What are the conditions for creating cultural golden ages, and can they be recreated through technological means in our era?

Why are most intellectuals leftists? Was Plato more right-wing or more left-wing than Aristotle? Did technological development lead to the creation of the Bible? What is the connection between the myth of the revelation at Mount Sinai and the invention of the alphabet in Sinai? A speculative interview with a speculative historian. The historian's name and questions are kept in the editorial office

A contemporary renaissance - restoring the crown to its former glory  (Source)

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Answer: You see, eventually your turn has come as well.

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Answer: The most important phenomenon in history is the emergence of prominent cultural golden ages, limited in space-time, and particularly - and this is the most amazing thing - very small in terms of the number of people who participated in them. Classical Athens, Jerusalem during the writing of the Bible, the Renaissance in Italy, the Scientific Revolution in Europe, the Industrial Revolution in England, the Jewish boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Information Revolution and Silicon Valley, and more. How can we explain the golden age in Athens, for example? Where did this enormous, miraculous concentration of talent come from, within just a hundred thousand people? What is crucial is the existence of a market, meaning mechanisms of competition, evaluation (reputation), incentives, and innovation (including creative freedom), not a capitalist market of money, but a market of creativity, which is the most efficient learning mechanism, the invisible hand of the spirit, that is, the invisible brain. The brain will eventually be understood as a market of creativity and thoughts, competing with each other. Stimuli competing for memories and actions, memories and emotions competing for actions, and thoughts competing for logic and attention and internal narrative, and for speech and writing. Therefore, the creative state of the brain is a state where many thoughts compete, and there is freedom of thinking within it in different directions, not a state of control and deduction. And the main thing is the incentive of creative pleasure, the brain that rewards successful creative thought with a burst of dopamine and pleasure. That's why sex is not a creative state, because there is no competition in it, only pleasure.

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Answer: Look, the most important speculative question to ask is: What will be the next golden age? In a historical perspective, the thing that will contribute the most to creativity will be harnessing sexual pleasure not for sensory stimulation but for intellectual innovation, and then people will be interested in creative thinking as they are interested in pornography. It's not some new logic, or a more sophisticated processor, that will drive the human brain forward - but a new pleasure, a new desire and a new passion. It's enough to rewire the whip, which is easier than replacing the horse, or increasing horsepower.

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Answer: To rehabilitate culture, we need to create a new golden age, and this time it's possible to consciously build a new, competitive market, using a computerized system, and computerized reputation. The competitive market of academia has gone bankrupt in terms of cultural creativity, for example, literary or artistic creativity. To save literature, we need to re-establish the literary republic. The new market must be distinct from the entertainment market, but still remain a market. The blind hostility of leftist intellectuals to the market delays the establishment of such a market, and therefore it will probably be established by right-wing intellectuals, who are always a very fertile minority among intellectuals. Why is the vast majority of intellectuals leftists? Not because the left is smarter, but because the left is more international, and less national, meaning it's a network that tends more towards connectivity than creativity (the uniqueness of each part).

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Answer: The question is not why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, but why there is almost no antimatter. What is the source of the absolute asymmetry, not just asymmetry? A slight bias is enough for almost all intellectuals to become leftists - because politics is a herd phenomenon. And why is there equal representation of left and right, secular and religious, precisely among the greatest intellectuals? A thinker who has passed enough time since his time - we can no longer say whether he is right-wing or left-wing. Is Kant right-wing or left-wing? Is Plato more right-wing or left-wing? Is he more right-wing than Aristotle?

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Answer: Can it be said that right and left are not directions in space - but in time? The right is the past and the left is the future, except in the economic sense, where the left is the past and the right is the future. And why this crossover? The right is against the economic state (i.e., in the intra-state system) and for the national state (i.e., in the inter-state system), while in the left it's the opposite. This is because the right has vertex thinking and the left has system thinking. The right will look from within the system at the system, and the left will look from the system into the system. In intra-state issues, individuals are the vertices and the state is the system, while in multi-state issues, the vertices are the states and the international system is the system. What will eliminate this contradiction is the disappearance of the state as a system, that is, as dividing between inside and outside, along with the elimination of the brain as a system, that is, as dividing between inside and outside. Every neuron will be a citizen in the entire global brain.

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Answer: Exactly. That's why it's important to build the social network that will save culture. We should rely on my cross-sectional studies on golden ages and imitate the historical conditions I found - so that the history of Athens will repeat itself, but this time in our era. For example, if we want to write great literature again on the scale of the Bible, that is, one that can survive thousands of years as the basis for all civilization - we must first clarify, historically, what is the difference between the Bible and other epics and myths. Why specifically it? Why specifically in Judah?

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Answer: Great. Now that we know what a golden age looks like, we can finally speculate on how the Bible was written. There was a network of competing stories and laws and prophecies and songs and wisdom proverbs, of people who told them orally, and there were also editors, who were scribes, who chose the best versions, and usually more than one, and combined them. That is, there was initially aesthetic optimization, a market of chapters competing for the heart of the people, and gaining reputation, and then religious aggregation that saw holiness in the materials, and therefore could not ignore reputation and erase chapters, but only combine them. This is how the network structure of the Bible was created, with parallels and allusions and recurring motifs. This is how a book was created that was written by a people, over generations, and not by any individual. It wasn't a genius editor who chose the best, but the people themselves (the market) created the reputation, and the narrative freedom stemmed from the fact that it wasn't a writer who wrote a book, in some court, but these were the stories of the people, and therefore the literary market was free. Hence the tremendous authority of the text, the superhuman, which is not the authority of any human writer or editor. On the contrary, the editor had very little authority in the face of sacred texts from the past, and the authority was the authority of the text, of the past, of an entire people. Hence the tremendous consciousness of the sacredness of the text, which when it was edited was already sacred, and they were afraid to erase and change and unite. No individual had decisive discretion in the process, but the invisible literary hand of the market wrote great literature. Hence the rare acceptance of the text by the people, not because of some trick or one-time reform (as my non-speculative historian colleagues claim), but because it was their text, for generations, which embedded within it generations of transmission, literary geology. The Bible is the result of an evolutionary process, not intelligent design. And why is this important for the future? Because here's an answer to the question - how to write the next Bible.

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Answer: Why was the Bible written specifically in Judah? Why didn't such a network exist in other nations? We must assume that this stemmed from the monotheistic idea, or conversely, that the monotheistic idea stemmed from these conditions. We must assume that the monotheistic idea was related to the invention of the alphabet in Sinai, the only place in history where the alphabet was invented, and that it is the source of all alphabets in the world - this is not a coincidence. Like many new technologies in the ancient world, this was an invention that stemmed from a religious idea, and its first use was religious. Unlike other religions, this was a religion for the masses, not a governmental religion.

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Answer: The abstraction of "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness" is related to the abstraction of the letter from a specific image - to an abstract movement, like an abstract god, and as a reaction to hieroglyphic writing, and in contrast to cuneiform writing which was an administrative script based on money and quantity (the number). The monotheistic idea also suits a popular religion, as opposed to the pantheon of gods of an institutionalized religion. That is, beneath the script and monotheism (which was initially the idea of the god of the people, and not of a single god) lies another development - of the people's religion. This is a religion of a people of slaves and nomads, whose heroes are simple people, the patriarchs for example, and not kings and aristocrats. Its literature is popular prose, not high poetry. The hero of the Bible is the people (not God!), and therefore it shapes a consciousness of the people's responsibility even before democracy. From here we can also understand what is the factor beneath the golden age in Athens.

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Answer: One can always express hope, but our time is up.