Laura Carvalho vs Neo-Darwinism.

Laura Carvalho, writing for Project Syndicate, thinks that 

The Dead Hand of Neoliberalism Is Blocking Green Growth

What is blocking 'Green Growth' in Carvalho's native Brazil? Criminals. Liberalism, neo or paleo, is predicated on the rule of law. Sadly, enforcing the law costs money. Also, that money might get stolen.  

The waning of neoliberalism gives developing and emerging economies a chance to cooperate on a new economic development paradigm for the age of climate change.

Moreover, cooperation between plants will cause them to overpower and eat animals. By eliminating animals, animal caused Global Warming can be done away with. Equally, if developmentally challenged kids get together, they will soon prove the Reimann hypothesis. Field Medalists will die of envy. But for this to happen, we must get rid of Neo-Darwinism as well as Neo-Liberalism.  

But addressing climate change is a global struggle,

in which only those who are smart and who have a lot of money are effective.  

and international trade rules generally do not allow developing countries to break with the old orthodoxy.

If there are 'Trade rules', then Trade isn't Free.  

SÃO PAULO – Recent election victories for leftist parties in France and the United Kingdom may herald a new era of climate policymaking in Europe.

Or it may herald higher spending on Welfare.  

Britain’s new Labour government has ambitious plans to expand renewable-energy capacity;

Plans don't matter. Budgets do. Keir Starmer isn't going to repeat Merkel's mistakes.  

and, although tricky coalition building remains, the climate-skeptic far right has been thwarted in France.

But the yellow vests can't be thwarted. If you want to cut the retirement age, you can't also piss money against a Green wall.  

One hopes this momentum can be carried into the G20 ministerial meeting in Rio de Janeiro on July 24. There, rich countries will consider Brazil’s pioneering proposal for a 2% annual minimum wealth tax on the world’s billionaires. Such a tax, along with new climate-financing instruments that are expected to be announced, could support investments in green growth, climate adaptation, and measures to address inequality within countries.

Actually, if Kamala wins in November, then Biden, in Rio, in December, will have the clout to come to a modus vivendi with Xi. Something could come of such a rapprochement. Before there can be a global solution, there must be global stability. 

But new investment vehicles will not suffice. As our experience with COVID-19 showed, purely market-based approaches were not enough to tackle a pandemic,

Nothing was. 

nor can they help counter environmental destruction

Apparently, Lula has reduced the rate of deforestation in Brazil 

or the world’s yawning wealth gap.

If Nations can't counter this, how can the globe?  

Even the rich world is starting to move away from the neoliberal orthodoxy of privatization and deregulation.

So as to become relatively poorer.  

But as long as developing countries remain hamstrung by the old rules, they will struggle to develop their own economic models and shape their own destinies.

Also, so long as donkeys remain hamstrung by the old rules, they won't turn into flying unicorns. The problem with a lot of developing countries is that nobody is following any rules- unless there is a rule regarding stealing and demanding bribes.

Where previously Western free-trade advocates decried China’s use of protectionism and subsidies to favor strategic sectors, now these practices are de rigueur in advanced economies.

Biden enjoyed pissing money against various walls 

The United States is pumping tens of billions of dollars into domestic electric-vehicle and battery manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction Act,

which, hilariously, immediately raised inflation

using the state to stimulate investment and job creation in green sectors. But addressing climate change is a global struggle, and international trade rules generally do not allow developing countries to boost their own industries in this way.

Very true. My M.P promised to give me a blow job and a billion quid if she got elected. Now she says WTO rules won't permit her giving me even a handy and a 50 pence coin.  

For example, Indonesia – the global leader in nickel, a critical metal in EV batteries – has been punished at the World Trade Organization for pursuing an industrial strategy.

The WTO can't punish shit. It is utterly useless. That's why the Obama administration stopped allowing new Judges to be appointed. Trump went a step further dispensing with appellate review of its dispute resolution mechanism. Recently, to further underline its own futility, the WTO has ruled in favor of the EU which had complained about Indonesia.  This changes absolutely nothing. 

Indonesia had banned the export of nickel ore because its falling price was making indigenous smelting projects uneconomic. The export ban forced the Chinese to invest in Indonesian smelters in Central Sulawesi. But this has created its own environmental and social problems. The WTO and the EU can go fuck their respective selves. Indonesia will still face the same problem- viz. price volatility- and there are also concerns that their may be a revival of anti-Chinese feeling.  

