[Henry, if I'm recalling correctly] Ford was channeling the attitude of [Herbert] Hoover’s recently reassigned Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, who had advocated a response to the Depression that amounted to financial nihilism: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness from the system…people will work harder, live a more moral life.” That had been [Frederick] Hayek’s position in his attack on A Treatise on Money. A bust was the inevitable consequence of a reckless boom, and any government sugarcoating of the necessary losses would only make matters worse.
To wit, burden everyone with a depression to purge the system; pre-Keynesian economics performing the work of 18th-century physicians: don't have a cure? Then bleed the patient! No wonder Hoover (who didn't buy into Mellon's extremism) didn't win re-election with advisors like Mellon!
Feedback can be positive or negative. By “positive” feedback, complexity theorists don’t mean that the feedback is always a “good” thing. Instead, they mean that the feedback reinforces or amplifies the initial change, and in the process it creates a virtuous or vicious circle.
“Briefly, what I am proposing,” [Clare] Graves writes in the article that first introduced [Don] Beck to his work, “is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.”
A long process of trial and error has weeded out the bad innovations, leaving behind what has stood the test of time. The result may not be perfect, but it is probably the best that can be accomplished with the materials at hand. Evolution or ecology should not be used to justify wealth and privilege or inherited evils, but it does imply a Burkean stance toward change. There is a kind of wisdom contained in the system—biological or social—that we would be wise to study and understand before we launch “reforms” based on our “progressive” ideas.
Even today, now that it has achieved stability and strength (if on the bodies of millions of victims), it is not clear that the leaders in Beijing accept the Westphalian concept of a community of nations in which each country is left alone to pursue its own national interest as long as it does not upset the world order by threatening others.
Caponigri, Time and Idea, 131: “ ‘Ricorsi’ appears in Vico, in the first instance, as a methodological notion. It designates a methodological device for making effective his discovery of the primacy of poetry and, with this, of the genuine time-structure and movement of history. It consists in the employment of the categories of poetic wisdom for the interpretation of the cultural and social structures of post-poetic times. By this employment there is determined abstract contemporaneity between time-form structures.” In other words: archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time. These poetic figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence.
