We Read Books

On the Great Emancipator

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:01:00 -0600

Obviously slavery played a big part in the Lincoln’s war in that the secessionists seceded to preserve slavery (although i think it’s dubious whether slavery would’ve been able to be maintained without the union army’s execution of the fugitive slave acts - There was no war to end slavery in Brazil, the government just stopped catching runaway slaves at it became cheaper to hire legit workers than to own slaves and hire guards to watch them. )

But I think a case can be made that it was more about taxes than egalitarian humanist idealism. Most of the exports from America were crops and cotton from the south and since there was no income tax at the time most of the federal governments income came from export tariffs from southern states. It seems as though the federal government would have been crippled without southern tariffs and this, in my opinion, is why lead to the north invading and conquering the south.

Slavery is just another government program, and it was ended in the rest of the world without successions, wars, or the idealization of politicians into revered pseudo-religious heroic luminaries (‘the great emancipator!’)

Charles Darwin and the Making of the Modern World

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:54:00 -0600

For most of man’s long history he has pictured himself as an observer, inhabiting the natural world but somehow profoundly separate from it. The belief manifests itself in religions where man is divine and the natural world was created for his pleasure - typified by St.Thomas Aquinas’ great chain of being, which nestles man snuggly between the angles and the animals.

The religious justification for this idea was largely discredited during the enlightenment
but the belief itself has remained with us nonetheless.

Methodological naturalists before the publication of On the Origin of Species have an embarrassing gap in their ability to explain the universe. Verily, they have no explanation for their own existence, or for the existence of humanity. This is more than a mere fact yet to be unearthed, and it is more than some esoteric philosophical riddle like, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” No, this question of what we are and why are hits much closer to home and is difficult to ignore. Indeed, an understanding of what man is frames any discourse about him, and has acute implications on all of philosophy, history, politics, ethics, psychology et cetera. Any body of study where man is the subject necessarily makes myriad presuppositions about his nature.

Darwin’s theory of evolution allows for a new kind of total philosophical materialism (not to be conflated with economic materialism.) Of course many pre-Darwin thinkers were secular and a few even atheist, IE David Hume and arguably Spinoza or Thomas Paine. But all, in some sense held mystical beliefs because naturalistic methods of understanding the rest of the physical world weren’t applied to humanity. The mind of man was seen, and in some ways still is seen, as immune to scientific analysis or somehow occupying another plane of existence. This attitude leaves us gravely ill-prepared to understand ourselves, much less improve our condition and add to the mantle of civilization. It like is a blind man trying to study renaissance paintings by touch and smell alone. The of study man without the foundation of knowing his origins is futile at best and fraudulent at worst. O what a mess it was, the enlightenment, when all the West’s most powerful intellects focused on the task fixing a mechanism which none knew for what it had been designed! How could even the most brilliant watchmaker or engineer complete such a task?

“It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” (Darwin, Descent of Man 4)

Any tome or treatise on psychology, art, history, medicine, ethics, politics or anything focused on humans that doesn’t first establish itself in the context of evolutionary biology is doomed to be a rehashing of preconceived biases and presuppositions. There is much resistance to the idea that the natural sciences should influence the liberal arts, and there is a concerted effort to keep the matters of the mind pure and immune to scientific explanation - that is to say, keep them immune to reality. This is obvious among the humanities where whole branches of study, for example, economics, gender studies, ethnic studies, political science, history etc. that are by and large uninterested in and often hostile towards the use of biological theories or data in their fields, even though all obviously depend on certain assumptions about human nature and behavior. Even fields such as psychology and psychometrics find this kind of knee jerk rejection of the application of science to the mind of man, as seen in the public backlash against the Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, after the publication of their book, The Bell Curve - the main content of which indeed has been reinforced by the mainstream scientific community.

This resistance toward applying the methods of natural inquiry to humanity comes from two main sources:

1) Mind/Body dualism

2) Christian Humanism

The former can be traced back to the early Greeks, and is typified by Plato’s theory of the forms. Simply put, if there is a self that is immaterial then what good would it do to study this transcendental mind with the same methods we use to study the more banal physical world? Thus meaning, purpose, thought, and emotions are simply off limits to science. Piggybacking off of this is the second culprit, Christian Humanism, which posits that this immaterial soul is ultimately good and righteous, since it was, after all, endowed to us by God, and that since everyone has an incorruptible immaterial soul, everyone at their core is equally good and righteous.

Although Christianity has been in stark decline in the West, especially in academia, the attitudes this ideology carried with it still insidiously percolate through the culture, and this has lead to a general distaste for scientific reductionism. It is the sentiment that the mind is sacrosanct, and can, not only, not be explained, studied and understood, but to attempt such is blasphemous, offensive, racist et cetera. Explaining the mind is seen as tantamount to destroying it, to reduce man to the condition of a mere animal, and to rob him of his cosmic significance. This last point is especially true for creationists who outright deny the scientific explanation for the origin of man, and this attitude can be seen in the ironic double meaning of the word ‘descent’ in Darwin’s titicular phase “The Descent of Man”

