Khoordination

February 26, 2026 //
0

In all the Southern African Khoisan languages,
strict rules govern where particular consonants may appear in a word:
all the clicks and most of the nonclicks must appear at the beginning of a word
and must be followed by a vowel…

I have already convinced myself that language is inherent to life.
That each living organism remains in an animate state for only as long as a flow of information continues to coordinate the processes which make life possible. And since information needs to have the same meaning at both ends of a ‘conversation’, each coordination effort depends on information being conveyed using a language.

Successful coordination depends on information being conveyed in such a manner as to make sense, the same sense, for all those involved in conversation!

A perfunctory look at a world-wide map is enough to determine that there are three ‘dead-ends’.
Places not that hard to go to but almost impossible to return from. Specially for our distant ancestors. Hunter-gatherers who lived off the land. Some of whom moved over whenever the population became too numerous for the place they inhabited at any given moment. If the new place was good enough, they thrived. Then, at some point, some of them went even further.
If not…if the new place wasn’t that good … the best they could do was to survive. Going back was no option. The old place was already full when they left.
The Namibian dessert in South Africa, the Southern tip of South America and Australia. OK, now that I remembered, I must add the Easter Island to the roster. Make it three and a tiny bit.

‘Living at the end of the trail’ means little to almost no interaction with your neighbors. Until the pestering Europeans started to ‘discover’ the world… but that’s another subject.
While people living in the ‘middle of the action’ – the Ancient Egyptians make a very good example – meant having plenty of ‘intercourse’ with the neighbors.

The Khoisan family of languages use a huge number of phonemes but in a rather rigid manner.
The Australian Aboriginal Languages use 15 to 25 consonants and a system of 3 vowels ‘phonetically stretched’ to make 6 to 8 vowel sounds.
The Chonan languages, spoken until recently in Patagonia, use 23 consonants and three to five vowels.

These are facts. Which can be checked online.

What can we make of them?
Other than building an interpretation? An attempt to make some sense out of them? Knowing very well that any interpretation will remain just that? A simple, impossible to prove, interpretation…

The Khoisan didn’t have to travel much. To get there.
If the cradle of modern mankind was somewhere in Ethiopia, it was a short walk in the park – well, in the savanna – from there to the Kalahari dessert. And, since we’re talking about the early days of humankind, probably the Khoisan were the first modern humans to take that walk. Meaning that they didn’t meet anybody during the journey.

Let me remind you that 70 000 years ago – read all about it over the internet – Homo sapiens almost disappeared. Population bottleneck due to a super-volcano event. 1000 to 10 000 of them survived, somewhere in Africa, and then moved about and reached almost every corner of the round Earth.

Going back to the Khoisan, what can we infer from the fact that they:
– use so many phonemes, some of which are clicks
– live in the same area since the start of human history?

Also to be taken into consideration:
Some languages belonging to the Bantu family (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and others) have borrowed some of the clicks used by the Khoisan. After the Bantu have arrived in the general area, came in contact with the Khoisan and drove them even further into the dessert. Some 1800 years ago.

So why would a ‘sophisticated’ civilization borrow sounds from hunter-gatherers living, literally, in the stone age? Taking into account that the Bantu used agriculture to provide for themselves and were savvy enough to transform iron ore into everyday tools…

Pidgin.
English, Dutch and Portuguese colonists needed to get in contact with the locals. To ‘coordinate’ with them.
To learn from them about the specifics of the place where they tried to make a living.
Hence ‘pidgin’. Various pidgins, depending on the circumstances.

