Meta Summary - 17-12-2025

I’m re-reading The Great Books of the Western World with a focus on:

• geo-theological | “How does power work”

  • Riding the religious and cultural waves

• geo-theological | “How do religion, economics, science, geography, politics feed back into one another and develop one another”

  • The current key insights:

    • Geography sets initial constraints (why cultures differentiate)

    • These constraints create problems to be confronted (why cultures differentiate)

    • The problems create selection pressure for specific skills (why cultures differentiate)

    • Those with those skills become the elites

    • The skills are institutionalized and create cultural artifacts

    • These institutions and cultural artifacts birth traditions and religion

    • Problems arise (class tensions, invaders, famine, corruption)

    • Revolution starts brewing from those problems (peasant uprisings)

    • Disaffected elites (or current elites) re-interpret, add to, modify, culture for political gain (peasant uprisings)

      • The religion and culture is the operating system of the people. To motivate the people requires tapping into that OS. Put another way, the only stories that will resonate with the people are stories that their cultural heritage will accept.

    • Culture & Religion changes but still keeps most of the old grammar
      From Gold To Calvinism | Why Atheists Think in Christian | Marx as Christian

      • E.g., Geneaologoy of morals, Marxism as Christian skeleton, Enlightenment as maintaining Christian time & victim focus & eschatology, dostoevsky, foucoult, girard.

        • Need to port these posts to substack: https://tantaman.com/blog.html

• self | “What psychological burdens can man not bear?”

  • This gets into an interesting understanding of God via the usefulness of God rather than truth value of God.

    • Dostoevsky (prediction of Stalinism before Stalin),

    • Girard

      • he explains modern political polarization

      • he predicts identity politics

      • he predicts “competitive victimhood”

      • he predicts jihadist martyrdom

      • he predicts social media dogpiling

      • he predicts the collapse of sacrificial protections

      • he predicts escalating mimetic rivalry

      • he explains why secular humanitarianism becomes violent

      • he explains why modern societies feel apocalyptic

    • Byung Chul_Han

• self | “How has our psychology changed?”

Pastoral power, confessional power: https://claude.ai/chat/94694b94-03ee-4a0f-b253-9724d73e6f97