Hope and Change

A friend reminded me that Aristotle explained the household and its marriage as the fundamental unit of the polis, and so to grossly oversimplify, we could infer that marriage itself has always defined some structure for a nation’s politics.

Never more than now.

I would like to suggest that an update is needed: HR should be now be seen as the political “concrete printer” of the building block metaphor in western society, which either s***s out or is enshitted with (I can’t decide which) the mental model for an unfortunate subset of modern marriage, a suffering institution that becomes the building material of the present day city-state.

In part because Human Resources is the most legalistic arm of a corporation, but also because like most “humanely for the good of humanity” efforts, it does its best work covertly.

In an optimal HR org, for all permutations of future interpersonal problems, you simply gather the data that benefits your position, and patiently build the case.

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Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

They say it just repeats, over and over.

This is not just civilization’s rise and fall, but the engineer’s dilemma. Which is, more accurately, Man’s dilemma. We invent problems in order to solve them, with or without technology, or capitalism. It’s the creative impulse, and in most cases it boils down to idleness, or too much time to think.

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Get full access to Astral America at astralamerica.substack.com/subscribe