Bøger af Graeme Donald Snooks

This book explores truth in human society - its nature, role, and future. But it does so in an unorthodox way, by employing a fictional framework. Truth conveyed within a lie. It is an exploration that ranges from Greek rationalism (truth told to outsiders and lies to insiders) in the West and Zoroastrianism (Truth versus the Lie) in the East, to the pragmatism of today, and beyond. It is the year 2044 in a world reeling from the devastating effects of a radical experiment by governments to impose a draconian global climate-mitigation program. After decades of oppression, right-wing forces in Metropolis, the world's leading society, have thrown off these shackles, taken political control, invaded the devastated oil-rich countries, and are advancing on China after a limited nuclear exchange. In the turmoil, a determined scholar is editing the unpublished essays of an obscure thinker, active between the 1960s and 2010s, who had predicted these events using his revolutionary general dynamic theory of life. A voice from the underground that had been ignored in its own time. The edited essays focus on the role played by truth in the dealings of the state, the people, the intellectuals, the businesspeople, and the clergy of Metropolis in the early years of the twenty-first century. A role that led to the chaos of 2044. Arguing from the grave, our thinker shows there is no general "will to truth", even among philosophers; there is no societal demand for truth in the struggle to survive and prosper; and that truth-seeking is the most extreme of extreme sports - a form of self-vivisection - pursued by deviants who often end mentally disturbed or taking their own lives.

Dead God Rising provides a completely original explanation for the many religions and myths that have arisen in human society. In particular, it exposes the mechanism by which human religion has been transformed over the millennia. To do this, the book focuses on a number of important and representative case studies in early human society (the Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians), together with those at the core both of the Neolithic (or agricultural) Transformation in the Fertile Crescent from Egypt to Mesopotamia (Egyptian religion, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and of the Industrial Transformation in Western Europe and beyond (scientism). This is a study in economic sociology rather than religion more narrowly defined. The book's basic argument is that religion and scientism arose from humanity's attempt to understand and sustain the hidden life-system responsible for human survival and prosperity in a hostile physical and social environment. This hidden life-system, which Professor Snooks calls the "strategic logos", is the book's major discovery. In addition to explaining the central mystery of life, it shows that religion - or "strategic ideology" - is the outcome of a set of rituals by which the Shamans and, later, the priestly philosophers attempted to gain access to, and to influence, the "strategic guardians" - the guardians of the logos - who were misleadingly called "gods" and, eventually, "God". What makes this book distinctive is the unique underlying theory - the "dynamic-strategy" theory - that Professor Snooks has developed to explain the dynamics of human society and of life itself. This realist transdisciplinary theory, which is based on 40 years of systematic observation of the patterns in life in general and human society in particular, extends beyond the work of orthodox sociologists and exposes the flaws in the arguments of the new atheists (such as Richard Dawkins) and Sociobiologists (such as Edward Wilson).

THE COMING ECLIPSE deals with the most important issue of our era, and deals with it in a unique way. This book is concerned with a critical choice of futures: either the adoption of a comprehensive climate-mitigation program or the emergence of a new technological revolution. As this book succinctly explains, the adoption of one will eclipse the other. A climate mitigation program of the type proposed by the IPCC will require the establishment of an artificial system of prices, which could only be achieved by establishing a command-like economy. Such an economic system would lock us into the old polluting fossil-fuel technological paradigm and thereby delay, even derail, the newly emerging technological revolution - the Solar Revolution - which will be based on radically new methods of energy extraction. By using a realist general dynamic framework, Professor Snooks shows that, by the end of the twenty-first century, the real dynamic costs of the mitigation program proposed by the IPCC will amount to an astronomical 90% of world GDP rather than the 1-2% estimated by climate mitigationists. Owing to their inadequate methodology, orthodox economists have massively, and dangerously, underestimated the real costs of climate mitigation, which would inevitably arise from delaying the imminent technological revolution due to begin in the middle decades of this century. A revolution that will transform our world, just as the Industrial Revolution transformed the commercial world of the eighteenth century. A revolution that, ironically, if not derailed will solve the current problem of climate change. This book is designed to be read in a couple of sittings by busy powerbrokers and businesspeople, as well as the educated public.

This book embodies a search for the ultimate reality in life; that unbearable truth from which we all shelter in the lowlands. Only those who delight in braving the alpine heights will want to read this book, which is about our true selves; about the real nature of good and evil, oppression and liberty, truth and lies; about the relentless reality of the life-system--the "strategic logos"--that enables us to survive and prosper; about the self-serving falseness of our ethical systems; and about the difficult but rewarding path to individual freedom. It is a book that tackles Goethe's sceptical question, "What is man?"; Shakespeare's query of disdain, "What is this quintessence of dust?"; Montaigne's rhetorical demand, "Is it possible to imagine anything as ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature?"; Nietzsche's statement of veiled contempt, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal"; and Thomas Mann's expression of disillusionment, "Is this all there is?".This book constitutes an entirely new approach to the philosophy of life, based as it is on the author's unique general dynamic theory of human society.Graeme Donald Snooks is Executive Director of the institute of Global Dynamic Systems (IGDS) in Canberra. Formerly (1989-2010) he was the Coghlan Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Snooks has been at the cutting edge of research on social and biological dynamics, and the new realist methodology, for 50 years. He has published 26 books and many articles.

ARK OF THE SUN provides an entirely new and holistic explanation for the origin and transformation of both life and human society. It does so by employing the revolutionary, demand-driven, general dynamic theory developed by Graeme Snooks over a life-time of cutting edge research. This book provides the capstone to Professor Snooks' extensive research, spanning five decades, on biological and social evolution. ARK OF THE SUN shows and explains how life on Earth is driven and shaped by a dynamic life system the author calls the "strategic logos". The "logos" is an entropy-defying, shock-deflecting system that has enabled biological forms and their societies to prosper in a hostile world. It is a system composed of materialist forces conceptually similar to the cosmos analysed by physicists, and to the human mind studied by psychologists. This book is essential to the understanding of life not only on Earth, but also wherever else in the Universe it might have emerged. And the theories it contains make possible what the intellectual tradition stretching from the ancient Greeks, through Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Darwin and Freud, down to the present, could never achieve -- a holistic understanding of biological and social dynamics. ARK OF THE SUN will be of interest to readers curious about the role of biological, social, economic, political, intellectual, and psychological transformations in life; and about the all-encompassing dynamic life system. Here is what one eminent international expert -- Professor Peter Schuster (President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, from the University of Vienna) -- has said: "The conventional view in science is often questioned by non-mainstream researchers, and once in a while, it pays to listen ... When I received Graeme Snooks' review presenting his view on evolution of the biosphere and human society ... I got the impression that demand-oriented evolutionary dynamics might be a useful view on problems of high complexity." (Editorial for 2008 in COMPLEXITY, Journal of the Santa Fe Institute).

Global Transition is an innovative study that analyses the problems and prospects of the Third World by building on the theoretical contribution - the dynamic-strategy model - made in the author's acclaimed Longrun Dynamics .

Explores the origin, development, and role of the self-conscious mind. Displacing the mind hypothesized by psychoanalytic, Darwinian, and complexity theorists, this book provides a perspective on human nature; the reasons for its continuing breakdown in a significant minority of the population; and on the surest road to mental recovery.