But scientists are not conquistadors out to steal Inca gold. Reductionism is good. Breaking things down into simpler pieces so that we have a better understanding of the whole when we put them back together is essential to the advancement and refinement of any body of knowledge. What’s more is that this does not take away the beauty of life, on the contrary, it deepens and reinforces wonder and majesty where it is applied. Introduction of evolutionary concepts should enrich our understanding of Shakespeare or Rembrandt, giving us more depth and clarity about why such things affect us the way that they do, and why we are driven to create them in the first place. Integration of these concepts into subjects like politics allow us to make more informed, rational prescriptions that are sensitive to the actual creatures that apply to, namely humans, taking their factual nature into account. In fact, the idea of studying such things without reference to biology is absurd. Studying English Literature without knowing the more basic principles of linguistics and psychology is like studying chemistry without knowing atomic theory. Perhaps some general tendencies can be deduced, but this will only be accidental, and the underlying phenomenon will remain mysterious and unpredictable.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 433)

The process of integrating Darwin’s ideas into any and all aspects of human life is the making of the modern world. And the term making is appropriate because this is a change we are still undergoing, and not without friction and inertia to overcome. It is the abandonment of the dualism and humanism that we carry as baggage from medieval times, and coming to a more sophisticated and accurate worldview. What must occur is not a complete dissolution, nor even a revisioning of the soft sciences and humanities, Just that a firm connection between them and their ultimate basis in human biology must be established. In this way evolutionary psychology can loosely be seen as the fulcrum between something like particle physics and something like English literature.

The breaking down of stark dichotomies and antagonisms between science and the Humanities is a process that has already begun but still has a lot of ground to cover. It is the next step in human advancement and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of it’s ramifications. These ideas will irrevocably change society, technology and philosophy. In short, It will reframe everything humanity has does.

And why shouldn’t it? Perhaps the existence of something rather than nothing has yet to be explained, but life, meaning, purpose and thought no longer occupy the floating crystal palace of philosophical inexplicables. The applications of understanding their mechanics and origins are limitless.

Marxism vs Freudian Psychology

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:23:00 -0600

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels do three main things: 1) define the communist movement, and explain its significance, 2) Layout the basic goals and ideals of communists, and 3) explain the economic, historical and sociological theory that buttresses the ideology. Karl Marx is credited with much of the development of communist ideology which itself is heavily dependent on Marx’s own analyses. Marx posits a historical dialectic of class struggle that persists through several epic movements, each characterized by it’s own economic system (feudalism, capitalism, communism, etc.). The coda of each movement is the reconstruction of society after the underlying class conflict conflict comes to a head. Modern society, in particular nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, is critiqued through this lens.

In Marxism, all great social issues of the modern era amount to the abuse of the poor working class, the proletariat, by those who own the land and the means of production, the Bourgeoisie. This includes any despotic acts of state because the state is, after all, “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (Marx and Engels 12) For Marx, This class conflict is even at the base of interpersonal problems. As Marx explains, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” (Marx 12) Thusly, strife, war and discontent are simply manifestations of the underlying class conflict.

In this light, progress comes only from a total restructuring of society, and a shifting of power into new hands. He sees the modern industrial west as distilled or more overt in its dialectic as compared to it predecessors in that it is characterized by the existence of only two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie by whom they are oppressed. This era is unique in it’s lack of, as he puts it, “a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.” (Marx and Engels 9)

According to Marx, this process of restructuring society will continue in the modern world as the tension between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat reaches critical mass, and the industrial west is consumed by a great revolution and transformed into a new egalitarian society, dominated by the socialist state. This state should enforce the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto, which would essentially transfer the ownership of all property into the hands of the state and establish general economic and legal equality. This socialist state would wither away revealing a transformed egalitarian society. This is the communist’s vision of the future: the abolition of the market, the total state and the emergence of the egalitarian paradise on the other side. (Marx 20)

Before Sigmund Freud, the mind of man was the domain of philosophers and mystics alone. It was a dark, unfathomable boundaryless void in which all thoughts, feelings, musings, mysteries and myths resided. It was a vacuous chamber which everyone both knew first hand, and yet knew nothing about. The great gift that Freud gave to man was to show him that the mind, however impressive and important, was not free of mechanistic order, and that it could be reasonably and scientifically understood. He sought to dispel the magic of consciousness.

If we may distill a central thesis out of Freud’s Civilization and it’s Discontents, it might be that the neuroses and disintegration experienced by modern man is a result of him having to repress his true nature in order to conform with societal standards. This basic theory underpins Freud’s analysis of man and society.

The dialect that Freud proposes is not one of the class conflict, but one of internal conflict. The Id refers to the part of the mind which is dominated by overwhelming desires and fears, and is mostly unconsciousness. The Id seeks pleasure and avoids pain. It’s counterpart is the Ego which seeks to mediate the desires of the Id with the demands of reality. At the helm of the ego is the superego which tries to mediate the desires of the Id with an important subset of reality - namely, social norms and the internalized desires of others. This dynamic is the central conflict in the Freudian psychological opera.

Just as for Marx, Freud’s prognostication follows easily from his basic thesis. unhappiness is the result of man compromising his true nature for the benefit of conformity. In the same way, criminality is the expression of repressed Id aggression, and political unrest is the mass manifestation of the fractured psychology of the men of a nation.