Now, what if the English, Dutch and Portuguese colonists could not go back? Reconnect to their original bases?
For how long do you think they would have been able to preserve their original language?
Keep in mind that the Bantu colonists did not use writing to preserve knowledge. Or their original language…

So, where are we now?
A preliminary conclusion, not talking about a geographical position…

The Khoisan, after the shortest migration ever, continue to use a huge number of phonemes but in a rather rigid manner.
The Australian Aboriginals and the Patagonian natives, after migrating to the other side of the world, literally, make do with less than half the phonemes used by the Khoisan. Leading a more or less similar way of life. Subsisting, for so long, in a such meager environment as to transform survival in a form of art.
The more ‘sophisticated’ travelers who arrived later – in comparatively small numbers, at first – have integrated at least some of the native language into theirs. Needing to get in touch with the reality present in that place, to coordinate their efforts with that reality, the newcomers had to get in touch, to coordinate, with the locals. In order for that coordination to happen, a new language was developed. Out of what? Out of what the two people had at their disposal. The two already present languages..In this context, we need to remember the fact that the natives were very curious about the travelers. At the beginning, at least…

Tags , , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Alone. And afraid…

February 23, 2026 //
0

We are terrified of the unknown.
We don’t know what that is, so it may be dangerous.
We are also afraid of the incomprehensible. Of things which challenge our already held convictions. Which challenge the things we currently believe to be ‘true’.

We turn our backs to the unknown and ignore, if we can, the incomprehensible.
If what we don’t understand seems ‘far enough’, without much direct impact on us, it’s simple. We just ignore it and that’s it. Especially if it doesn’t carry any emotional charge.
But if it affects us, directly or emotionally, we perceive the unknown as being abnormal. And declare it as such. An abomination…

By being familiar, the things which surround us make us feel safe. We’re familiar with them, we entertain the notion that we understand them, so we know what to expect of them. We end up feeling ‘good’ in their presence.
Things that come into flagrant conflict with the familiar, which challenge the order we consider to be natural, are also considered to be aberrations! So we don’t pay attention to them. They are not part of our familiar, they are considered rare. Rare, aberrant and, consequently, not worth taking into account.

But after we find out… Or after we’re no longer able to ignore what’s going on…

A mafia-like gang sexually exploiting underage girls.
One of them – at least one – commits suicide. The public assumes that if there had been others, the press would have brought it forward.
For some people, sexual abuse is part of the things that happen. Which is not OK, not ‘good’, but still part of everyday life. Like earthquakes. For these people, the suicide of the victim is an aberration. Something that should not have happened! If the rest of the girls survived… it means that there was something ‘more’ involved. It was she who was not strong enough. Her support system was not adequate. Or something else might have pushed her in the wrong direction… After all, it doesn’t matter! An ‘aberration’… One of those things which are not worth much of our attention…

For other people, sexual abuse is something caused by aberrant individuals!
An aberration from one end to the other! Earthquakes are normal, sexual abuse is not!
For this kind of people, sexual abuse cannot be normalized! Under any circumstances.

This is where the interesting part starts.
Even those who think that sexual abuse is part of life don’t feel good when they learn about specific cases. When the victims ‘get names’. They know that it ‘happens’ but they don’t think about this phenomenon all the time. They have nothing to do with it, it doesn’t affect them… Until they can’t pretend anymore. Until it affects them. Not necessarily in a direct manner… Until the reality of the fact can no longer be ignored!
To escape the psychological discomfort they experience very suddenly, these people need to do something. Quick!

‘Aberration’ to the rescue!
Epstein becomes an aberration.
Andrew becomes an aberration.
Even the victim who committed suicide becomes an aberration!
In reality, ‘the aberration’ is that these things happened at all! That they happened before our own eyes!

This aberration could unfold, for so long, only because too many of us are ‘resigned to the fact’ that sexual abuse is ‘a part of life’. A ‘normal thing’. ‘Normal’ at least as long as it doesn’t affect us….

This aberration – industrial-scale sexual abuse, practiced by apparently ‘respectable’ people revealing their true nature under Epstein’s ‘direction’ – has been made possible precisely by too many of us having chosen to ignore the information ‘sloshing’ around our feet!
‘Silently’ shouted by the victims we have chosen to ignore. Until it was too late…

Tags , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, corruption, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Reliable

February 19, 2026 //
0

Trust, but verify!
Russian proverb,
“adopted as a signature phrase”
by Ronald Reagan

“Suzanne Massie, an American scholar, met with Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987 while he was President of the United States.[1][2] She taught him the Russian proverb doveryai, no proveryai (доверяй, но проверяй) meaning ‘trust, but verify’. She advised him that “The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few.”

