Collapse: The Blog

On Abstractions

One of the memes I read about growing up when I started to develop an interest in political thought is the association of abstraction with the left. The right, by contrast, is supposedly more pragmatic, more concerned with reality and institutions, etc. (I may have read this in Kirk or Nash or something).

Now, I tend to think there's an element of truth here, but we must stress that correlation does not necessarily entail causation. Virtually all of the big technocrats, bureaucrats, social planners, and the like are leftists. The ones who live and work in the real world are virtually all comparatively more right-wing. But zoom out the camera lens a little and I think you'll see this tendency is due more to differences in IQ than social attitudes. The big technocrats are all second-sigma types, with IQs in (at least) the above average range; the doers are all of comparatively modest intellect. Insofar as there's a correlation between social attitudes and IQ, what we're seeing here is probably what, in statistics, is called a mediating relationship (where the relationship between X and Y vanishes once you control for Z, because the effect of X on Y is not direct but is channeled through Z).

I think once you control for differences in intellect, the gap reverses: the rightists become more abstract, the liberals more concrete. Actually, it might be more appropriate to say that at high levels of IQ, rightists supplement their concreteness by acquiring some degree of abstraction, whereas leftists remain relatively flat. The vast majority of even intelligent liberals could not really hope to understand something like Bonald's essay on authority, much less write a coherent leftist equivalent of it, and it's not just because they subscribe to an essentially antiauthority ideology.

In fact, to the extent leftists are "abstract" at all, it is about the nature of concretes. It has to be; what else would they abstract about? Metaphysics, which they deny? Religion, which they deny? Human nature, which they deny? These are people who think you can't know anything you can't experience  empirically, for Heaven's sake. They have a clinical aversion to abstraction; they just don't get such things, and assume that anything unintelligible to them must be false or not worth knowing. If you don't believe me, hop on over to Edward Feser's blog and see him periodically grapple with atheists whose opposition to religion is based almost entirely on cliches and embarrassing misapprehensions.

So the ultimate leftist goal is, of course, not something so abstract as the salvation of the human soul, the realization of the good life, or the fulfillment of human nature. It's all political: the establishment of a perfect political system, a perfect law, that runs everything perfectly according to their designs, maximizing their designated virtues, minimizing their denigrated vices. (For more on this, see Dr. Charlton's Thought Prison). It's very telling to me that the main thing for which Jeremy Bentham is known, besides utilitarianism (i.e., about a third of modern leftism), is his proposal for a prison in which a single individual can constantly monitor all inmates without their knowledge.

A logical consequence of this is that most liberals are actually at least semi-decent people who, in good faith, swallow something they don't fully understand (leftists, please don't huff that I'm condescending to compliment you; this is a far more generous concession to my opponents than one could extract from the average leftist sophsticate). It may be true, for instance, that at the highest levels of intellectual liberalism, gay marriage is actually accepted as a means of smashing traditional gender roles, destroying the family, and corroding authority and tradition; but at the level of mundane street liberals, they just think it's a good thing to do. A corollary to this is that while liberalism is inherently opposed to authority, order, and community, the liberal parts of the country tend to be better organized, more communitarian, and just nicer places to live.

When I lived in Maryland (one of the most inarguably liberal states in the country), there absolutely was a sense of community, communal character, and general neighborliness. Crime was largely confined to the ethnic barrios, which were kept carefully cordoned off from the rest of the state. Beautiful and well-maintained parks, safe public playgrounds, abounding history and culture, charming brick sidewalks, and streetlights by the thousands were the norm. Contrast this to the dusty, cultureless "conservative" Texan slum I presently live in, where an insuperable gloom settles over everything in the evening, enabling an army of semiliterate degenerates to emerge and proceed to punch out cops in strip clubs, burn down abandoned buildings, or scream at their women in the middle of a crowded residential street at midnight.

The majority of liberals aren't malicious, though their beliefs are malice given intellectual expression. If they had the capacity to follow their beliefs through to their logical conclusion, most wouldn't be liberals; they'd rather keep the nice communities than let some some homosexual somewhere bugger his boyfriend on the taxpayer dollar. But they don't have that capacity, and the reason is that they are allergic to abstraction.

I've attributed this aspect of the leftist mind to spiritual autism before, a stunting of the soul and a crippling of the mind's transcendental capacities. But whence this autism? I'm still uncertain, and it remains an unsettling question to me, because it is an obvious impediment to grace.

