Part 17 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics
There's something revealing in what the supreme wizard of the 'New Economics', John Maynard Keynes, said in the last paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), part of which is an often repeated quote:
"...Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist....", which he continued on from there with:
"...Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas..."You should keep your eye on that 'of a few years back', as it is revealing of the modernist game. Keynes concludes that last paragraph of his book with:
"... it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”, so that in Keyne's mind, and most others - including who's often taken as the leader of the opposition, Libertarian F.E. Hayek - it wasn't the wisdom that had stood the test of time, or even the selfish desires of those with wealth & power that they expected would determine the course of societal events, but instead, those ideas 'of a few years back' which had been learnt by men of "...twenty-five or thirty years of age...", are what would rule their minds when they came to power. They didn't expect wisdom, practical wisdom, or even their own interests to direct the course of society, they expected that direction to come from those ideas of the new 'Social Sciences', like 'economics'.
Despite the 1,936 years A.D. of expectations that the wisdom to lead society would and should be found in those men of experience who'd lived & learned more than others, Keynes thought that, in 1936, when no 'economist' had been long dead or defunct for more than a few decades, that those 'economists' were who were determining how society is, 'should', and would be, organized and run.
That's a telling reveal of how swiftly and thoroughly the new academic regime, which the Idealists had given birth to shortly after the opening of the 1800s (our colleges today bear almost no resemblance in either form or content, to those our Founding Fathers attended), had been able to utilize its new field of 'Epistemology' to divert society's attention away from the classical Western considerations of "What is" & "What follows", and "What should be done". Instead, those 'ideas of a few years back' were informing the new TURDS that since we kant know reality as it really is, 'they' should rely instead upon 'experts' to tell them what 'works best'.
Naturally, those deemed and certified to have that expertise, came from the new Social Sciences of 'Education', Social Studies', and 'Economics', which expertly traded away that broad understanding which had traditionally marked a person as being educated, for training in a very specific set of skills. These Idealists - subjectivists and empiricists - having traded away History for Social Studies, Philosophy for Economics, as well as transforming the high regard that people had for Logic, into its being perceived as either a tedious verbal parlor trick or the apparently meaningless hieroglyphics of symbolic logic - had implicitly and explicitly discarded the very basis of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture's form of knowledge and understanding. And as an encore, having made the foundations of Western society dissappear before our eyes, they planted their Utopian (no place) flag in its place, and have successfully convinced and compelled We The People, year after year, decade after decade, to send our children to absorb their 'New Ideas!' of nothingness.
The fundamental values which underlie the systems and macro perspectives of 'Economic Thinking', are what mark it out as being truly Pro-Regressive, as it is those collective sensibilities that are found on the far side of The West's dividing line between the years B.C. and A.D., that modernity most embraces. Now matter how otherwise admirable, it is true that however foundational the ideas and institutions of the West B.C. were, and are, the Greco/Roman without the Judeo/Christian - as expressed by the Greek dramatists, and Plato, and even with Aristotle and Cicero - presumed the individual to be utterly inconsequential in the face of the interests of society. It was only after the Greco/Roman had merged with the Judeo/Christian, that the individual came to be recognized in the West A.D., as a uniquely valuable person, each created in the image of God and recognized as not only having value as an individual, but as being on an equal footing in the eyes of justice with all other persons, no matter their social & political standing.
We forget today how truly revolutionary that view was, and still is, and how completely it is that our *modern* 'economic thinking' rejects and rebels against it.
Those moderns yearning for the B.C. worldview, needed a means of pivoting away from the A.D. understanding of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, in order to pro-regress back to the B.C. view where the individual served the collective. And the needed to do so without anyone noticing that they were being turned away from the foundations of the West, which required progressive efforts across centuries of time:
It would be difficult if not impossible to imagine the strategic deflections from reality that a person would have to become consciously accustomed to making, if classical philosophy hadn't been either ejected from or sterilized within wAcademic circles. The truth of that was essentially 'proved' by the experience of SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism)'s founder, Thomas Reid, who had effectively beaten Hume's skepticism back and arguably enabled America to be born, and at the last possible moment that was conceivable. Modernity's post-partum response to our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, was swift and brutal. Attacks were piled upon every aspect of SCSR, as it was verbally derided from every quarter of wAcademic circles by 'Classical Liberals' from Kant to J.S. Mill, and by the latter 19th century, they'd succeeded in reversing popular opinion about the common sense of Common Sense.
- Machiavelli tried to go against the A.D. tide, but his efforts were too obviously and easily called out.
- Bacon & Hobbes made a less direct assault upon the culture as well, but their notions tended to be thought of as additions - as 'reality adjacent' - rather than challenges to it.
- Descartes & Rousseau began to move the needle,
- it wasn't until the evolution of 'Economics' as a 'Social Science', that the TURDS were able to sidestep outward concern for individual rights and virtue, by promising to manage what had recently been considered an actual evil (the violation of individual rights & property under the law), in such a way as to promote the 'greater good' (rather than a mere singular Good).
