This is not so much about Obama as it is about politics and economics in general. In order to understand what’s going on, some history is in order. This is intended as the first of two parts, building a foundation of economic ideas, and leading into the kinds of change produced by electronic technologies.
One of the great influences on economic thinking in the decades after the founders in the United States declared independence from England, was Adam Smith’s book on capitalism, entitled “Wealth of Nations…”(the title is longer, but everybody recognizes this one).
While the economic leaders praise the “invisible hand” of which Smith wrote, there are some statements he made which seem to cancel the effectiveness of that invisible hand of free competition. For example:
“…after the division of labor has once thoroughly taken place, it is with but a very small part of these with which a man’s own labor can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labor of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase”.
Smith has just pointed out that to control wealth, one must control labor. The more who work for your goals, the more you can control the degree of wealth and control over others.
“The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and means not to use it or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities”.
Money, in this context, is merely the exchange medium by which all economic transactions occur. You can either produce it by working yourself, or you can extend you power by finding ways to control the process by which other produce it for you.
“Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased, and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command”.
So, quite simply, if you wish to be wealthy, you must find a way to organize and control the wealth of others so that enough of it is directed to you, for your own pleasure. Capitalism, as Smith defined it, made it necessary to develop ideologies to support the idea of wealth, but those ideologies could not try to define ideological goals beyond the accumulation of wealth for its own sake.
Such ideas as “free competition”, “free markets”, and “Invisible hand” became the catchword of the culture, along with something that later gained ascendancy; “Social Darwinism”.
If Smith demonstrated the need for some guiding ideology, he left a vacuum by declaring that “success is succeeding”, a tautology. The religious force that gave impetus to this notion was the doctrine of Calvin, that the one who is “elect” before God can demonstrate that election by being blessed with worldly riches in his efforts. These two ideas, combining free markets and free competition with the idea that Gd blesses those who are financially successful, created what was later known as the Protestant Work Ethic.
This was a strange doctrine by which one could demonstrate that his “works” are blessed by God, even though he was already predestined to be saved in the first place, which pretty much made his “works” unnecessary. “God helps those who help themselves”.
As Richard Tawney writes in “The Rise of Capitalism”:
“What is significant, in short, is not the strength of the motive of economic self interest, which is the commonplace of all ages and demands no explanation. It is the change of moral standards which converted a natural frailty into an ornament of the spirit, and canonized as the economic virtues habits which in earlier ages had been denounced as vices. The force which produced it was the creed associated with the name of Calvin. Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology”.
Further: “Capitalism, as an economic system, resting on the organization of legally free wage earners, for the purpose of pecuniary profit, by the owner of capital or his agent, and setting its stamp on every aspect of society, is a modern phenomenon”.
If labour is the full purchase price of all wealth, wrote Tawney, it is “not merely an economic means: it is a spiritual end….So far from there being an inevitable conflict between money-making and piety, they are natural allies, for the virtues incumbent upon the elect- diligence, thrift, sobriety, prudence-are the most reliable passport to commercial prosperity. Thus the pursuit of riches, which had once been feared as the enemy of religion, was now welcomed as its ally.”
How about “Think and Grow Rich”? Or more familiar, “The Seven Laws of Success!”? Or Norman Vincent Peale, who praised our “divinely ordered capitalist system” and “The Power of Positive Thinking”?
Tawney continues: “The true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true cause of international warfare. It is that if men recognize no law superior to their own desires, then they must fight when their desires collide”.
Karl Marx saw this weakness in Smith’s presentation, and realized that if money is the “universal equivalent” of all things, then every single value, of labour, of faith, of every effort, could be reduced to money. Everything, said Marx, was exchangeable for money, but a thing is exchangeable, wrote Marx, only if it is alienated from the individual, when the individual sees more value in the exchange than in the thing itself.
If everything could be transformed into money, said Marx, then the human being could be alienated from every single value he considered basic. That was Marx’s realization that the “so-called inalienable rights and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them break down before money”.
