Pro Commerce

Category: Pure Pro Commerce

  • Entertaining Gods of Commerce

    Why is the first commercial president so keen on ending warfare?
    Peace

    Before I try to answer that question let me summarize where we are.  Since the late 1980’s I have used the term Pro Commerce for my global view.  My permanent google search for that term turns out about one usage a year, mostly in French.  

    The summary of my life’s work at age 87 is the incredibly strange view that there is a God of humans who interacts in human history.  Earlier this year for similar reasons I concluded that there is a God of the Jews, his interaction with history.

    But why would a God interact with human history? He wouldn’t unless there is something in history that is clearly beneficial for humans and the earth.  Good for humans defines two previous human/God interactions.  Moses’s presentation of the Ten Commandments and his creation of the Jews.

    The third interaction with humans seems to be the infinitely slow creation of commerce.  God loves commerce and has interacted with human history to promote it.  Why commerce?  It is the only social mechanism that promotes human well being.  That is not to say that there isn’t well-being among other species or phyla, there probably is; but commerce is uniquely productive of well being among humans.

    Commerce has always been the one and only social mechanism that brings the total variety of humans together to cooperate.  Other social mechanisms bring some varieties of humans together ranging from mechanisms such as religion to constitutional democracy; but only commerce brings the greatest variety together as an inherent attribute of the mechanism. Cafejpg

    Just sitting, mornings, at my coffee shop in San Francisco I am, every day, astounded by the variety of people (and dogs) that sit together to drink, chat, and to work together as the staff does.  Plus, the incredible variety of people who bring the coffee to me from the entire planet and prepare it, and invest money in the parent global company.  Only commerce does that without dogmas, priests, scriptures or universities, teachers or even people who understand it.  This institution of vitality, neutral caring, universal decency is widely hated, especially by vast multitudes of young people.  Nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of commerce.

    Back to the question of why President Donald J. Trump puts so much effort into creating peace treaties.  Because, unlike the false narrative about commerce by its ignorant haters, war is of no benefit to commerce.  It is fundamentally destructive, promotes arbitrary hierarchy, and wastes resources.  Trump sees the world through the eyes of commerce.  Gaza should be like Singapore, a booming beautiful paradise and a testament to commerce, but it's not, Gaza is a tribal swamp of human hatred.

    America is great because of commerce and God wants America to succeed.  I hope it will.

  • Three Key Concepts to a Better Life

    Three Key Concepts to a Better Life Pos

    1. Positive sum outcomes occur in nearly all human actions.
    2. Cooperation is the mode of modern commerce.
    3. The American model of government is an improvement over all others.

    Every day of my life I have had to deal with people who fail to understand these three fundamental principles of reality.

    Every child starts out saying ‘mine’ and adults have to teach sharing because the world doesn’t work for anyone if there is no sharing. Multiple children can share a single toy but when they don’t share only one is happy and that is not real happiness; it is power over others.

    Most games are zero sum. Only one winner.  But in the real world, with technology and commerce, there are multiple winners.  When three people make bread there is more than three times as much as when one person makes bread.  Specialization allows for non-zero (positive) sum output.  So does technology.  The 90 car freight train can pull thousands of tons more of anything per worker than a single tractor trailer truck.

    Many young people rant against ‘capitalism.’  All societies have capital; the idea that some are based on capital that is owned by the state is an historical error of language and politics. Socialism has been tried in the biggest country, the country with the largest population, an island country, a country with the greatest resources and every other element and always fails. The word should be commerce not capitalism. Every society has it, and some are better run than others.

    Group

    All societies have commerce. The ownership of capital is seldom any different among them. The ones that promote commerce the most are the ones with the greatest wealth and the greatest ethnic and social diversity, like the U.S. and Israel.

    Commerce thrives with cooperation, not competition. In any business, including some with a million employees, the employees work together, the businesses work in cooperation with their suppliers, landlords, banks, neighbors and broader communities.  Commerce is 99% cooperative and only competitive in 1% of all transactions. That is reality. 

    America has generated thousands of homeless on the streets since 1978 and the number of billionaires has increased from a dozen to 750 in the same period.  There is no possible connection. One billionaire could not be created with all (by confiscating) the lifetime production of a hundred thousand homeless people living on the street. Workers

    Two giants, Standard Oil and AT&T, were broken up by the government and two decades later they were back to the original voluntarily, because it was so much more efficient.