At any rate, none of this really changes anything. There's not much daylight between stupidity and evil. and leftism remains Miltonian Satanism with a sophisticated public relations sheen. That some people buy into it in good faith only makes their ultimate damnation tragic.

More on B.S. "Rights"

Live from Gomorrah:

The Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights confirmed that it is investigating allegations that Catholic University violated the human rights of Muslim students by not allowing them to form a Muslim student group and by not providing them rooms without Christian symbols for their daily prayers.

Actually read the article -- at one point, the hack ambulance chaser (who apparently has an axe to grind against CUA) actually suggests that the Catholic basilica is so tall and visible that it's offensive! Surely there's no equivalent in Islamic religious architecture.

According to Wikipedia, Catholic University is a private, pontifical university established under the purview of and directly responsible to the Vatican.

So we have, then, established that there is a "right" for Muslim students, with full foreknowledge of the fact that they were applying to study at such an institution and that their false religion would not be accomodated, to decide (retroactively and evidently without resorting to nonlegal recourse first) that this arrangement is not suitable for them and to demand that the government intervene on their behalf. And evidently this right is so important that it trumps the previously-acknowledged right to private property.

Notice of course that they do not appeal to natural rights (because there is no freedom to practice error) or civil rights (because there is no civil right to do what you want on other people's property without their approval) but human rights -- the meaningless metaphysical muck of modern manure-peddlers, a formless, baseless, made-up bit of damnable nonsense used to justify whatever obscene outrage the far-left and their ethnic/religious minority orbiters have decided to pursue this time.

In a sane world, the rabble-rousers would have their rank ingratitude repaid with prompt expulsion (and, if their terms of admissions contract permits, conversion of any tuition assistance they received to student loans). Instead, the safe bet is that the university will collapse (or be forced to collapse by the legal sharks at the "Office of Human Rights") like a microcosmic version of our whole shoddy, tragic civilization, and submit to the blasphemy of removing the likenesses of the Lord and the Holy Father from its walls in order to appease the exaggerated sensitivities of a few barbarous Mohammedans.

Pfah!

What's a Reactionary To Do?

Authority is the glue that binds societies together and endows their operations with reason and morality, yet it is quite clear that authority is breaking down at all levels, and most especially at the level of social organization.

Social authority has been condensed to a few incestuous power centers: government, the professoriate, the media, and the bankers. Of these, the latter are insolvent and on the verge of going up in flames, and no amount of pillaging by the first three can change this fact. The professoriate is ideologically opposed to authority in principle and the media makes its living undermining it in practice. The government has adjusted itself accordingly, wielding, in place of authority, the blunt object of police and judicial power, with which it will bludgeon anyone into compliance -- and then lie about it.

What is a reactionary to do? Authority is surely a good in itself, but what is there to be had of it nowadays? What duties do we on the far-right have to power centers that wield their power to advance agendas that are frequently subversive, blasphemous, and evil?

Back to Work, and Tea Party Fail

Posting's been light the last few days, I know. I've been insanely productive at work these last few days, and a minor pain issue has been distracting me from any thought more sophisticated than, "Golly gee, this stinks" (that was censored; my life is not Leave it to Beaver). I promise I'll slog through it.

Meantime, this little ditty popped up one of my Facebook friends' feeds:

This is truer than people realize -- the Federal Reserve's primary dealer system actually makes big banks an organ of federal government and central planning -- but the thing that struck me about it was how much public perceptions of the Tea Party have clearly changed. Most people don't seem to remember that the Tea Party started out chiefly anti-big bank. Of course, their protests were government-directed, but only because they opposed the government's proposed bailouts of financial institutions. Only after the Tea Party was co-opted by the evil Palinite mainstream Republican pseudoconservative establishment did they start complaining about government spending and (later) Obamacare and whatnot.

Which makes me wonder how long it will be until Occupy Wall Street is co-opted by the mainstream leftist establishment and morphed into a protest against... I dunno, homophobia or whatever other B.S. issue-of-the-month they decide to make up.

Will > Intellect?

Most of the modern project has proceeded on the assumption that the will is metaphysically prior to the intellect. The scholastics held the contrary position. Civilization's gone to Hell since they were dethroned in the nominalist revolution, which I took to be a vindication of their position: garbage in, garbage out, after all.