Thus, while neoliberal policy prescriptions fall out of favor in developed economies, they are being repackaged in green boxes for less affluent ones.

No. Indonesia banned the export of ore and gained massive f.d.i so as to move up the value chain. But, precisely because poorer Indonesians aren't receiving much benefit, there could be political problems going forward. Also, new technology could shift in the derived demand curve and so the problem of deteriorating terms of trade remains.  

Policymakers in high-income countries can rely on costly industrial policy levers like tax incentives and loan guarantees,

sure they can. What's more, if they are strategically located, as Indonesia is, then they can gain 'Belt & Road' infrastructure investment.  

whereas developing countries have no such luxury.

Developed countries might actually heed WTO judgments. Developing countries can always scream about Neo-Imperialism or Neo-Liberalism or Neo-Darwinism which has prevented donkeys from evolving into flying unicorns.  

The latter must figure out how to create jobs, reduce inequality, and decarbonize their economies all with a much more limited set of tools and technological capacity.

No. Their leaders can steal everything in sight while telling the Environment to go fuck itself.  

Moreover, richer countries are pushing developing countries to “leapfrog” to renewables at an unrealistic pace.

They are also pushing them to be less fucking corrupt. But they are told to fuck the fuck off.  

They fail to recognize developing countries’ need for limited fossil-fuel use in the short term, or that unfair trade rules are limiting poorer countries’ access to affordable green technology and cheap capital.

Nobody is observing those so-called rules. On the other hand, it is true that Neo-Darwinism has unfairly blocked donkeys from evolving into flying unicorns.  

Such double standards are indicative of the same power imbalances observed in recent years when wealthier countries hoarded vaccines, slashed aid budgets, and failed to deliver on past climate-finance promises.

Worse yet, wealthier countries refused to grant poor rapists equitable access to their teenaged daughter

This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed. Authoritarian populists such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentinian President Javier Milei, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have each promoted the narrative that climate policies undermine economic growth.

The Club of Rome promoted the view that economic growth was very very evil more than five decades ago. Anyway, the Australians got rid of carbon pricing a decade ago.  

That may be true in many cases, but only because of the trade-offs imposed by neoliberal policies.

No to mention the trade-offs imposed by Neo-Darwinism. This lady could have easily evolved into a donkey which evolved into a flying unicorn which farts rainbows but for evil savants in the Global North.  

If developing countries could shape their own policies, climate investments would drive job creation and inclusive growth. Governments that are being asked to green their economies need flexible financing at concessional rates.

Also poor rapists need urgent access to your teenage daughters.  

They also would benefit from progressive national and international tax schemes that build on recent successes such as the UN Tax Convention, an effort led by developing countries to democratize tax rules and claw control away from closed shops like the OECD.

It will be utterly useless. On the other hand the UN Flying Unicorn convention will definitely succeed in redefining donkeys as flying beasts which fart rainbows.  The Global North will cry and cry. 

The waning of neoliberalism gives developing and emerging economies a chance to cooperate on the design of a new paradigm.

Also donkeys can cooperate with monkeys to create hyper intelligent unicorns. 

By devising state-led models that link green strategies with socioeconomic development, they can shield the climate agenda from attacks by authoritarian opportunists.

By banning elections? How else will keep Trump or Orban or, that Neo-Liberal, Fascist, Kamala out of power?

Consider Mexico, a manufacturing powerhouse and oil producer that has just elected a climate scientist, Claudia Sheinbaum, to the presidency.

Climate scientists are very good at battling the drug cartels. Claudia's secret identity is Wonder Woman.  

Her administration aims to invest $13.6 billion in renewable energy, with a goal of meeting 50% of electricity demand through zero-carbon sources by 2030. If done right, these efforts should promote job creation and reduce inequalities,

because guys with good jobs get paid the same as guys with no jobs or really shitty jobs- right?  

with state-owned enterprises being leveraged to support the deployment of green technologies.

In other words, state-owned enterprises will buy overpriced shit from state subsidized enterprises.  

The encouraging announcement of a new ministry 

i.e. more red-tape and corruption 

overseeing science and innovation could also support the development of advanced manufacturing and high-tech industries. 

