Girard in Silicon Valley: Notes from a Lecture by Peter Thiel
imitatio.org
imitatio.org
As much as I dig ontological psycho-historical speculation I find myself beginning to realize just how different we moderns are from the ancients. I fear that any resemblance between our own systems and those that existed several millennia ago would, like "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs", be purely coincidental.
It just so happened on this moist summer eve that as I stumbled upon this link I happened to be perusing Tagore's Sādhanā.
In "The Relation of the Individual to the Universe" he indeed speculates about what caused the ancient forest-dwellers to acquire wealth, build cities and become kings. After failing to become one with Nature, the ancient sadhus sought to emulate the wider Cosmos in a controllable microverse, in which they could achieve a limited all-consciousness.
Perhaps somewhat analogously to the way mathematicians in the 1930's, stymied by Gödel's proof that axiomatic formalism would always remain necessarily incomplete, created their own artificial oasis of finite and deterministic binary logic in the form of early computing.
I think it's just something in human nature to want to raise and nurture something successful - but past a threshold you become too much and are now something to vilify and despise. Seems like a good way to put it is that for successful people, the public says "We think you are a God, but as soon as you believe you are, we will kill you to prove that you aren't"