I posited yesterday that “languaging is how things work in the living world”.
That a constant flow of information is piece and parcel of any living organism.
I will add today that the information flow mediating the life of those organisms has to be reliable.
To be true. To its stated purpose.

That an organism needs a dependable flow of information in order to remain alive. In order to be able to perform the feats which differentiate a living organism from a clump of inanimate matter. Maintaining its structural integrity and a controlled exchange of specific substances between the inside of the organism and its environment.

Well, the same principle ‘animates’ the meta-organisms we call ‘human communities’.
With a single, but very important, difference!

We lie!
On purpose…

There are many living species which use deceit in their quest to make a living.
Carnivorous plants which trap their prey.
Animals which use camouflage to pretend various things.
Even birds which emit false signals in order to fool other animals.

Yet we, humans, are mastering this on the rim of disaster!
We have not only invented the concept of lying but also mastered it to perfection.

How much sense does it make and how wise is it to harness the power of AI to a chariot full of deceit?

And when are we going to cut the crap?
To adapt our languaging to the new reality?

“It will take more than this, however, to restore our faith in the photographic image.“

‘Faith in the photographic image’… really?!?
OK, human language cannot be as precise as the kind of information flowing to keep our organisms alive.
Human language has to be more flexible than that. For evolutionary reasons to be mentioned at a later date.
But let’s be reasonable. And keep it from ‘jumping the shark’.

By transforming artifacts into objects of faith we actually let the ‘makers’ walk scot-free. Allow deceivers to shed all shrouds of responsibility…
What happened to ‘do not make idols’?
OK, I don’t believe in ‘God’ either but it would be wrong for us to discard time sanctioned wisdom in the process of setting ourselves free from organized religion.

‘Faith’ should be reserved for people, not for objects.
Faith, the word, stretches only as far as we pull it.
It’s up to us to do that sparingly!
Human language is far laxer than the ‘natural’ one. Which makes it less reliable.
It’s up to us to keep it dependable.

Or else…

Tags , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Language

February 18, 2026 //
0

Since the early days of Photoshop in the 1990s,
developments in image fakery have seen us looking at photographs with rising suspicion.
But the Rijksmuseum’s latest photography exhibition asks a pertinent question:
Have photographs ever told the truth?

As I mentioned earlier, individual organisms remain alive for only as long as:
They manage to keep their innards in and most of everything else out. Or, in more formal parlance, to maintain their structural integrity.
They manage to take in what they need in order to continue their metabolism and to excrete the consequences of the before mentioned metabolism.

To perform those tasks, organisms need two things.
Matter and rules. Substance distributed in such manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about and instructions regarding what to do in each circumstance.
For example, while not all organisms need to breathe, all of them need to take in some ‘matter’. Use some of it for ‘maintenance purposes’ and the rest as fuel. In order to recognize the precise substances needed, each organism needs very specific ‘filters’. And information from ‘inside’ regarding the amount needed in each moment of time. Then, once the required quantities of those respective substances have been ‘ingested’, the organism needs to perform certain precise tasks in order to obtain the necessary results.
Not to mention the fact that ‘substance distributed in such a manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about’ has to be ‘distributed’ in a certain manner… yet even more information!

So life is about matter and information. Big deal! Nothing new under the sun…
Even Pulcinella knows that living organisms rely on genes to pass information from one generation to the next one.

True enough.
My point being that transfer of information is inherent to being alive!