For Freud, then, the way forward is to foster more integrated, less neurotic, self actualized people though improvements in child rearing and therapeutic psychoanalysis, and most importantly more liberal cultural norms that are less at odds with the wants and needs of the Id, “It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness.” (Freud 39)

While both were German speaking, atheists, materialists, determinists and Jews from around the same time, Freud was, at his core, a psychologist, whereas Marx was fundamentally a sociologist. This distinction is neither as banal, nor as benign as it sounds. Freud was working at a lower level of abstraction than Marx. Because of this his writings are somewhat less applicable to socio/political/economic matters, but they also take less for granted about human nature, so that while being narrower in scope, Freud is ultimately more accurate.

Freudianism holds that man at his core has certain immutable needs and wants, and that any attempts to stifle, repress or fight against his libidinal urges will not only fail to change the underlying desires, but indeed result in more suffering and undesirable behavior (neuroses).

Marxism holds that man is at his core not predisposed for any particular way of life.

Contra Freud, Marx sees human nature as malleable and shaped by whatever socio/economic position it finds itself in, and for Marx the fundamental nature of man can change. What’s more is that the overarching historical narrative of Marxism not only supposes that these kind of great sweeping changes in the mind of man have occurred, but verily, it depends on another one to occur to allow for coming of the classless egali-topia that Marx proposes follows the industrial epoch. In fact, the only element of the Marxist narrative that remains constant through all of history is the oppression of the many by the few, but even this is seen as something which can change form and eventually be abolished entirely. As Marx explains, “the social
consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within
certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the
total disappearance of class antagonisms.” (Marx and Engels 19)

For such a radically different economic system to function Marxism depends on the transformation of modern man into a new socialist man, (although marx never used the term) who would have no ties to any nation or creed, and devote himself to the collective without exception. (Marx and Engels 18)

any systematic study of man must necessarily abandon notions of the tabula rasa before scientific claims can be made. This is because any claim about the mind of man necessarily gives texture to the blank slate. This is why Freud and Marx are at odds when it comes to human nature. As a psychologist, Freud’s focus is on the specifics of human nature whereas Marx, being a sociologist, takes the absence of these specifics for granted. This is a fundamental discontinuity between the Marxist and Freudian methodology, that is to say, they are mutually exclusive theories.

WORKS CITED:

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.

Marx, Karl, and Fredrich Engles. The Communist Mannifesto. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969. Print.

The Socialist and the Anti-Statist: Episode 3

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:45:00 -0500

Mark:

Me:

It’s too bad that welfare hurts the poor just as much as the wars and the banksters do. Poverty was steadily declining in the US until the 1970s

The massive expansion of the welfare state has been powerless to stop this at best (and probably contributes to the increase in the poverty rate.) Of course, if you subsidize something, you get more of it.

Not to mention that the State has to print money to pay for all this welfare (along with it’s wars, education camps, and hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation) and of course inflation hurts the poor the disproportionally more than anyone else. The sickest part of the whole scheme is that it’s the poor who vote for this insanity.

Mark: Which is exactly when the Nixon administration began tightening program access and greatly increased the number of denials among eligible people and since then there has been a fairly steady decline in welfare benefits represented in constant dollars.

Me: So if it’s because the welfare benefits are too small then shouldn’t poverty have been declining just somewhat slower than it was in the 50s and 60’s? If it’s that the benefits weren’t destructive, but just not enough why did poverty stop declining, stagnate for a few years, and then start increasing?

Also, somehow by restricting benefits and eligibility Dicky managed to nearly double spending on welfare programs. I don’t think the specifics of how this is doled out are of particular significance. The more the state does, the more the economy is distorted, and the poor are most vulnerable to economic hardship and instability.

I can’t find poverty stats before 1959, but i did briefly look into heathcare. In the 1920’s one could afford a year’s worth of medical services for a days wage, and some doctors (complaining about being underpaid) lobbied for the creation of the AMA (basically a cartel on the provision of healthcare) and over the next 80 years the state as increased by an order of magnitude its spending in the healthcare industry

And the result we have today is cheap and affordable healthcare for everyone… oh, wait, no, I mean the complete opposite. The subsequent technological advances since 1920 should have made healthcare practically free.

But this is the issue. Everything the state touches becomes terrible and expensive -housing, banking, stocks, education etc. It’s not just welfare, it’s slimy tentacles are everywhere and it’s insidious. What’s most brutal and offensive about this whole system is that the moralizing statists use the poor as an excuse and justification to further the power and size of this cancerous venomous gaping black bloody maw which devours the poor wholesale!

Obama's a Nazi Commie Muzlum!

Sat, 19 May 2012 20:21:00 -0500

Depending on how you measure it, 7 or 8 of the 10 planks of the communist manifesto are in place in America right now, and not in a clandestine way either, there all things most everyone supports (Public roads, schools, social security etc.) , I count anyone who supports the democrat or republican parties as a communist. Marxism isn’t radical, it’s the status quo. The only sizable opposition to this is political libertarianism, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell etc, but they’re dinosaurs - castrated by their lack of principle and religiosity.

This is almost certainly not the case, but it would kind of make sense if Alex Jones was being paid by the CIA or something to smear the credibility of fringe groups opposed to the state by his association.

