"German Engineering, Japanese Productivity, American Ingenuity and Obesity, European Decadence, French Romance and rudeness, the terms are common. But what do they mean?" The professor is an old man, prodigious by years and achievement.
"What is it that builds the soul that we so often refer to? Man is infinitely variable, he changes like the wind, blowing hot and cold, generous and selfish, an asshole a moment and a beloved friend the next. The great brutal drug lord Escobar that ran wild nearly a century ago was a renowned family man. Napoleon was hopeless in bed, and Ceasar lived in eternal fear of balding, if at least for political reasons. Man is discrete in his traits, jagged in their combinations. A mishmash of pieces pulled together to certain affect. At scale, you would imagine this would yield a great mass. Amorphous in nature, with no specific traits but the physical ones that seemingly define them." His accent, worn with a little bit of french as he rails and roams the stage, exploring and splattering concepts freely like paint on a blackboard. He carries with him a stick of polished wood that taps the ground with a clack every time he steps anywhere he steps.
"They say the world makes us. That the deserts made the Inuit and the forests the aborigines. Or is it the other way around? But do we not affect the world around us? Are we not at least partly our own product. The world makes the man, and the man makes the world. A great game of chicken and egg. An eternal cycle." He stares at the class before him. His eyes covered in brown semi-transparent framed glasses.
"It is tempting" he inflects the world with force. "It is tempting to think that we have agency in all this. That a civilization has an inherent personality. That it was Japanese bravery and ingenuity that aided their reconstruction after the second world war and not the perfect storm of an educated, nationalist populace formed from the Meiji restoration, we talked about last class and a shortage of extractable resources combined with globalization in the '60s that would yield those resources without significant exploitation of the people and encouraging entrepreneurship to produce and process those materials in an era where that would yield far greater profit. That the jew proclivity for banking and mercantile enterprise is a result of some supernatural capability or conspiracy and not a result of mass ostracisation from any and all classical fields, like farming, and really primarily farming. Ban a people from doing all but lending and trading and ban all other people from lending as the church declared at one point and what else would result but a culture that masters and dominates banking. And not just masters as some would tastelessly imply, but also pioneers it. But as those variables disappear so do the warpages. And sooner or later every damn hippy is out collecting interest" He swings his stick pointing at the class.
"As individuals we are free and people of agency. An individual is unpredictable, a pawn can kill a queen without any regard for position or power. Blood spills the same either way. People evolve and change, warp, intimidate, and cower. But as a group you are influenceable. Your reactions are predictable. You are like a mimosa. A plant that closes to the touch. You respond to stimuli. And quite effectively and to the right eye and arm, predictably. The world can be engineered to you're taste. And society always yields. But never against its nature. You must weaponize the nature of mankind to control it. Understand what they desire, and give it to them, But for a price. The dictator of Albania in the '50s, the 1950s mind you, nearly a century ago spent considerable effort to exterminate religion. He jailed the priest and clergy, appropriated temple and church property and arrested people for following their religion in peace. For years he put his entire weight into it." He smirks, shaking his head as if humored by the failed attempt. As if he could do better. And he probably could, as he had, in his time. Repression 101 as the class was called with a little humor, and sometimes by the professor himself, for this was not an ordinary professor to deal with. For where do tyrants go to retire if not in bespectacled universities where all is forgiven but never forgotten in the name of objectivity.
"Human nature, of course, outlasted him. Albania today remains strongly religious. Islam is the biggest religion, with more than 50 percent of the populace, and Christianity also continues strong. No effort of man is ever as wasted as that which goes against his nature. The competent dictator is as much a construction of the people, as they are of him. If you notice, keen students, that that is more religion than much of Europe and America. Prosperity achieved more in decades than Repression ever could. Statistically, the easiest way to make man forget god is to make him rich and idle. A society of 30 hour work weeks and olive oil with toast is hard to keep religious. The nature of Humanity brought to bear. And that's how you bend the populace. With chocolates and cheese and plenty of bread to spare. But never too much lest they might think too much of themselves" He smiles at the class.
"Questions?"
An hour Later
Harold smiles to himself as he looks at the door at the students shuffling out of the class. He uncaps the top of his stick and looks over at the one oncoming student as he takes a swig from the stick. Always wise to be a little buzzed for these interactions. The warm rum runs down his throat burning slightly, his throat. "Yes Franklin" He smirks. "What question do you have for me today?"
"No question, sir. That was a fascinating lecture" He stares at the professor, a little trepidated.
"I have your results sir. The coroners office gave me a right tight fight on it, but I got it. They were wondering what it was I wanted to do with it?" He looks at him. "I told them I'm doing a project on death rates by ethnicity, location and age." He smirks. "It would be very hard to do that with these" Harold grabs the sheets smiling at the kid, "Your help is appreciated." He nods slightly, hobbling a bit towards the door. Then turns, sensing the kid's hesitance. "I'll get you that 'A' kiddo." The kid nods, smiling slightly, "Thank you sir" he nods and walks past the old man. Harold smirks. The perks of making friends outside the department. Every once in a while they can be useful. And hard to track.