A ‘new born’ cannot ‘become’ unless the pertinent information is ‘put forward’ by its ‘parents’.
And it cannot remain alive unless information continues to flow between the individual organism and the environment where it lives. As well as inside the above mentioned organism…

But there’s a problem here.
I keep saying ‘information’. But what is it? How do we recognize a signal as being information?
The answer is contained in the question. To have information we need signals and a key to interpret the inputs.
For instance, ‘get some more oxygen, or ‘food’ ‘, and a receiving agent, capable of performing the task, which can decipher the signal. ‘Lungs’, or ‘guts’, able to simultaneously understand the signal and to fulfill the need expressed by the ‘managing center’.

To cut a long story short, languaging is how things work in the living world.


True or false?
Does it make any sense to sent false signals?
To interpret them ‘differently’?

‘Living’?!?
What does it mean, after all?

Tags , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, biology, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Sola Gratia

February 16, 2026 //
0

“For by grace you have been saved through faith.
And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God”
(Ephesians 2:8).

Same person, inscribed simultaneously in a square and in a circle. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

What better metaphor?
We belong to the real world. And, simultaneously, to a world of our own making.

A ‘virtual’ world.
In the sense that our world is crafted according to our ‘virtue’. Defined by our virtue…
Our collective virtue, of course. Nobody has ever managed to make an entire world for themselves… The world we live in, we inhabit as quests, is the consequence of our cultured efforts. A collective endeavor in both space and time.

OK, and where’s the link between redemption by divine grace and this schizophrenic world of yours?

The virtual world we’ve made, innocently until people have started to guess what God had in mind for us, can be measured across two dimensions. Freedom and faith.

You don’t make any sense…

Freedom of will is what allows us to choose.
Faith is what keeps us together.

To make sense, freedom and faith need reality.
There’s no such thing as absolute freedom and faith needs to be anchored in… you guessed right, hard core reality!

So here we have it.
Individual human beings collaborating in good faith and making good use of the amount of liberty made possible by the reality present in each consecutive moment.

Or

Herded people driven by blind faith ignoring the very concept of liberty. (Can you even consider these people as being human?)

Since both the above situations are fictional extremes, the truth is – as usual – somewhere in the middle.

Individual human people trying to make a living in whatever circumstances they have happened to open their eyes.
Since nothing is perfect in any given situation, people have to make do with whatever they have at their disposal.
One of the tools they use to keep going, to remain true to themselves, is the famous fallacy.

Faith in themselves…
Until the shit hits the fan!

Tags , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Strategy

February 12, 2026 //
0

Identify the goals you actually need to reach.
Prioritize them.
Divide each into tactically achievable targets.

Existence versus survival.

There is inanimate matter. And there’s life.
Living things – read ‘organisms’ – consist of inanimate matter and remain alive for only as long as they are able to function according to a species specific ‘set of rules’. Species specific yet individually formulated instructions coded by the genetic material governing each organism.
Matter is mainly about existence. No two things can exist in the exact same place AND most of the inanimate matter is not influenced by time. There are a few exceptions but they are defined by our understanding of time rather than anything else.

Life is mostly about survival.
Individual living organisms survive only if the information contained inside their genetic material is compatible with the environment in which they happen to be. And, regardless, they do survive, most of them, for only a limited amount of what we call time.
Species, on the other hand, evolve. Survive only for as long as they are able to update the information they carry along from generation to generation. The updating mechanism, natural evolution, is governed by rules but essentially depends on pure luck.

“Innocent til proven guilty“

By whom…?

Living organisms behave as if ‘enjoying’ a certain degree of self-awareness.
They keep their insides in and most of the outside out. All this while minutely managing what goes in and what goes out, according to their metabolic needs. The point being that most living organisms do accomplish these tasks innocently. They just follow the instructions they came up with for as long as this remains possible.

It so happened that layers and layers of evolution after life sprung up have produced what we call ‘consciousness’. A self-awareness sophisticated enough to observe itself while committing ‘the act’. To ‘observe itself observing‘, as Humberto Maturana had described it.

The simple advent of consciousness has opened a completely fresh can of worms.

No longer linear.

