The Autonomy & Dao of the Korean People

No other book in my life has come close to having as large an impact on both my personal growth and my intellectual development as this book has.

Its title is "The Autonomy & Dao of the Korean People."

I came across it serendipitously as I was browsing a random Korean bookstore just as I was beginning my university studies in Korea.

This book has given me so much. Not only did it help me gain a firm understanding of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (better than any English-language material I've ever come across) that worked a type of therapy on the way I view life, but it introduced me - via footnotes - to the two other major intellectual influences in my life: Lewis Mumford and Martin Heidegger.

I have read and re-read this book so many times that the original binding fell apart. Luckily I took it to a local copy store that re-bound it for me. It is full of my marginalia, notes and underlines.

It is my treasure.

Unfortunately, this book has been out of print for years now, and most Koreans aren't even able to read it anyways because of all of the Chinese characters in it. Of course there is no translation available, but I have translated a few passages throughout the years on this blog that may be of interest to some.

Check out those writings via this link, and I recommend you start with 'Dao and Study'.

Cent & Mumfordian Design Principles

It seems like the more people think about cryptoeconomics, the more they bring up Friedrich von Hayek. And that's cool. I read 'The Road to Serfdom' and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' when I was an undergraduate too.

Maybe I need to re-read Hayek (I plan to), but given the very early, immature stage crypto finds itself, I think that it may be of more use for individuals and teams who are building some of the first consumer facing dapps to look for other figures whose ideas may be able to offer more immediate and practical insights.

For me at least, I think that the time has come to look back at Lewis Mumford, and in particular his work and insights on cities and their development in history.

As prolific a writer and polymath as Mumford was in early twentieth century America, outside of a small group of urban planners today, he and his numerous works have all but been forgotten, but not by me.

In his later works, particularly in the National Book Award winning 'The City in History' and in the second book of his The Myth of the Machine series entitled 'The Pentagon of Power,' the dual concepts of 'Materialization' and 'Etherialization' figured prominently in his thoughts on cities and cultures.

Although Mumford originally came across these terms in Arnold Joseph Toynbee's 'A Study of History', Mumford made them his own.

Materialization is the process wherein a subjective, pre-linguistic idea becomes embodied materially in objective reality. It always starts with an idea so faint that it's barely a dream. As a helpful example, think about the original dream that brought together the first cypherpunks. These original cypherpunks, over a period of decades, kept the seed of the idea alive by relentlessly, but very slowly, studying, researching and discussing - which is to say incubating - their nascent idea until that fateful day Satoshi Nakamoto appeared.

Mumford refers to the stage of materialization when an idea becomes inextricably intertwined with a person as 'incarnation'. This person normally strikes a chord with a large group in society who have been yearning for something different than their rigid depersonalized surroundings. Sort of like how, amidst the occupy movements and the frustration with the system in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008 that many felt, Satoshi and the idea of Bitcoin appeared who in turn saw a group of devoted disciples from around the world spring up who helped give voice and intellectual formulation to the idea of crypto.

It is at this point, when the subjective thoughts about the idea begin to manifest as objective reality. The formulation, ideation, and elaboration of 'the idea' by many people in their daily experience of living bridges that original dream with the realities of social life. Think about all of the unique insights that people have just started deriving over the past few years from Satoshi's white paper that have been incorporated in new projects and collectives. This wider socialization of the idea Mumford calls 'incorporation'.

And this is where we find ourselves today. It is here that the design of these projects and collectives needs to be fully thought through in order to ensure the best possible long-term outcome.

Let's take Cent as an example. Just like Mumford's conception of incorporation, a conscious rational effort amongst the community of Centians is just beginning to create distinct habits, customs, routines, practices, rituals and procedures that will shape its future. But it is still raw. Its initial design needs to account for the inevitability that, over time, the original organizing idea of the Centian culture will become played out and rigid in some ways. In Mumfordian terms, the expectation that the original organizing idea will become fully embodied needs to be reflected within the design set during incorporation in order to allow for new ideas to take hold in the future.

To paint a few very broad strokes this could roughly mean that whilst a few Centurions may be introduced early to Cent to help curate a culture that I have described elsewhere (here and here), the decentralization of this centrally set institution needs to also be baked into the original design. The same holds for future airdrops or any other future plan. That near future, and more importantly the far future beyond that, needs to be set *loosely* and allowed for today.

