almost capital Free Enterprise vs capital-heavy Franchise Enterprise

One of the biggest bilge streams feeding into Era of Progress's emphasis on plenticide and synthetic autarky was 'capitalism' -- which I define as making money off of your rare access to large lumps of capital in an economic culture that really needs large lumps of capital to function.

Capitalism needs two things to really flourish : scarce physical/scarcity bottlenecks controlled by 'franchises' and the necessity for capital-intensive factory processes to successfully operate those franchises.

It is not enough that that there are only a few potential sites to produce sizeable amounts of hydroelectricity in any given nation and that governments get to give them away as exclusive "franchises" --- to the people who bribe them best.

It is also necessary that these few hydro sites require billions in capital before they can deliver a single amp of energy.

One of the best forms of an exclusive franchise is a 'patent' , hopefully one that also requires licensors to pony up a billion or two to put their license to work - for then the patent practically polices itself.

(After all few potential competitors will bother to evade patent royalties if doing so still requires coming up with tons of money to get the pirated process to produce output.)

Let us see how my claims work out in a specific example.

Wool was once manufactured, cleaned and carded in hundreds of millions of tiny almost capital free enterprises quaintly called "farms".

The wool itself was actually manufactured in even smaller factories called "sheep" (or lamas etc) --- factories dirt cheap to buy and that replicated themselves so you hardly ever needed to buy another.

But if synthetic wool was ever even semi perfected, only a few people would own the right (the patent) to make it and only a few factories would actually make it worldwide, partly because of the high cost of patent royalties but even more importantly because of the inability to pony up the billion dollar cost of the huge lumbering clumsy factory set to make the synthetic wool.

I almost said "and don't forget the additional billion dollars in ad dollars needed to fool people into thinking inferior synthetic wool was better than natural wool", but I didn't.

Because that job was done, totally for free, by thousands of deluded scientists and science 'journalists' (cheerleaders), drunk on their own synthetic Kool-Aid.

Over all, this shift from millions of tiny efficient factories to a few huge inefficient factories was called "Progress".

You gotta love it !!!!!

As a political animal, I do tend to see Modernity as an ideology, not an Era

I freely admit, that as a longtime political animal (and as an Dal '80 political science graduate) I do tend to see the world through the glasses of 'political' ideologies.

That is, I see our internal/personal ways of viewing reality ultimately having sharp public/political (power/force/violence) consequences.

So, in many ways, JANUS MANHATTAN'S CHILDREN is as much a work of political science as it is of history.

This is because of its focus on WWII's shortfall between modernity's ideologies and physical reality.

This will encompass, just for example, examining the pre-WWII ideas about armies clashing vs WWII actual acted-out clash of physical armies vs post-WWII ideas about what did happen during those clashes.

War imagined (pre and post) versus War lived, to freely adapt Lucy Riall's definition of the new approach to biography in academic history.

History is particular good at going into German and Soviet archives and counting dead tanks to find out if Prokhorovka's reputed claim as the 'greatest tank battle in history' actually happened as publicly remembered.

While Political Science is excellent at determining what public/political capital that all the world's soldiers, politicians, deniers and video game designers made out of Prokhorovka's myth.

Similarly, conventional histories of WWII strategy are content to simply that the UK had less population and soldiers than Germany and so Britain was loath to invade Europe without American help.

But I intend to ask what private prejudices lay behind the Allied unwillingness to think of getting the 6 million strong volunteer dark-skinned Indian Army to invade occupied Europe --- instead of a waiting for a mere million white American conscripts instead ?

But I suspect that so strong is the hold of Modernity-cum-racism still upon the western mind that historians - even today - are loath to even think my suggestion can be taken seriously enough to be examined before being dismissed.

This is why I so adamantly reject the claim of Modernity 'merely' being a period in time (an Era), a period of time when the ideology of socialism/communism clashed with those of liberal/conservative capitalism and of fascism.

Instead I see these admittedly better known ideologies as being (during the Era of Modernity hegemony) absorbed into and completely affected by, the larger and newer supra-ideology of Modernity.

Similarly, in the hetro hegemony of today's Era of Postmodernity, these sub-ideologies along with that of the fading Modernity survive (all in altered postmodern forms) but all must compete against the fastest rising supra-ideology of Open Commensality....

Modern Era/Modernity: Matter/Anti-Matter

You have to admire the sheer audacity of Modernity as it sought a full compass rollback of the effects of the Modern Era, under the sheep's skin guise of daring to lead this counter-revolution under the name of Modernity !

Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.


So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.

Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.

The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.

The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.

Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.

Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.

The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....