Time doesn’t flow for inanimate matter. It either exists or not.
Time flows linearly for innocent life. Organisms are born, live and die without having much individual contribution to the whole thing. Except for being cannon fodder for evolution.
Which evolution is – used to be, more precisely – linear. Just as linear as time.

No longer.
As we, human beings, have developed what we have called consciousness… things have become way more complicated than they used to be.
Since we have noticed death…

I promised yesterday an explanation.
A putative evolutionary explanation for why fallacies have survived. Survived us realizing their falsitude…

Categories Uncategorized

post Hoc

February 11, 2026 //
0

OK, so it did happen in front of you.
But this doesn’t mean you necessarily have to claim any credit for it.
Not even if you were the only one to notice…
Or to understand what was going on!

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is considered to be a fallacy.
A logical fallacy based on a confusion. Correlation is not causation, right?
Then why so many people continue to ‘indulge’ in this habit? Even after they’ve been ‘prompted’ about this…?

Evolutionary speaking, fallacies should not be able to survive, right?

But… but…?!?

OK, let me put it the other way around.
Fallacies have already survived for long enough. For us to pay attention!
Let me propose an explanation for their survival.

“Logical fallacies survive and thrive because they are often highly persuasive, psychologically comforting, and cognitively efficient, despite being logically unsound. They function as mental shortcuts (heuristics) that allow people to navigate complex information without rigorous, time-consuming analysis”.
“Ultimately, fallacies survive because they work as tools for social interaction, debate, and emotional management, making them difficult to eradicate from human discourse.“

According to Gemini, the intelligence perusing the internet when we google something, fallacies survive simply because we’re comfortable using them.

‘We’re comfortable using them’?!? You’re not making much sense… ‘We’ consider them to be ‘wrong’ – as in “fallacious” – and you say “we’re comfortable using them”…

OK. Let me point your attention to the difference between we – as a collection of individuals happening to be in the same mess but fierce-fully guarding our individualitIES – and the collective WE. A group of people – a collective, a society or even the entire species – engaging in the same behavior. Knowingly, unknowingly and anywhere in between.

We’re made from the same ‘cloth’. Dust if you will…
We ‘work’ according to the same ‘rules’. In the sense that we share 99.99% of our DNA. Or more…
The fact that we’re so different, individually speaking, is the ‘strange’ thing. The marvelous thing!
We shouldn’t be so cross when noticing how much we have in common…

The tendency to indulge in fallacies, even after understanding they are ‘wrong’.
The tendency to appropriate credit when none is due to us…

You still expect me to keep my promise?
An evolutionary explanation for why we keep indulging in fallacies?
Come back tomorrow!

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Why Bother?

February 10, 2026 //
1

How many apples had fallen?
Before one of us noticed?

I really don’t care whether the story is true or not.
All I’m interested in is ‘why it took us so long’?
After all, things had fallen towards the center of the Earth since always. Eratosthenes had already calculated the circumference of the obviously round Earth back in 240 BC. And “By the 1st century AD, the spherical model was widely accepted, and Ptolemy developed maps based on a globe with systems of longitude and latitude.” According to the currently famous internet, obviously …

The way I see it, the world was not ready for it. Before Newton.
We didn’t have the ‘language’ in which to spell this new reality. And nobody really cared about the matter. Really invested into the matter, as opposed to interested about the subject…

But things change.
1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Trying to go to India but steering into the ‘wrong’ direction. Inaugurating the era of sailing into the unknown.
1524 The posthumous publication of Johannes Werner’s method of determining longitude and latitude by measuring the angular distance between the moon and other astronomical objects. The method was not usable at the time because the necessary data, ‘tables of ephemerides’ had not yet been published.
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus. a priest, published his famous book about how the planets circled the Earth.
1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for defending and promoting Copernicus’ ideas. The world was still not ready.
1595 – 1627 Johannes Keppler published a series of works detailing Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the Universe and elaborating mathematical tools for the job. Including a set of Ephemerides, in 1617. His work was met with mixed reactions, the opposition being mitigated by the fact that Keppler, a very religious person, never crossed any of the significant figures he came in contact with.
1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. Integrating and formalizing the work of many, Newton’s synthesis filled the ‘need to know’ of those concerned. While his theory was met with some philosophical opposition – Huygens and Leibniz, among others, on the practical side no one had raised any objections. Until Einstein, but that is another subject.