If the original design doesn't allow for new ideas and uses to manifest out of the original culture and associated infrastructure, there will be a breakdown, or in Mumfordian terms 'de-materialization' will occur. This breakdown is an example of the negative side of 'etherialization'. For a project like Cent users would begin defecting to other networks that better incorporate the urges and impulses behind their new idea that is seeking expression.

If, on the other hand good design is employed, the positive forces of etherialization will play off of the existing creative culture by transmuting its energies into more refined forms (e.g. symbols). Technical infrastructure (e.g. market mechanisms, incentive architectures) will become simplified in design and operation. The longer etherialization is allowed to continue, the larger the environment will be, both in space and time, for further user development.

According to Mumford, good city design ensures continuity by providing both stability and creativity. Existing institutions and structures take on symbolic meaning. At the same time they provide collective support to help translate new ideas into habits, customs and new design choices that will be applied to the city in the future that will, in turn, impact the next generation in new and surprising ways.

In simple terms, the goal of good design should be to build containers in both a technical infrastructural sense as well as creative cultural sense that, with minor changes here or there, can last over time to hold new generations of dreams.

In 'The City in History' Mumford wrote, "The rhythm of life in cities seems to be an alternation between materialization and etherialization." Whilst designing dapps and their incentive architectures, the relation of and interplay between it and the waxing and waning forces of materialization and etherialization that the community will exert needs to inform the design. If Cent can accomplish that it will be able to set up something that will continually enrich and nourish generations of Centians.

Lewis Mumford

In society man faces himself and realizes himself; and in a free society...each citizen has an oppurtunity to plumb all his potentialities: the specialized fragments are re-united in the whole man.

사회에서는 인간 자체가 타인이랑 생활하면서 자기 자신을 마주볼 수도 있고 자기 자신을 인식할 수도 있다.  개방사회 (free society)는 시민들에게 각자 본인의 가능성을 그들의 한계까지 시도할 수 있는 기회를 제공한다. 그러므로 개방사회에 이제까지 전문화된 혼재되어있는 개인 각자는 시간이 지남에따라 완전한 하나의 인간으로 재성장할 수 있는것이다.

The Good Life

What is the function of a city?  More precisely put, what should the human function of a city be?

This is a question that I presume will have a vast array of possible answers that are predicated in no small measure upon each persons respective position in life.  Moreover, for most people the city is something that has long since transcended the limits of individual conception, leaving a mere sliver for them to inhabit let alone conceive of.  This conception - or rather misconception - allows individuals in turn to view the city simply as a sort of rudimentary means towards fulfilling singular needs.  For example, Manager Kim has a home in Mok-dong¹ in order to secure educational opportunities for his children. (full stop).  Any other advantage(s) secured by happening to reside in a specific space is simply the happy result of pure coincidence.  To this mind at least, such binary 'choice making' - because to consider this sort of behavior as something even approaching thinking would merely indicate how much one is not thinking to begin with - is a direct refutation to (of?) life itself.  Like, why are you even living, guy?

The simple answer to why we are living, why we who have been afforded the accident of life at this particular juncture in this particular form with the sum total of human actions so far (i.e. history) serving as our latent potentiality + α is simply thus: to have our total life etherialize² into impact itself.  What this abstract statement looks like is quite simple: an idea, usually in written form, that aims to better life or put simply, the pursuit of the good life³.  It was in ancient Greece that this idea of the city as the container of this so called 'good life' found it's own voice, and as the fates would have it, it was none other than Aristotle who said, "People come to the city to live; they stay in order to live the good life." Of course ancient Greece is respected more for the fact that this ideal was allowed to form, conspicuously within Athens, but no less in Cos or Rhodes for example, as opposed to serving as a direct model because, err well, slavery.

Obviously the good life cannot be static; it must be something inherently dynamic and organic in the sense that it can only exist and can only be brought about through a continuous, free dialogue between citizens and the city itself.  This dynamic presupposes a few things: Firstly, both the psychic and physical possibility of withdrawal and return and Secondly, a truly autonomous city.  From the collapse of the medieval guild societies the ancient universitas⁴ for long was the means for withdrawing and returning to society.  The layout of Oxford in super blocks, quite nearly another world within a world, not only allowed for physical freedom from the city at large but existed for the mind to focus on concerns completely other than the normal (for that particular period) day-to-day matters at hand.  Today, are not the university and city itself just two cogs in the wheel of global capitalism?  This is not to imply that the pursuit of capital ipso facto is inherently negative; this is merely a call to resuscitate the dialogue of what the good life can or should be, and towards that end the collective as well as individual questioning of our basic assumptions that must occur, for questioning is the piety of thought.


