Prompt: Look, no one is driving the school bus. The children pretend to be amused.
Given a lot of practice during covid with getting work done remotely, the logical civilian defense action is to stay out of big cities, avoid trains and airplanes. A ghost town economy is in the offing.
We notice DC is making no preparations for citizen safety, let alone mental health, in its rush to join the lunatic fringe in support of an arch enemy (to many, including within the Pentagon).
Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Citizens are being held hostage in the unholy land.
The appetite for work and business as usual will dissipate and the economy will grind down to a very low gear if the screens keep showing nothing but chaos and destruction.
The filthy rich are starting to move to their bunkers some will notice.
Should we let them emerge? Maybe under a rock is a better place for them?
Not that the rich have much say in this. The clique maneuvering us towards a conflagration is minuscule. No one is feeling “represented” these days.
As Jeffrey Sachs put it, we’ve been reduced to the role of helpless passengers. The school bus is running on Tesla auto-pilot, FSD: full self destruction.
Some of you "diplo" types will be interested in the cultography here, which isn't always Prime Directive anthropology where the whole point is to not disturb with your own alien culture to the point where you've disrupted the tribe under consideration.
The paradigm anthropologist in question, the non-interventionalist, is great at (a) blending in but also (b) being forthright with the elders in terms of making it clear this is not some covert operation, not even missionary, but more innocently an opportunity to understand, document, and explain to peers back home. The goal is more mutual understanding, fostering better diplomacy on both sides down the road.
That style of anthro is closer to what a diplomat does; they're not about undermining "the other" so much as standing up for themselves, and not being undermined. They play a defensive game, for the most part, which doesn't mean withholding criticisms or refraining from polemics to deflect insults. However, a lucky anthropologist has a support team and quick extraction services if need be, as in "OK, I see we're not getting along, I'm happy to get out of your face, let us know if you want another visit". I can see the ETs waving goodbye from their UAP windows.
Another style of anthro is more missionary, where you believe strongly in saving or liberating some target audience from some vile way of thinking organized by satanists or whatever. You're deeply invested in some goodies versus baddies melodrama, and have many unstated ulterior motives.
"Interventionist anthropology" is not really in the same ballpark as doing "objective science" to the point of sounding oxymoronic, thanks to a gentleman (mainly male) class in a certain polite society awhile back. I'm thinking of Victorian England, at the height of the UK empire, and the emergence of "anthropology" as an academic and secular discipline, adjacent to curation and natural history. The National Geographic Society comes to mind -- less a tool of imperialism, usually (I confess to not reading their magazine recently, is it more like The Atlantic these days?).
What does all this have to do with Quadray Coordinates?
Put simply, Cascadians strongly notice they have a different pantheon when it comes to subcultures. More Blake and Swedenborg, less Galton, less of a NeoRoman eugenicist "us versus them" vibe. In those terms, that's hearkening back to the European schools, but then more to the point is how we don't really have to depend on Europeans that much to keep it grounded, meaning we have folk traditions that don't piggyback on eastern hemispheric mythos all that much.
Lots to put in your pipe there, I know. Smoke it for awhile and see if it clicks. Watch the embedded YouTube to pick up on some of the cultography I'm talking about, if curious.
