Capital Structure: A Cheat Sheet
This writing attempts to comprehensively describe the structure we live in historical and observational contexts. Most
important to this writing is that the model developed to represent the
structure be applicable throughout both humanity and time; it has to be
fundamentally unbiased.
I am doing the work on the Wikiversity as John Bessa/Capital Structure. The Wikiversity is a part of the Wikipedia world, and as such work there is (generally) open to public editing.
A basic goal of the writing is to describe Capital as an entity. Many people tend to think of capital (with a small "c") in terms of its minor components, such as family bank accounts and home equity, and have difficulty grasping Capital as "the big picture." And others can only think of capital in terms of economic formulas; one reader described Capital as "productive goods measured in money, as is consumption."
Also important here is defining a relationship between Capital and family capital, and I attempt to link the two by showing that the big Japanese firms developed very recently as corporate (and hence Capital) families, applying this idea as what I describe as a "clean model" of Capital over an existing structure that grew separately from traditional Capital, and hence the term "clean."
Knowing that the Web works best in bite-sized (or byte-sized) bits of information, and that beneficial changes
require clear maps, I have attempted to introduce the classic structure
of Capital (mostly as I learned it from Lewis Mumford, Joel Spring, and
Will Durant) in the context of recent experiences that can easily be
pointed to and confirmed by observation.
Capital Components:
- Financial and industrialized Capital
- Education
- Medicine
- Immigration/Colonialism
As
I began naming Capital components and developing a structure, I started
to think of Capital more as a description of an entity rather than a culture of business people.
And this leads me to think that the culture of Capital (there
definitely are such things as financial communities) as a template. Present-day Capital culture as multiculturalism, would not then be a circle of friends, but actually a cooperative process.
Capital culture is unlike, say, musical or artistic communities; it is
not about community and mutual support, but, predictably, about making
money. Capital culture is the structure of Mumford's "machine," and hence not a culture at all.
If you follow the evolutionary concept that community and morality
spring from Darwin's idea of "natural affection" among the higher
animals, then Capital culture is a reversal of natural evolution, and
hence shares precious little with humanity.
Mumford easily pointed to the few things Capital presents as humanity
as "false charity," and no one I know thinks of corporations in terms
of affection.
I have found Durant's writing to be very useful in helping understand the historical roots of Capital components in Roman history, such as the historical basis for government bureaucracy. He shows bureaucracy to be beneficial in that it was designed to prevent the capital families of Rome from swallowing the state. Durant's description goes a long way to help explain corporate hate for government; I found the level of hate perplexing when I was on Wall Street. My thought back then was "where is the manual for this thing?" Well, I now think that this mysterious handbook is the Capital template that has been passed down through many generations, and hence my excitement about this writing.
Durant
is helpful, also, because he is pro-Capital, and pro-Roman, despite
Rome's cruelty, and seemingly pro-killing in his writing about
primitive man. I don't
buy his rationalizations for accepting the cruelty of humanity, but I
respect his research, and his pro-Capital slant helps balance the
anti-Capital approaches of Mumford and Spring. (Perhaps anti-Capital is strong, but both sound socialist at times.) Durant also easily shows that we live in a well-preserved modern version of the Roman Empire.
I attempt to extend his idea by showing that the Capital arrangement is
largely universal, and that resource exploitation systems arrange
themselves in much the same way everywhere, and that denying this universality is biased thinking.
I deny that capital development is evolutionary, because evolution is
empathy-based (or affection-based, if you prefer, and there is nothing
affectionate about big business!)
Below is the "structure," and beneath it is the supporting and contextual material, which is divided into two sections.
The first of these is a contextual setting that attempts to describe
the sources, both historical and observational that contributed to the structure. The second section, document development, has material that was developed as the structure was created.
The writing has become far weightier than planned, so I am putting it below the structure. While the structure is about 99% inserted (only
needing rearranging and linking to the supporting material), there are
still un-obvious components of Capital that have yet to be
"discovered," or at least need to be shown to be a component of the
Capital entity. Religion, for instance, is important
in Capital history, but like government, it is not a direct component
of Capital; Capital has used religion in colonialism to demoralize
Natives, or to combat efforts to limit population growth with birth
control. Capital punishment, another example, is another important component of the Capital entity, but not yet discussed here.
Capital Structure
Capital
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