¹ 'Dong' or '洞' refers to a single administrative area whose amalgamation with other similarly demarcated areas make up one of the twenty-five larger municipal districts or 'gu(區)' of Seoul.

² Etherialization, according to Arnold Joseph Toynbee (A Study of History), is the counterpart of 'Materialization' wherein a (material) idea is refined closer into its essential aspect (e.g the church was the etherialized form of the ancient city that allowed the culture of a particular city to be transposed across long distances as well as through time, or the mp3 file as the ultimate etherialized form of music itself, etc.).

³ The 'good life' spoken of here is none other than that earthly place where everything that is good co-exists as the Same, in that everything benefits life, or what is known as eutopia which is derived from the Greek εὖ + τόπος (meaning literally the good place); differentiated from the purposefully abstract and ambiguous conception of utopia (οὐ + τόπος literally meaning 'no place') as that ideal which has no earthly counterpart.

⁴ Universitas being the collective name for all guilds, originally.

Prescience: 1961

On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear.  The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set: soon, with a little more automation of traffic, mostly in a motor car, traveling even greater distances, under remote control, so that the one-time driver may occupy himself with a television set, having lost even the freedom of the steering wheel.  Every part of this life, indeed, will come through official channels and be under supervision. Untouched by human hand at one end: untouched by human spirit at the other.  Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find The Lonely Crowd.

The organizers of the ancient city had something to learn from the new rulers of our society.  The former massed their subjects within a walled enclosure, under the surveillance of armed guardians within the smaller citadel, the better to keep them under control.  That method is not obsolete.  With the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control.  With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.  To exercise free speech in such a scattered, dissociated community one must 'buy time' on the air or 'buy space' in the newspaper. Each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit, a broadband line.  This is not, it goes without saying, the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority: it is an organic by-product of an economy that sacrifices human development to mechanical processing. Suburbia offers poor facilities for meeting, observation, collective debate, and common action - it favors silent conformity, bot rebellion or counter-attack.  So Suburbia has become the favored home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all powerful.

I might be uneasy about the validity of this analysis had not the prescient de Tocqueville anticipated it long ago, in Democracy in America.  He sought to 'trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.'

"The first thing that strikes observation [he says] is an uncountable number of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to produce the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.  Each of them living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest - his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country."


De Tocqueville was describing in anticipation the temper and habit of life in Suburbia, a habit that has worked back into the city and made even democratic nations submit, with hardly a murmur, to every manner of totalitarian compulsion and corruption.  What this great political philosopher foresaw with his inner eye, less gifted observers can now see with their outer eye.  This is the last stage in the break up of the city.  The expansion of our technology only quickens the pace of this change.  What is left, if no counter-movement takes place, will not be worth saving.  For when the container changes as rapidly as its contents nothing can in fact be saved.

Mumford, Lewis 1961 The City in History pgs. 583~584

Thoughts on a Bus

Love is like a cobweb; beautiful for its seemingly indiscriminate union of unique geometrical shapes, figures and strength derived thusly from; at the same time a nightmare when no longer viewed in the light of day. In the dusk of a former love's memory gazing, nearly hypnotized by the pink and orange effluvia projected upon the near eve sky by that hollow glow of what was, sinking beneath the horizon, one runs the risk of becoming entangled within that forgotten web behind. Fight as they may, it is soon realized that all effort to free oneself from this web be futile; the more one struggles the more impossible it becomes to extricate oneself from the grasp of this mental cobweb.  