Mexico had a Minister of Security- Garcia Luna- who has been arrested for drug trafficking.  

Brazil is also well positioned to pioneer green policies for the developing world.

it may indeed pioneer new forms of corruption.  

Freed from Bolsonaro’s destabilizing rule, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s

who had been in jail for corruption 

administration is pushing sustainable development and tax reform.

and corruption 

If it can effectively coordinate its industrial policy, infrastructure aims, and green initiatives like the Ecological Transformation Plan, it could power ahead with a robust green growth agenda at home, while expanding its regional and global influence as the host of this month’s G20 meeting and next year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30).

Very true. This is why, a couple of years down the line, this stupid lady will be writing an article about how the rich countries in the Global North used Neo-Liberalism to force nice and sweet Brazilian donkeys to become Ministers and steal everything in sight.  

We can build a new world of climate justice and social equity on the ruins of neoliberalism.

However, it may be safer to run away from that new world to somewhere run by old fashioned capitalists.  

To succeed, we need new economic structures that are informed, actively shaped, and maintained by low- and middle-income countries.

Why not by donkeys and monkeys? If we must reject Neo-Liberalism, why not Neo-Darwinism as well? 

A fairer global order requires more robust, proactive states that can design and implement policies to drive economic growth, job creation, inequality reduction, and decarbonization.

Very true. People in Brazil or Mexico are foolish to worry about criminal gangs. What is vital is that new Ministries are created so corruption can burgeon.  

Becky Thatcher kicking Oppenheimer in the balls.

What Vishnu's theophany displays, as Worship's own World Destroyer

Vatsalya's Witness replays as Mum, servile, Civilising her Employer

So, every Mrs. Sippy's 'oikos', deny 'nikos' to Tom Sawyer

& Huck Finn, win, for Becky, America as but voyeur.

Envoi-

Prince! Is your Mum really a bruised reed, or barely snuffed out taper?

Mine, brought to mind, restores naked Job to a dress not of paper.

Oikonomia mysterion & Proverbs 3:11-12

Since very Economia's Mysterion cashes out as but ontological dysphoria

 Only Love's crucifixion can incarnate Logos as Canonical aporia

Contra Pope- no 'great chain can draw all to agree'

Which is precisely what is useful about Utility

Envoi- 

Peace hath a Prince! So long as Stewards but stew

In juices no Jesus would, as amniotic, renew.

Riposte- 

That only the son can discipline Daddy- all virgins know

& marry what were slobs- till a bigger belly grow

Siddhantha- 

For needs unmet, Hail we yet, a prole so Popish as to let her vagina widen

So but Plutocracy pouch the joey that was Senility's President Biden. 

Radhakamal Mukherjee's Ecological idiocy

More than a century ago Radhakamal Mukherjee, a Professor of Economics who hadn't studied Economics at all, wrote-

“In India more than in any other country the great intellectual, social, and religious movements have originated in villages,

But those movements were so utterly shit that a couple of thousand British dudes were ruling over an Indian Empire larger than that of Ashoka or Akbar.  

and, nurtured by their thoughts and aspirations, at last reached the cities.

Where they were told by Turks or Europeans to fuck off back where they came from 

The soul of India is to be found in the village, not in the city.

It was the soul of a beggarly, infantile, dependency. India, as the Americans were pointing out that time, wasn't a Colony. It was merely a dependency too stupid, ignorant, weak and lazy to police or protect itself.  

In modern Europe, on the other hand, the discoveries in intellectual or social life are made in the city and are then communicated to the village, which receive them as gospel truths.

Nonsense! The villages had their own Parish Councils and elected Members of Parliament who shaped government policy. In India, the British District Magistrate/Tax Collector and the British Police Superintendent ran things. The Villagers had no votes or other voice in the formulation of Government policy.  

The city sets the example. The village imitates...[In India] the village is still almost self-sufficing,

Fuck off! It couldn't even police or protect itself- forget about contributing to national defense or national policy making.  

and is in itself an economic unit.”

Which is why, but for the British famine code, its poorer members would starve to death periodically. Still, it must be said, some villagers did manage to end up as indentured laborers in South Africa or Fiji or Trinidad. They were the lucky ones. 

