Avoiding Civilizational Collapse - 3 Strategies

If man wants to progress, he must create new forms of energy of greater and greater densities.

-Lazare Carnot (1784)

The hidden "Irony" in the term "Byzantine"

from Google AI:

The Byzantine Empire achieved organizational simplification primarily through the Theme System (Themata) in the 7th century. By combining civilian and military governance under a single general (strategos) and granting hereditary land to soldiers, the state streamlined its defense and tax collection during constant invasions.

The Theme System

To survive near-constant territorial threats, the empire abandoned the complex, corrupt late-Roman separation of military and civil powers.

• Civil-Military Merge: Regions were divided into administrative zones (themes) governed by a strategos (general) who held total authority over both the local military and civilian administration.
• Land Grants (Strateia): The empire allocated plots of land to farmers in exchange for hereditary military service. This decentralized defense while ensuring a highly motivated, localized standing army.
• Cost Efficiency: It removed the need to pay regular salaries and transport funds across vast, vulnerable territories, allowing the military to be self-sustaining.

Bureaucratic Administration

While the empire shrank, the central government in Constantinople maintained a highly effective, centralized bureaucracy to manage the treasury and administration.

• Fiscal Optimization: Specialized departments (sekreta) headed by Logothetes (ministers) accounted for state resources and tax collection.
• Separation of Power: The central government strictly forbade regional military leaders from collecting taxes directly, preventing generals from using regional treasuries to fund rebellions.

Strategic Philosophy

• Diplomacy over Warfare: Rather than relying solely on brute force, the state employed massive, structured intelligence and bribery to turn enemies against one another.
• Cavalry Focus: Tactics transitioned from the rigid, foot-based Roman legions to a highly mobile, cavalry-heavy force capable of repelling quick-striking invaders

To avoid collapse as its territory shrank, the Byzantine Empire decentralized into a proto-feudal system, created mobile standing armies, leveraged deep-in-depth fortifications, and perfected advanced diplomacy to divide and conquer its enemies.

• The Tagmata (Professional Armies): To supplement local thematic militias, emperors established small, highly trained, mobile standing armies. Stationed near Constantinople, these troops provided a reliable rapid-response force to counter invaders.
• The Pronoia System: As funds dried up, the state granted land and tax revenues to nobles in exchange for military service. This feudal arrangement provided a cost-effective way to raise cavalry and troops without maintaining an expensive standing mercenary force.
• Strategic Fortification & Defense in Depth: Instead of risking all-out battles, the Byzantines drew invaders into difficult, fortified terrain. They gathered all local crops and livestock behind city walls, forcing enemies to overextend and starve, making them vulnerable to ambushes.
• Masterful Diplomacy: The empire's most effective survival tactic was "divide and conquer." They used lavish bribes, arranged marriages, and paid one barbarian tribe to attack another, keeping their numerous adversaries too fractured and busy to threaten Constantinople.
• Naval Supremacy: The use of "Greek Fire"—a highly combustible, inextinguishable liquid weapon—allowed the Byzantine navy to defend the strategic waters around Constantinople and maintain maritime dominance.

Hands Up! Georges Bataille: The Threadless Minotaur Living Inside Goedel's Labyrinth

Heidegger's hand is tied to the terrestrial order. Thus, it does not grasp the human future. Human beings have long since stopped dwelling between 'earth' and 'sky'. On the way towards the un-thinged [Unbedingtheit], they will also leave the 'mortals' and the 'divinities' behind. The last things (τὰ ἔσχατα) will also have to be eliminated. Human beings soar up towards the un-thinged, the unconditioned. We are headed towards a trans-human and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information. Human beings shed their being be-thinged, their facticity, even though this is precisely what makes them what they are. 'Human' is derived from humus, that is, soil. Digitalization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition Of the humanum. The future Of humans seems mapped out: humans will abolish themselves in order to posit themselves as the absolute .

Byung-Chul Han, "Heidegger's Hand"

Losing Ipseity in the Second-Order Observation Perspective of Profilicity.

from Google AI:

Ipseity is the quintessential element of identity, derived from the Latin word ipse (meaning "self"). It refers to selfhood, individuality, or the unique quality and nature of being yourself.

