Nobles don't feel a lot of need to seek power through claims of spiritual experience. If you're in the hinterland, however, you might find being possessed by a fox as a way to move up in the world.
My son had a friend whose parents came from China, his dad had a big job, his mom felt like might have been a mistake to immigrate because she had a medical certificate (barefoot doctor?) of some sort which wasn't accepted in the US.
Now my son's friend was mentally ill, I believed, and his mother believed he was mentally ill because he was possessed by a demon. She went to an evangelical church where I wouldn't expect her to be encouraged that belief. Some people have said, "it's a good thing she isn't practicing medicine in the US if she believes stuff like that"
It's kinda no surprise that a person from a rural village in China would believe that or, really, that anyone from a rural village in the developing world would believe that -- it's what they do.
My son's friend gave him an expose about witch doctors in Africa written by a missionary that, based on what I know now, was probably motivated by his experience with his mom. In particular, I was later to learn that the fox cult in China is pretty similar in how it works, I mean, you might have hundreds of fox shrines in your area and if you have some problem you can't work out the fox (through a medium) will tell you how it will be. If you fail to comply, the fox doesn't need a lot of help haunting you (you'll bump into fox shrines every day) but you can rest assured the fox can call in a favor from someone if it needs help haunting you and if the fox is just starting in its career it has connections it met at the fox academy that will help it because it will then be indebted to them.
As it is an alternative route to status, fox mediumship is a career path for lower-status men or women of a wider range of SES who might find it's a job they can do out of the house.
Nurture probably plays a stronger role than nature here, yep. For CCP cadres, signaling rationality is probably a no-brainer against the ever-present threat of populism, but they are also not going to do anything that are going to make peasants wonder about the mandate of heaven at an inconvenient time (e.g. demolishing shrines)
>being possessed by a fox as a way to move up in the world.
Pretending to be possessed, this is a populist, and should I say, traditional move, agreed
(Ntheless, you might be surprised how (privately) superstitious the urban elite (of the SES, not the intellect) in the Greater Bay of China are, just as how publicly superstitious many stay-at-home moms are in the US?)
But let's move on the idea of property insurance, generalized to the intellectual sort :) good patch for Szilards idea of the Bund, imho.
(Whose nemesis was another technocrat, blueblooded Vannevar. Not sure of the latter's condition,he was too high SES to tell)
Poor Grothendieck could have had some! That pays out in, if not friends, careful non-fans to play math with him in the shed. (Here informalism would be crucial)
However, I'm still a bit mindfogged so maybe next round..
but I did look up the finer details of Tokugawa & the Prussian influence on the Meiji effort to soften absolutism with social democracy. There's even a dissertation calling it "corporatism" (Graeber's term for Trump's ideology)
("Laksmana" is the Indonesian word for "Admiral", things like nominative determinism are perhaps also more common in the 3rd world [transplants])
Oh.. music seems to be the best therapy for Sz.. (think Helfgott-- he credits his father) if your son's friend was not past tensed, they could make a band
My son had a friend whose parents came from China, his dad had a big job, his mom felt like might have been a mistake to immigrate because she had a medical certificate (barefoot doctor?) of some sort which wasn't accepted in the US.
Now my son's friend was mentally ill, I believed, and his mother believed he was mentally ill because he was possessed by a demon. She went to an evangelical church where I wouldn't expect her to be encouraged that belief. Some people have said, "it's a good thing she isn't practicing medicine in the US if she believes stuff like that"
It's kinda no surprise that a person from a rural village in China would believe that or, really, that anyone from a rural village in the developing world would believe that -- it's what they do.
My son's friend gave him an expose about witch doctors in Africa written by a missionary that, based on what I know now, was probably motivated by his experience with his mom. In particular, I was later to learn that the fox cult in China is pretty similar in how it works, I mean, you might have hundreds of fox shrines in your area and if you have some problem you can't work out the fox (through a medium) will tell you how it will be. If you fail to comply, the fox doesn't need a lot of help haunting you (you'll bump into fox shrines every day) but you can rest assured the fox can call in a favor from someone if it needs help haunting you and if the fox is just starting in its career it has connections it met at the fox academy that will help it because it will then be indebted to them.
As it is an alternative route to status, fox mediumship is a career path for lower-status men or women of a wider range of SES who might find it's a job they can do out of the house.