Introduction

This is the English language part of a website that contains a description of the Rhineland model, the economic model prevalent in the northern and western European countries, named after a region in the north-west part of Germany.

The Dutch version of this site has over three thousand pages, most of them source material representing the facts from society in the form of newspaper articles, using this material for an analysis that involves all disciplines that have something to do with society. These disciplines are put in the order of: Psychology, Sociology, Economy, Politics, and Media. The argument for this arrangement is that the psyche of individuals determines their behavior in groups, which determines their materialistic dealings, which determines their rules, which determines the way they mass-communicate.

The inspiration behind this order comes from the relatively new discipline of general semantics, the discipline that studies the relations between words and reality, and the way human thinking deals with these relations. The order of human disciplines reflects one of its central concepts, the ladder of abstractions, in going from the most specific: the human individual, to various and increasingly more abstract forms of group behavior. Since all rational human dealings, and a lot of its thinking, are done in words, and the understanding of the usage of words is basic to them all, we here put general semantics on top of the other disciplines, taking over the role formerly fulfilled by philosophy - more detail on this here .

The Dutch part of this site contains a full-fledged version of this approach, with four menu's that can be chosen via the hyperlinks in the site banner: or , or , or and or . On the Dutch site, hyperlinks on content pages are denoted by colored arrows like this , which makes it possible to denote steps between the disciplines or abstraction levels by arrows and - the teaching of general semantics that insists on always anchoring one's theory in the real world, is implemented by the extensive use of brown-colored arrows pointing downwards , which mostly link towards newspaper articles reporting from this real world. In similar vain, links towards literary, philosophical and similar remarks are denoted by .

The English part is almost entirely limited to articles on general semantics and sociology, but most functionalities are copied to the English version. So one can familiarized oneself with the English version, and then go to the fully-grown Dutch version here , opening in a new window, with the characteristic menu on the right hand side - to aid its interpretation, the header of the menu with corresponding English translations can be called by clicking here .


This page with menu: click here.