What happened?

People had been already sailing for some 2000 years.
But until then, it used to be a ‘craft’. Something passed on from father to son and kept, more or less, into the family.
The ‘Sea People’…
Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, 1498, was the last of the ‘craftsmen’ who ‘discovered’ places. By sailing there using ‘the good old, time sanctioned, manner’.
Christopher Columbus, by sailing the other way around, was the first to transform this craft into an industry.
He also started the process which transformed the whole world.

Sailing and trading on an industrial scale demands a different kind of people. And transform those who embark unto the adventure.
Ancient Athens, heavily involved in sailing and trading, had invented democracy. The city continues to exist while we consider democracy to have been invented by the Ancient Greeks.
Ancient Sparta, Athens’ fiercest domestic competitor, a quintessentially agricultural society, was run as a dictatorship. Only ruins survived. And a myth…

Isaac Newton, and his readers, were able to understand gravity because they needed that knowledge.
Which was but a step in the road they were opening. For themselves and for those who followed.
Basically, what they did was to spin a new story, read ‘narrative’ out of information which was already floating around.

Are we capable of following in their steps?

For ‘only God knows what reason’ this very morning I was reminded by ‘the FB algorithms’ about a comment I made some 7 years ago.
“Democracies fend off challenges when participants value the preservation of the system—its norms and ideals and values—over short-term political gain.”

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/understanding-death-democracy-not-really-trump/


Tags , , ,
Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mindset, skin in the game

Dimensional Analysis

February 6, 2026 //
0

Kill time.
Solve problems.
Learn, understand, discover.

Gather information.
Grind it into a modicum of knowledge.
Make the call.
Implement it.
Wait for feed-back.
Evaluate and reach a ‘final conclusion’.

Formal decision making in a nut-shell…

Philosophy bothers itself with what to think. What conclusions we should be reaching…
Science bothers itself with the hows of the matter. How should we think in order to reach the right conclusions! ‘Right’ as in as close to reality as (humanly) possible.

But why?!?
Why do we think at all?

I haven’t read everything Ernst Mayr had ever written but I’m sure he would have answered ‘because we can’!
I’m no student of philosophy so I really don’t know whether a better answer has ever been offered. Or even if the question has been asked before…

So. What’s driving us to think?

Whoa! This is a different question, you know!
‘Why do we think’ is not at all similar to ‘What drives us to think’. But the second version is an easier one to answer…

As you’ve already noticed, I hope, this blog is about the ‘limited nature of our consciousness’.
Which consciousness is defined/generated by our ability to think.
Which has to be trained in order to be effective but I’ll save that for another post.

So, what drives us to think?
Sheer necessity, survival instinct… I’ll come back.
As the rest of us, I’m thinking as I go along. New paths open, left and right, but there is a place I want to reach today.
The dimensional dimension of the whole process of thinking.
I introduced the ‘driver’ to ‘open the space’. A driver needs a space to drive in…

According to the formal theory, thinking is a linear process. A narrative…
According to the day to day practice, a thought is, indeed, a linear thing. A narrative.
But the fact that a trail is linear doesn’t make driving into a linear something.

So, a thought is, indeed, a ‘linear narrative’ while thinking, like driving, is more like an exploratory process.

OK. Now that you’ve got my full attention, how about you get to the point?
Cut the crap, already…

I’d really love to oblige but I need to make a small detour…
I’m an engineer. As such, I do understand physics. Up to a point… Modern physics demand a lot of mathematics and that’s where I falter. As such, I’m aware that some specialists maintain that there are some 11 dimensions which measure the physical world… most of them being so tightly compacted that we don’t notice them in day to day life.
Same thing when it comes to thinking… There are many dimensions which may come in handy but I’ll mention only three of them.