Mukherjee could be considered a precursor to Elinor Ostrom. He wrote ' in the Indian village communities there are minute communal relations of the supply of water to prevent the mutual rights of the cultivators. To prevent a tyrannical use of property, India has sought to establish a kind of communal ownership of tanks and the distributory channels of irrigation — the most important instruments of agricultural production.”

Mukherjee hadn't noticed that those 'minute communal relations' were utterly shit. Vast numbers of villages had been assigned to some Turkic or Pathan war-lord or, at a later date, to some tax-farmer or 'Zamindar'. The villagers had no fucking power save such as would suffice to fuck each other over. On the other hand, the British run Canal Colonies of the Punjab, where water supply was wholly out of the hands of the villagers, were thriving. Indeed, they were exporting food even as far as Europe. 

Even if the villagers had prevented tyrants emerging amongst themselves, they had failed dismally, for a thousand years, to prevent the whole country being ruled by foreign tyrants. 

One may as well say 'Indian birds and animals have prevented any bird or animal from exercising tyrannical power through the acquisition of rights to private property. Monkeys and parrots, in India, have originated great spiritual and philosophical traditions. In the West, men- that too city dwellers!- have originated Science and Technology. That is why the West is such a mess. Did you know, Prime Minister Asquith is not even able to fly into the air and shit upon the head of Lloyd George? This is because instead of following the example of nice rural pigeons, the Brits, very foolishly studied the works of Isaac Newton who wasn't even a monkey or a donkey. That fucker was a man! Also he lived in a City! How fucked is that?' 

Mukherjee believed that 'applied human ecology is the only guarantee of a permanent civilization'. He hadn't noticed that a civilization which can't defeat invaders dies out- save in some backward villages. You can't apply ecology or economics if you don't control resources. But to control stuff you have to defeat others who might want to grab that stuff. This could no longer be done by muscular dudes wielding swords. The sinews of war could only be provided by technological industrialization. But, it was a very expensive business. Private ownership of land and water and other resources permitted the taxation of the revenues thus derived. This could pay for a standing Army as well as a the maintenance of internal law and order. True, as Netaji Bose suggested, a one party totalitarian state could, in theory, extract surpluses to create infrastructure. But, Indians- because they are villagers at heart- are simply too corrupt, incompetent, or lazy or crazy to take this road. 

Gassing on about the spirituality of the donkeys or parrots in the villages did not promote either ecology or economics or anything else. 

Surat Al-Baqarah 2.102

When I remove my spectacles and into Heaven's dark mirror cast an abject Copernican gaze

The Cyclopean Moon which receptacles wandered wits in its auto-enucleated eye

Melts into tears- lamenting every blind snowdrop's 'enforced chastity'

Till it Christ behoove, to refrain Love's amaze- so Pity, again, Die. 

Envoi-

 Be it for who, under Zohra's spell, fell into Harut/Marut's Well or Love's tragic chink in Thisbe's Wall 

 Prince! Who weep in Babylon but expel such Magic as holds enchurched brides in thrall.

Why 'common knowledge' is uncommon nonsense

Alexander Pope, in 'Essay on Man' asks us the question-

Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,

And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?

Pope, whom the Germans considered a philosopher rather than, as we do, a gifted versifier, was thought to be expressing the Newtonian- or, later, Kantian- orthodoxy re. the existence of 'naturality' (non arbitrariness) or 'categoricity (having a unique model) such that Nature and God were as but the same Book in which all might read and, save by reason of stupidity or a myopic type of self-love, arrive at the same coordinating or prescriptive conclusions.

This was not Pope's own view. God allots each creature a place in His plan. The 'untutored Indian' is condemned to no inferior fate (though 'Christian thirst for gold' may claim otherwise) if the humble Heaven granted him is one his dog is welcome to follow him into.

But, this is what happens when Yuddhishtra- the 'Just King' who must learn Statistical Game Theory to overcome 'vishada' (mental illness)- gets to Heaven but refuses to enter unless the dog 'Dhruva' too enters with him. 

Sadly, neither Hindus nor Germans nor lovers of English Literature have understood what Pope actually said. I have. But then, I was born in 'Benares on the Rhine' and had to study a bit of Statistical Game Theory when I was sixteen or seventeen (after which I devoted myself to drink). 

