Jonathan,
Thank you for your reply. All your points are theoretically valid. However, the issue is time. The delay of political praxis indefinitely for the relative or stage completion of the science aspect becomes ever more problematic. In turn, you could validly ask, “What do you expect the CasP Core (for want of a better term) to do?” Realistically, there is nothing more to do than what you are doing already. Citizens and intellectuals are faced, somewhat equally I think, with their powerlessness to effect change in this system; at least so long there is no broad-based solidarity of the major classes and no broad understanding of what is actually happening, environmentally and in the political economy of power.
I referred to money, finance and capital as fictions, as social fictions. I ought to be more careful about terminology, definitions and expositions. The power of capital in this system is no fiction. It is very real as CasP uncovers and elucidates. The social fictions exist, at the publicly conscious and debated levels, as the tales which hold that money and capital are measures and stores of value. This is the “theology” and “catechism” of capitalism to use the very useful Fixian (Blair Fix) analogy. CasP uncovers that money and capital are measures and stores of (social) power which translatable into physical power.
To speak pedantically, social power is all physical too, in the monist view of the cosmos as a complex relational physical system. The theology and catechism of capitalism, preached and propagandised to the populace incessantly by politicians, business leaders (so-called), media talking heads, the advertising industry and all the bought and suborned managers, advisers, bureaucrats and apparatchiks of neoliberal capital, are dinned into the brains of all those indoctrinated under this system. The ideas in their minds are entirely what they have been trained to think. There is no element that they have critically deduced for themselves. In the literal physicalist sense, the firing pathways and circuits in their brains, in their synapses, have been trained and to a significant degree sense formed, laid down, wetware-wired – as per plastic brain theory – to accept the rubrics and platitudes of capitalist dogma as self-evident truths. This is the physical sub-stratum and indeed the basis of the human network of false consciousness under capitalism.
It is this level of mind programming and indeed of firmware or wetware installation in the brains of the populace from birth to maturity which produces what we may call the hive mind of capitalism. However, we would be selling humans short if we didn’t consider that they still have autonomy and the ability to detect and process the gap between their real physical and emotional or conscious qualia state (under increasing impoverishment, exclusion and privation) and the claims that under capitalism they are and always will be living in the “city of light” [1]. A further phrase I find useful in this context is “the day prophecy fails”. The day is fast approaching when the prophecy of capitalism fails. We will find we are not living in the eternal cornucopian embrace of endless production and blissful consumption but rather in a dystopian hellscape of runaway climate change and ecological disruption. No recitation of catechisms will fill empty bellies or placate existentially terrified minds at that point.
As I have said before, (scientific) theory of this general type (like CasP) must be prepared for the day that people are ready to hear it. So I guess this is part of the role of Capital as Power: to produce theoretical models more homomorphically congruent (my terminology) with aspects of reality and to deploy them to replace the mythic constructs of capitalism with more realistic models ready for use when people lose faith in capitalism. Eventually the idea that billionaires should have, almost in their hands alone, such huge wealth and indeed a majority of the world’s wealth and the attendant power to creorder the world to their wishes and against the majority will begin to seem obviously wrong and insane to the majority. Work and cling to the tiniest hope. That’s about it.
Footnote 1: “The City of Light” is featured in the dystopian series “The 100”. The series is full of grinding, grisly violence and plot holes often associated with improbable recoveries from gut holes but it has some interesting symbolism and an extensively imagined continuous collision between technology and barbarism. “Perverse Instantiation” Parts I and II explore AI and AI brain implant issues, imaginatively and sensationally.