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Introduction to the Introduction
-- RF Williams

This is a somewhat cleaned-up version of the "Introduction to Capital-in-eRepublik, Part 1" by Phoenix Quinn (a/k/a Silas Soule), originally published approximately half a century ago in e-time.

Your dedicated curators here at Radio Free Dixie intend to publish additional excerpts from this epic work. That is, once we've been able to remove more of the coffee and tobacco juice stains from the original. And decode the text beneath all of the inane scribblings of flying socialist dinosaurs and whatnot that were scrawled all over it, probably, we think, by the famous early pioneer in freedom-socialist proletkult expressionism, Mark Valshannar, who had little use for economic theories.

Our intrepid researchers have determined that "PQ", as he was affectionately known by his 3 or 4 fans, and who, it is well-known, liked to create e-pastiches of real life works in an attempt to word-paint a kind of "sci-fi parallel universe" explanation of the New World, probably used the following real life references when putting this screed together...

- CAPITAL in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty
- CAPITAL, by Karl Marx
- The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
- Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
- All-Star Comics, 1940's, 1970's and in reprints, mainly those featuring the "Justice Society of America"







eRepublik -- a sketchily detailed, obliquely realistic simulation. Where players are ripe as rain for something, anything really, which is too strange to believe.

The uncanniness of the ninth part of its denizens, who are, allegorically speaking, and largely against their conscious will, sinking into a synchronized swim with anti-evolutionists who make up for their total lack of scientific training with an unbridled enthusiasm for ignorance.

This eerie e-spookiness of magic unrealism permits a superheroic anti-hero goober like me free access to claim a laser-like, Deceiver-slaying insight regarding the serious topic before us -- e-economics.

It's like being an "expert" on the Internet, but even less meaningful. To the barricades, then, citizens and comrades, with our critically-pointed mouse-clicks at the ready!






Some things in e-life are unequivocal and well-established.

We know that e-trolls, for example, will spend 30,000 years in the e-afterlife climbing a tree of metal thorns while giant, fiery, razor-toothed women devour them.

And we know that people who steal BH medals will go to a purgatorial slaughterhouse on an unpleasant planet not too far from Tralfamadore, to be crushed over and over again into a fine emerald-soylent pulp, until they learn to manage, through mindful means, to undo the consequences of their actions and that they will then be reborn as a multi of one of Groot's lesser minions ten or twelve hundred times, before being able to re-enter the realm of respected players.



e-Economics is less so firmly established in our body of e-knowledge.

The discipline has a childish passion for mathematics, as well as a tendency towards purely theoretical and highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and inter-disciplinary rigor.

Luckily, I come from a long line of journalists, poets, alcoholics, white-witches, space-travelers and Frenchmen for whom economists are not highly respected. In my circle of family and friends, economists, despite their charms, are required to set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything, before being granted a place at the table.


In fact, we cherry-pick those parts of political economy that are convenient to our world view. We all do this. Left, Right, Center, Drunk.

Because cherries are yummy.





Baroque refers to a lack of emptiness, to a departure from structure and rules, an extraordinary plenitude of disorienting detail.

The Americas -- those mysterious continents of symbiosis, mutation, and mestizaje -- have engendered and embodied the baroque spirit for millennia. With its elaborate Aztec, Mayan and Inca temples. With its strange poetry of flower and song and its pervasive rituals of communal dance and song.

America. The Turtle Island. With its poet-rulers and elaborate coyote stories erected and relayed on the rolling music of drums and flutes and guitars that assembles friends far and wide and calls them, calmly, relentlessly, to roll on down the river forever, to obey only the law of the flowers.


It was a beauty for all the ages.




And then along came Capital.


Nothing recalls the smoke and rain, the destroyed temples, the great councils, the exultation of vanished pride, fortune, majesty, praise and power except this, here, right now, this written page. This screen. This window in your mind between then and now.

Nothing else. The actual, detailed, profound, glorious, perfumed America of endless forests and flowers is all forgotten and ignored in the annals of New World officialdom.




It is just and right to begin with too much of too little. To begin with remembering the last times of the people of words, those poet-philosophers who demanded from the peaks of their elaborate and mighty pyramid-mounds...

"Does mankind possess any truth?"



Let us begin by asking, along with the caretakers of the Peaceful People, the Hopitu, who always ask all of us in this Fourth World, each year, as we start our retreats once again for the cycle of the Soyal, as winter closes in. As they have been asking since time began...

"What shall we sing?"









OK. That's it for today turtle-friends. Be well and keep swimming.

And remember to take a refreshing swim in the Socialist-Freedom Pond!



Thanks for checking out this edition of "Radio Free Dixie"!

All you home-grown economists, please share your notes in the convenient comment section below. Except for any whacked-out trolls with nothing to say except to piss and moan. Y'all can just shut it, plox, ya filming? 😉