Friends have told me Trump threatened “reason”. Well, their reason (they tend to be in the 1% or serving the 1%, those “friends” of mine). There are many facts and possible logics to animate them, out there.

Consider Brexit logic: it is sheer madness, the madness of rage unbound. As in Trumphobia, Europhobia is motivated by a deep pain which arose from earlier events. (Clinton fanatics hate Trump because of the pain Clinton, Bill, Bush, and Obama, inflicted on them.)

An Arabic scholar wrote to me, saying there was no reason for progress (yes there is, just as on a bicycle). A Jewish (real) friend pointed out that many of the attacks against Europe also stealthily promoted the annihilation of Israel (correct).

The rabid, hateful, anti-European logics out there have doubled as outright attacks against honorable reason. Accusations of racism have been hurled, just to avoid debates (both Trump and your truly were subjected to this; many attacks against me were made snapchat way: erasing the fighting words full of hatred within minutes, after they were widely distributed, a method to practice defamation… without being able to prove it).

All we need to know is that never before in the history of the biosphere has the potential be greater for extreme catastrophe. Or extreme progress towards more mastery of nature by life. In any case, superior reason will adjudicate.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags:Europe, Progress, Reason
Posted in Systems Of Mind, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought | 49 Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘Progress’

CLASH OF MENTALITIES, NOT CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

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1. Solon (c. 630–560 BCE)

2. Themistocles (c. 524–459 BCE)

3. Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE)

4. Pericles’ Son (Xanthippus)

5. A Great General Executed for Winning a Battle

7. Gaius Marius (157–86 BCE)

8. Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE)

Why Were Reformers Prosecuted?

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