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” - John Maynard Keynes

Creation Myth

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:42:00 -0500

So, i read “Creation My th” about Steve Jobs visiting Xerox. I thought it was fascinating that Dean Hovey bought the parts to build their prototype mouse at a Walgreen’s. It’s seems like computer technology is so complicated and integrated now that something like that is a thing of the past. Of course, with only a few weeks of learning and practice, I could, in theory, write the next hit iPhone app which would be arguably more advanced than anything they had back then.

I suppose the main idea to take from all this is how little the so called ‘mavericks’ actually come up with. Perhaps being an inventive genius is less about having some brilliant idea, and more about luck and seizing opportunities. I remember reading somewhere that Steve Jobs actually hired Bill Gates to write the applications for the original Macintosh. So Steve Jobs learns to build and program computers which have been around for decades, goes to Xerox who has a computer with a desktop themed interface and a mouse, which they got from some other people who will be forgotten by history, then he takes the mouse and desktop, plugs them into a nothing special for it’s time computer, has someone else program it, and then somehow he’s the inventor of the personal computer.

The invention of the computer is an interesting case study. I suggest reading science historian James Burke, or watching any of his TV series, “Connections” which is available for free on Youtube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4io-gaRso&list=PL06C1E02505897BA3)

In the case of the Computer, which was in it’s infancy when he filmed this series (and arguably still is) he points to the invention of a new kind of sail for ships in medieval Europe leading to more trade with the near east, which sets off a fashion craze for complex Arabian patterns on textiles which leads to advancements in loom technology, one of which is the idea of a punch card telling the machine how to make the pattern, which is picked up by a bureaucrat on Ellis Island who uses it to take census more efficiently, and subsequently goes on to use the punch card idea in the new company he founds, called IBM.

The title, “Creation Myth” is interesting in that it can be taken as ‘the story of how the mac was created’ or as an example to show that the idea of someone simply ‘creating’ something totally original is a myth, that all of technology, and indeed culture is a maelstrom of crosspollinating incremental tweaks that build off of everything else that ever was.

Recognition of this in regards to art means understanding that the categories of ‘original’, ‘derritive’, ‘remixed’ and such are nebulous and flow in and out of each other. They are not going to be well defined ever, because the concepts don’t respect the paradigm of interrelated, interconnected, evolving ideas that refer to each other and then back to themselves. If something were to be truly original would that mean that it is not influenced by or relateable to the rest of the swirling soup of culture? What meaning would such an object have if it didn’t connect back to anything else? How would we understand it if it was completely new and unrelated to all that came before?

Culture is signs pointing at signs. We can try and define what a remix is and how it’s different from a remake or a copy or a homage or a parody, but there will always be counter examples that don’t fit the definition well but are clearly a remix. Our language is intuitive, and it’s categories are gradations that lack rigor or boundaries. For more on this last bit I recomend George Laykoff’s book, “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things”

Antigone vs Dido

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:17:00 -0500

I’ve always loved the Greek playwrights, and recently I read the epic Roman poem, the Aenied by Virgil. I found some interesting connections to the Greek fiction so i thought i’d analyze my favorite character from the Aenied and my favorite character from Antigone.

Sophocles’ magnum opus, Antigone, presents us with the soul crushing dynamic of a tyrannical king struggling to maintain order in his city conta his bull headed monomaniacal niece trying to bury her brother/commander of an invading army in a suicidal attempt to restore the chaotic shambles of the stark and brittle world she lives in. The eponymous character, in the fallout of her father and mother / grandmother’s death, punctuated by a literal war between her two brothers is left only with her sister, and her cousin/fiance. Antigone makes herself into a martyr for the the cause of giving one of her dead brothers a proper burial, such that he can proceed to the afterlife. Incidentally, her uncle/king is bent on preventing this and orders the execution of anyone caught trying to do so. So we have both main characters willing to kill and die respectively over whether a certain corpse is on top of a few inches of dirt, or below a few inches of dirt.

Antigone, knowing full and well the grave consequences of defying her uncle/king decides to go out and try to bury her brother’s rotting remains, which are guarded by armed guards. Although her cousin/fiance does fight for her sake, she ends up being locked in a cave, wherein she hangs herself.

The story of antigone is the story of a self assured fatalistic martyr, who attempts to balance humble victimhood with a presumption to know and understand the wishes of the masters of the universe. Her inflexible bigotries and single mindedness make her an interesting character.

Virgil’s magnum opus, the Aenied, presents, among other things the tragic love affair between the hero of the fallen troy and the widowed queen of Carthage. Dido is depicted initially as a decisive leader and confident powerful woman. After meeting the Aeneus, however, she seems to be tainted. She experiences the ‘fire in her bones’ as she falls for the hero of Troy. The gods having put a spell on her, manipulate her carnal desires and turn her into a tool for their higher plans. She quickly disintegrates psychologically into a desperate lascivious teenager, neglecting her other obligations for the pursuit of a relationship with Aeneus.

When Aeneus leaves to follow his true destiny, Dido, already emotionally unstable, tries desperately to stop him, and when he leaves anyway, she petulantly burns all the belongings he had left with her and the bed they shared - not long after deciding to throw herself onto the fire, ending her life.
The story of dido is the story of self assured highly competent leader, who is dragged down to the depths of despair, weakness and instability, culminating in her own death. Her ultimate vulnerability in the face of her own emotions make her a compelling character.

