We’re seeing the medieval Personality Cult up close this week. The press and other courtiers are always devoted to the Person of the King. The actions and behavior of the King are utterly irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the King is a baby or an incompetent imbecile or an evil monster. Everyone must sacrifice and die for the Person of the King, and everyone must fight and die to defeat the Pretender To The Throne, whether Nixon or Trump.
In this clip Batya is interviewing Yannis Pappas. He comes from an old Greek culture and has a long racial memory. His old culture gives him a more mature view of Western idiocy.
Starting around 4:00 he narrates a universal story in that part of the world. The Ottoman sultans were EVIL, and their occupied countries developed ways of surviving. His grandfather was sent to Egypt to keep him away from a local sultan who liked boys.
In a more modern sense Pappas talks about his father’s Greek restaurant in NYC. Mafia protection was a MATURE way of dealing with criminality. Systems are fake. Systems never work. Personal power works. Blackmail works, and blackmail can be a beneficial two-way transaction.
Everyone thinks like a child now. It’s all good guys and bad guys, all a game board. Back then everything was cash. If you didn’t want to get robbed you got protection. When the criminals knew your restaurant belonged to Albert Anastasia, they didn’t bother you.
YES. The Mafia works better than police. I’ve seen it in Enid, which was a fully connected city when I lived there in the ’70s. There was very little petty crime, the social structure was ‘flatter’ and more accessible, and the city government was COMPETENT. The government actually SERVED THE PEOPLE because it functioned on a COMMERCIAL BASIS.
I learned the cultural lesson a few years earlier in prison. The guards were incapable of protecting you from private rapes. If you had a Man, you were protected. You could also find a less violent cellmate through Beasley’s Realty Service.
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Retail transactions create a personal two-way obligation. True in business and in governance. When you forbid the analog adaptiveness of retail, all transactions become binary. In a binary system, one man has all the power.
The evolution of this new setup began around 1910 and accelerated in 1946. “Good Government” movements eliminated local retail politics and stressed the importance of “rule of law”. At the same time, parenting and personal relationships were destroyed by all-consuming EXPERTS. Never trust your senses. Always trust the Scientist and the Economist and the Doctor and the FBI Agent.
2020 exposed the total and absolute failure of all systems and abstractions. It’s all medieval now, all old-culture, all raw PERSONAL POWER. If you still believe in systems, you’re a fool.
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Later thought: Both “sides” believe in the Person of the King. The Repooflicans tell us that nuclear war is imminent because the King is an imbecile. It doesn’t work that way. The button has been controlled by a complex network of technocrats and computers since the 70s. Again we’re echoing the ancient setup where the courtiers had all the power. Baby Kings or imbecile Kings were openly represented by a Regent, who was the verb form, the imperative form, of the King while the infantile or senile body was the noun form of the King.
Polistra's Mill 