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The second worldview creates powerlessness by preventing collective action: if problems are inside the individual, people cannot identify with others or change society together.
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He argues globalization, mass media, and the internet shifted young people toward individual health, happiness, and economic opportunity over community obligation.
Jiang says Marx's product-as-mirror metaphor helped form modern individualism and materialism.
Jiang says ancient monumental work was not organized around individual proprietary credit; it was organized around whether the shared vision was built.
Abstraction means removal from reality; civilizational maturity increases abstraction, individualism, atomization, and dependence on money.
The second worldview creates powerlessness by preventing collective action: if problems are inside the individual, people cannot identify with others or change society together.
Modern students answer the happiness question with individual goods, which Jiang treats as historically unusual.
The modern scientific-psychological worldview says humans are memories and synapses that can be manipulated to control anger, depression, and fate.
A worldview that locates all problems inside the individual prevents collective identification and collective action.
"And they're not going to be able to conform to the community. Okay? And historically, these people have been killed by the communities. And..."
"In my expression of my life, I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity, I have realized..."
"...it becomes a basis for our society, okay? The idea of individualism, the idea of materialism, okay? Keep on going."
"In such a situation, our products would be like so many mirrors, each one reflecting our essence. Thus, in this relationship, what occurred on..."
"Okay, so this is a really important metaphor, okay? He's saying that objects become mirrors where we can see our own individuality reflected, okay?..."
"Look, that's a great question, okay? And this is hard for us to understand, but there's no sense of individual propriety, okay? It's like......"
"...is it was built. Do you understand? There's no sense of individualism. There's no sense of capitalism. There's no sense of like private property...."
"But as you go up the civilization ladder, as you mature as a civilization, what happens is you have increased abstraction. Abstraction is just..."
"But when you move to a megacity, what is it that holds people together? It's money. Right? Money is the greatest abstraction. The problem..."
"So, the problem with number two is you're incapable of collective action because you think all the source of your problem is the individual..."
"Okay, all right. So again, you guys are stuck in the scarcity mindset. And it's very convincing. So let's move on, okay? So this..."
"What else? Exactly. Power, right? Sure. Power. Freedom. Excuse me? Freedom. Okay, good. Freedom. Yeah. What else? Relationships. Relationships. Yep. Sure. You have good..."
A source-grounded reading of Jiang's lecture on immigration as a game: school success is not status, rule-following can become a trap, fertility and cohesion beat obedience, and America's open-society ideal begins as a settler...
A source-grounded reading of Jiang’s lecture on transnational capital, British sea empire, Frankist revolutionary theology, Disraeli’s Coningsby, Bolshevism, Marx, Bakunin, and Freud: modernity appears as a machine that hides capital, displays a scapegoat, turns...
A source-grounded reading of Jiang's lecture on temples, pyramids, farming, ritual ecology, and the modern inability to build wonders: people once organized around heaven on earth; now the religion is capitalism.
Societies do not fall because one problem gets worse in a straight line.
The first Secret History class begins with Kant and ends with alchemy.
The first Secret History class starts with Kant and ends with alchemy.
Modernism begins as a religious problem before it becomes psychology, literature, art, social media, and depression.
Freud is not introduced as a neutral founder of psychology.
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