Auntology: The Waystation of Red Pill Sanity

“...At the same time, because of the existence of such institutions, it is hard to avoid becoming an empire because the system itself had its own power...  This institution, which can scare the Communist Party, should probably mirror the Communist Party. It also needs bureaucratic institutions and armies as large as the Communist Party, otherwise, you can’t oppose the latter... For McCarthy, this was very painful because he had a close flesh-and-blood connection with the American community, it was a great pain for him to leave politics. But for Ayn Rand, it did not matter. She was what I call a rootless wanderer from the very beginning. She had no flesh-and-blood relationship with American society. She was an intellectual and relied on selling her theory... ”

"...Such an America could not have played a major role in world history. The key to this significant role lies in two events: the New Deal and the Second World War... If you only treat this phenomenon as a dichotomy of the left and the right,  you haven’t grasped its full depth. The correct understanding is that it is in essence a Roman imperial nature..."

"...The good guys around us are just like those in the movies. Senator McCarthy was then such a Judge Hardy. At the same time, Ayn Rand was a wanderer who first found her way to New York and California, with a little bit of achievement and a little bit of money, started to cultivate her social life... Since Ayn Rand came to California and then moved back to New York, her social circle consisted largely of intellectuals... The way she understood American society was totally different from those of McCarthy who relied on his experience and instinct..."

"... What is civic education? The people are the rulers, and what is the task of the rulers? A ruler is someone who takes risks for the ruled, just as a parent is someone who takes risks for a child... The people of a truly sustainable democracy are accustomed to mortality, war and danger. They are used to learning the necessity of making the right decisions in the midst of all sorts of dangers, at the cost of wrong decisions and bad decisions. They are comfortable with developing the ability to manage risk in themselves as leaders..."

Season 3 Pandemics and Beyond
Episode 1 Dense but homogeneous populations

"... The spread of infectious diseases requires densely inhabited conditions, which is tantamount to requiring civilization itself. Civilization has the innate concept of a dense population... One byproduct of civilization is that it allows its certain beneficiary groups, such as those that first invented agriculture, to breed in large numbers with relatively homogeneous genotypes, and as a result create a susceptible population in an epidemiological sense..."

Season 2 - Lords and Wanderers

The third episode is a part of a casual discussion between William and Zhensi Yuan taken place in 2014. The full script for the discussion (in Traditional Chinese) has been published as a book《文明更迭的源代碼》and is available on Amazon.

"A responsible landlord as a chief stakeholder in a community can become a rootless wanderer, just as a peasant can turn into a vagabond..."

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Season 2 - Lords and Wanderers

The first two episodes are excerpts from an invited talk of YiXi, which was first published on April 12, 2014.  The full video (in Mandarin Chinese) is at https://youtu.be/edB7ly0_KSc .

"One thing that has been consistent from the Middle Ages to the present, when comparing the West with China, is that the West has always had much richer organisational resources than China. Chinese society is flattened and scattered, an iteration of countless single cells, and complex structures cannot be created, just as a pagoda cannot be built on top of quicksand. "

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/auntology_pod

Season 2 - Lords and Wanderers

The first two episodes are excerpts from an invited talk of YiXi, which was first published on April 12, 2014.  The full video (in Mandarin Chinese) is at https://youtu.be/edB7ly0_KSc .

"One thing is different though, the Chinese dream does not really exist. The so-called American Dream is a stable consensus that runs through history and permeates across society, such as individualism, personal striving, a sense of protagonism by ordinary people, that sort of thing. There is no such consensus in China, and the Chinese Dream is merely a cosmetic phrase, used for perfunctory purposes. "

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"...In this regard, I suggest that all of you: first, do not believe a word in Chinese history textbooks; second, for the books produced by Chinese scholars, even though we must respect their ability to verify and collect information, you'd better not subscribe to their conclusions, because they are essentially ignorant of ecological fields in the sense of evolutionary ecology..."

“...As a very cunning man with a deep understanding of imperial court politics, under the desperate circumstances of 1972, I believe, Mao had no better choice. China was in the same situation as Assad and Damascus today: the Soviets wanted him to die, the Americans wanted him to die, his own party comrades wanted him to die, and the people had been tormented by you almost to death, so as soon as he breathed his last, his end would be very terrible, and he may even be killed before death...”