Where You'll Encounter the Word

• Philosophy: Used in phenomenology and existentialism to describe the first-person perspective, "mineness," or the foundation of human consciousness.
• Psychology: "Ipseity disturbance" (or self-disorder) is a term used to describe a foundational rupture in an individual's sense of existing as a distinct subject.
• Theology: Often contrasted with aseity (existing entirely of and from oneself)

Emile Durkheim: Sociology, Suicide, and the Nature of Religion

Marcel Mauss: A Century of Symbolic Gift Giving

The 'Gift' of 9/11

The twin towers were not destroyed by terrorists. The twin towers committed suicide. They collapsed under their own weight. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide planes with their own suicide. It has been said that even God cannot declare war on himself. Well he can. The West in the position of God, divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy has become suicidal and declared war on itself.

-Jean Baudrillard, "The Spirit of Terrorism"

from Google AI:

Continental Philosophy (The Event as Rupture)

In Continental philosophy, an "event" is often viewed as a sudden, unpredictable rupture or breakthrough that changes everything—it alters how we perceive truth, language, or history. 

• Alain Badiou: A French philosopher who defines an event as an unpredictable, ground-breaking rupture that brings forth new truths. According to Badiou, an event shatters established norms and forces individuals to take a leap of faith to remain faithful to this new truth (e.g., a revolutionary political movement or falling in love).
• Gilles Deleuze: Drawing from the ancient Stoics, Deleuze viewed events as "incorporeal" entities. Rather than physical actions, events are the meaning or sense of what happens, which subsist at the surface of things and transform how we understand ourselves and our realities.
• Martin Heidegger: In his later work (Contributions to Philosophy), Heidegger conceptualizes the event (or Ereignis) as a moment of appropriation, where human beings and the meaning of "Being" come into a mutually revealing relationship.

The End of Pure Positivity

Adjusting the Markov Blanket

More on Plur1bus

More on Markov Blankets

Valentin Turchin: Meta-Systems Transition Theory - A Case for Anti-Fragility?

Chapters:

00:00 The night the bronze age went silent 

07:10 The world before the crash 

15:00 Egypt’s records and the sea peoples name 

23:36 The last letters from ugarit 

36:55 Hatti collapses and hattusa burns 

51:34 Mycenaean greece and the end of palace life 

1:08:45 Cities along the levantine coast fall 

1:24:18 Cyprus and the broken copper highway 

1:39:51 Anatolia in motion 

1:54:27 What the battles might have looked like 

2:08:15 Earthquakes, drought, and the climate question 

2:22:22 Piracy, refugees, and a sea full of desperation 

2:36:14 Why the great powers couldn’t bounce back 

2:50:30 Where did the mystery army go 

3:03:39 What the collapse left behind 

3:19:32 A mystery that still breathes

What?  No "Sea Peoples" from Atlantis? 

Peter Turchin (Valentin's son): Elite Surplus Theory -

Sovereignty...

Jean-Luc Godard, "A Bande Apart" (1964)

Hector Goes to War

Friedrich Schiller, "Hector and Andromache"

Andromache
Will you, my Hector, forever go away
to where with unmatched hands Achilles makes
Patroclus bloody off’rings?
____________________Who will teach
your little one with strength to throw the spear,
or how to honor the gods, if what I fear
occurs and Orcus devours you?

Hector
Dear wife, enough of tears, for go I must,
for love of you I burn with battle-lust
my arms sustain Pergamus.
____________________If now I fall,
I’ll fall in the Trojan gods’ and your defense
as a pious hero, then make my descent
to grim, to Stygian Dis.

Andromache
I’ll never hear the clash of your weapons again,
unused, your iron will rust in the halls of men,
and Priam’s line will die.
__________________You’ll go to where
no sun, no day e’er shines his golden face,
to where the Cocytus slithers through the waste,
your love will die in the Lethe.

Hector
Though all my hopes and all my thoughts will sink,
from the gentle flow of the Lethe, my love won’t drink,
no, my love won’t drink.
__________________Listen! The Greeks
are blustering at Ilium’s walls. Now gird my sword,
hold back your tears, and listen to my word;
My love won’t die in the Lethe.

 

Georges Bataille: The Solar Anus & Sovereignty

I Am the Je Suis!

Just Follow the Plan!

THE PLAN

In the beginning was The Plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without merit.
And The Plan was without substance.

And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, “It is
a crock of shit, and it stinketh.”

And the workers went unto their supervisors and said,
“It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the supervisors went unto their managers, saying, “It is
a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that
none may abide by it.”

And the managers went unto their directors, saying,
“It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”

And the directors went unto the VPs, saying unto them,
“It promotes growth and it is very powerful.”

And the VPs went unto the Prez, saying unto him, “This plan
will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company,
with powerful effects.”

And the Prez looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good.
And The Plan became Policy.
This is how shit happens!