And what is communism? As a political formula? Perhaps we can define it, with a nice 20th-century social-science jargon edge, as nonempathic altruism. Or for a sharper pejorative edge, callous altruism.

The phrase “Pathological Altruism” is another term you may want to look up. There’s even an entier academic books by that name.

To confirm Frost’s evidence for pre-historical guilt, do you think Christ would have been able to shame the Romans into feeling guilty if they weren’t pre-disposed to feeling guilty in the first place?

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Frost is confirming my hypothesis (stated here http://www.xenosystems.net/deeper-darkness/#comment-28452) that the Black Death accelerated certain social changes, rather than caused them.

It’s nice, because I was simply doing pattern recognition. Clark reveals that the industrial revolution wasn’t a phase change, it only appeared that way to star-struck observers. Similarly, only Petrarch though the 1600s had an enlightenment, it was another case of later, star-struck observers. It seemed likely that the Black Death would make a bump on a graph that these same romantic idiots would blow out of proportion, and lo, it was so.

Heh, late Rome let the Outside In…but went for ethnic Outside rather than dark knowledge, and it at least contributed to the empire’s suicide.

By contrast, Chinese civilization has fallen several times, but since they never choose the method of forgiving the Other for being Other, it has risen again in the same place.