What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget

What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget

Part 16 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

With the awareness that metaphysics, causality, ethics should be the backdrop to your normal frame of mind, and aware that that understanding remains actively involved even when left unseen in discussions concerning an economy, you're now in a position to begin noticing the numerous issues that 'economics' routinely leaves unseen (and excluded), such as what I've been referring to over and again, which repeatedly goes unseen, and left unasked, and is actively evaded in economic schemes, which is the meaning of: 'Should'.

They use the sound of the word 'should', but not its meaning, and as you listen to them sounding hte word out it is important to notice that 'Should' is not an 'economic' term. Is 'Should' something that can be calculated from mathematical equations? [spoiler alert: No]. 'Should' is a term of ethics - what is or could be ethical about distant persons and powers deciding that person X 'should' be deprived of some of their property and rights, and that person Y should receive some of that property? When considering Ethics in a societal context of taking actions that affect the lives of entire populations, its scope is more directly referencing that other subset of Ethics, which is the field of Justice, which 'Economics' is but the ethical stepchild of.

Is Justice something that is found in, contained by, or that somehow should take its cues from, economic indicators, indexes, and curves? Spoiler alert: No.

Despite their heavy use of the word that they spelled as 'should', and 'Justice', 'Economics' operates by dialectically substituting what is 'useful' for what you should do, and the 'greater good' for what is good, in their descriptions of 'what is...'s, and 'need to...'s - they don't refer to what actually is Good, but only to what's most useful to them and to their economy.

The truth is that questions of what 'Should' is and should be, are determined by philosophy, not by 'Economics', which points out the fundamental problem with treating Economics as an authority over the operations of society, and it's worth pointing out again, that Economics doesn't begin with Economics.
'Economics' is not a primary standalone field.
'Economics' is not a secondary field.
'Economics' is not even a third level field.

'Economics' claim to the authority to order & reorder society, as an idealized means of social control which the likes of J.S. Mill & Karl Marx both envisioned, is only possible when the traditional branches and roots of philosophy (and reality) are at best ignored... on the way to their being reversed.

Simply recognizing metaphysics (covering the 'which is...?'), leads to an epistemology of causality (what 'follows') and logic (validating the hows') within ethics (covering the 'shoulds'), and emphasizes the fact that 'Economics' is much less than simply a subset of Ethics, as it is necessarily defined by, beholden to, derived from, and subordinate to, those traditional fields of thought. Happily for 'Economics', the moderns' new 'fourth branch of philosophy' which they labeled 'epistemology', enables and requires that traditional respect for reality to be ignored.

"... The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays at least, is in search not so much of truth, as of liberty - that is to say, of liberty conceived of the largest field imaginable for the satisfaction of his whims...."
pg. 6, "In Praise Of Prejudice - The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas" - Theodore Dalrymple

And what you begin to see the importance of that ignorance of traditional philosophy (as Mao assaulted 'the four olds'), when you take note of the low place in the regard of ideas that economics held in traditional philosophy, which, as Say noted, 'Economics', 'oikonomy',

"...From οικος a house, and νομος a law; economy, the law which regulates the household. Household, according to the Greeks, comprehending all the goods in possession of the family..."

, it originally was limited to the management of household decisions, and was so because 'economic thinking' is truly suited only to first-hand experience, and can and should extend no further than that. As such, 'Economics' is in reality situated as a lower level (the lowest) subset of the field of Politics... which is itself a philosophical subset that's contained by the second level subset of the field of Law, which is in turn contained under and within Justice, which is in turn a subset of Ethics.

IOW, 'Economics', is a third-level subset of the third branch of philosophy, and from that backwater position, its managers have dared to claim the power to determine, dictate, and manage our lives. They've gotten away with evading the ground floors of philosophy by insisting that people perform feats of philosophical parkour to 'engage' with them, because we have allowed it to usurp the authority of those fundamental fields that are the proper avenues for even considering such issues.

Because we've allowed 'those who know best' and the TURDS to tell us that 'Economics', for all intents and purposes, replaces Philosophy (and even Religion) in our day-to-day lives, and to do so openly, it presumes to make decisions upon such matters for us, even as it proposes its various policies and distribution curves which blatantly ignores and even violates the very principles that are fundamental to those fields it's rightly subordinated to.

Because the 'Economic good' cannot recognize what is 'good', it cannot determine what 'should' be done, and accepting that and acting on that, means that you become de-moralized - not in the sense of feeling glum, but in the sense of no longer being able to recognize what is good, right, true. That's not just a problem, that's a description of the 'Ouroboros' (the snake eating its own tail), and it is the means by which 'Economics' buys us a tyrannical reality, on a political and philosophical budget.

Do you begin to see why 'economic thinkers' don't want you thinking about metaphysics, causality, and ethics?

It's as if a newly hired retail store manager suddenly began assuming the power to issue orders setting worldwide policy and practices for the company, based upon his local concerns - and then the entire company management began abiding by it. If you were a stockholder of that company, wouldn't you be asking what's going on here? Shouldn't every stockholder be doing so?!

If this is true (and it is), if 'Economics' is as out of place, empty even, as I'm saying, then how has it been made to become such a real factor in our lives?

My reply to that comes from a phrase that, even keeping in mind the philosophical overview above, will likely be seen as an outrageous claim, and though to the best of my knowledge neither James Lindsay nor Stephen Coughlin have said it in this context, it fits the phrase they've utilized in connection with gnosticism and dialectics, and seems to me to fit exceedingly well here, which is 'stepping into the Wizards Circle'.

It is important for us to notice that 'Economics' begins by excluding metaphysics, causality, ethics. With that accomplished, it swaps out the quality of Good, for those quantities of utilitarian pleasures which then seem especially alluring to those who've accepted its invitation to take the economical and very consequential step into an alternate reality, a 'copy world' of 'transcendental' ideas, that have little to do with what is or can be real and true, but which is so clearly empty and meaningless to those who haven't.

...Ouroboros image from The Palmer Worm

The portentous step that 'Economics' invites us all to unwittingly take, is one of praxis - that of putting into action without conscious thought, your implicit consent to violate the principles that America was founded upon because they were understood to be truly good, and it leads us into doing so in service to the 'greater good' which is a further denial of them. Once that step is taken, that immersive ideal is what will then seem to be real to you, while what actually is real and true, will appear from this new perspective to be as crooked as an arrow does when refracted through water.

That misleading nature is something that I think is more than hinted at, which Niall Ferguson, an historian & economist, partly exposed in his quip on economists' in thrall to, on John Maynard Keynes veiled quip:

"...even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist"

More on that, next.