[FRIAM] we are lost

[David Eric Smith]

> On Oct 29, 2021, at 4:32 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> excellent reference/article... thanks.
> 
I agree, Marcus; thanks.  I was struck that not only do I wish I could write that way; I wish I could _think_ that way.  There are few thoughts I have had that aren’t already contained in Packer’s synthesis, in forms compatible with or better than the ones I would have given.  (Usually those with which I overlap aren’t different enough that I consider his take on them a lot “better”: mostly I think he chooses well the things I would front.  The “better” part mostly comes from a view that goes well beyond any that I could have commanded, and much better ability to arrange it all into a coherent layout.)
> Is it a 4 component spring model, or is a four body problem in the orbital mechanics sense... probably no harder than the three body problem?
> 
But I think the whole core of Packer’s article is that it is not merely 4, but 2.x 2.

There are axes of stress, and visible fractures along the first two principle components of stress. 

The Left-Right axis has resolved itself, in the current era, into a kind of cultural-status axis, with educational markers being a big part.  But the axis is somehow more and different than only that, as it has historically moved through primacy of other dichotomies that can still be seen, while retaining its essential nature: Open vs. Closed, Cosmopolitan vs. Parochial, Communitarian vs. Dominance-ordered.  None of these seems quite adequate as I write them, but something along that line.

The Up-Down axis is probably about winners versus losers, itself existing along several dimensions that have become correlated.  It can be conditions of living, or hope versus despair w.r.t. power or agency as well as wealth or safety.  That is why Packer sets the Just up as an uprising against the Smart, and the Real as an uprising against the Free.  The nature of the uprising and the stress driving it is in a sense the same, and the establishment and the insurgency sort of remain within whichever silos they started in.  Mostly because that phase is still fairly young.

Anything that becomes organized, it seems, becomes available as a tool to entrench advantage in a setting where competition never relents.

Eric


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