Harold
In a 117AD when Trajan stood upon his ship surveying the Persian gulf, I wonder if he knew he'd be the last emperor to ever walk those shores? Harold smirks as rolls his palms through the paperwork, I'll find what that fucker did, and have him nailed by morning. On the TV, the errant entrepreneur jibbers and jabbers, about one construction and the next. Great plans that speak of decades unseen, of golden towers and streets of paved silver, or so he'd imply. I know what you did, you motherfucker.
"What is it that builds the soul that we so often refer to? Man is infinitely variable, he changes like the wind, blowing hot and cold, generous and selfish, an asshole a moment and a beloved friend the next. The great brutal drug lord Escobar that ran wild nearly a century ago was a renowned family man. Napoleon was hopeless in bed, and Ceasar lived in eternal fear of balding, if at least for political reasons. Man is discrete in his traits, jagged in their combinations. A mishmash of pieces pulled together to certain affect. At scale, you would imagine this would yield a great mass. Amorphous in nature, with no specific traits but the physical ones that seemingly define them." His accent, worn with a little bit of french as he rails and roams the stage, exploring and splattering concepts freely like paint on a blackboard. He carries with him a stick of polished wood that taps the ground with a clack every time he steps anywhere he steps.
"They say the world makes us. That the deserts made the Inuit and the forests the aborigines. Or is it the other way around? But do we not affect the world around us? Are we not at least partly our own product. The world makes the man, and the man makes the world. A great game of chicken and egg. An eternal cycle." He stares at the class before him. His eyes covered in brown semi-transparent framed glasses.
"It is tempting" he inflects the world with force. "It is tempting to think that we have agency in all this. That a civilization has an inherent personality. That it was Japanese bravery and ingenuity that aided their reconstruction after the second world war and not the perfect storm of an educated, nationalist populace formed from the Meiji restoration, we talked about last class and a shortage of extractable resources combined with globalization in the '60s that would yield those resources without significant exploitation of the people and encouraging entrepreneurship to produce and process those materials in an era where that would yield far greater profit. That the jew proclivity for banking and mercantile enterprise is a result of some supernatural capability or conspiracy and not a result of mass ostracisation from any and all classical fields, like farming, and really primarily farming. Ban a people from doing all but lending and trading and ban all other people from lending as the church declared at one point and what else would result but a culture that masters and dominates banking. And not just masters as some would tastelessly imply, but also pioneers it. But as those variables disappear so do the warpages. And sooner or later every damn hippy is out collecting interest" He swings his stick pointing at the class.
"As individuals we are free and people of agency. An individual is unpredictable, a pawn can kill a queen without any regard for position or power. Blood spills the same either way. People evolve and change, warp, intimidate, and cower. But as a group you are influenceable. Your reactions are predictable. You are like a mimosa. A plant that closes to the touch. You respond to stimuli. And quite effectively and to the right eye and arm, predictably. The world can be engineered to you're taste. And society always yields. But never against its nature. You must weaponize the nature of mankind to control it. Understand what they desire, and give it to them, But for a price. The dictator of Albania in the '50s, the 1950s mind you, nearly a century ago spent considerable effort to exterminate religion. He jailed the priest and clergy, appropriated temple and church property and arrested people for following their religion in peace. For years he put his entire weight into it." He smirks, shaking his head as if humored by the failed attempt. As if he could do better. And he probably could, as he had, in his time. Repression 101 as the class was called with a little humor, and sometimes by the professor himself, for this was not an ordinary professor to deal with. For where do tyrants go to retire if not in bespectacled universities where all is forgiven but never forgotten in the name of objectivity.
"Human nature, of course, outlasted him. Albania today remains strongly religious. Islam is the biggest religion, with more than 50 percent of the populace, and Christianity also continues strong. No effort of man is ever as wasted as that which goes against his nature. The competent dictator is as much a construction of the people, as they are of him. If you notice, keen students, that that is more religion than much of Europe and America. Prosperity achieved more in decades than Repression ever could. Statistically, the easiest way to make man forget god is to make him rich and idle. A society of 30 hour work weeks and olive oil with toast is hard to keep religious. The nature of Humanity brought to bear. And that's how you bend the populace. With chocolates and cheese and plenty of bread to spare. But never too much lest they might think too much of themselves" He smiles at the class.
"Questions?"
An hour Later
Harold smiles to himself as he looks at the door at the students shuffling out of the class. He uncaps the top of his stick and looks over at the one oncoming student as he takes a swig from the stick. Always wise to be a little buzzed for these interactions. The warm rum runs down his throat burning slightly, his throat. "Yes Franklin" He smirks. "What question do you have for me today?"
"No question, sir. That was a fascinating lecture" He stares at the professor, a little trepidated.
"I have your results sir. The coroners office gave me a right tight fight on it, but I got it. They were wondering what it was I wanted to do with it?" He looks at him. "I told them I'm doing a project on death rates by ethnicity, location and age." He smirks. "It would be very hard to do that with these" Harold grabs the sheets smiling at the kid, "Your help is appreciated." He nods slightly, hobbling a bit towards the door. Then turns, sensing the kid's hesitance. "I'll get you that 'A' kiddo." The kid nods, smiling slightly, "Thank you sir" he nods and walks past the old man. Harold smirks. The perks of making friends outside the department. Every once in a while they can be useful. And hard to track.
