Last year, I recommended a remarkable little book that sets you thinking about macrohistory and the future of mankind. I summarized some of the main points of the book:

“Taub has written the type of book you may find many details wrong with, but which overall, sets you thinking, and its immense value lies in generating so many questions. In short, as we will return on this book as Book of the Week later, he argues that rather than see the world as an evolution of class, we should look at it as an evolution of caste, with caste referring to deep seated preferences for a particular way of doing things and of conceiving the world. In short, he claims, as the Hindus would agree, we moved from the prevalence of the spiritual caste, to an evolution towards the subsequent dominance of warriors, merchants, and workers (the bureaucratic-technocratic structures of today), with a coming return of the spiritually-inclined.

An interesting points he makes is the following. In any transition, three phases can be recognized: 1) the pioneering phase which takes place in the dominant countries of the old sphere (example: emergent of merchants in feudal/imperial Spain and Portugal); 2) a revolutionary/evolutionary phase: the revolution takes place at the periphery (i.e. the merchants take power in Holland and England), while in the former dominant countries, an evolutionary caste merger takes place. But the countries where the revolution takes place, become the new dominant power centers. Example: the workers revolution’s took place at the periphery in Russia and China, but in the West,the elite of the worker’s caste merged with the merchant class to form social-welfare with technocratic capitalism.”

Larry Taub also visited us in our home in Chiang Mai and we became friends. Like me, he was struggling to make ends meet and to reconcile his desire to make the world a better place, with the realities of the marketplace.

So it is especially pleasing that this underground classic is getting traction, in Japan of all places. Here’s the message I received from the author:

“The Japanese edition of The Spiritual Imperative came out on Dec. 13, and immediately rose toward the top of the Amazon Japan best-seller list. It was No. 1 on the list for two days, Dec. 19 and 20. Then it stayed up between Nos. 2 to 7 for about two weeks. Then all 8000 copies of the first printing that Diamond Publishing Co. (Diamond-sha) did sold out, and copies became available from Amazon Japan through secondary sources only. Diamond then did a second printing of 3000 copies right after the New Year, and Amazon Japan is now selling copies directly again. When Amazon Japan ran out just before the New Year, the book slipped down to the 900s, but when they started selling again the book came back up to No. 14 and has remained in the top 75. Right now it is No. 69.

The Japanese title is: Mittsu no Genri: Sekksu, Nenrei, Shakai-kaiso ga mirai o tsukiugokasu (The Three Principles: Sex, Age, and Caste Stir Up the Future [rough translation]). My name as author is Rorensu Tobu.”

You can order signed copies of the English version of the book by writing to elitov at hotmail dot com.

Larry also now has his own blog, and for a taster, you may want to read this posthumous interview of Karl Marx by Larry Taub.

Just to make sure, I should say that there are many things to disagree with in this book, but it is a synthesis that is powerful enough to make you think in-depth about the future of mankind as a whole.