BlackGrowth

Power. That is the abstract concept behind the one of leadership, fundamental to understand the evolution of human sociality. The nature of power is elusive and yet fascinating.  Everyone wants power . There are the ones who want to rule, and they need power; the ones who strive to accomplish, and they need power; even the ones who just wish to live quiet and unnoticed, they need the power to have someone else manage responsibilities in their place. Any ambition has to be sustained by power. And power is in the first place the power to choose; who to be, what to do, how to act or even to not act at all. What is power? So many variables and just one word, then. What is power? How would you define it? ‘Power’ has many possible facets, depending on the contexts. In general, we can say that power is the capability to bend and shape specific aspects of reality according to one’s will. This is magnified when people work together – humans are a social ...

Humans are a curious species. We are eternally conflicted between our individualism - treasuring freedom, boundaries and independence - and our sociality - which is actually a need and one of the main reasons for our evolutionary success. By exploiting our sociality we are naturally oriented toward progress by expanding the fields of our knowledge and technology. However, in concomitance with our times of crisis and struggle, we see that the way to progress is not necessarily smooth. It is mostly evident in economy and finance - we see that there are perspectives to widen the field and we invest, eventually investing so much that the system can't cope with it and the suddenly expanded field collapses on itself. It is a speculative bubble. Here I will discuss how it is not a mechanism limited to finance - it is everywhere in human activities. It is one of the dark sides of progress itself.     Expanding a field acts on three axis, starting from a pre-existing sphere of acti...

In this series of posts we are using a human body as a similitude for a State.           Among many organs and tissues, which ones better correspond to specific State apparatuses?          Which parallelism can we draw between them? Here we will look at lungs and their counterparts in a State, first by reviewing how they are structured - anatomy - , then how they work - physiology - and eventually what happens when they get disfunctional - pathology. Anatomy - Lungs oxygenate blood like investments supplement economy with new money from http://hyperpshysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/ hbase/Biology/respir.html We already compared blood to money , specifying that blood flow is required to sustain cells as money circulation sustains people. Lungs create the conditions for blood oxygenation, thus allowing it to deliver oxygen to cells. When considering economy and society, investments act like lungs by f...

The West awakes and abruptly - and eventually - notices the ongoing immigration crisis at its gates. Media and politic are focusing their and our attention to the borders, be them between USA and Mexico or Europe and Northern Africa and Middle East.  However, long waves come from afar and this situation has been developing for years. We mostly ignored the causes of this immigration, leaving them unchecked. Blitzkrieg on the economic front Some immigration is due to political chaos and ongoing conflicts. In many other cases, the reasons are economic. Choosing not to regulate the numbers and means of immigration, and not addressing its causes, we allowed it to become the major social issue that is presently confronting us. The issue is also moral and yet it also is made into a business with many illegal shades: moving immigrants closer to borders; employing them underpaid or leaving them without honest jobs at all, ready to be exploited by criminal organizat...