    The American model of government is seldom appreciated. But it is the longest stable government on the planet.  While America created the Japanese government and the UN, the model its creators used was the English parliament with the parliament selecting the government.  The UN doesn’t work.

    In the American model there is a local plebiscite for the executive office and two legislative bodies.  The high court is chosen by a combination of both.  In Israel the judiciary selects itself and has failed to maintain its popular survival.

    The reason for the great success of the American form of government has been its weakness: with power divided against itself and among the states. Liberty and individual freedom has been able to thrive with a weaker and more inefficient government.  Few people in the world appreciate this, especially immigrants who hope for a good president, not for a weaker government.  The U.S. survived for four years with no president (Biden).

    Yet these three aspects of reality mean nothing to the wokie leftist ranting about the evils of America and capitalism.

  • How I Succeeded

    How did I carry out three projects in San Francisco out of many that I will describe in the future?

    *The oldest, most successful high end vegetarian restaurant in America.

    *The beautiful East Bay Bridge.

    * A gorgeous small park.

    The oldest, most successful high end vegetarian restaurant in America is Greens in Fort Mason; already 47 years old and thriving. Always listed in San Francisco’s top ten restaurants.

    That is what I was going to write about and will do so later.  In searching the web I find no real history of the modern Ft. Mason. Ft. MAn important history that is unknown. All I could find was this:

    Fort Mason Center, a nonprofit organization, partnered with 

    the GGNRA and opened in 1977. It was the first conversion 

    of a military base to peacetime use and as such, has served

    as a national model. Each year more than 1.5 millions visitors 

    connect with arts and culture on the historic waterfront campus. 

    Through special events and resident organizations, Fort Mason 

    Center offers musical and theatrical performances, exhibits,

    workshops, and classes that inspire and foster creativity for 

    visitors of all ages. Within the historic warehouses are free

    museums, a bookstore, classes, restaurants, and theaters. 

    It began in 1977 when a mature and attractive woman, Ann Howell, came to me and said that the lower part of Ft. Mason, buildings and wharfs, were going to be made a public facility, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation area, the first military facility in an urban area to become public.  

    #2She wanted to apply for the role as operator. She had gathered the names of 110 non-profits, nearly all the hippy groups that came to a Kohotec celebration that had been held in the Civic Auditorium across from City Hall in late 1973.The Fort was going to be given to a non-profit.  So I told Ann to form a non-profit 501:c3 organization and suggested some prominent names of my friends for the board. Ann did everything I told her to and to my complete astonishment she won the property. 

    The reason a sweet innocent inexperienced woman won the management of Ft. Mason was probably that the man who had to decide, Bill, was beleaguered by the most powerful organizations, the University of California, the U.S. Congress, the U.C. Med School, giant hospitals and City Departments.  He was under extraordinary pressure.  Probably hated it.  So, out of pique and revenge he gave the Fort to Ann and her hippy gang.Ann and her boyfriend moved into one of the three giant empty office buildings and started renting the other spaces to 60 non-profits that she could find on her Kohoutek list. Everyone wanted a 50 cent per square foot rent.

    When it had been nearly filled up, with an eclectic collection, she asked for more advice.  I said then that she needed a center for the entire community to converge on to create a durable and stable community.  A restaurant with a coffee shop, in the mornings, and a copy shop.

    Greenssanfrancisco27She didn’t know how to get a non-profit restaurant. So I said I’d do it.

    I chose a location: the old Army vehicle repair shop.  I went to two dear friends. Dick Baker, the Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center who ran several non-profit businesses, the most successful being Tassajara Resort. I showed him the site and he was excited to run a vegetarian restaurant in a beautiful location with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I then went to Rudy Hurwich, another good friend, president of the non-profit Fort Mason board. He supported the idea.

    Three problems that had to be solved.  First the concrete floor was covered in oil that could never be cleaned. Problem solved by California State architect and friend Sim Van der Ryn, who made a new floor 4 feet up which also gave a view out the windows to every table. Second, a fine diner needs wine. The Zen Center voted to make a beer and wine license an exemption to Buddhist tradition, worthwhile.

    Third, a great chef was needed. Abbott Baker got a great Zen cook, Debbie Madison, to spend a year studying with pre-eminent chef Alice Waters. The first chef, Debbie, published many cook and food books over the coming years. The two successor chefs have been equally great. The current one, Katie Reicher, continues the tradition as a genius.

