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Finally, Some Sense on Nolan's "Odyssey"

One thing you gotta hand to Christopher Nolan. He’s got everyone talking about his mega-movie The Odyssey.

And I finally read an article about The Odyssey that has half a clue: “You Don’t Really Get Homer.” It comes down to the definition of “intelligence”, if you want to understand what is going on with Odysseus:

In Plato and Aristotle, for example, the usual abstractions of choice are nous, logos and episteme

In other words, knowledge is an abstract thing: ideas, logic, and reason.

But, in the olden time,

Homer, by contrast, tends to use the word metis, which denotes a more practical kind of intelligence.

So, the whole point of The Odyssey is a tale of the cunning and practical Odysseus as he bonks his way home to Ithaca and his faithful wife and faithful dog.

All through the Odyssey, Homer lingers over Odysseus’s feats of knowhow and craft every bit as lovingly as he does the feats of martial strength performed by Achilles, Hector, and Ajax in the Iliad.

Let’s bring it into the present. Mayor Mamdani, son of a college professor and a filmmaker is famous for his quote:

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

What the heck does that mean? Actually, it’s a lie. Because in the market economy and the world of interacting individuals, there is a warmth of cooperation, of give and take. But in government collectivism there is nothing but force and fraud.

The practical Elon Musk is building an actual rocket to take humans To The Moon, Alice, and beyond to Mars. The collectivist Mamdani will open a government food market. In a couple of years.

You can say that Mamdani is a man of “nous, logos and episteme” — which I think is Greek for mumble and fumble. Musk is a man of “metis.” He is a Maker. Here’s an example of Musk at work:

A SpaceX intern once described eating lunch next to Elon Musk in the company cafeteria.

The intern said Elon sat down at a regular table with a regular tray of food. No entourage. No reserved section. He sat next to two junior engineers who were clearly terrified. One of them was explaining a problem with a valve component to the other.

Elon listened without introducing himself or interrupting. After about three minutes he turned to the engineer and said “have you tried running it at a lower pressure gradient first.” The engineer stared at him. Then realized the CEO of the company had just casually solved a problem his team had been stuck on for a week.

There are endless stories like this.

According to UnHerd, in the modern age

[“we” have] decided that the Greek ideal means top-down planning, rational bureaucracy, vast sovereign efforts to make the world conform as neatly to abstract standards as possible.

But did you know that Metis “was the name given to Athena’s mother — the Oceanid nymph who marries Zeus”. And guess what. Zeus end up swallowing Metis whole.

[I]f you want to be King of the Gods, you gulp down metis, the most mysterious, unrepresentable form of intelligence of all.

I am so glad that the US gulped down Elon Musk. Because we need his metis — that’s Μῆτις to the Greeks. But now let’s go to the source. What does Elon’s Grok say about metis?

It denotes an adaptive, opportunistic kind of intelligence effective in fluid, uncertain, or competitive situations—combining foresight, subtlety, deception when needed, technical know-how, and the ability to find a way out of difficulties.
…
Nestor praises skill (mētis) over force in contexts like chariot-racing, woodcutting, or seamanship.

It seems to me that Nietzsche was talking about something close this in his notion of Übermensch, self-overcoming, getting away from the logic and reason of the Enlightenment.

| Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:46:25 GMT |

Here's How I Understand the DSA

There’s a piece at The Free Press with various experts discussing “What the Movement Taking Over the Democratic Party Wants.”

I say the answer is simple.

The DSA activists believe that they are The Ones That Will Save the World. With politics.

It’s a funny thing really. As I like to say, we had two double-blind social science experiments conducted by two social scientists in the 20th Century to see whether converting a society to an all-powerful state run by a dictator with the power to control everything will create Heaven on Earth.

The result, in both cases, was “genocide,” as we now call it. Millions of people were either killed or starved to death. In both cases: under the dictatorship of Stalin and then under the dictatorship of Mao. Stalin and Mao did not create Heaven on Earth; they created Hell in Russia and Hell in China.

Both of these social scientists were inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, who wrote, in the mid 19th century, that capitalism would cause the “immiseration” of the working class. Here is the main prediction, in Das Kapital, Vol.1, from Grok:

He argues that as capital accumulates, the relative surplus population (industrial reserve army) grows, intensifying competition among workers and worsening their conditions overall.

There was indeed hardship in the “hungry 1840s” when Marx was a young man. But that was the moment that things began to change. A century later, in the 1950s, the workers were living in nice apartments and homes with toilets and refrigerators and driving mass-produced automobiles. There’s never been anything like it.

Notice that the experts are making the same prophecy about AI. With AI, they believe, there will be no jobs.

By the way. Anyone that writes about “the accumulation of capital” doesn’t understand capital, capitalism, or the market economy. Elon Musk is a trillionaire because the market believes that Musk’s ventures will create a fountain of economic growth and profits for his companies as far as the eye can see. But they could be wrong, and if they are Musk’s fortune will collapse to zero. There is no accumulation. Wealth does not accumulate like grain in a grain silo. It is the present value of expected future profits.

I think the way to understand political activists at a deep level is to realize that they are prophets. They are saying: “believe in me, and follow me, and I will save the world.”

But that’s not how the world works. Not any more. But it used to. Here is a quote from Two Paths to Prosperity by Mokyr et al.

In the period following the fall of the Roman Empire, migration took place via the movement of entire tribes.

That was then.

But as individualism slowly came to prevail, migration by individuals became more common, often aided by corporations.

By “corporation” is meant any social or economic group other than government by which people organize for collective purposes, including guilds, churches, fraternal organizations, Friendly Societies, and eventually, businesses.

Do you see the point? Back in the day, human life was circumscribed by the clan or tribe. You stayed with your clan or tribe, presumably because that’s how you stayed alive. But with the development of cities and market relationships and the modern family, society became more individualistic, and people moved around as individuals rather than as clans or tribes.

That means that people interact with each other as individuals, outside blood relationships. And these interactions occur under the radar.

But the prophet, political or religious, wants to organize people in the old way, as a tribe or religious cult. Or as Moses leading the Children of Israel out of Egypt.

I think there is a vital thing to understand here. The development of individualism happened under the radar. The development of “corporations” happened organically, without anyone directing traffic, under the radar. Machine textiles were invented by nobodies, under the radar, until they changed the world. Henry Ford was a mechanic, a nobody. Elon Musk was a migrant from South Africa that had this crazy idea about reusable rockets.

Do you see how different this is from political activists that want to create a “movement?” When you are creating a new economic idea, you develop it below the radar. But when you are creating a movement, political or religious, visibility is the whole point. All the world’s a stage, and all that.

I reduce all this to my Four Laws:

1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises).

2. The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek).

3. Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler).

4. Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Then there are the additions:

Activism cannot work because shouting slogans cannot solve anything.

Administrative hierarchy never works because it can’t admit mistakes.

No administrative plan survives first contact with the market.

But the real scandal is that these DSA kiddies getting elected in New York City are all college graduates — with post-graduate degrees — and yet they know nothing about all this: the horror of communism in the 20th century and the soft failure of the welfare state since World War II. And the simple science that government supremacy over the market does not work.

| Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:03:38 GMT |

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