To be fair, Pope didn't say what I said he said. But that's because Pope was a genuine poet and thus remained 'untaught by the wisdom he had uncovered, the laws he had revealed.' The Hindu does not expect his faithful dog to accompany to Human heaven. But if a dog, or any other creature, attaches itself to a man arduously climbing to that destination, it deserves an equal admittance to what lies beyond the gates even if the man himself decides its comforts can't justify the horrible shit show that is life on Earth. 

Obviously, for Pope's readers there were two types of 'Indian'- some were noble and 'Red', some 'Black'. Notoriously, the 'Black' retained an ancient belief in metempsychosis. They had no use for the type of Christian Heaven which Christian 'greed for gold' could buy entry into. Thus, Pope's admonition-  "Go, like the Indian, in another life / Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife"- means the opposite of what Bolingbroke- the Alcibiades, or Petronius, of his age- would have received it as. The fact is, your wife- whom you oppressed in this life- will be your husband in the next life unless you are her puppy dog because your dog attained the state of God and decided this was a sweeter way for you to discharge your karmic debt. 

The bottle, however, it is my fervent hope, is the impossible, perhaps because wholly Eucharistic, 'fixed point' of all Creation's 'eigenform' such that Landau's problems forever remain unsolved- or rather, not properly posed. What I mean is that the 'merit' of prime gaps may themselves offer a superior encryption such that all revealed language remains its own Pascalian cypher. Obviously, when I say 'what I mean is' what is meant is that I'm drunk off my head. 

In Game Theory, Common knowledge is stuff everybody knows everybody knows everybody knows. Sadly, everybody also knows that nobody knows what they know or, at least, are not able to act as if they do.

This is because Man knows that Alexander Pope- not some unreadable shithead, like Marx- was right.

 Even if there are no 'accessibility' or 'computability' problems, strategic considerations, resource or endowment diversity, etc, etc there is a fundamental mathematical problem with 'Common knowledge' viz. if knowledge is finitary, and has a language, 'Common Knowledge' can't be a well defined formula in it because it is an infinite conjunction. The workaround is a 'fixed point' theorem. The problem is 'singularities'. If the universe is full of black holes and white holes, why should 'knowledge' be different? Following Chichilinsky (but also, I believe, D.G Saari) we can equate singularities with Arrowvian dictators or just departures from 'naturality'- i.e. arbitrariness. This is related to uncorrelated asymmetries which in turn are related to costly signals. In other words, 'Knowledge' is a type of information which is biologic or arbitrary & Popean. What it can't be is mathematical or represent indefeasible propositions from the STEM subjects. 

Hannah Arendt vs Grete Hermann

 Hannah Arendt was five years younger than Grete Hermann. But Hannah studied under philosophy under Heidegger- a stupid, spoiled Catholic, shithead- whereas Grete studied mathematics under Emmy Noether & Edmund Landau. In 1935 she showed the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem. Hermann was also a student of Leonard Nelson and made a good neo-Kantian fist at accommodating Quantum Theory. Hermann returned to Germany after Hitler's fall and contributed to the Bad Godesberg program which enabled the Socialists to take power in the Sixties. Hannah's Aunt went to America where she babbled hysterical, ignorant, nonsense in return for a little money.

Writing for Aeon, Samantha Rose Hill takes a different view. She believes that 'In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves'

This is nonsense. Hannah's true self was that of a charlatan who had studied nonsense and who was pretending to be smart so as to earn some nice dollars. Grete had studied worthwhile, high IQ, stuff. She didn't get much international recognition till late in her life when savants pointed out the manner in which her work anticipated that of Bell. Grete's politics were consistently Socialist and though her resistance to Hitler was unavailing, her own hard work helped post-War Germany to rise. Hers was an authentic life because she genuinely was smart and had grappled with high IQ problems. Hannah played the Holocaust card when the fact that she'd fucked Heidegger wasn't enough. Still, she helped spread anti-Semitic canards and thus was more authentically Teutonic than Grete. 

Was Hannah always stupid? Could she have been a student of Emmy Noether? The answer is that Hannah had some literary talent but was as stupid as shit.

This is a poem she wrote when she was about 20. 

When I consider my hand
– A foreign thing related to me –
I stand in no country,
I am neither here nor there
I am not certain of anything.