Antigone and dido overlap in their self destructive behavior and their suicidality. I believe that Antigone has a death wish from the beginning of the play. Based on her actions, it almost seems like Antigone is trying to bury her brother just as a excuse to get herself killed, being that she knew the penalty for attempting to do so, and she must have known she would not actually be able to overthrow the state and somehow successfully keep her brother buried. She knew going into it that she would die, and her brother would remain unburied anyway. Dido, on the other hand is a much more dynamic character, only killing herself after being manipulated by the gods, abandoning her duties as queen and losing her lover.
I see these two characters as fundamentally different.

Antigone is certain and static and her goal is her own destruction. She has perfect harmony between the ego and the id. She does not apologize for herself and she wears her grudge like a crown. She is proud of her bigotries and shows no signs of inner conflict or ambivalence. Although she is significantly younger than Dido, she has a hardened, crystallized psyche.

Dido’s existence is much more complicated. She changes from competent and strong, to manic and desperate, and finally to rageful and self-destructive. She goes from confident adult to needy child to toddler throwing a tantrum. There is great turbulence within her, and her ultimate motives are neither clear nor consistent. What is consistent and is the strong sense of psychological regression and disintegration.

I find both characters very archetypal and in some ways opposites to each other - Antigone’s rigidity vs Dido’s instability. I think aspects of both characters are expressed by everyone at one time or another.

Philosophy is Dead Part 1: Rationalism

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:47:00 -0500

In his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes aims to abolish from his mind all presuppositions about reality, and then syllogistically rebuild his knowledge based on self-evident truths. Not only does he utterly fail at this task, but he makes a perfect example of why such tasks, and indeed why much of western philosophy, however disciplined are both futile and empty.
Descartes starts by asserting that the very fact that he can question the nature of reality is evidence of his own existence, because cogito ergo sum, after all. Fair enough, but he has already presupposed that reality is consistent, causal, and logical, which is a fine assumption that indeed I think everyone should hold, however, an assumption nonetheless, and to neglect this fact is not acceptable given Descartes stated goals of trying to derive truth by reason alone, free from any, as he puts it “Precipitation or prejudice.”

He then proceeds to invoke yet more presuppositions, saying that recognition of his flaws necessitates his having of the concept of a perfect being, and the existence of the concept intern is evidence for the existence of the perfect being - not only that, but Descartes, having been a Catholic seems to believe that this perfect being must obviously be Yahweh, the god described in the literature of bronze age Palestinian goat herders, and that European culture at large around him also believed this seems to Descartes to be incidental, and not to have influenced his “reasoning”.

Here is a string of baseless and blatant non-sequiturs. That recognition of his flaws necessitates the concept of perfection is simply not true. I have no doubt that if i had had the chance to ask Descartes to describe in detail all the qualities that define perfection he would come up short. Perfection is a word, a meta conceptual tool, not derived from interaction with reality, but rather from the needs of rational beings to manipulate other concepts. It is like the word infinity - definitionally unrealizable and incomprehensible.

Even if he were able to define what this perfection is that he is lacking, what objective basis would his definition have? Would it not be simply the realization of that which he subjectively values? On what objective grounds are omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence ‘right’ or ‘correct’? None. They are simply assumed to be.

No. Clearly Descartes is not rationally building up his knowledge, brick by brick, tediously and methodically. He is making assertions which he already believed, one after another. His position of God is obviously a manifestation of his preexisting religiosity, justified by the dead hand of Plato as it spookily guided his quill. What’s more is that Descartes own existence and the existence of his God seems to be as far as he got in uncovering the ultimate truths of the universe, which is a step back, even from the primitive state of sixteenth century scientific understanding.

Discourse on Method is the typification of everything that is bad about philosophy. Fixation on the abstract, at the expense of the concrete. If Philosophy was really concerned with understanding thought, truth and the human experience - a quest inward to find the underlying ways humans interact with their world, why then is there no, “Discourse on Child Rearing” or, “Discourse on Angriness” or, “Discourse on Intercourse” or anything analogous? People who are called philosophers generally only study four things: Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy. While these are good skills to have under your belt, they are worthless without real sciences like psychology, chemistry or nutrition to apply them to.

Indeed, to divorce thought from it’s basis in real, observable phenomenon is to castrate it, yet this seems to be the prime goal of the rationalist - to discard all preconceived notions, indiscriminately. Verily, this divorces rationality from it’s own purpose, the betterment of the human condition.

This search for pure reason is a farce.

The great gift of Descartes is to show us these limitations of philosophy, and the importance to abandon ratiocination where it becomes too disconnected from reality. Descartes teaches us that we don’t need philosophy as such. We already live as if we’re not deceived by a cartesian demon, and we already use the scientific method in our everyday lives. I find this insight extremely helpful and freeing. Abstract syllogisms and reasoning from first principles have value for working out ‘kinks’ in our already formed ideas, but ultimately the hard sciences and technology are the true mantle. They are the ultimate source of truth and progress. Philosophy is dead.

In part two we will examine the ideas of progress and the enlightenment, using our old friend Immanuel Kant as an example.

And as always feedback, corrections and criticism are encouraged.

