(introduction)

(UNDONE: The introduction typically describes the scope of the document and gives the brief explanation or summary of the document. It may also explain certain elements that are important to the essay if explanations are not part of the main text. The readers can have an idea about the following text before they actually start reading it.)

Introduction

Our Next Great Enterprise

“Europeans do not know how to liveunless
they are engaged in some great enterprise.
When this is lacking, they grow petty
and feeble and their souls disintegrate.”
— Ortega y Gasset

[W]e have the fortune to live in interesting times – and in these interesting times, we must, even if reluctantly, refresh our souls, people, and civilization, and engage in a great enterprise.

This work explains that next great enterprise.

What Is This Book About?

A Reformation

In every great transformational era cast off the superstitions, errors, justifications, and lies of the prior; and in doing so cause those who either benefit from the prior era, or find opportunity in the newer, to produce waves of resitance and retaliation using new ignorance, error, superstition, justification and lies.

So each great trasnformational era consists of a cycle in which old impedimental rents are destroyed, new transformative opportunities are created, organizations and leaders rotate, consumption and population expands, and the gradual accumulation of calcifying rents proceeds yet again, in and endless cycle of opportunites and their exhaustion.

That is, until a shock by technological innovation, natural disaster, plague, overconsumption, overpopulation, over-extension, trade route disruption, war via immigration, war by religious conversion, warfare of conflict or conquest, creates a demand to change and adapt the entire order.

If there is either no institutional technology available to assist in the adaptation, or there is insufficient free capital to reorganize leaders, institutions, production, population and skills to produce an alternative order, then, as a consequence, the markets we call cities, are occupied, and the populations replaced, or the system of cooperation collapses, disappears, and is hidden by the accumulation of deposits over time.

That failure to reform or transform is why civilizations fail. Those civilizations that do transform, adapt, and evolve, do so for the good reasons – reasons we’ll discuss later on.

Transformational Eras

Transformational eras are made possible by … the invention of new ( … )

Meaningful, descriptive, rational, measurable, commensurable, combinatorial, or transformational technology.

Record by names and descriptions, then by stories, then by writing, …

We compare by ideal types…. Supply-demand curves, and equilibria

We measure by counting, then arithmetic, then by accounting, then by geometry, then by calculus, then by statistics, then by non-Euclidean geometries of consistent but infinitely complex constant relations no longer physically possible, but only logically possible.

We reason by examples within our experience, then by analogy to myth and legend; then by analogy to religious parable, dictate, and dogma; then by justification of morals, norms and law; then by correlation with evidence and recorded measurement; and now by demonstration of existentially possible construction using recipes, formulae, algorithms, programs, models, and simulations.

We trade by luxuries, crafts, commodities, fractional interests, information, and time.

We create weights and measures …..

We render the inconstant commensurable by money and prices,…. Property…

We create various monetary instruments ….

We rule by violence, then by religion and ostracization, then by law and punishment, then by credit and consumption, and now by digital reputation and access to opportunity.

We organize by kin, then by cult, then by law, then by administrative division, then by economic model, and finally by civilization.

We practice imitation ethics, heroic ethics, virtue ethics, rule ethics, and outcome ethics.

Incremental Expansion of Productivity in the Division of Knowledge….

Incremental Expansion of that which has value

spirits, farming, metals, hydraulics, gears, steam, electricity, and now something new.

(myth, reason, theology, rationalism, empiricism, and now somethi

Incremental Suppression of Parasitism

Suppress crime by….

(undone….. solution? The ‘therefore’?)

. . .