But if the intellect is prior to the will, then the nominalist revolution should've been impossible. That it happened at all is evidence that there is no real reason to choose between the axiomatic principles on which scholasticism was based and those on which nominalism was based -- that, at the end of the day, where you fall really does boil down to will, to arbitrary choice.

Which means the whole dispute was over before it began, because the nominalists were right. Which perhaps explains the really quite remarkable collapse of the scholastic tradition, which, I'm given to understand, was almost continent-wide within a century.

But if scholasticism is hopelessly unable to counter nominalism, and if nominalism leads inevitably to modernity (as Michael Allen Gillespie demonstrates in The Theological Origins of Modernity, which, darnit, I'm still reading), then Western Catholicism was doomed from the get-go, and it would've been better for it to have followed along the footsteps of the Orthodox Church (which never had to deal with this crap) by developing a less rational and more mystical theological tradition.

What Has Become of Economic Man

If you troll Internet discussion boards long enough, you'll come across him.

He's smart-ish, perhaps as high as the upper range of what our friend Jehu at Chariot of Reaction calls the "second sigma," that 14% of the population whose average IQs fall within one to two standard deviations above the mean.

He's basically a libertarian, although if you press him (and perhaps even if you don't) he'll admit that he prefers to be identified by some glitzed-up version of the word -- most likely "anarchocapitalist."

He may be a drug user, and if he is, he is not afraid to admit as much. He is probably (though not necessarily) pretty young. I am not using a gender-specific pronoun out of careless sexism or syntactic convenience; he actually is a male.

He thinks there is really nothing more to know about society than the manner of its economic organizations. Freedom, to him, is economic freedom; duty is an alien concept; authority something to be grudgingly tolerated (at best), rebelled against and destroyed (at worst), if nothing else heavily monitored and regarded with suspicion and hostility.

He has not read much beyond economic philosophy, and is almost certainly convinced that nothing worth reading was written before the 17th century (and he probably hasn't read anything written before the 20th, except the Greek classics he had to trudge through in his public high school). If he has an opinion at all on what he no doubt derisively refers to as "social issues" (and if he does, they will be more-or-less left-wing positions),  he will be hesitant to articulate them because, after all, they're "irrelevant" -- what matters is taxes and trade policy. He is almost certainly an atheist and a utilitarian.

He is pretty much Economic Man given human form. He is also profoundly autistic, an amateur economist version of Gregory House. He is not interested in people at all, only aggregates and statistics. He will declare (and he thinks this is a mark of sophistication on his part, because he's being honest about his beliefs) that he's quite alright with the fact that free trade sends jobs overseas because people don't have a right to a job, anyway (he cannot understand anything unless he can understand it in the paradigm of "rights"). His preference is for systems that are as abstract and mechanistic as possible, as far removed from organic and spontaneous human organization as could reasonably be achieved. Nevertheless, the fact that he disagrees with leftists about what such abstract, mechanistic systems based on an atheistic and utilitarian conception of the universe ought to look like is sufficient for leftists everywhere to tar him as right-wing (not that he's interested in labels... sort of).

He probably thinks I'm a socialist.

He harbors fantasies of a utopia built on his principles (one that looks like Manchester, New Hampshire, and not, as it would actually look like, Flint, Michigan), but he is deeply uncomfortable with the question of what to do with those who would resist it. Deep down inside, some ember in his sludgy and incinerate heart intuits that his principles aren't worth killing for. He glosses over this mentally, assuming that the great revolution will affect a transformation in man's nature and everyone will go along to get along. In his fantasy, he doesn't have to smell the dead pits.

Say Hello Open Thread

Traffic to Collapse: The Blog has been spiking recently, with the daily hits over the last seven days about double what it was just two or three months ago. Perhaps it's the spam bots but the recent referrers list suggests otherwise. Maybe the message is getting out there.