Marx then proposed “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”. A central banking system. This would create what Marx called a permanent revolution. Equality would become the passion of the masses, and the masses would never be satisfied until all barriers are broken down, and everyone is equal. Where all are equal, all are “alienated” from the basic goals and needs, such as property, that once made them individuals. Humankind becomes subject to planning and re-distribution. What was “God” if not an ancient tyrant who brought more war and hate than love and peace? Religion is the opium of the masses.
The unfolding of world events began with Adam Smith, who presented the flaw of his philosophy, which was seized by Marx, who promoted socialism and communism, the “red-headed step-child” of capitalism. Both are the creations of a mechanical era. What is now emerging is the dynamics of an electronic age, in which all events occur at near light speed, connecting us in one worldwide grid, changing all the rules.
Interesting. I’ll have to do some thinking before I comment further.
Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan introduced trhe idea that “the medium is the message”. The medium doesn’t “have” a message, it IS the message. In Adam Smith’s day, labor was about the proper organization of men in a moral fashion, and Smith had clearly shown that the equal rights of every person to pursue wealth was not a guarantee of individual wealth, since a person could control no more wealth than labor. The dominant medium of such communication was the printed word, combined with the printing press, allowing for repeatability, standardization, and easy access to the same information for all. The “self evident truth” proclaimed by Jefferson, therefore, was that all men are created equal(but women and Blacks had some progress to make).
The self evident truth stated by Jefferson was a LITERARY truth, based in the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press.
McLuhan, however, pointed out the changes occurring in this literary process of education:
“The young student today(1964)grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments, but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the ‘mythic’ world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted.”
A new environmrent has been created by this instant electronic media, and the “content” of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The “content” of writing, said McLuhan, was the alphabetic text. That text shaped the process of thought unconsciously in a linear process, with one letter following another, one sentence, and one paragraph, making the concept of empirical knowledge almost inevitable. The “content” of a book, technically speaking, is a movie, with frames created by organizing words into segments and then speeding those segments so that there is the illusion of continuity in each frame. With the development of TV, however, the “frames” of the TV image are created by an electron gun which alters certain pixels of an image, creating continuity of motion simply by changing necessary pixels in each frame per second. Ths very technological change led Kenneth Boulding to point out that “the meaning of a message is the change it produces in the image”. Information itself became gradually defined as changes or differences occurring within observable patterns. The personal computer uses the “content” of the printing press(keyboard) combined with the TV monitor, which can then re-assemble information instantly in new configurations, from words to images, in infinite configurations at the speed of light. The near light speed acceleration of communications allow us to “frame” every social structure and isolate its distinguishing patterns, so that we can view the process as being now detached from that process, where once we were merely “cogs in the machine”. The computer now “contains” all the mediums that developed as a means of communication, from alphabet to worldwide telecommunications, leaving humans able to manipulate these media more and more as individuals. We are no more the extensions of our technologies. Our technologies are extensions of us.
As Eric Hoffer pointed out, one doesn’t leave a mass movment or cult. He “swallows” it. That is, instead of being just a “cog”, the individual now embodies the entire meaning of the movement within him/her self, and can detach and view all such systems in their operations and flaws, with an increasing ability to influence any part of it he or she chooses.
Ralph,
Are you familiar with the research and theories of Nikolai Kondratiev (another Russian)? Specifically, Kondratief Winter?
BB
Your on to something there Bob. I never read about this character. Much to learn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
Yes, these patterns are rejected by both “capitalist” and “socialist” theorists, if you look at the proposed “solution” of Bernanke regarding the economy. He assumed that the Great Depression occurred because the FED did not supply enough “money” to offset speculation, and like most generals , started fighting the last wars using a strategy geared to outdated technology. From Wikipedia, source James gives above:
“The saturation of major markets or infrastructures (canals, railroads) creates a stagnation in the economy.”
This idea was not lost on the US founders, since they rejected the notion of infrastructure and corporations to develop infrastructure were rejected. A look at “Federalist 45” shows Madison clearly declaring that any infrastructure and improvements will be left to the states, not allowed for federal regulations. The idea was clearly rejected by a number of our early presidents as well.
“However, stagnation does not necessarily mean that markets are mature. Markets were temporarily oversupplied during the high growth period from the 1870s-90s, during which time there was also a lot of creative destruction in industries like iron, which was displaced by steel, and labor, which was displaced by machinery, but re-employed because of growth.”