Ruling Imagination

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:58:00 -0500

Response to this.

The author of the article makes the argument that property is not the foundation of liberty, and that the success of open IP industries demonstrates this.

First we have to understand property from the ground up. Life is scarcity. The Earth and all her bounties are finite, and since all of us will die eventually even time is scarce. Because of scarcity, man invented property. Since matter is scarce, spending time, energy and resources to obtain things has is agreed to mean that others will allow you a great deal of control over the things obtained. This control is not infinite. For example if I find an unclaimed stretch of land 1,000 acres long and farm one tiny tomato plant at the west end of it and don’t so much as look at the rest of the 1000 acres, it would be unreasonable for me to shoot anyone who steps one foot past the border on the east side for ‘trespassing’. Most human property systems use some version of the ‘homesteading’ or active use principle - that is, that in order for something to be agreed as yours you must actually use or otherwise render it unusable to others. for more on this agreement or intersubjective consensus I recommend this.

So that’s a basic rundown of property, and the main point is that property is a response to scarcity. If we treat entities that aren’t scarce, such as ideas, melodies or patterns of ones and zeros like we do cars, food and other scarce items made of matter, then we will see grotesque and perverse disruptions in the economy, which brings me to my next point. Intellectual ‘property’ is a grotesque and perverse disruption of the economy.

The author of this article has conflated the more germane and reasonable form of property that is made of matter, with the contrived and esoteric perversion of the former - Intellectual Property. I don’t think I have to try very hard to make the case that information and ideas aren’t scarce, and so ultimately information is not a zero sum game in the same way that property is*. If i take your ipod, then there’s still only one ipod, so now you don’t have one. But if i pirate ”The Tree of Life” then not only do i also get to watch it, but now even more people can have it if i seed the torrent. IP is essentially fraudulent.

thinkers from the Austrian School of economics have shown empirically that patent rights actually impede scientific research and innovation. Briefly, this is because it takes the same skills, equipment and costs roughly as much to reverse engineer a say - a viagra pill - as it does to develop one, and in the time it takes to reverse engineer something, the original inventors enjoy the temporary monopoly, so there is an incentive to innovate even if there is no legal protection from copycats. the notion of Intellectual property is unfounded, unreasonable and untenable, and society will eventually outgrow it as the structure of production adjusts and evolves to take advantage of emerging technologies.

The case for property being the foundation of liberty, whatever that is, is another essay, but the main idea here is that IP =/= Property.

*property is only a zero sum game in the immensely long term. if we count the ocean floor, then the overwhelming majority of the earth has never been seen by man, let alone claimed by anyone. Consider the fact that the entire world population of 6,000,000,000 could fit in an urban area the size of texas. There will be ‘more where that came from’ for at least several generations to come, and by then we can expect interplanetary travel and terraforming technologies to push back the time scale even further.

The Socialist and the Anti-Statist: Episode 2

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 03:08:00 -0500

Episode 2

Me:

Mark:Chomsky’s quite anti-statist in his beliefs and philosophy of Libertarian Socialism.

Yeah, Chomsky’s an anarchist. lol

Me: ‎”What we need is a progressive tax system, of, incidentally, the kind that Jefferson advocated.”

” we’d be a lot better off if we were higher taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are. I mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes sense to pay them for that work, they’re doing important work for the society. And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.”

“A majority of the public has long favored a national health care system, which should be far less expensive and more effective”

“Personally I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control.”

-Noam Chomsky

Oh, sorry. You’ll excuse my confusion.

‘Anarchy’ doesn’t seem to have any consistent relationship to the support of a state and i don’t find it to be a particularly descriptive term. I suppose this is a case of the narcissism of small differences. If you were to make a pie chart of everything the man said i would probably agree with most of it, probably even more with him than with someone like Ron Paul. His opposition to markets is something that i systematically disagree and his grammar theory has been empirically shown to be false (see work of Daniel Everrett on the Piraha tribe) I guess it’s because he’s so right about some things that I find his opposition to markets so unacceptable. I wouldn’t make a post about Cenk Uygar or William Lane Craig because they’re not interesting to me. At least Chomsky’s on the same planet. but in a way i feel like, “well what’s his excuse then?” It seems he feels likewise towards Misesians.

While I think Chomsky’s own words justify the meme, perhaps it would’ve been more appropriate to use a picture of someone more like Michael Moore.

Homeless Hotspots

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 08:51:00 -0500

In response to this

Before I get into this I must confess that this one is much more opinionated and less rigorous than some of my others. I will cavalierly employ gross generalizations and this is intended to be taken less seriously than some of my previous writings.

I heard about this on NPR a few weeks ago, and I was shocked by the whole ordeal. People’s outrage towards this kind of action I think is twofold. The first count is a general anti-business sentiment, and the second is simply white liberal guilt.

Certainly, there has been no shortage of dirty dealings in the modern business world, but I struggle to see how BBH is a good example. One of the biggest issues in today’s political mania is unemployment, and who needs a job more than the homeless? The company is not only paying these people, but also giving them an opportunity to be a productive member of society, rather than begging, they actually have something valuable to offer. They are providing people with a useful service, and making some money at the same time. Why shouldn’t moralizing starbucksers jump at the chance to help out the homeless while getting 5 bars of wifi so they can post about their generosity on tumblr?

