Quick Note: Institutions Push the Cycle of Thesis and Antithesis Along

I’m not in the right headspace to draft a full chapter at the moment (caught up in the trouble of attempting to take the Framework Process down to infant trauma or sideways to what I’m calling “acute trauma”), but I’ve thought up a little device that clears up a gap several readers have found in my schema.

“Why do parents intentionally inculcate their children with the appropriate pathologies at the moments of history when the cycle of Eros and Thanatos shifts?”

1: A crisis occurs due to the fundamental weaknesses of a pathological society (the Black Death kills 1/3 of an over-grown population)

2: Individuals who have, by happenstance, been inculcated with the appropriate pathology thrive in these new conditions (Medici bankers et al)

3: They form organizations which similarly thrive because they are dispositionally primed to outcompete what came before them (guilds and burgherates winning rights from feudal lords)

4: Parents, seeing the success that can be had by joining these institutions, seek to train their children for success in them (apprenticeships)

5: This process expands until, eventually, society as a whole institutes a process designed to inculcate children with the appropriate pathology (high schools)

Then it loops back around.

At no point is this process mimetic. The condition parents are aiming for is a real relationship of means to ends (a pathology) which you could find in an identical form in another population bearing an entirely different history (i.e. Han China and Rome). The homeostasis points are embedded in our psycho-physiology, so the process that unearths them is a process of mass recognition prompted by the example of a competitive institution, not a process of manufacturing a mode of being out of thin air.

I’ll write this up more prettily later.