This connects to the point I made about labor changing in value due to technology. We are increasingly able to control more “labor” in the form of machinery and computers, so that markets are no longer dependent on the old “owners vs labor” paradigm. The more growth in a market, however, the more market freedom there must be to explore that growth in an “organic” fashion. George Gilder also wrote about this in a book published in 1980, called “Wealth And Poverty”. Gilder pointed out that such “creative destruction”, followed by periods of growth and change, are accompanied by tremendous increases in debt, not unlike what we’re seeing today. Inflation, wrote Gilder, is now caused when technology can no longer adequately distribute “supply” to match ‘demand’. A “bottleneck” is created, in which prices are bid up for goods that are either overproduced, or the present market cannot adequately supply them. Gilder wrote that debt can be increased, but there must be a corresponding reduction of government regulations that allow for re-configurations of technology.
“[4] The stagnation phase is characterized by a lack of good investment opportunities that leads to low interest rates and lowered credit standards which creates a speculative boom and high debt levels, followed by a crash and financial crisis.”
Precisely. In order to get the economy moving, the FED bought more government bonds and sought to stimulate the economy by keeping interest rates low. This creates “oversupply” by an artificial market, in which people are encouraged to extend credit and “demand” on an artificial basis. The recent collapse of “Freddie Mac” and “Fannie Mae” are largely the results of that, along with the “necessary” bailout of large corporations.
“Past speculative excesses included canals, railroads, farm land, real estate and the broader stock market. Carlota Perez describes the roles of financial capital and production capital in the cycle. Perez also says excess financial speculation is likely to occur in the “frenzy” stage of a new technology, such as the 1998-2000 computer, internet, dotcom-mania and bust.[5]”
Yes. The developing computer technologies, along with the internet, bailed out Reagan’s policies by allowing new technologies that escaped regulation, and therefore allowed for rapid investment, followed by a “bubble” as a large number of people entered into this speculative market. However, those that remain stabilized and created new markets based on the internet that offset the bottleneck created by new technologies, and allowed for government growth and individual empowerment.
Economics is now about information flow, not economic and political planning. The government read Gilder’s recommendation for increased debt, and stopped a that point, seeking to use dent merely to increase their own control over the economy, which now results in stagnation and decay.
“The last two long cycles, which were both 53 years, can be better seen in international production data than in individual national economies.[6] The pre-1870 cycles can only be seen in Western economies.”
Paper money as legal tender, along with establishment of the Federal reserve Board in 1913, was supposed to offset the “boom/bust” cycle, but it merely deepened it and caused more suffering.
Ralph,
Re-reading your article: “Marx then proposed “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”. A central banking system. This would create what Marx called a permanent revolution. Equality would become the passion of the masses, and the masses would never be satisfied until all barriers are broken down, and everyone is equal.”
Reminds me of how the housing crisis started. It was basically “forced” upon people of this country to make everyone equal. The American dream of owning a home was available if you wanted it, but could you afford to pay for it? The answer was no. Many could not, hence Freddie and Fanny, the banks, etc go belly up. A government created economic mess that will have no end in site for decades.
By the way, do you know that some banks are being investigated now by the Justice department? They won’t loan to minorities or others of low economic incomes so they can buy homes. What do you think? Deliberate destruction of the economy or forced re-distributional socialism?
“What do you think? Deliberate destruction of the economy or forced re-distributional socialism?”
I’d say a bit of both. Once people become almost totally dependent on the economic system and jobs, a destruction of the economy forces people to demand re-distribution. The government ends up saying “We didn’t want to, but you, the people, insisted!”
As if the people had any real choice. I’m in agreement with Tom Greco over at http://www.reinventingmoney.com The most effective way to combat this is to start forming commuity based currency systems that allow for smaller adaptive groups to develop their own systems.
The socialist system has proven the Marxist idea that economic change is the basis of social change, so we simply develop money at the community level to satisfy the interests and information needs of each community.
