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The essential is what binds form and content in a living unity. It is what tells you, pre-analytically, what matters - what must be preserved, what must be done, what is noble, what is base.
The crisis of the West is a cultivated, institutionalised, and now runaway doom loop of blindness to essence: an active training away from seeing what is essential.
It is the faculty by which one perceives hierarchy - not of status or price, but of meaning. And it is just this faculty that has been systematically dulled, distorted, and finally mocked in Western late modernity.
Something that comes to mind with the xz backdoor, is that in 2014 OpenSSL had the Heartbleed vulnerability and it was discovered that OpenSSL only received $2000 in yearly donations to support the project.
Every major corporation used it (Cisco, IBM, Amazon), but nobody paid to support it.
βThere are very few things better done by speeding them up, yet we live in a world that is demanding more and more speed, and less and less reflection.β - Iain McGilchrist