Joyanna Adams

Henry Adams Describes Elon Musk Perfectly

Nobody Remembers

I have missed reading. Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with other endeavors, and last night I finally got to “read.” I’ve been obsessively reading books since I learned how to read, which took some patient training from my second-grade teacher, bless her heart. She spent an hour with me and once I got WHY I was so far behind, (dyslexia) I never stopped reading. She cured my confusion in one hour.

I was the Forest Gump of never having a day go by without running, I didn’t let a day go by without reading a book…or 8. I will literally go numb if I don’t read something that day.

And I read the words of my distant ancestors a lot. The Adams came over on the boat with Thomas Hooker from Braintree, Wales, and founded Braintree, Massachusetts. In the early 1600’s.

 I find comfort in their thoughts, because they seem so very close to my own. And last night I was reading The Education of Henry Adams.  Henry was the son of Charles Francis Adams, who was the son of John Quincy Adams, (Preisdent) who was the of John Adams. (President) Sam Adams a distant cousin. (Starter of the Revolution)

They were all part of our founding.

Henry Adams went on to become a journalists and historian. He was cantankerous, biting, critical, much like Tucker Carlson of our time. While reading in Wiki, I came upon this:

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Henry “We are in the hands of the Jews”, Adams lamented. “They can do what they please with our values.” He advised against investment except in the form of gold locked in a safe deposit box. “There you have no risk but the burglar. In any other form you have the burglar, the Jew, the Czar, the socialist, and, above all, the total irremediable, radical rottenness of our whole social, industrial, financial and political system.”

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While you might be surprised at the anti-Semitics, you can’t deny that not much has changed.  

Here he writes of what we call the NEOCONS of today:

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In his 1909 manuscript The Rule of Phase Applied to History, Adams attempted to use Maxwell’s demon as a historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle.^[44] Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards “equilibrium”, but he saw militaristic nations (he felt Germany pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a “Maxwell’s Demon of history.”

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His views on population

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In 1910, Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a “theory of history” based on the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy.^[42][43] This, essentially, states that all energy dissipates, order becomes disorder, and the earth will eventually become uninhabitable. (Elon?)  In short, he applied the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson to the modeling of human history.

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After the war was over, Henry went to the White House to meet President Grant. He believed Grant to be pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seems so even to the cave dwellers.

But the one-page last night in his book, which stuck with me was this one…

Quote:

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“In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal: men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought: men who sprang from the soil to power: apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others: shy: jealous: sometimes vindictive, more or less dull in outward appearance: always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant, –the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature, energies of the prime like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others. The fact was certain: it crushed arguments and intellect at once.”

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Tell me, is that not a good description of our very own Tony Stark: Elon Musk?

Yeah…Henry had Elon pitched perfectly, and like this descendant, now in 2024, I’d say:

Henry, you still got it! And this Nobody Wonders: What Elon would think of Henry’s description?

February 18, 2024 - Posted by Joyanna Adams | Uncategorized | Books, History, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, reading