Whether we believe that Moses wrote the Torah as inspired by Yahweh, or that the Jews created it as their own mythology, it would seem that the commanded “jubilee” year, in which all debt was expunged every 50 years, uniquely treated this downside of the long-wave cycle of free market economies.
BB
Yes. A reading of Max DiMont’s “The Indestructible Jews”, which doesn’t insist on any “divinely inspired” conclusions, demonstrate that Jews were at the bopttom of the presently devceloped banking system.
Not only the Jubilee year, but the command in Deuteronomy 24 regarding loans. There was nothing allowing loans to be made on a person’s property, and if property was taken, it was to be returned that day if needed(verse 12).
Further, a look at Micah 2:4-5, shows that collective property assessments such as “zoning” was not allowed: “Therefore thou shalt have noe that shall cast a cord(surveyor’s line) by lot(vote) in the congregation of the Lord”.
DiMont points out that Jews later legalized mortgage(“death terms”) by allowing the one who borrowed to make a public statement to the congregation that the mortgage terms was acceptable. This was a kind of “waiving of rights” by the person borrowing the money.
Of course, history has many examples of Jews who could biblically charge interest, and who served kings as non-christians, giving them exemption from laws that affected other citizens. This is freely admitted by DiMont in his book.
And, of course, the Talmud, which is the core of Jewish theology, was created in Babylon.
The “Jewish Connection” to Anglo-Saxon history is also told by DiMont, who points out that when William conquered the Anglo_Saxons in 1066, he brought with him a contingent of Jews who were already quite familiar with banking, commerce, and civil laws. The Jewish influence produced the trial by jury, with six Jews and six Christians serving to manage a fair decision of guilt/innocence.
Magna Carta, in referring to banking and loans, simply says, “the Jews” in these general references. So, yes, Jewish influence can be traced directly to present banking and economic systems now, by a highly acclaimed historian, even among Jews, Max DiMont.
Well, one of the things I chose not to throw out when I left WCG was
my perception of the Jews as some pretty cool people. That’s probably because I knew and liked a lot of them in high school.
Also, seeing as how the Armstrongs and other culties always milked and magnified the downsides of lesser known cycles, it’s always nice to be able to identify such cycles whenever possible, so that we don’t let them get away with assigning false cause and effect relationships.
BB
Ex-WCG members are pretty cool, for the most part, but most of them admit what they believed was a major load of crap. TGhere is a division between the biblical laws and principles of what is called Torah, and Talmudic law, along with Mishna. Historically, the main schism developed at just about the time Jesus was said to have walked the earth. Rabbi Hillel had developed his “seven laws” showing that the Talmudic laws could be reconciled with Torah, while a faction with which Jesus was associated, declared that the people should have the right to decide in each case.
You see thios in Matthew 23, amnd Luke 11, in which Jesus challenges the Pharisees by declaring they “shut up the kingdom of God to men”.
Essentially you see a parallel to this in the development of English common law, in which the customs and traditions of the people are to be practiced above “code” law, especially Roman civil law.
The reversal, if there is one, is that Pharisees claimed an oral law passed down by Moses, which they were supposedly qualified to interpet, and the written law, which was actually left to all the people, to be taught to each generation.
What emerged in Talmudic law was a departure from what those such as jesus believed was the true law to be practiced by all the people.
“What emerged in Talmudic law was a departure from what those such as jesus believed was the true law to be practiced by all the people.”
To quote myself here, what HWA did was to confuse the idea of Pharisaical law, in which the ministers told us what to do, with the teacings of Jesus, who admonished us, IN MATTERS OF LAW, to reserve the right to judge for ourselves according to the facts. His great condemnation of Pharisees in Matthew 23, showed that they were interpreting the law for themselves, when the people should be able to see and understand the law as equals before God.
Deuteronomy 30:11-12 points out that the commandment is there for the people, while the Pharisees took it upon themselves to declare an oral law which was given to them parallel to the written law. There was no need to “go up for us to heaven”. It was given for all to see.
HWA and the COGs declared that they, like the Pharisees, had some ordained dispensation to teach the law to us, when we can read it for ourselves. Jesus jumped hard on the Pharisees for this very idea.