    FrdayFinally, I introduced a marketing idea I had first developed 15 years earlier: to create a grand opening and a loyal customer base.  Everyone within range of S.F. Zen Center and friends of friends were invited to a two month crowded opening.  That came to nearly 10,000 people.  Many were given complimentary wine and meals. Greens was full from then to now.

    Abbott Baker was responsible for the aesthetics of Greens. I later contributed the welcoming values to other restaurants and food events, knowing that more food related business was good for Greens.  Business is not competition, it is synthesis.

    Two of my ideas were not adopted by Greens.  One was to give people who wanted ‘left over’ containers, one out of five people, a high quality freezer box with the name Greens on it.  Greens already had enough business. The second was to designate a small room, the Steve Jobs room, where Steve ate regularly and had his wedding night meal.  No one else liked the idea.

    How did I create this historically important exemplar?  

    The most important was my vast network of friends and associates.

    My personal reputation as someone who is good at business as a: former banker, creator of MasterCard, open to new ideas and a receptive non-judgmental listener. 

    Someone who doesn’t seek personal credit for my many accomplishments.

    Retainer of vast collections of trivial information. I stayed awake when I was in the Army and we listened to lectures and saw movies during my reserve duty special trips to Fort Mason from 1962 to 1967. 

    Finally, I pay close attention to how society works.

     

  • One Man Is Now What Matters

    You should know this name by now: Robby Starbuck.

    StarbuckOne person with the power of the modern social media, the visual media, and the right idea can now have new political power never before imagined.

    Robby Starbuck, understands America’s core values, primarily because his parents escaped from Cuba.  He realized that the ‘woke movement’ to replace the business value of merit with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ ‘DEI’ is a very unAmerican idea.  

    Merit is a core value of America that has slowly surfaced over the 250 years of our history.  Merit has been at war with America's union values of seniority and equality. The triumph of merit over union values emerged at the end of the 1950s as the modern world of commerce triumphed over the domestic hereditary elite (see many earlier blogs). 

    Robby saw the situation. He realized that many corporate Leviathans were suffocating their employees with DEI in house re-education programs; corporations whose customers abhor the woke ideas of DEI.

    Robby, with a Hollywood background in film and a list of over 70 music videos, has made Internet videos showing the DEI programs at Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniel's and put these videos on social media where they were picked up and viewed in the millions. Each of the companies promptly publicly announced the end of their DEI programs.  My favorite result were two videos, one showing an empty Harley-Davidson repair station at the greatest motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D. and another with a motorcyclist shooting his Harley to death.

    The true power of one man with the right idea, the video graphic skills, and modern social media, is that giant Lowe’s and behemoth Ford both backed down and ended their DEI with just the threat that Robby was making a video of their compulsory DEI programs. That is the incredible power of one man.

    It just tickles my fancy that the greatest farce in American media, the New York Times says Robby’s “Attacks aren’t working” while the Wall Street Journal calls him a “One man power house destroying DEI.”

  • In the New Revolution, Teach Commerce

    The revolution in higher education is coming.  There will soon be several new and very high quality universities that will protect and appreciate Jews.  It will be important to teach the realities of commerce.

    Shinjuku_GyoenThere is no such thing as ‘capitalism.’ There is only ‘commerce.’ ‘Capitalism’ is a term that comes from Karl Marx who had an erroneous theory of labor as the source of prices.  Simply, the cost of goods sold is equal to the labor input to the goods and services plus a payment for capital, plus whatever the ruling class can force on to the top of the cost.  That explains virtually nothing in commerce, which is why the labor theory of capital was never taught anywhere in economics.  It doesn’t explain rent, the prices of land nor anything else. The market prices of commodities vary continually as do the price of equities. No relation to labor.  

    ‘Commerce’ on the other hand is not a homogeneous entity.  It has three separate components. Trade, Clientry, and Industry.  

    Trade is usually a single proprietor often with hired workers.  The trader buys goods and marks up the price for sale based on the various costs, the volume of sales expected and the amount of lending needed to make the sales happen, plus a markup to keep the business running over time. A flower shop or a small bakery are good examples.  The French and the Overseas Chinese are masters of ‘trade.’ There are flower shops and bakeries anywhere there are French.  There are stalls or storefronts with single categories of goods wherever there are Overseas Chinese.