For a German philosophy student, looking at one's hand reminds one of Kant's argument against Leibnizian relationism, in favor of Newtonian absolute Space and Time, based on the fact that hands are 'incongruent counterparts'. In other words, Hannah's hand, subjected to analysis situs, projects her into some Kantian transcendental realm.  But, this has the effect of deracinating her. She is no longer German. She needs someone to guide her via Fichte and Hamann, maybe Schopenhauer and Nietzsche etc. into something more Volkisch- if not Catholic coz maybe Catlicks had joined the Jews in stabbing the Army in the back. 

Samantha takes a more charitable view- 

The poem, titled ‘Lost in Myself’, reflects upon a feeling of self-alienation.

Back then, girls only went to Collidge so as to get alienated from their natural instinct to have babies and cook strudel.  

It is that feeling of self-alienation when one is unsure of anything, let alone themselves.

Nope. Hannah had just done a year of philosophy. She was referencing Kant's 'incongruent counterparts' argument which had a new salience because a cunning Jew, Einstein, was seeking to subvert Space, Time and the German duty to be as stupid as shit. What Kant wrote was -It is apparent from the ordinary example of the two hands that the shape of the one body may be perfectly similar to the shape of the other, and the magnitudes of their extensions may be exactly equal, and yet there may remain an inner difference between the two, this difference consisting in the fact, namely, that the surface which encloses the one cannot possibly enclose the other. Since the surface which limits the physical space of the one body cannot serve as a boundary to limit the other, no matter how that surface be twisted and turned, it follows that the difference must be one which rests on an inner ground. This inner ground cannot, however, depend on the difference of the manner in which the parts of the body are combined with each other. For as we have seen from our example, everything may in this respect be exactly the same. Nonetheless, imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That [hand] would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause in producing the counterpart.

By the time she was 14, she had read the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant,

which is why she thought her hand was 'foreign' to her because it revealed that things have 'orientation' in addition to any relational qualities or characteristics that we might observe. 

the writings of her future professor Karl Jaspers on the Psychology of Worldviews,

Kant is high IQ. Jaspers- not so much. 

and taught herself Greek and Latin

which is why she was a bit crap at both. But then so was Heidi.

What does it mean to discover one’s true, authentic self?

It is to find out your true nature or inclinations or capacity. Back in the Sixties, I was a member of Her Majesty's Secret Service with a license to kill. Also, I was married to Mary Poppins. Women to whom I mentioned this tended to be sympathetic. My wife, however, punched me quite hard any time I mentioned the subject. The consensus amongst the fair sex seems to be that I am a sad, fat, loser. Still, I am quite authentically useless for doing anything useful around the house or for getting a well paid job and so allowances should be made.  

To act from a place of authenticity?

Actions which are as good or useful as the actor suggests are authentic. What Heidi and Hannah were engaging in was fraud.  

Is there a truer self within the self that can be uncovered? What are we really talking about when we talk about authenticity?

Something which aint spurious, meretricious, fraudulent or pretentious. 

Authenticity emerged as a philosophical concept

a decade or two after people had begun to suspect that philosophy was fraudulent. Einstein had taken down Bergson's pants. Heidi could score over Husserl who had initially looked mathsy but clearly was barking up a particularly stupid, non-existent, tree. Since Heidi wasn't mathsy he didn't have to bother with debating smart peeps.  

from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), published in the aftermath of the Great War.

It was published a couple of years after Hindenburg was elected President. Heidi was moving from Catholicism to something more Prussian. Hannah too would have ended up converting if Hitler hadn't come to power and suddenly race trumped religion.  

Heidegger’s work attempted to recover Being from the ordinariness of everyday life in which people exist in the world with others.

This is because the Church didn't accept his vocation. He couldn't even get a Philosophy gig at a Catholic university. Thus he had to pretend to have a super spiritual inner life.  

For him, most of our everyday existence is inauthentic, because being in the world with others turns us away from being with our true selves, our true selves who are unaffected by the world.

Emmy Noether or Grete Hermann had a true self working on mathematical theorems which were indeed unaffected by fads and fashions or popular prejudices or political passions. They weren't pretending to be smart. They actually were smart. 