Goal.
Individual prowess.
Environment.

Polichinelle is my witness. Each and everyone of the above dimensions can, and will, be divided in sub-dimensions.
Soon.
Here.

Tags , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Confusion

February 5, 2026 //
0

“Capitalism has already ended and we don’t even know it,”
“Anyone who owns that power can direct you…
to train you, gain your trust, and infuse desires in you.
This is no longer capitalism. Welcome to techno-feudalism.”
Yanis Varoufakis

Speaking to Euronews after his panel at Web Summit Qatar, the former Greek finance minister said the world could be heading toward another crisis like 2008, driven by the rise of stablecoins and powerful tech platforms.

“Capitalism has already ended and we don’t even know it” is, helas, true.
“Techno-feudalism” is, indeed, a pertinent description of the current state of affairs.
Any further than that…

Varoufakis is ‘long’ on money. He’s so heavily invested in this concept that he has somewhat lost his bearings.

For him, capitalism had started to die when public money has been replaced with the private kind. When people have started to replace national currencies with encrypted ones.
I’m afraid this is a huge misunderstanding.
‘Real’ money being replaced with the ‘fiat’ kind was a symptom, not a cause!

I hear you!
For purists, ‘commodity money’ is the real thing while fiat money is printed by the government. Hence ‘commodity money’ is considered to have ‘intrinsic’ value while fiat money is seen as being less valuable than the paper it’s printed on. For some of those purists, bit-coin – and other equivalent coins – are real. In the sense that their valuation comes from the market. ‘Bit-coin is valuable because people keep buying it’.
As if people buying gold, and accepting dollars in exchange for what they have to sell, is not the very same thing! Value being conferred by the free market…
The way I see it, real money is the kind people trust to use while fiat money is the kind which is ‘made’ by somebody.
These two are not mutually exclusive??? But why should they?!?

Back to Varoufakis’ confusion. Which is a continuation of that between capitalism and the primitive accumulation of money.
Crassus, a very wealthy contemporary of Caesar, was loaded. Full of money. The real kind… Loads and loads of gold coins.
Did that, Crassus owning an insane amount of money, made him an early capitalist?!?

Capitalism, the one hailed by Adam Smith, is about trust, not about money!
We became capitalists the moment we started doing business with each other. When when trade was no longer sanctioned by the lord.
When commerce no longer had to be ‘protected’ by the Mafia which previously controlled the territory. As was the case during the feudal era.
Hence the insistence of those who know what they are talking about when it comes to market freedom!
I repeat, capitalism began when market participants had enough mutual trust to trade directly. To deal with their partners without any intervention or mediation from the the powerful of the day.

And yes, if we look from this angle, capitalism has disappeared. People, those who populate the market, have lost both their trust and their freedom.
The vast majority of them are obsessed with profit. And the obsessed are anything but free!
Meanwhile none of them trust their business partners anymore. In earnest…
People continue to trade because they rationalize their greed. Consider that chasing the fast buck is the rational thing to do and are convinced everybody in the market are equally ‘reasonable’. That since all of them chase the same thing, all of them will act rationally. Hence predictably…

Which, as we innocently discover periodically, is nothing but horse manure. Bull-shit. Pure and unadulterated crap!

Crassus wasn’t chasing even more money!
He wanted power…

Another fallacy we keep entertaining is that ‘people respect the law’. And are going to fulfill ‘the contract’, without any outside intervention.
We’ve grown accustomed with contracts being fulfilled, in good faith, during the ‘good old days’. When a handshake was enough.
Nowadays… contracts are fulfilled only because the parties don’t want trouble. And this is not at all the same thing!

Unfortunately, Varoufakis is right. Capitalism is dying.
But I’m afraid Varoufakis still has no clue about what capitalism really is!
Used to be…

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, In English, Rule of Law, skin in the game, Trust
« Older Entries