I must clarify what i mean by white liberal guilt. I don’t mean that every white person with a leftward political bent is irrationally against BHH, in fact i would venture to guess that most of the people at BBH and most probably the ones who came up with the idea in the first place would fit into this category. What I am talking about is the phenomenon where privileged (and i don’t mean this pejoratively. There’s nothing wrong with being born into a family that has money.) and educated people make themselves into martyrs for the lower class. Perhaps they are guilty because they feel they have had a relatively easy life, or they feel guilty because of social inequalities caused by racism of their ancestors and less liberal peers. The exact reasons are vague and vary but this is what I think is going on here.

The very idea that the homeless people in question are being degraded, or ‘commoditized’ is nonsense. They are providing a service just like anyone else with a job. What’s more is that the homeless people hired by BBH aren’t the one’s complaining. In fact some of them have come out in support. One that I heard on NPR said something like,

“Before we started doing this, all the people who would come to the conventions here wouldn’t even look at us and would pretend we weren’t here, but now people stop and talk with us and acknowledge us as people.”

I’m paraphrasing, but i’m sure you could find the actual quote if you wanted to.

What I find so unacceptable is that the public outrage against this actually got BBH to end this Homeless Hotspot program for the time being. The company will be fine, but the moralizing busy-bodyies who took issue with this have essentially put the homeless people they claim to care about out of a job again.

Having a gut reaction of outrage to the sight of a homeless person wearing a shirt that says, “i’m a 4g hotspot” Is easy. Emotions are cheap. Any animal can emote. What seperates us from other social apes, apart from having relatively little muscular strength and a penis without any spines or bones in it is that we have the ability to think abstractly and analyze the long term consequences of our actions. We are not slaves to our emotions. If you cannot suspend your gut reactions and think logically then please leave society and go back to the jungle.

Progress

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:47:00 -0500

He who thinks that the the general state of humanity is or has been declining over the long term has no systematic understanding of the historical context out of which modern man emerges. The greatest crimes committed in the 20th century, while on a scale never before seen, were the norm in centuries past. The mantle of science and technology has been gaining momentum, and i think we are on the elbow of an exponential curve.

More needs to be said on this, but rates of physical and emotional abuse towards children have been on the decline since the beginning of history, and consequently rates of psychopathy and other mental illness like religiosity have been on the decline (see psychohistory and Lloyd Demause). The average person is smarter, more rational, less violent, happier and more productive than ever before. And that’s not just my opinion, that’s fact.

Like i said, more needs to be said on this, and i may write more. If you have any questions, comments or criticisms please post them.

The Art of the Steal

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:48:00 -0500

Response to the Documentary, “The Art of the Steal”

You can find it on netflix.

I found this to be a very interesting look into the the art world in general, but also in regards to historical art that is highly valued and ownership itself. The central conflict is around the estate of Albert C. Barnes, and those who hold it after his death. Barnes was adamantly opposed to the institutional forces of the art world, especially in Philadelphia. This perspective is compelling on many counts.

When Barnes assembled his collection of post impressionist art and created the barnes foundation the major players of the Philadelphia art scene, most notably a particular member of the board of directors at the Philadelphia art museum who was also the head of the local newspaper, criticized him heavily, and tried to discredit him. But as the style and artists Barnes had chosen became increasingly popular and valuable, he was harassed by these same people trying to now buy the works they had previously criticized.

Another reason this perspective is compelling is that the major players in the art scene of philadelphia tend to be politically connected, and were attempting to use their political clout to seize Barnes’ art from his posthumous estate, against his will (literally - against the actual document specifing what to do with his property after his death) . Pretty scuzzy people indeed.

To be fair though, i think the case of the Barnes collection is more nuanced than this. At a fundamental level, the absolute propertarianism that says what a man chooses to do with his property shall be done even after his death for the remainder of eternity is not practically attainable, especially if the society at large highly values what you owned, there is a point at which people will take what they want, irrespective of the posthumous owner. Whether this is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not of concern to me, but practically speaking it is a fact that if no one is around to defend something, then it will find new owners.

On another level we must understand that large art museums are profitable. While some of this inevitably comes from political favors, aside from that, the fact that millions of people each year choose to spend their money on visits to places like the Philadelphia Museum of Art means that these institutions are providing some value to society. If they were not providing value, then people wouldn’t pay for it. In this way we can look at art that sits in a room for no one to look at and dosen’t make any money as not bringing people any value. Which brings me to my next point - After Barnes’ death the foundation was unable to make a profit off one of the most valuable collections of art in America. perhaps this was due to the stipulations and strictures Barnes himself had left in his will, or maybe it was due to poor management by his survivors.

The methods which members of the lincoln board and the pew charitable trusts used to obtain the Barnes collection were slimy and underhanded, but i don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that the collection will be better off in its new home, even if this amounts to pissing on Barnes’ grave. His refusal to have these pieces ever shown in any kind of commercial setting betrays in him an ignorance of the basic principles of economics. Just because something is commercial, doesen’t make it bad, and deciding that your art collection can’t be open to the public for forever after you die espically, when there are bunch of forces in the relevant society that want to show this art, is kind of unreasonable.