Paul himself pointed out this very same principle in 1 Corinthians 6, leaving it up to the “least esteemed” to enter judgement for certain offenses.
Keep in mind that what miost people support today is Zionism, not the original Judaism that proclaimed this right of all the people to read and know for themselves. Many Orthodox Jews are opposed to Zionism, due to the very simple idea that God will establish his own kingdom if one is to be established.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvCYVJbULlI
Here’s a video you might enjoy. Connects economics and religion pretty well, I think.
Very good video, Ralph. I have long referred to our economic system as a system of “wage slaves.” Even as a self-employed craftsman, I was in many respects, and still am, a “slave” to the sysstem. The constant round of bills keeps one’s nose to the proverbial “grindstone.”
I guess it will always be thus. If there is some way out of it all, I don’t see it anywhere. If revolutions occur, they universally result in the exchange of one slave system for another.
When you watch all the other parts of the video, the author does not come to conclusions or offers a solution. The rioters are from the EU zone and are tearing up the town because their state is cutting back on entitlements. These are the same people who make endless demands on the state and in the process, empty the treasury.
Recall what Marx said about this?
Allen, you are correct on wage slaves, and exchanging one systrem of slavery for another, IF we assume that we must follow some person’s idea of how we should behave collectively. That’s why I like Tom Greco’s proposals and links over at reinventingmoney.com
Tom takes the idea presented by Smith as fact, that wealth is precisely equal to the labor we possess or can control, and offers a simple “solution”: create your own money as representative of your wealth. It will circulate, and you may, at some point, be asked to fulfill the actual contract of work you promised, but it will tend to act like the partial reserves maintained at a bank to back up loans. If the people have confidence in the statement of the “money” you issue, they’ll simply exchange it, until it comes back to you, after which you simply tear it up and issue another.
IOW, the exchange system is based on individual contracts which each person is capable of fulfilling, rather than on a collective demand by a centralized system of banks that will throw you out of your house if you don’t keep up on debts and taxes. Money is merely an information system.
PT Editor, you are right. I didn’t watch the whole video, but was most interested ion the points made and recognized by Allen above.
We can’t really change the fact that we must produce if we are to eat, but we can change the process by which such contracts of productivity are controlled. The further connection I saw in this is the spread of religions, and the reminder of Salvador Dali’s statement that “the foundations of no new religions can be laid without the blessings of bankers”.
Traditional Christianity, whatever “brand” we choose, subjects us to this mentality of sheep instinct or herd instinct. HWA lured us in with the promise of truth, and then trained the men to wear suits, carry briefcases, learn how to speak in public and become interchangeable units in the mass market system. He even promioted the idea of the “Seven Laws of Success” to strengthen our determination to walk up the hierarchy.
I suspect thios is more an “unconscious” process of christianity, as it was shaped over centuries and hardened into proselytizing zeal, in which we felt we must “convert” others and make them productive members of God’s kingdom. The church is a fiction, and the state is a fiction that relies on the church, but in “unconscious” ways. Church and state are both collective fictions.
Money is nothing more than a “contract” between you and another in the performance of a transaction. A dollar now is merely a representation of wealth, but not wealth in itself. If I hold a thousand dollars, I can claim the equivalent in goods and services, assuming those goods and services are for sale.
What happens if the dollar gets so worthless it’s not worth the transaction? The value of your efforts is degraded, you yourself are degraded, and you still have no choice but to accept the dollar in payment(unless gold or silver are offered, or an exchange in barter).
If money inflates, I will have to hold more in order to buy what I used to buy for less. The psychological purpose of inflationary currency is that people will buy goods, a nd services, or if smart, invest in land that wil be worth more dollars later. But the point is, if dollars are worth less and less, the people will buy more and more.
Recently, Bernanke said he would do nothng more for a while to stimulate the economy, but he is, in fact, holding interest rates down, which means he is still “monetizing debt”. That is, in order to hold interest down, he must still make more money available for the people to spend.
This encourages investment and spending, but it also encourages people to avoid saving, since the dollar will still decrease in value over the long term. Also since money is “loaned into existence”, every dollar created for investment at low interest merely represents more debt to be repaid somehow. This amounts to a gamble that somehow spending will increase business and productivity enough to overcome the growing debt if the interest on that debt is sufficiently low. Will it work? Japan tried it ten yeasrs ago, and they’re still in a “dead zone” even before the recent Tsunami. Have been for ten years.