The philosophical reverses which The West has suffered since then, couldn't have occurred, certainly not in less than a century, if the populace hadn't been simultaneously 'educated' into the cultural and institutional amnesia, which 'Economics' has proven itself so well suited to inducing in us.
It's difficult to overstate the willfully unseen presumptions involved in how that pivot is still being carried out in headlines such as:
"... The Wall Street Journal reports that GDP was up last quarter, and though the Chairman of the FED noted that the inflation rate has only slowed .03%, jobs numbers are expected to increase...", as it smoothly evades and conveys what our society has explicitly come to accept as being 'reality', and by our wearing those shaded lenses, we enable 'Economics' to assume the authority that it has assumed in our lives, with the confidence we once would have looked to religion and philosophy - or at the very least to law or politics - for advice on the *wisest* course of action to follow in our day-to-day lives.
The expectations of, and nearly invisible utilization of power that is conferred through the materialistic leviathan of 'Economic Thinking', eager to take whatever actions may be deemed necessary to 'help the common good', has necessarily entailed abandoning our earlier understanding of what was finally coming to be recognized as uncommonly good. Shorn of the foundations of The West, thanks to the 'epistemology' that modernity's misosophers such as Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc., established to suppress our regard for reality, 'Economics' has had little or nothing to fear from the wisdom of those classical philosophers who've been safely memory-holed away from popular opinion.
No matter how at odds their various economic ideologies ('Capitalism, 'Marxism', 'Socialism', 'Libertarianism', etc.,) might appear to be with each other on the surface today, they only really have to contend with the 'long dead economists' opinions of 'a few years back', as they all share in the opinion that their views are a more than sufficient replacement for the traditional western understanding of metaphysics, causality, ethics, literature, law, and political reasoning.
With Economics freed by its votaries in and out of Government & wAcademia, it's been free to engage in Social Science experiments (what do you think 'public education' is?) that utilize We The People as an efficient means of generating the data ('privacy?! Ha!) it needs for forming and reforming its ever new & improved theories on how 'best' to drive policies which usurp whatever power (governmental, financial, and social) it claims to need for the benefit of the 'common good'.
 |
| You should *should all over yourself* |
That is the awesome social and political power that we've gone along with conferring upon 'economic thinking', so that where Political Economy once observed reality in order to understand what would be most just, and therefore most effective and good for all, 'economic thinkers' now read their indexes and curves as technological tea leaves to tell them how they should correct our course into the future, free from the 'wrong' actions of 'old fashioned' thinking. It's almost as if the positions of 'Priest & King' in society, which modernity loves to pat itself on the back for progressing past, were alive and well under the modern guise of 'defunct economists'.
Next time you hear the Economic news that cannot be avoided today, you should think of the magician up there doing his magic act on stage, and remember that he performs no magic there - none! - he only stylishly and theatrically uses his costume, top hat, and wand, and of course his attractive assistant, to distract the audience (of which you are seen as but a small part of) into being convinced that they magically did what you know they didn't do... to thunderous applause.
If you do pay attention, you'll notice there are three components of the economic stagecraft that its magicians use to keep the audience's attention filled with 'Ooh!'s and 'Ah!'s:
- Economics is not about reality, it's about spinning up a semblance of one (jobs#'s, unemployment %'s, average income), which you are expected to treat as if it were real. It isn't... and by stepping into its circle, you risk being lost to it.
- The Economically minded use terms such as 'Rights!' and 'Fair' not because they're meaningful to them - their every use is self-contradictory and without being rooted in metaphysics & ethics, Economics is fully blind to those concepts that even 'fair' is derived from - but for the effect the narrative produces in the audience, which furthers their aspirations of gaining power over 'this, that, and the other thing'.
- Economics operates through a dialectical simulacrum of language fused with abstruse mathematics - Economics Speak - not to communicate, but to both cow and corral the populace with, as they tweak their miniature models of reality.
If you keep your eyes on the magicians other hand, you might notice that 'economics' incessantly evades metaphysics & ethics, through its wand waving of diversionary references to aggregate market conditions, income brackets, fields of management, labor disputes, information management, so that it can use your income, cost of living, and the rising prices that you experience, to reduce you into references to percentages and anecdotal concerns that are 'too miniscule' to warrant the concern of TURD's who're focused on the 'big picture'. Be careful as the pretty assistant dressed in the tight skirt of NEWS & current events, winks and curtsies at you, or you might miss how your concerns are being efficiently handled as issues of 'micro-economics', whose mountains of carefully gathered data of GDP, CPI, etc., makes your cost of living yield to the societal concerns of the collective, which only they are prepared to manage, and which the individual must yield to, for the 'common good'.
Just keep in mind that there is no magic. Keep in mind that neither reality nor our Common Sense A.D. ability to understand it, have been made to vanish. Keep in mind that their magic consists of nothing more than distractions, and that all such magic tricks require tangible tools to distract you with, which is what we'll turn to next.
No comments:
Post a Comment