The socialist and the anti-statist: Episode 1

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:51:00 -0500

From conversations i’ve had elsewhere on the internet. I am the anti-statist, and we’ll call the marxist/socialist, “Mark”

Me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H2rSJayL_c&feature=g-vrec&context=G219a7f4RVAAAAAAAAAQ
[it’s a video of Rothbard arguing that society should not be conflated with the state, and that in fact the state is anti social.]

Mark:There is no “the” state. There are only states. The free-market is a religion. Rothbard is a charlatan. His is the mirror image of a so-called “principled” man who condones Obama’s continuation of fascist policies only he is a man who throws his weight behind men like Pat Buchanan and George H.W. Bush who, if my memory serves me correct, invaded a sovereign nation over Exxon Moble profit margins. And his comments on the “Welfare State” are Limbaugh-esque. His standing in front of a chalkboard and teaching is tantamount to Kenny G playing with the London Philharmonic.

Me: When I say ‘the state’ i am almost always referring to the United States Federal Government and it’s subordinate institutions. This is the state I live under, and the state that is most relevant to my life.

I have no idea what you mean by calling Rothbard, a charlatan. Admittedly i haven’t read much of him, most of my political philosophy is built off of Mises and a few other contemporary authors.

Calling the free market a religion is dubious. To me, recognizing that the emergent nexus of individuals interacting is the only sustainable way to allocate resources more closely resembles an evolutionary perspective. The top-down ham-handed imposition of controls on society by a dues ex machina (almost any flavor of statism)seems to me a better correlate with religion.

Order is emergent, in the biosphere as described by the theory of evolution, and in the economy, as described the science of economics. From this perspective, you could call soviet style central planning “Economic creationism” because it is the belief that the economy needs to be orchestrated from on high, and from scratch. And you could call the ‘mixed economy’ or free enterprise with various regulations that the democrat and republican parties support a kind of “Economic Intelligent Design” because it is the belief that the economy can form on it own but needs to be guided.

Mark: Rothbard is Mises is Rockwell is Friedman. Mises lost me with his belief that all economic activity is rational. That is an absurd statement. It is all the more foolish because it is a statement that can be proved wrong immediately. Wal-Mart comes to mind. Black Friday? I can think of few things less rational.

If human beings are on an evolutionary path (which they are indeed, for better or worse) than government has always been a product of emergence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with government. How it governs is the philosophical mystery.

Human beings have the peculiar problem of being the tenders of the world. The extremes of humanity either want answers or they want to be the answers. I can understand the desperate creature outreaching their arms to an invisible god than the self-aggrandizing preacher that worships an invisible hand.

Do correct me if I’m wrong but the idea of emergence is to say that our past is wrong and, if we are to correct the failure (government), we must start from scratch as the Soviets would?

There is no room for contrived loyalties to a party in America anymore. I myself, am for the people, and if we are tenders of the earth than it is our duty to fill it full of beautiful art, music, poetry; hard work and the ethos of humanism against tyranny. I cannot abide by men who gather in groups to denounce socialism and collectivism. Think tanks like the Von Mises Institute or the CATO Institute are built on the foundation of a government ideal and use government as a weapon to impose their “free philosophy” on a groups of people who could give a shit less about the tailoring of an Oxxford suit or the deficit. Friedman is the very definition of government stooge. Before he was a government stooge he was a Mises stooge.

Just to be clear I honestly enjoy the exchange of ideas and I mean no harm! You seem open minded and void of hostility. Better this than a knife fight.

Me: I will admit that the idea of agents in the economy being rational is a rather weak point in austrian theory. I think it just needs to be understood that rational =/= correct and it =/= healthy. People sometimes have shitty, shortsighted, self-destructive and/or unconscious values, but by and large the way they go about satisfying those values is rational. We have to assume that action is aimed at satisfying some value that the actor holds (even if it’s stupid and even if they’re unaware that they hold it) , or analysis of action becomes impossible.

Just as an aside on the Condell/Limbaugh comment. To say that any anti statist “Throws their weight behind” these clowns is misleading. Neo cons may use some of the same arguments against compulsory welfare programs and certain areas of economic regulation, but imperialism, the war on drugs, corporate welfare, restrictions on immigration and on reproductive rights, sex and marriage are all totally inconsistent with anti statism. Men like this are totally unprincipled. No anti statist in his right mind would support them. By my measure, marxists, anarchists and mutualists are much more allied with anti statism than right wing statists. and if a bunch of marxists try to succeed from the US and form a voluntary commune than they will have my support.

Libertarians railing against “collectivism” aren’t against organizing in groups anymore than someone who is “against capitalism” is against labor multiplying devices. They’re just against certain arragnements of these things.

As for the emergence thing i would never say i am against government and i agree that society needs some form of governance. But the state =/= governance. By being anti statist i am no more against government than i am against roads or education. I just don’t want the state to be involved. And the state is emergent in the same way a tumor is. Cancerous cells are perversion of the function those cells evolved for.

I advocate polycentric law and unlimited secession. If you take this to mean “imposition of my ideal ‘free philosophy’ ” then that’s fine, but understand that in my ideal world (this goes for Mises and Rothbard as well) voluntary communes and worker owned firms would be free to form and prosper, much more so than they are under today’s psychotic mix of social democracy and imperialism.