The question is Ralph, will these government suits ever learn? I think not, nor care.
Here’s something in line with what you wrote.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkxGEKnsORA&feature=player_embedded#!
Politicians, Priests and Pornographers are of the same ilk. Trust none!
Yes, that video says pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying. If you’re ready to accept atheism, that there is no God, why not do the same for the state? “Stateism”, instead of “state theism”.
If there is no God, we can safely conclude that the authority of God was created by the reasoning of humans.If the very best reasoning that humans could offer resulted i n the slavery of religion, why would we assume that the very best reasoning humans can offer would somehow be any better with the state?
Would your argument be “since we have excluded God we can do better by relying on the state”?
How would we go about showing that one is an improvement over the other?
Seen this one Ralph? Its a prophecy come true.
“Robert Welch, Founder of The John Birch Society, predicted today’s problems with uncanny accuracy back in 1958 and prescribed solutions in 1974 that are very similar to Ron Paul’s positions today. This is proof that there are plans in place by the elite to systemically disassemble US sovereignty.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZU0c8DAIU4&feature=related
Talk about synchronicity. I was just looking at this video on Youtube before I switched to this webpage. Haven’t watched the video in full yet, but a logical understanding of the philosophy of the founders, along with a study of how the people of England had to constantly guard against encroachments of the king, makes it obvious that there has always been a conspiracy of the very wealthy against the poor. Adam Smith himself stated it in “Wealth Of Nations”. The “masters”, said Smith, are always in a “sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination…the masters, being fewer n number, can combine much more easily, and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not p[rohibit their combinations….”
Stefan Molyneaux only half jokingly pointed out that farmers learned their cows produced more milk if they had more freedom, so the idea was to give enough freedom to ensure greater production of milk. A similar strategy is used by the very rich to get maximum productivity out of people.
IOW, you can freely have anything you want, as long as it is controlled by the centralized issuance of a central banking system, and all money is created so that it is based on debt. This way, your own ambitions are perpetually used against you.
I watched the video on psychopaths. I was familiar with much of it, as I’ve been with a woman for over 20 years now who made the serious mistake of marrying a man who was a psychopath and a pedophile. He repeatedly raped her child by her first marriage, and then told the child he would kill her mother if she ever told.
That little girl is now in her 30s and terrible psychic damage has been done, with the child learning to copy the behavior of her pedophile stepfather. Since she was so young when it all began, it’s the only behavior she ever learned from the stepfather. When I met the mother, she literally lived in a terrified existence, after finding out what had happened and then having the courage to throw her husband out, he stalked and threatened her, all the while living with his parents, who condoned his behavior and virtually kidnapped her son, who had been born to the pedophile. The son lived with the grandparent, along with the father, and he was encouraged to disobey his mother and disregard every effort she made to try and discipline him.
I was immediately attracted to the kindness and gentleness of the mother, and found myself getting emotionally involved. Having just come out of the marines, which is basically a group of people who train us to be psychopaths, the behavior of the pedophile brought a smile to my face. I wanted to see whether he or I were the most insane.
He ended up hanging himself in his father’s shed after it became apparent he was going to stand trial. The thing that bothers me is, did he actually hang himself, or was he helped by his equally dysfunctional parents, who did not want the shame brought on them by their son.
I found it strange that he so terrified this woman and her daughter while I found him to be a wimp who could only frighten women.
My experience in the marines allowed me to convince the parents that I was crazier and cared less about social image than they did, so they finally left her alone, but great psychic damage had been done to both the son and daughter, due the father’s manipulative actions.
The cold detachment the marines had taught me, possibly along with my experience in the WCG, seemed to fit me well to help this woman, though her daughter was too deeply damaged to help. The son, interestingly enough, was so full of hatred of my becoming his stepfather, that he began lifting weights and winning trophies, bench pressing more than 400 pounds. His size helped him to become an undercover cop in a neighboring county. He had wanted to get strong enough to kick my butt, but instead turned out to be a pretty good family man and father of two daughters and a son.