Out of my time spent partaking in life, it is indeed a rarity to find a soul who enjoys, beyond the mere nominal acquiescence, the cleaning up after oneself or another; it always remains a chore. However, tidying up to keep a clear home leads to healthier physical potentiality. As spring cleaning serves to rid the house of the accrued death and cobwebs accumulated over winter in preparation for the season of rebirth in the physical world, the same is necessary in that other, regrettably often too neglected world we also participate in. In this dialectic world of the subjective self and objective surroundings, the exterior receives most of the attention; leading often to deleterious results for both. The cult of change that society has become the exemplar devotee to, that man and woman have without so much of a feigned struggle, chose to accept over the past century; a change that affects the very life blood of humanities political economy in the classical sense, is but the negative principal of the forgotten positive ideal. We've removed ourselves from the seasons of nature into the narrowly sterile, neatly quartered monetary confines where wares for the abstract concept of what we used to know as seasonal changes are peddled. The fight for this change is what people live towards in this day and age. 

Focus on this sterilized form of exterior change, having removed us from the bosom of mother nature has also diverted attention away from our Jungian selves. The ego being the conspicuous element of adolescent development that projects itself outward to rely on style or the opinions of others for support. As a natural, but not absolute antithesis, the self being the container of the hitherto weaker parts of the personality relegated to our unconscious, serves at first as a means to protect our fragile ego development from failure. On the whole, however, it is not supposed to be suppressed forever, and in keeping with Hegalian dialectic, it ultimately purposes to create, or more appropriately endeavor to create a synthesis or in Jungian terms a 'Gegensatzvereinigung' with the ego. 

It, refering to the self, is to be perceived at first with recognition and a purposeful striving towards strengthening those weaker elements of the personality to make a fuller, richer self. Thusly, since life itself is but the objective backdrop of what our subjective self projects out upon it, a necessarily richer and more diverse world will be able to cultivate itself and spring forth organically, rising out of the compost of all humanities subjective selves. That is, to move away from what Freud termed the 'death instinct' or that of relying upon lifeless material things and dead cosmic superstitions to compensate for our disconnection from that richest conception of unified existence; that of the inseparable nature between a mother and child in its first two or three years. So then, having recognized and internalized the self and our previous death instinct there arises an attempt to recreate a new system of life; that of moving back towards, not the infantile, but a new mature and enlightened 'life instinct'; utilizing the crystallization of both human and natural history is what we need to strive for. (UNDER CONSTRUCTION) 

A life instinct whose only hope of rediscovery for the majority, I fear, is within that sterile egoistic state that men and women have cocooned themselves within. Despite the consciously oriented attempts of humanity until now to create a sterile, lifeless canvas for life to be rationally organized and directed upon, the most conspicuous element of the former organic life, full of potentiality towards reorienting our lives in exactly a more organic direction is love; specifically the lost, forgotten, only to be re-discovered within the unconscious dusk of love's cobwebs. The pain of being trapped within, makes us look within, towards our own self, and it can only be through a re-connection of that boundless depth and diversity of life that resides in all of us that we can even maintain the most infinitesimal hope for a better objective life for all. 

From whence we came...

Surrounded by the societal superfluities we call progress, i close my eyes and cover my ears to this world.  I'm left with emptiness: the essence of utility.  "Nothing," unlike zero, more like a negative harmonized with it's absolute.  That is what is in all of us, that's what should be all around us.  Everything we need can be found within ourselves.  Journey there my friend.  It's too dark you say?  Then open your eyes; everything you see is you, both good and bad parts.  This world is the overarching framework whereupon the archetype of our self can be expressed.  Just like the sanctions we place on the DPRK, our environments have the potential to displace our instinctual energy.  Every action has a reaction is the adage, and if suppressed our instincts have the potentiality to manifest into a trojan horse right in front of our own ocular receptacles.

Rape, hate, murder, pillage, plunder; what are all these actions but responses to imposed constraints? Constraints placed on us through societal regimentation, by our ancestors beliefs or by our very selves.  Reverting to these states of our Raw Primitive we accept them as a conscious inevitable reality, rationalizing them with the "Law of Progress," but in actuality our consciousness has been paralyzed.  Our unrestrained, unchecked, hitherto neglected sub-concious is shouting out; shouting for us to look inward as a society, as a people.  Isn't it ironic how this warfare of life is so harmonious?  The machine of war, so precise and methodical; a myriad of independent components working together; harmonizing and coalescing beautifully at the instant of death.  This machine of death, can very easily be converted into a machine of life; the difficulty lay in the task of lifting the egoistic veil away, of cutting the pseudo-conscience spouting from external loud speakers and inserting the earbuds of the inner self of all the individual automatons.              

To be continued...