Slavery, Opium, and Hydrocarbons: Bottom Lines & Ruling Classes

If you are to have any direct perception of the ruling class of our times, then you must be able to relate the same to the hard bottom lines which motivate their behavior and utterance. 

This may seem abstruse, but in accordance with the method one transparently employs it will become clear in retrospect from the suspension of a set of exemplars. We will start with slavery.

In the case of slavery it was much like any businessman at any time or place: they dread not only not making a profit for the year but even more so being ruined. 

This was one of the predominant reasons why reluctance slowed emancipation: 'You are going to compensate us for the loss of our slaves, are you not?'

In fact, people were ruined by the end of slavery: people like Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, a Malagasy poet generally acknowledged as one of the best African poets of the 20th century. His family was of noble extraction by the reckoning of his people, and its wealth lay almost exclusively in the possession of slaves. With the emancipation of the slaves there went the fortunes of the family.

We have sufficiently seen the relation of the ruling and comfortable classes in relation to the bottom lines and realpolitik of slavery and emancipation.

It does now to increase the expressions of this underlying form in the set. One will pause here in order to make this clear, since it is the transparent method mentioned earlier. It must be understood for the pedagogical method to be clear in direct relation to human thought. 

For human thought receives multiplication from the existence of items in a set; and the Montessori for adults method transparently used here aims at stimulating thought by thus deliberately guiding people ever more towards the underlying essence common to all items of the set. 

It is just the same as in spiritual instruction, where it takes the form of showing people the same correspondence from different camera angles in the Word; or the same concept as expressed first in narrative and then in proverbial mode. 

We return to the hard bottom lines and the promised second item: the Opium Wars.

The Opium Wars were two wars fought by the British Empire to keep egregiously large numbers of Chinese people addicted to opium. 

If you think about it, this is truly extraordinary. Did they tell you that in history class, by any chance? I suspect it will have been skipped entirely or mentioned in passing with a mumble and no contextualization.

Well, this is the contextualization: the British Empire's finances were in such a delicate state that farming junkies looked preferable to the alternative.

To be clear, the schools of the British Empire will not have spent much time on this matter anymore than the schools of transnationality will be as honest as they might be about those 'carbon emissions reductions'! 

It will be appreciated how promptly a student in the Roman Empire will have answered his instructor's query about the Emperor along such lines: 'He gets elected every ten years by the Senate'. He would no more say that the Emperor would snuff any Senator who did not vote Yes than a 19th century British school would tolerate insinuation that the Empire's finances were heavily dependent on drug addiction! 

Before we leave the topic of the Roman Empire, one will topically note that it comprises a second item of the second set which we will label 'hard bottom lines of finance in extensive Empires'. For the Roman Empire which initially enjoyed such 'conquest prosperity' began over the course of time to yield less of such even as the financial burden of administration grew.

This will of course be understood in relation to the finances of the British Empire as the unenviable situation that such agglomerations face. 

We have sufficiently seen to two items in the primary set with which we are concerned, the hard bottom lines of realpolitik in relation to the ruling and comfortable classes of a given world-historic period.

It remains to conclude with the third item, the emergence of transnationality in the context of the subsumption of the nation-state; and the relation of the same to the hard bottom lines of energy return on investment and the actual rates of consumption, exploration, extraction etc of the primary several dozen resources energetically and materially.

It becomes very clear why it is suddenly so important to have fewer cows and to declare from a million excited product labels that such a one contains plant protein!

Breathlessly, we are ever informed when plant protein has been a notable part of our dining experience.

It becomes very clear also why the ruling class of transnationality has such a horror of 'overpopulation'. Let us just zoom in on this term. Note the prefix 'over'. Unless there is some other variable in relation to this which functions as an overriding imperative of carrying capacity, then there is no 'overpopulation', there is only population!

Of course, like all items in the set of the tools of realpolitik deployed by the ruling class of our times it comes down to... what's that again? Bottom lines. It costs less not merely financially but energetically if you eat more soymeat and less beef. And as for that prefix 'over', it is one thing to feed up to 8 billion people in the age of complex hydrocarbon abundance; but quite another to to feed the same number of people with the same tendency to drop litters in the age of complex hydrocarbon scarcity.

Suppose you own a mining company. Do you use the highest quality coal first or the lowest quality? Of course you use the highest quality, like the anthracite so prized by railway travelers for the cleanliness of its burn and the lesser wear on their clothes. 

Do you use the coal farthest away from the train station or closest to it? Of course you use the coal closest to it. And you and other directive elements make this and many a like decision countless  times.

This in the course of an enthusiastically profligate bicentennial creates an increasing drag on the world system and, so to speak, the 'imperial accounts'; the directive class is then, like a surfer riding a wave the incidence of which is beyond his control, in the position of surfing the bottom lines of the world-historic period. 

There will be conscious decisions and agreements in relation to those bottom lines; but the ruling class, if it is genuinely such, will proceed to 'dance' with the drag on the world system of worsening bottom lines consciously or unconsciously, in any case compelled to adapt or perish, mitigate or lose power.

These considerations in relation to the items of two sets have been designed to allow unhysterical perception of the reasons behind policies presently causing much perplexity and suffering in a world grown increasingly dystopian.

When in doubt, therefore, ask: what does this policy have to do with hard bottom lines in relation to the transnational decision making structures independent of national borders of our times? 

It is unhysterical and clear. What is unclear is whether the average person will ever see beyond the haze of 'climate protesters' gluing themselves to roads to the reality of contemporary governance in its relation to the bottom lines which, as ever in history, motivate the policies pursued and the public statements made, eg the French speech about the end of abundance; which is one of the most honest statements to have been made to any public. It neglected, of course, to be so blunt as herein due to the perceived necessity of discouraging hydrocarbon hoarding, civil disorder, and general insanity. 

One would like to conclude by making a very challenging matter both intellectually and emotionally very simple and human; and thus one hopes to make up for the work one has just made you do! One said that the ruling class is motivated by the logic of our world-historic period to favor your eating soymeat rather than beef. To be clear, I am motivated by the same logic to eat soymeat rather than beef! I have been motivated by the same logic not to own a car! That is to say, you and I and the rulers and the ruled are all going to react in ways appropriate to the bottom lines of our times, the bulk of people for more financial and less idealistic reasons. You do not, therefore, have to leave the house in order to determine with 100% accuracy that unpopular policies must, as you have been told, relate in a manner similar to that described to hard bottom lines such as  population, energy, and resources.

It is so in your life, it is so in governance. But do not feel obliged to be tightly constrained by these considerations, please, since they are exploratory and not exhaustive, designed to clear the fog but also to be flexible. Use them exactly to the extent that they are useful and no more for achieving a bird's eye view of our restructuring times. 

One will emphasize one final and spiritual point at the conclusion of a secular lecture written in what the Church calls a natural and  external state; specifically an external state in which the commandments of the Lord are remembered to do them. That point is this: the model of transnationality in its relation to bottom lines is designed to facilitate not hating the ruling class in addition to its other duties. 

It is designed to be supportive ideation to not hating them just as wine is designed to make bread easier to swallow. 

When I personally am tempted to hate them, I think of their behavior in these terms and without passion. This is one of the highest uses one may put to framing and modeling of this nature if so inclined. 

May this model prove useful to you in your attainment of a bird's eye view worthy of the name.