    Clientry is the form of commerce that is designed to provide goods or services for the lifetime of the buyer.  A barber or dentist are good examples.  The price of the good or service is based on the market price and the level of skill of the seller. Clientry is based on a lifetime of service as the horizon for pricing. Surprisingly banking is a clientric business, with the intention of the seller or lender to maintain a long-term relationship with the customer, but bankers seldom have the sense of devotion to the customer found among lawyers and architects.

    ConsultIndustry is the type of business designed to maximize economies of scale. It is found wherever multiple stores, or large capital investments are operating.  Every chain business is designed to benefit from economies of scale as are all the entities we call industry; railroads, steel companies, airlines and McDonald’s.

    Commerce thrives in societies that value markets, societies that restrain the power of government, and societies that are open to individual initiative.  

    Government bans are a great restraint on the nature and quality of business.  Government’s absolute bans on silver restoration, cleaning solvents, and metal plating are a tiny example of the tens of thousands of businesses that are foreclosed by unreasonable and disproportionate government restrictions.

    TeamCommerce is 98.3% cooperative. The very nature of commerce is that hundreds, thousands, and sometimes, millions of people cooperate with each other daily. They cooperate within businesses, between businesses as suppliers, and as renters, advisors and colleagues.  

    Yet the popular image of competition is the paramount mode of thinking about business. Commerce is cooperation on the grandest scale known to humans.

    Lastly, commerce thrives where diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of values are allowed to work together.  Merit is the milieu for commerce that creates vigor and innovation.

    Someday more people will understand commerce and the world will be a better place.

  • We are in a Luddite Era

    The reason I can see what is happening in society is because I have a class analysis.  I call it Social Thought but it is not far from standard class analysis.  

    The academic world had transformed class analysis from a Marxist version to a racist one over the past 35 years because there was no working class in America and no hereditary upper class either.  

    LudditeSo what is happening is that we have a large group of wokies running our universities, government, media, many major corporations and our educational system.  To them the oppressors are whites, Jews, Indians, police, corporations, and Asians. The oppressed are blacks, Arabs, Spanish and Portuguese speakers, native Americans, heavy drug users, and criminals.

    What is interesting to me, is the synthesis of the religion of Human-Caused Global Warming Apocalypse with the Marxist Oppressive Racism. We call this combination ‘Woke.’

    To this has been added Jew Hate, the most ancient and enduring human persuasion.

    What I realized is that these three groups of hysterics all fit together.  People inside this hysteria want the world, the modern world, to stop. To stop right now.  

    This is Luddism, the same old imagery of throwing a wooden boot into the giant programmed weaving machine.

    What pulled it all together for me was the recent public addition of Jew Hate.  

    The hereditary elites of America, England, Europe, Russia, and many other nations have always harbored a strong Jew Hate.  The reason is clear to me now.  The hereditary elites have always, always wanted to stop social change because it is a threat to their domination and status.  Jews, for thousands of years, have been a primary source of social change and innovation.

    Jews from day one have believed in education, they have known mathematics, they have been readers, writers, and traders. If there had been Nobel Prizes in 500 CE, the majority would have gone to Jews.

    These all fit together.  Stop the world today.  Believe in Armageddon that is human- caused, be strongly opposed to meritocracy because it drives innovation and blame all horrors on Jews.

  • Documentary Film on the History of Earth

    Netflix is running a documentary on the history of the earth called Life on Our Planet. It is an eight-part series with gorgeous CGI.

    I recommend it to anyone.  

    LionI have one serious problem with the story line.  The same problem I have with the consensus view of commerce.  The presumption in both cases is that competition is the dominant operating force.  Commerce is supposedly about competition.  Evolution is supposedly about competition with some species as the apex predator.

    The fact is that both are overwhelmingly cooperation.  Commerce, which I know deeply, is better than 95% cooperation.  Workers, suppliers, customers, and landlords are cooperative nearly all the time.  Commerce couldn’t work unless everyone helps everyone else. Which is why tribal and communist societies are poor. Poor in every meaning of the word.

    I’m not a biologist but I love mycology.  I know that the barren landscape after a mass extinction event would not be habitable without the mycelium processing the land surface to make it habitable for all the fauna phyla.  That is cooperation on a grand scale.  The Netflix documentary focuses entirely on competition and the grand master of competition; the apex species.

    CoopSharks and big whales may be the apex predators in the ocean but together they are an infinitely small part of that biomass.  The same is true for lions and tigers on land and eagles and hawks in the air. 