For Heidegger, there was a difference between what is translated as ‘Being’ (with a capital B) and ‘being’ (with a lower-case b)

So what? The bigger difference was between Heidi and Einstein. The latter could extract something useful from philosophy. The former had a paranoid theory about how philosophy took a wrong turn and the result was that the fucking Jews were busy stabbing all the nice Aryan people in the back.  

This distinction does not indicate a transcendent Being, the way capitalising the ‘g’ in God does, but rather the fact that one is not always merely a being among beings. Or, to put it another way, Being means that there is a truer version of the self, a more authentic version, that can be experienced only when one steps out of the flow of everyday life, what Heidegger called ‘everydayness’. And when we experience this Being, we do not just experience our common lives, we experience everything that being human means – including our own inevitable death, that part of ourselves – our nonexistence – that otherwise remains hidden from our consciousness.

Which is cool iff we gain super-powers. Otherwise it is still mundane. Nobody cares if a sad, fat, loser like me thinks he is Secret agent or whether he coincides with his own being as sad, fat, loser without even a satisfactory fantasy life. 

On the other hand, suppose I knew everything important about myself. Then, in a sense, I would have super powers because I could use my body with maximum efficiency. This is like the notion of an eigenform in second order cybernetics. The sky might well be the limit of a reflective system which can constantly keep improving itself recursively. 

The German word he uses for authenticity is Eigentlichkeit,

i.e. that which characterizes a thing. This is like the eigenvector or eigenform in math or cybernetics. 

which is defined as ‘really’ or ‘truly’. Eigen means ‘peculiar’, and ‘own’ or ‘of one’s own’. Literally, it might be translated as possessing the quality of being truly for oneself. Or, colloquially, today we might say something like ‘being true to oneself’.

If I knew my own capabilities and had achieved perfect control over my body, I might be able to Kung Fu you to death while making a moving speech and also farting melodiously 

In those moments of exception, when one fully experiences the truth of themselves, they are apart from the herd, alone in their Being.

Why? You can be part of a herd and play a leadership role, leading it, and yourself, to safety.  

And in this way, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is a very lonely concept. It is to allow oneself to experience for a moment the terrifying aloneness of nonexistence – one’s death – while still alive.

So, this is mystical shite rather than the gaining of a super-power. Why bother learning Kung Fu if all you get is 'satori' rather than the ability to fly through the air kicking the heads off evil Ninja assassins? Worse yet, it is one thing to pretend you experience mystical raptures in your garden shed and another thing entirely to have to give lectures and supervise PhD dissertations in stupid shite. 

In France, philosophy was taught at high school. A number of teachers of that shite dreamed of a better life as writers or journalists. A few- Sartre, Camus but even Beauvoir- were able to quit teaching by getting paid to write pompous or hysterical shite. Later, there was the option to become a pop-star and later yet, to get rich as a stand up comedian. 

In the midst of the Second World War,

which became inevitable once France permitted the remilitarization of the Rhineland 

French existentialism emerged out of German existentialism.

France had great mathematicians. Stupid people went in for a literary type of psilosophy.  

If authenticity was a question of being for Heidegger and a question of freedom for Jaspers,

but this would involve a 'leap of faith'. The problem is that people doing useful stuff don't have to jump at anything.  

for Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus it became a question of individual ethics.

What stupid shite I write can get me some money and a blessed release from having to teach shite?  

The underlying question shifted from ‘What is the meaning of Being?’ to ‘How should I be?’ The credo underpinning Sartre’s work – ‘existence precedes essence’ – meant that we are thrown into the world without any fixed substance, and this meant that we get to choose who we become.

Should we pretend to be Commies? That might be fun.  

While philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau tried to capture human nature by imagining what life was like before society, for Sartre, there is no human nature.

His people had no character. This was because after the re-militarization of the Rhineland, France had no offensive doctrine which meant its East European allies could place no reliance on them. But, once Mussolini went over to the dark side, this meant that the French could not rely even on themselves. I suppose a life without honor is but bare existence. But to maintain honor requires doing sensible things and telling philosophers to fuck the fuck off.  

We must always be imagining and reimagining who we are,

if we have shit for brains- sure.  

which is to say we are always in the process of becoming. For Beauvoir, becoming was a creative enterprise, a work of art.

Then she died and her oeuvre was preserved by the brain dead for the brain dead.