Harold
In a 117AD when Trajan stood upon his ship surveying the Persian gulf, I wonder if he knew he'd be the last emperor to ever walk those shores? Harold smirks as rolls his palms through the paperwork, I'll find what that fucker did, and have him nailed by morning. On the TV, the errant entrepreneur jibbers and jabbers, about one construction and the next. Great plans that speak of decades unseen, of golden towers and streets of paved silver, or so he'd imply. I know what you did, you motherfucker.
The thought flashes through his head. You didn't just pop out of the womb on that pedestal. It's the tyrant's lesson, if you've made it somewhere, you know what it takes to get there. If blood were as adhesive as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, his hands would be painted red. Or perhaps those of his goons. It's a rare man who does his own dirty work. A rarer one who gets there without ever doing so. The document is a large one, a file with thousands and thousands of names, printed in paper form so as to be unsearchable. Nasty bastard, if only I weren't your match. He works through the pages, pushing date by date, location by location. It's designed not to be scannable. Text that undulates ever so slightly, it's unreadable to the computer. Of course, that's bullshit. That shit would fly in the 20' and maybe the '30s but the truth here is far more simple. There's no way a few warps in the text can confuse a computer that can read bad handwriting as if it were cooked on a typewriter. The truth is, he's messed with the software companies to make sure no software comes out that will cut out his little loops, to read the text. A good way to enforce control. Since most people never run across documents with such text, no major open source solution has been attempted. Why solve something that doesn't affect you? Controlling the variables. He hasn't learnt the first lesson of control yet, the entrepreneur. But he will. Harold will make sure of that, if painfully. He thumbs through files pushing, date by date, place by place. The info is in here somewhere. He knows it. The first farms were located in North India, somewhere in Bihar. A perfect place, fit for exploitation. And the entrepreneur had really dug in. The more Harold had read, all those years ago, he'd been fascinated. The entrepreneur leased the land for peanuts and mechanized the farms at vast scale, building a tax free business empire that over the years rivaled the best. Like all good businesses, he'd integrated vertically, controlling the supply chain, leveraging a great waterways network along the Ganga and Brahmaputra to move goods rapidly and across India. Controlling the manufacturing for the requisite massive farm machinery. Even occasionally selling to competitors. Never at quite the same quality though. That should have been a hint. Most businessmen would have taken the short term gain. Plowing money from every means possible. The plans here were bigger. The margins he was making were unheard off, undercutting all other farms and still swimming in profits. The benefits of unprecedented scale and efficiency. The next thing he knew he had a business that commanded 20 percent of the food flowing into Kolkata and Delhi. He hedged against the weather by spreading his farms along the network and cut his costs to peanuts by leveraging the scale of his network. Nobody could compete. It was surprisingly simple, not easy mind you, but simple on the surface. Underneath, it was all sorts of complicated, with logistics networks so vast, the government would have struggled to build them. The wonders of private enterprise. He found it on the map, Harold. Tapping his fingers upon the paper at the location. A village that no longer existed. In fact, none of them did, for miles and miles now. Factories and factories, spinning up goods, farms, weaving food in the fields and the occasional tenement for the small corps of engineers required to run them. Turns out the city business had turned out to be more lucrative than the farm business. Though less tax-free. But who cares about taxes when you're making money hand over fist. Everybody cares. The thought flashes by as he smirks. Not a man he has seen in all his years with a deep love for those beloved taxes. It had been an elegant idea, and the next thing it was everywhere. Cities so high they would touch the sky. Clumps of towers all interconnecting, capable of housing more people than had ever lived together. The first megacity built in all of human history of even comparable size was Tokyo. And upon that model came even larger constructions than that which once stood out as the gold standard. Where Tokyo housed 40 million people the first great Megacities the entrepreneur would build would grow up to 50-60 million people. Chewing upon the hungry masses that dotted the Indian subcontinent. And soon it was Africa and the middle east too that was engulfed. Wherever there were villages, and a sparsely spread populace living in poverty, there was a megacity, ready to hoover them up and stack them sky-high. Saturating and concentrating opportunities, and building a culture of hope and mobility as he proudly called it. If the country was to ever grow into anything as great as the west ever had, more people had to live in cities, a bright future was almost certain to have more cites, and possibly bigger ones. It was a sharp insight, that drove the entrepreneur driving him to sink all that he could and more into these constructions. It was obvious, an inevitability, but not certain to work. Mistimed brilliance works out to little more than folly. Almost but no cigar is no cigar. And possibly more. But it worked. It would have been a disaster to get the timing wrong. But he got it right. And maybe he aided in making it so. And so did others. Harold's fingers press the buttons on his remote to build up the volume. He looks at the tv. And as he looks at that smug, proud, face expositing away, he smiles. Not over yet Buddy. Not over yet.
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