    Cooperation in life is the core reality in biology and commerce.  Why competition and the apex predator model are so popular escapes me.  It is wrong and absurd.  It doesn’t come from Adam
    Smith.

    Part of the problem is the word ‘cooperation.’  We don’t say a father and daughter are cooperating when they are behaving normally like family members, nor do we say the door man taking a message for a tenant is ‘cooperating’, the doorman is just doing his job. Cooperation is the norm of behavior, or vice versa, the norm of behavior is cooperation.  We just don’t have a word that acknowledges normative behavior in English. 

  • What Happened?

    Elon Musk happened.  Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023.

    CarThis seems to be a big secret.  None of the media reports what just happened.  I want historians to know first- hand.

    Two things happened.

    • The first was that Elon Musk bought the online site twitter.com and proceeded to fire 2/3rds of the employees.  Roughly 5,000 employees out of 7,500. What everyone in management around the world realized was that the company ran just as well or better with the remaining ⅓ of the employees (2,500.)  Fellow tech companies were forced to question whether the same excess of employees was also a problem of theirs. They proceeded to fire many employees.
    • The second was that many tech companies withdrew operations from Russia on orders from the U.S. government.  As I said in an earlier blog, every company in the world that uses American tech immediately had reason to doubt the reliability of American tech companies in providing continuing maintenance support.  Since competitors have not fully entered the market, the full impact is still a long way off but the initial impact was evident in year- end 2022 tech sales data. Firing followed.

    Any action by Elon Musk is significant.  Mr. Musk is a technical and a managerial genius of historic proportions.  He created the first successful electric car in this century, the Tesla, which has the largest global market as of this date and is very profitable.  He created the first successful commercial space rocket company in history. Musk’s SpaceX launched more successful rockets last year than NASA launched in its whole history.

  • Me Alone. Why? Part 2

    The question is why I have been able to see the sources of the modern world and why I find no one else has.  It is definitely not my IQ. 

    I knew I was a Jew 

    When I was 8 years old in El Paso, Texas, where my father was a prominent Liberal rabbi, several (3 or 4) Mexican boys chased me home from school throwing rocks because “the Jews killed Christ.”  They heard this from a ‘Hell-fire and Brimstone’ traveling Franciscan priest.  As a Jew, with a 3,000 year family history, I knew I was not run-of-the-mill.

    I had been a Marxist 

    ScoutsI knew since age 11, when I got my Boy Scout troop to read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, that  I was very conscious of the ‘ruling class’ and paid attention to that idea.  

    I saw the American hereditary elite fall apart in the early 1960’s, first hand, and was very aware of it.

    Raw Data

    The Hutchins-Adler Great Books program at the U. of Chicago taught me to always use original documents and data.

    My experience on a Kibbutz

    At age 19, I spent 3 months learning Hebrew in Israel on a Kibbutz in the Galilee.  Because I had previously read George Orwell’s Animal Farm I was able to see that in reality Marxism was mostly nonsense and that hierarchy was a human norm.

    Self directed

    For the rest of my life I never had a real boss, except for the few sergeants in my Army service. 

    My first traditional job was starting the marketing research department at the Bank of America. I set my own agenda because nobody knew what marketing research was. The same was true at my next job at the Bank of California where I created MasterCard.

    My third and last semi-job was as Treasurer and Business Manager for Glide Memorial Methodist Church where I set my own agenda and reported quarterly to a Board of changing members. 

    Insatiable curiosity

    IbmFrom the first time I used a computer service in 1962 with punch cards for input and tiny hole-punched printouts, I have used the latest computer tech constantly for the rest of my life. I was always tech-savvy and even published my first book in 1974 on the ARPAnet at the Stanford SPIRES computer.

    Saw the inside workings of 2,000 businesses

    In 1974, after the publication of The Seven Laws of Money  I became the ‘Finance Guy’ to the Global hippy community.  I started the Briapatch small business community and subsequently consulted with over 2,000 businesses large (including Itochu, the largest business in the world at that time) and small.  I have probably consulted more businesses directly than any other human.

    I also founded a business school in San Francisco,  called Noren that lasted 9 years. The Noren classes that I taught resulted in three business books including Marketing Without Advertising, the third most successful marketing book in English (excluding text books.)

