asciilifeform: this is tricky to get wholly right; consider, the english had ~decentralized charity, but it was plugged into a quite centralized church.
asciilifeform: interestingly the only wholly alternate ~stable~ solution to same puzzle i know of is... the castes of india
asciilifeform: (or at least 'feels' cheaper, like eric naggum's 'fast bathtub')
asciilifeform: initially it looks like a good deal because cheaper than watching your back
asciilifeform: in the sense that it was full of a buncha blokes who didn't sow or reap.
asciilifeform: cambridge was a quite centralized thing.
asciilifeform: (partly on account of their complicated 'isolate these folks from all reality', partly because they did not simultaneously pursue artillery...)
asciilifeform: nor maxwell (though he could ride a mean ride)
asciilifeform: heaviside, for instance, was certainly no scythian.
asciilifeform: all of the components of everything we're now doing, from the basic maths to the semiconductor, are product of what mircea_popescu derides as 'palace wankery'
asciilifeform: looking at the religions of the past (the selfsame inca empire, my recent kick) i've come to suspect that the overall 'belief load' typical human can carry is roughly constant
asciilifeform: (it is not scarce in the sense that there is little of it, but in the sense where it is strictly finite and conserved)
asciilifeform: this is possible because the scarce juice is saved for it.
asciilifeform: but this would not leave sufficient juice left over for pretending other pretenses
asciilifeform: for instance, i recently went, in usa no less, to an airport, and was shown into an actual airplane which actually burned some actual petro and actually flew. whereas if pretendjuice were not a finite resource, i would probably have been sat down in a cardboard box and 'zoom, zoom'
