"Trick or treason?": the portfolio & the plumbing

After a digression into AI social impact here & here, let's return to social commentary we left off here. 

Ezra Klein is my favorite NYTimes presenter: he waded into the Odyssey (IMDb) commentary maelstrom with a thoughtful take on YouTube; Christopher Nolan's Finest Trick refers to the trickster in socio-politics thru time.

At a Community-building group in Calgary ending 30 yrs. ago as I moved to Dallas, I'm still in touch with its leader of my alma mater's International Journal of Fear Studies here: his favorite was the coyote or trickster archetype per Joseph Campbell (Perplexity); 10 yrs. later in the So. CA San Bernardino Mtns. below, a Serrano Indian drum leader told me of "(the) Coyote in Serrano and neighboring Southern California traditions (...) trickster archetype: a disruptive, amoral, yet culturally essential figure who tests norms, exposes human folly, and drives narrative change" (Perplexity). 

It struck me in the context of this blog that Ezra Klein developed here the commonality among "People of the Book" (Wikipedia) on inclusivity (my words):

• Leviticus 19:34
• Matthew 7:12
• Hillel, Shabbat 31a (Babylonian Talmud)
• Qu'ran 4:36 (last two from Perplexity)

... All say grosso modo "do unto others what you'd have them do unto you"!

He goes on: "Was using the Trojan Horse a trick or a crime? To Homer, Odysseus is a hero. To Nolan, he's a man in search of redemption." For in effect "Cruelty is weakness. It is only compassion and reciprocity that can build a durable and decent society." And finally in his NYT opinion piece here:

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli-born historian [said]. “A lot of the thinking, and also the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” he told me. He added:

"For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned?

And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life.

It’s a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then."

Let me add: it is a pity that Jewish and Muslims are at each other - perhaps precisely because they are so alike, they're all Semitic in Israel for ex. - in neither case is there separation of church & state, as there is in parliamentary systems; both remained 1,500 years in the past - the very period during which the West developed parliamentary governance.

Note: all here are observations not criticisms.

This whole blog is devoted to the evolution from the tribal model (Middle East) to the parliamentary model (the West) - see also the endnote - is that not akin to a business evolving from a sole proprietorship (an individual) into a public liability company (a group), in order for the group to survive the lifespan of the individual?

In yet another NYT opinion piece here on the 1788 East India Company impeachment proceedings, William Dalrymple reports the summary by the prosecutor:

"Corporations,” he said, “have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.”

In other words, we have a conflation of pre-democratic government-cum-religion and post-industrial soulless corporations! I argue in my Medium four-part mini-series "Welcome back to the New Middle Ages" (starting here) that we are regressing to the "bad old days" for one very simple reason: lack of means to address the hurts that beset us daily; that "sh*t happens" is not the issue... the issue is our inability to recover from hurts & maintain our inherent zestfulness we're born with - see on Medium here the reason behind it:

Society has no comprehensive system for people to address and try to heal all their mental issues.

Ezra Klein argues that Nolan infused the Christian into the Greek Classics - the portfolio. I argue that the underlying cause of the current miasma is neglected psychology - the plumbing.

Note: that metaphor is thanks at the very end to an unrelated Perplexity prompt here. 

Endnote: this is of necessity a gross simplification designed to tease out a key trend. Britain's king opens Parliament & heads the Church of England, Iran and Israel have parliament equivalents, Bahrain introduced one thirty years ago, & Kuwait actually dissolved theirs while I was there... because they were only rubber-stamping various princes' edicts! Drop a comment below to ask for specifics peppered throughout this blog.