For new readers, welcome to the blog. I encourage you to pop in and say hello. There's a few posts you might be interested in reading, which I think articulate this blog's beliefs pretty succinctly:

• "The Demonic Society: Drucker on Collapse" was one of the first long posts written here, and describes the failure of modern economic society to organize, rationalize, and moralize the operations of our common social life.
• "Post-Capitalist Economics: A Proposal" articulates an alternative vision to the economic model employed in modern Western nations. In it, I argue that economic goods must be subordinated to noneconomic ones. You might also be interested in a three-part series of posts explaining how a society organized along militaristic lines could provide one such alternative -- although I'm not a fan of the idea.
• Relatedly, you might be interested in my post on "Unemployment and Society," in which I argue that unemployment should be understood not as an economic issue but a social one.
• Check out "The Problem of Credit (or, Why Economic Collapse is Mathematically Inevitable)" for an explanation of the reasons for our coming economic apocalypse.
• Readers of a more stridently right-wing bent might enjoy some of my posts on how leftists write and what their writing style says about their minds and souls, specifically, "The Lexicography of Leftism" and "Lefticography and Spiritual Autism."

Also, check out the blogroll on the right. If you like what you see here, you should like those, as well. Or stick around and enjoy the show.

It's Not a Question of Economics

Keeping up with my post from yesterday, the problem we face is fundamentally not an economic one at all -- which is why the (economic) objections to my proposal to outlaw usury fall flat.

I'm not advocating abolishing usury because it will enrich society economically. It would probably impoverish it. But it would almost certainly stabilize and, more importantly, ennoble it. The trade-off, to me, is worth it.

I don't care if people see paying interest as a worthy exchange for the ability to consume right now. People simply don't have a right to live beyond their means. (In fact, in a natural law sense, they have no right to any "means" beyond those necessary to live). Frankly, I'd much rather people's material appetites be curbed, by force if necessary.

The question, really, is: what kind of society do we want?

At present, we have one that is organized on the principle that economic goods are supreme -- and that all other goods must, if necessary, be sacrificed in order to achieve it.

So we are quite content to serially blow bubbles in the economy that explode, leaving people destitute and perhaps even homeless. We'll permit banks (and the people who run them) to launder drug money, commit fraud, and harrass and terrorize debtors into an early grave in order to get a 2% rise in the Dow. We'll sell our children into debt slavery which they can never escape so that we can keep tenured professors of sociology living in luxury while their TAs teach all their classes for less than minimum wage.

Some folks like to imagine that the political class is in thrall to the big banks because of campaign donations. That's nonsense. Men like Barack Obama are not failing to take the big banks into receivership and orderly liquidation because they're bought and paid for (though they are). They let big banks destroy people's lives in order to keep GDP growth barely in the black because they think it's a good thing to do. The money comes after this belief, not before it.

This is what you get when you have a social order predicated on (a) materialism and (b) consequentialism.

All you pro-family, God-fearing "conservative" Christians out there who think this is capitalism (much less that capitalism is the way to go) -- be warned. This monster will turn on and devour you in a moment. Capital, as they say, is agnostic. It doesn't care about you or your family or the colors on your flag or the nature of your God. It will screw you over for a buck just as surely as it will all those poor and unskilled workers you deserve to live in squalor. One big slip-up and this nation will be ground into the dust as capital flees, and you and your children will curse God and die, starving in the gutter.

And when it happens you will only be living out the logical consequences of your own beliefs: your belief that the only real god worthy of worship is the invisible hand of the market, and that all that other stuff -- family, community, food on the table -- is expendable.

At the end of the day, the present crisis is economic: but it is born of conscious decisions about how to moralize and organize our society. The way out, then, isn't some contrary economic policy -- not communism, nor the internalization of our creepy national socialist bureaucracy -- but the abandonment of economic policy as the organizing principle of our social lives.

On Not Thinking Too Hard About Gay Marriage

The above image has been making its rounds among my Facebook friends (the arrow is intended to point to the avatar of the poster). Clearly, my friends aren't the most thoughtful ones around. I've yet to work up the courage to point out that everyone already is able to marry in a civil sense, and that a more honest formulation of their argument should be "everyone should be able to get taxpayer subsidies for having sex with whatever they want." Pretty sure that would cut my friends list in half.

The sad thing is, one of the posters is the chair of the psychology department at the university from which I graduated. Evidently professional ethics isn't sufficient to deter tarring opponents to one's position with (stupid) psychopathological diagnoses.

EDIT: For those who haven't seen it already, check out my post contra gay "marriage" from a few months back.