He recently let me fire his 50 caliber machine gun that he keeps as a member of the SWAT team. Oh yeah, he’s got the psychopath tendencies, but he learned how to control his behavior(for the most part).
That’s scary. A cop having psychopath tendencies. Those are the ones that land up executing people. I hope that is not the case with this guy.
He has more of his mother’s nature than his father’s. I pushed him as a kid the same way my father pushed me, tapping into his own sense of pride rather than trying to control him. Sort of the “boy named Sue” philosophy.
BTW, that psychopath video does bring some ideas for a possible esay that leads from Smith’s concepts on economics to the culture that Hoffer wrote “was a godless, age, it is the very opposite of irreligious…”
The problem of identification here, in both economics and religion, is that we have confused mechanical processes of thought for actual truth, when there is a great difference between the two.
“The problem of identification here, in both economics and religion, is that we have confused mechanical processes of thought for actual truth, when there is a great difference between the two.”
Politics and religion are just belief systems. Now economics is another case entirely. Economics is the driving force behind both politics and religion. Its all about the money.
“The love of money is the root of all evil”. Remember that one?
Marxists captured part of it by their insistence that economic change is the basis of all social change. I tend to agree with that conclusion, though not with Marxism.
My old friend Michale Linton wrote that “money is the information system by which we deploy our productivity efforts”. It follows then that if we gain control if the issuance of money, we no longer have to form PACs and committees along with the bureaucracies the engender, to re-gain control of our own society.
Your video on psychopaths stirs many thoughts. I can ask what is the difference between a psychopath and the “normal” person, but there are many experts who can give me an answer for that. The problem is, as the video says, the psychopath can often rise to positions of leadership.
If that is the case, it would appear that we have created a society more attuned to psychopathic personalities than to “normal” personalities.
It reminds me of a test done by Alan Turing back in the 1930s, called the Turing Test. If you put a computer and a man behind a curtain, and on the other side of the curtain, you had a man who would write down questions to be presented to either the computer or man behind the curtain, could you ever reach the point that you could tell no difference between the answers of a computer and the answers of the “real man”?
When that happens, said Turing, there will be no actual difference between a human and a computer.
But a computer doesn’t know “love’ or “hate” or “empathy” , though it could possibly mimic all those to a degree that it fooled the questioner. When you speak of a psychopath, therefore, it seems you are talking about a machine that acts like a human. Words are merely words, and each has a symbolic meaning that can be copied.
This idea leads me to a central point about all religions: if you try to reduce “truth” to a system of symbols that represent meaning, then you are merely creating a psychopathic religion, in which more and more people are encouraged to act “as if” certain things are true, in order to fool those who may not be inclined to believe you. Religion and government are the forgers of psychopathology. Those who are most inclined to believe in this type of reasoning will tend to rise to the top of such systems.
“Those who are most inclined to believe in this type of reasoning will tend to rise to the top of such systems.”
Yep! And they always seem to “graduate” to the top forcefully.
“I have tried to hold the mirror up for you to see yourself as others see you. But still you don’t see in that mirror the same YOU that others see-or are unwilling …”
http://www.servantsnews.com/docs/merlet02.htm
It is interesting that two major proselytizing religions are k nown as “people of the book”. As you show in your example above, people use either the Bible or Koran to decide what God expects. But the book is made of words, and words are linear constructions composed of interchangebale parts, based on an alphabet of a couple dozen letters.
You can take these words as an interpretative instrument, and build virtually any collective ‘reality” you wish. That is what is great about the alphabet. But that same alphabet, combined with phrases like “thus saith the Lord”, wil produce wars and more wars over just which interchangeable form and meaning is actually the part that “God” said.
No matter how hard you try, you can;t get ‘there” from “here”. So we do the next best thing: we find somebody who;s close to our idea, and we follow that person, and pretty soon there’s a whole lot of people following other people, and nobody knows what “the Lord” is actually saying.
if social systems can be so easily manipulated, with a great mass of people hungry for truth, then the psychopath, who is adept at the use of words, can rule the masses.