Friday 13th of December 2024

Why did the West rise above the rest?...

poster

Over the last two decades, academics and pundits have tried to answer this question. Most begin their search for the birth of the modern world somewhere over the last few centuries: the discovery of the Americas, the invention of the steam engine, perhaps the outbreak of the French Revolution.

 

 

Yet the research of two path-breaking economists suggests that these answers are misplaced. In separate works, they argue that the invention of capitalism and liberalism in Western Europe should be traced to one surprising source: the medieval Catholic Church.  

 

The research program of Jonathan Schultz, an economist currently attached to the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution research group at Harvard, is built on a simple observation: Western Europeans—and their cultural descendants in places like North America and Australia—think differently from people raised in other cultures. This is not a unique observation. Over the last two decades, psychologists have asked questions like “Do you think most people can be trusted?” and “Is it important to think up ideas and be creative, to do things one’s own way?” They’ve complimented these questionnaires with games cleverly designed to test how willing subjects are to trust strangers, punish rule breakers, break rules themselves, and treat friends and family impartially.

 

Schultz and his team drew on 20 of these cross-cultural experiments (including several “natural” experiments, such as the likelihood that a diplomat at the U.N. from a given country would call on diplomatic immunity to get out of a parking ticket) to sketch a psychological profile of the Western mind. They found that on average, Westerners are more individualistic, more trusting of strangers and public institutions, more likely to donate anonymously, less concerned with the opinions and judgments of their peers, less likely to cheat or bend rules (especially for the sake of friends and relatives), and far less tolerant of nepotism than those from other parts of the world.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-catholic-church-created-our-liberal-world/

 

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 GUS:

 

This is total bullshit… Well not entirely. As explained in my major work “The Age of Deceit” (still in progress), We Westerners are better at deception — including the religious deception. But I am glad that Tanner Greer concluded that:

 

… their work presents a compelling account of the origins of modernity. Capitalism and liberalism are the twin pillars upon which the modern world was built. And both of them were built, unconsciously, by the priests and popes of the medieval Catholic Church.

  

Big words indeed.

 

The whole lot could have unraveled at the Battle of Poitiers — where Charles Martell defeated the Muslims. This battle was the most important, the pivotal point in the whole “Western civilized” structure that followed. And we cannot forget the Cathars either, a religious entity that endorsed the equality of men and women. Since the defeat of the Cathars, by king and pope, the Western World women (WWw) have been bearing the brunt of ongoing discrimination as well. The Church (sort of) normalized non-kin relationships through marriages and this may have had a certain influence on the status of our civilization.

 

But far more than Capitalism and Liberalism, stemming from “kings abandoning the popes in favour of merchants”, the psychopathy and the sociopathy of our leaders were the main bearers of these “Western civilised” gifts. Deviousness was the key “to stay on top” — a deviousness that has been sold to us as capitalization — a process in which what we created was kept and added to with more creation and ruthless ownership, through valuing fictitious profits and robbery through deficits — and liberalism — a devious process with which we (our Western societies) chose to destroy other cultures through war or enslave them. See: tired of being the cake of kings and of emperors, after the opium wars and being the US slave factory...

 

The qualities of dishonesty that would let someone to claim diplomatic immunity to get out of a parking ticket are not exclusive to other civilisations, snigger snigger. The West is full of this shit, including nepotism, trust me, and many of us in the West are good at hiding (except Donald Trump who does it in the open) that we’re deceiving kings, coniving fools and flattering knaves. In our present ways, we, the plebs, huddle in our inane cotton-wooled comforts while we let our officials, which we elect knowingly or blindly, do the dirty deeds which we have to describe as “just” or as “crusade” in order to maintain our moral slate clean.

 

And our “news” are a cultivated form of distraction, disinformation and bullshit that help us maintain this disparity between reality and morality.

 

The West rose “above the rest” by preventing the rest to rise — or be itself. The “West” used various ruthless tactics such as colonialism, slavery and war. The Catholic Church was often a tag along, also used to send its missionaries to prepare the ground for invasions and provide the “mind control” thereafter.

 

On the scientific front, the new thinking was designed to counteract the idea of god. Sciences have actually been the best driver of our morals than the Church. But behind the scene the psychos and sociopaths are using every tricks to make us swallow greatness when it is a precarious illusionary and contemptuous concept.

 

Presently the “West” (read the USA) is fighting to retain this ugly-gained “control”. We are fighting dirty. 

 

"Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Developed”? Yes we have comforts that we do not understand the price is paid on credit to the planetary demise.

 

The “sins" of the Western civilisation are quite extensive:

 

Extra CO2 through industrialisation

War

Poverty (at home and abroad)

Freedom illusions under various hegemony 

Pollution

The destruction of Nature

The desolate inane mindset of a distracted Western population, with “entertainment” and gadgets, that does not see what its elite (church, merchants — aka multinationals — and governments) are doing.

 

Gus is an atheist.

a difficult awakening...


How the West eats its children

 


by  Thierry Meyssan

For Thierry Meyssan, by taking to the streets, the French have become the first Western population to take personal risks to oppose financial globalisation. Although they do not realise it, and still imagine that their problems are exclusively national, their enemy is the same force that crushed the region of the African Great Lakes and a part of the Greater Middle East. In order to understand the project which inextricably unites these apparently disparate events, we have to take a step back.

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article204208.html

the west's yellow vests...

A visiting fellow at the University of Wollongong has resigned in protest after the university surprised and angered academics by accepting a Ramsay Centre-funded degree in Western Civilisation without consulting staff.

UOW academics, including visiting fellow Sarah Keenan who handed in her resignation, woke on Monday to news the university had signed a deal with the Ramsay Centre to establish the country's first degree in Western Civilisation.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/education/staff-left-betrayed-as-university-revea...

 

Read from top....

Read also: The University of Wollongong in no to the ramsay centre pollution of minds...

 

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes


O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folks who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.

Leonardo da Vinci


how china rose above the west...


economic miracle that pulled 700 million people out of poverty
China has pledged more economic reforms to push growth higher and help offset any impact from the US trade conflict. It comes as the world’s second-largest economy marks the 40th anniversary of “reform and opening up” this week.

Statistics show that more than 700 million Chinese people have shaken off poverty since Beijing started its program of economic reforms four decades ago. The figure accounts for over 70 percent of global poverty reduction during that period.

The first wave of reform, which lasted from 1978 to 1989, was characterized by agricultural reform and revival of the private sector. The second wave of reform (from 1992 to 2012) resulted in the legalization of the market economy, China’s accession to the WTO, and a booming private sector.

China’s record in poverty reduction since reform and opening up is without parallel in human history, according to Wang Yiwei, professor of the School of International Studies at Renmin University.

“Between 1978 and 2017, China’s economy expanded at an annual average 9.5 percent growth rate, increasing in size almost 35 times,” he told Xinhua News.

The total expansion of China’s economy over a 39 year period was almost three times as much as Japan’s, Ross noted, adding that “No other economy commencing sustained rapid economic growth even remotely approaches the 22.3 percent of the world’s population as China had in 1978 at the beginning of reform and opening up.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/business/446692-china-reforms-us-war/

 

Of course this did not happen without any help from the West treating China as a defacto slave state...