    San-Francisco-1San Francisco

    Is where I lived continuously from age 21. I had lived there intermittently at earlier ages. Most people have no idea that San Francisco and environs are the source of a great deal (much) of the innovation in America in the arts, ideas and commerce. Ranging from major fashions and music over 150 years to the invention of television. Compiling such an history  would be an encyclopedic effort drawing from a vast body of literature. Someone someday will do it.

    San Francisco is overflowing with talented and creative people.  The hippies were not exceptions in creating the greatest wave of innovation as the Baby Boomers from the 20th Century.  I did my part and wrote about the early wave of Baby Boomers from the Civil War who created the ‘Progressive Movement’  (Baby Boom 2) based in San Francisco.  The abundance of art at Burning Man is a testament to artistic richness that is overflowing.

    Which gets to the next and last important point. 

    Not New York

    Many people believe that everything new and important ostensibly originates on the East Coast. Usually New York or Boston. However,  knowledgeable people recognize that this statement is false.  

    A 1 ton gold meteorite could crash in downtown San Francisco and not make news.  The next day a 100-pound iron meteorite could land in Times Square and it would be headline news around the world.  News is always about New York, seldom about San Francisco.

    I have actually seen this East Coast bias many times with my own eyes.  In 1991 a Korean bartender in a restaurant at 2nd and Geary in San Francisco figured that he could use a Japanese drink called shochu to make strong alcoholic drinks on his beer and wine license. Shochu is 2 to 4 times more alcoholic than beer or wine but is covered under the same license.  The Korean Ashesbartender started making shochu cocktails and the lines quickly wound out the door and up the block for his invention.  This invention, shochu cocktails on a beer and wine license, spread rapidly everywhere around the City.

    By 1997 I saw the first article about the brilliant new invention of exciting cocktails invented in New York and rapidly proliferating with a shochu base.

    Unless my ashes are scattered in New York, my work may never be discovered.

  • Eureka! One of Two

    I have put the last two pieces together in the puzzle.  

    The puzzle is how an animal as limited as humans can build such a beautiful and complex society as we have today. The two pieces I have just found are ‘cargo cult’ and ‘empiricism.’  Other parts of the puzzle I have found during my life and can be found in my eleven books and my blogs.

    Th-3042747674Let’s begin with the ‘cargo cult.’

    I have been baffled by the existence of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. How can a Bedouin tribe build a modern functioning city?  The answer is a cargo cult with oil/gas, steel and concrete instead of bamboo.

    ‘Empiricism’ comes from Yoram Hazony, who figured out that what created the modern dichotomy between Jefferson and Hamilton was that the former was a platonist and the latter was an empiricist.  That is the missing piece in the evolution of the modern world.

    The modern world was created by modern commerce,  I have spent my life trying to understand how this highly improbable system came about.  Now I know.

    First came the Jews who focused an entire tribe on the idea of a unitary god.  That created a coherent group who had to debate and understand how the world around us could have been created by a single entity. The Jews mastered writing and debate which elevated empirical wisdom and recording of that wisdom along with education to create an historic chain of learning.  We Jews have been the social lubricant of empiricism throughout history.

    Second came the European Catholic Church which slowly, over a millennium, enforced the idea and institution of a marriage that demanded the isolated and efficient nuclear family.  Tribes could not create the global world of colonialism.

    Th-2576393892MThird came Columbus, Kepler and Galileo, who used empiricism to begin the discovery of the world around them.  Immediately following these great technologists was the Dutch Republic, the first home of Protestantism and modern global commerce. 

    Fourth were the pioneers of the empirical world, mostly in England after the Dutch invaded it.  Newton, Adam Smith, Priestly and James Watt.

    Fifth was the creation of the modern commercial national structure by Hamilton and Franklin.

    Sixth were the Colonial world, the Masonic Order and the Great American West that allowed for the destruction of the hereditary elite and the freedom of the other siblings to emerge.

    Seventh, the discovery of Bessemer steel and oil, the key physical ingredients of the modern world.

    Eighth was World War II, which caused the collapse of the American hereditary elite in 1960 that in turn made the spread of the modern innovative corporation and meritocracy a global reality.

    Now I have it.  That is the modern world.  Just add the cargo cult and we see how the world of modern commerce became established.  Totally fortuitous.

    The world of Modern Commerce, the world that I discovered, has allowed countless individual small-minded humans to cooperate and share their small units of knowledge to create magnificent technology and complex institutions.

    Let us hope, that my greatest fear, that the world of Plato, Descartes, Jefferson, Kant, Marx and the Wokies will not destroy what we have accidentally created.