changing policy first required changing politics, which meant first and foremost finding a counterweight to the right’s new intellectual edifice.

[...] Kuttner sees a direct line from this kind of thinking to a series of positions that led to a hollowing out of the middle class and an abandoned political constituency that eventually found its way to Donald Trump. The paradigmatic example Kuttner cites is the expansion of free trade, especially to China. This shift was devastating to certain communities and sectors in ways that a landmark 2019 paper by MIT economist David Autor and co-authors eventually acknowledged. “The article examined the loss of factory jobs due to trade and the impact on regional economies, on marriage, and on political backlash,” Kuttner writes. “This story was well known to journalists, sociologists, and historians. The only thing new was that a mainstream economist was attesting to the reality.”

But inside the Democratic Party, Kuttner says, the pull to the right on economic policy wasn’t just intellectual. It was also financial—and personal. The party came to rely too much on donations from groups and individuals with stakes in a low-tax, low-regulation economy, Kuttner says, and on policy advisers who hailed from the world of finance. One person he singles out in the memoir is Robert Rubin, the Wall Street titan who became a top economic adviser to Democrats and who supported policies like focusing on deficit reduction or deregulating the banks that, Kuttner says, were as disastrous as politics as they were as policy.

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/81/when-happy-days-were-here-again/

"Native American beliefs were of particular interest to Weber. On his only visit to America in 1904, he turned down an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt to visit the White House and headed to the Oklahoma plains in search of what remained of Indigenous communities there. Orenda is an Iroquois term for a spiritual energy that flows through everything in varying degrees of potency. Like charisma, possessors of orenda are said to be able to channel it to exert their will. “A shaman,” wrote the Native American scholar J.N.B. Hewitt, “is one whose orenda is great.” But unlike the Western use of charisma, orenda was said to be accessible to everything, animate and inanimate, from humans to animals and trees to stones. Even the weather could be said to have orenda. “A brewing storm,” wrote Hewitt, is said to be “preparing its orenda.”

This diffuse element of orenda — the idea that it could be imbued in anything at all — has prefigured a more recent evolution in the Western conceptualization of charisma: that it is more than human. Archaeologists have begun to apply it to the powerful and active social role that certain objects have played throughout history. In environmentalism, Jamie Lorimer of Oxford University has written that charismatic species like lions and elephants “dominate the mediascapes that frame popular sensibilities toward wildlife” and feature “disproportionately in the databases and designations that perform conservation.”

Compelling explorations of nonhuman charisma have also come from research on modern technology. Human relationships with technology have always been implicitly spiritual. In the 18th century, clockmakers became a metaphor for God and clockwork for the universe. Airplanes were described as “winged gospels.” The original iPhone was heralded, both seriously and mockingly, as “the Jesus phone.” As each new popular technology paints its own vision of a better world, we seek in these objects a sort of redemption, salvation or transcendence. Some deliver miracles, some just appear to, and others fail catastrophically.

Today, something we view as exciting, terrifying and revolutionary, and have endowed with the ability to know our deepest beliefs, prejudices and desires, is not a populist politician, an internet influencer or a religious leader. It’s an algorithm."

https://www.noemamag.com/the-secret-history-and-strange-future-of-charisma/

Roughly 2,500 years ago, something remarkable happened. It occurred not in one place but across the Eurasian continents, largely in parallel. Against the backdrop of Bronze Age civilizations collapsing, empires disintegrating, city-states competing and waves of migration and warfare reshaping social structures, the old mythic orders were failing. Local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience. And out of that turbulence, new kinds of questions broke through: What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?
Within a few centuries, the responses to these questions crystallized into several of the world’s enduring wisdom traditions. In China, Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi explored ethics, harmony and alignment with the Dao. In India, the Upanishadic traditions, the Buddha and Mahavira investigated the nature of consciousness, liberation and nonviolence. In Persia, Zarathustra articulated a cosmic moral struggle between good and evil. In the Hebrew world, the prophets, voices like Isaiah, called for justice and ethical monotheism. And in Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle began a systematic inquiry into ethics, knowledge and the nature of reality.
German philosopher Karl Jaspers named this the Axial Age. What these movements shared, despite their vast differences, was the discovery of a deeper interior dimension of the human being. For the first time, human beings stepped back from the immediacy of mythic experience and turned inward. They developed capacities for moral reflection, compassion and the articulation of universal ethical principles. A new vertical axis opened, linking the inner life of the individual with something transcendent: a universal moral order, a ground of being, a deeper source beyond the self.
Yet this shift carried an unintended cost. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the long arc of this development eventually gave rise to modernity and its “buffered self,” a self that is autonomous and self-authorizing, but also increasingly disembedded from the larger cosmos. Mind became separated from body, subject from object, self from nature. 


https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/

"The AI moment reveals that what we have been calling “intelligence” is not one thing. There are at least three different intelligences that need to be balanced and integrated in today’s institutions and social systems.

The first is artificial intelligence. Its epistemic stance is third-person knowledge: the world as a set of objects, as a data-shaped environment. Though powerful, it is locked in an epistemic stance that operates on patterns of the past.

The second is organic intelligence. Its epistemic stance is first-person (subjective), second-person (intersubjective) and third-person (objective) knowing. It views the world as a shared space of co-existing, living beings. This inherently holds multiple relational perspectives.

The third, emerging intelligence could be called field or source intelligence. Its epistemic stance shifts the viewpoint from a set of objects to a source — the field or soil from which all perspectives arise. It’s a shift not only in the observed, but in the being of the observer. Through that subtle shift, the collective field can become aware of itself.

This is what the mystics knew, what Indigenous knowledge systems have always practiced and what the second Axial threshold calls us to cultivate at the collective and civilizational scale. My colleague Eva Pomeroy and I describe this epistemological stance as fourth-person knowing."

Technology capable of enlarging human freedom, abundance and collective intelligence is being deployed into labor markets, public institutions and information systems that were already creaking before AI arrived. Left unaddressed, that mismatch produces three foreseeable failure modes.

- Productivity without prosperity. As the economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson illustrate in a 2021 article, general-purpose technologies create broad value only after heavy complementary investment in new processes, skills and organizational redesign. When those complements lag, work is reorganized faster than people can retrain, bargain or move, and the gains fail to translate into security, mobility or broader participation.

- Execution without verification. As the economists Christian Catalini, Xiang Hui and Jane Wu argue in a recent working paper, once the cost of producing text, images and code collapses, the scarce input becomes the human bandwidth to validate outputs, establish provenance and ensure accountability. Decisions grow easier to automate than to justify, and algorithmic systems without accountability erode sacred values and the social fabric.

- Capacity without constraint. AI can make states and large organizations far more capable, but as influential intellectuals and policy leaders in AI, Justin B. Bullock, Samuel Hammond and Sèb Krier note in a chapter published last year in “The Art of Digital Governance,” the same tools lower monitoring costs and concentrate discretion, pushing bureaucracies toward centralized control unless contestability, appeal and civil-liberties safeguards advance in tandem.

https://www.noemamag.com/what-humanity-needs-to-flourish-in-the-next-decade/