We Really Don't Need More Inflation

Reuters has observed that inflation doves are getting more aggressive, beginning with Chicago Fed President Charles Evans' call for monetary easing based on inflation and employment targets rather than arbitrary calendar schedules. The media's picking up the call, with Rex Nutting declaring boldly that "we need more inflation" and Philip Pilkington pointing out that Nazi Germany revitalized their devastated post-war economy through policies that would today be considered inflationary.

I appreciate Pilkington's tacit admission that we in the West have adopted the Nazi economic model, which is something I had never heard anyone say prior to reading Robert Locke's column on the non-neoliberal Japanese economic model. (I owe Locke a lot of credit for my philosophical development; his writings were the first to liberate me from bland American pseudoconservatism and introduced me to the works of Peter Drucker. For further readings on how the Western economic model is neither truly capitalist nor meaningfully socialist, see his articles "What is American Corporatism?", "Is Capitalism Conservative?", and "Conservatism Under Corporatism." Be aware that he writes from a hardcore Burkean perspective).

What I don't appreciate is his apparent uncritical acceptance that this model is worth preserving.

Debt and money are fungible: $10,000 in cash is worth exactly the same as a $10,000 debt owed to you, which (in a pinch) you can always liquidate for cash. But debt has to be paid off, or else it's not really debt and no one would have incentive to lend. But if debt has to be paid off, and debt is money, then logically paying off debt destroys money -- and therefore reduces the amount of money available in circulation to pay off other debts. In an economy that permits debt to exceed the amount of money available (i.e., a fractional reserve system), this means that large-scale deleverage is fatal to the economy, which in turn means that debt must grow exponentially (forever!) in order for the economy to continue functioning.

There are obvious flaws in this system. People have a natural limit to their ability to finance things: there is only so much, after all, that you can buy. Thus, this system is necessarily inflationary; prices exist to match supply with demand, after all, and debt circumvents this rationing measure, forcing prices upward. (This works solely because inflation lags, so that increasing the monetary supply today doesn't rise prices for, potentially, several quarters; if the price-jacking effect were instantaneous, there'd be no advantage to inflation at all). But if this system is inflationary, then incomes must keep up with the monetary supply. If they don't, people will very quickly find their ability to take on new debt is taxed, eventually hitting a "ceiling" in which they can no longer do so. When new debt cannot be created, defaults happen -- and defaults destroy money, causing people who were treading water before to sink, which cause more defaults, in an ever-tightening spiral of monetary collapse. Fiscal stimulus and monetary accomodation are all aimed at plugging the hole caused by a lag in new lending, introducing new money into the economy so that the house doesn't collapse in on itself.

This means that the economy must be very carefully managed. Even small differences in growth compound to ludicrous extents over a sufficiently long timeline, and if the debt curve runs away from the income curve, you get the abovementioned collapse; this has necessitated the creation of large institutions with tremendous power to manage the economy and virtually no oversight (e.g., the Federal Reserve). Over time, the job becomes progressively more difficult, as the spread between the curves must narrow in order to keep one from running away from the other; again, even tiny differences, over time, compound.

Now, the inherent evil of such a system that essentially compels people to become indebted in order to maintain the same standard of living is bad enough. What is worse, though, is that the managing institutions have done a terrible job here. Free trade and mass immigration has destroyed the ability of income to grow (indeed, one of the chief arguments of the free traders was that American workers were overpaid and needed to take a haircut). The result was predictable: in 2008, we hit the ceiling. Debt creation slowed, the overleveraged defaulted and those leveraged at capacity became overleveraged. The financial system (and the entire American economy) nearly exploded. Only a tremendous influx of debt (now sovereign debt, since the private sector was overleveraged) plugged the hole.

Of course, there's a limit to how deep in the hole sovereign nations can go, too. Ultimately, this game can only be played long-term through raw money-printing. This will continue until the wages of American workers reach equilibrium with those of, say, Uganda and Thailand, whereupon economic goods will be distributed with relative uniformity across the world.

The calls for more inflation make sense in this respect: the monetary supply must grow to keep the Ponzi scheme from collapsing. But when was it decided that the Ponzi ought to be permitted to run at all?

That is, when was it decided that it is really quite OK for Americans to be sacrificed to the gods of the ever-growing Dow and GDP?

We don't need more inflation: we need an economic system that is rational, sustainable, and humane. That's not what we have now. And we'll see the logical consequences of it soon enough.