Summarizing - 19-12-2025

I’ve been exploring how power pulls the levers. My intellectual (and software development) style is to explore as much territory as fast as possible then to come back to tighten, polish, pressure test, scale up and fill in the details. To that end, I’ve heavily leaned on Claude to research and write these essays based on my theories. The next phase will be to come back and manually write the full synthesis once the territory has been mapped.

The ground explored thus far on how power works:

• Co-opting religion

  • Secularized Worship

  • The Alchemy of Power

  • From Galilee to Empire

  • The Invention of the Confessing Animal

• Directing and Forming education, Exploiting Literature

  • How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature

    • The Russia-Ukraine section is particularly interesting, deserving its own essay

  • The Employable Subject

• Re-defining the Self
  (not all of these essays relate to power, but they lay the groundwork for definitions of self that power can then exploit).

  • Burnout is a Modern Invention

  • From Calvinism to Capitalism

  • Know Thyself: Greek vs Christian

  • Know Thyself: Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu

  • Know Thyself: Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart

  • Know Thyself: No Self

  • Know Thyself: Through What?

  • Know Thyself: The Kingdom Within

• Picking and Filtering Ideas

  • Why Power Chose Materialism

  • Why Reasonable Ideas Die

• How Religion lives on as a ghost in secular ideas, creating unexpected outcomes.
  (These need better synthesis and summarization).

  • Christianity’s Structural Inheritance in Marxist Thought and Practice

  • Monstrous Doubles: René Girard and the Mimetic Inheritance of Religious Structure

  • Why Marxism Is Impossible Without Christian Eschatology

  • Monotheism to Now

And a little bit about where those chosen levers are taking us:

• Results of American Education

  • The Employable Subject

• Results of Materialism

  • Materialism is Killing You

  • Countering Materialism

  • Burnout is a Modern Invention

• The results of secularized Augustinian Christianity

  • The Invention of the Confessing Animal

And some of the things that set initial conditions:

• Geography → Selection Pressure → Culture

  • Why Cultures Differentiate

But what “hard constraints” remain in place over time?

Next realms to explore:

• Financial power

• Hard power

• Media power

• Permanent hard constraints

• Black swan events

  • AI

  • Industrial Revolution

  • Internet Revolution

  • Atomic Power

• Taking secret societies more seriously

• Modeling Capital as a “Cosmic Power”

• Interests of Trans National Capital

The ultimate goal is to try to figure out where we’re headed once I see where we’ve been. Predictive History has been valuable fuel for thought on this journey as well as my past proclivity for and attraction to:

• Kierkegaard

• Nietzsche

• Heidegger

• Hume

• Girard

• Foucault

• Byung-Chul Han

• GK Chesterton

• Wittgenstein

But I need to branch out, find more thinkers, get back to reading full sets of works. E.g.,

• Calvin

• Dante

• Augustine

• Aquinas

• Chaucer

• Shakespeare