Racists: Still Crazier Than Mad Hatters

A friend recently mentioned the incendiary fact that white people tend to have higher IQ's than blacks, at least when measured as a group.  While this idea is politically provocative beyond almost anything one might say in the public arena today, it soooo misses the most important fact about race, which is that race may be the least significant factor in predicting a person's IQ.  For that matter, race may be the least important factor in predicting anything significant about an individual, except the color of a person's skin tone ... and even here you can't always know for sure what shade of skin color belongs to which race!  

More importantly, I believe there is something ominously wrong about focusing on a person's race, at least to the extent that one loses sight of a person's unique and irreplaceable attributes as an individual.  

The evil of racism is that it is collectivist, meaning that the racist loses sight of a person's precious individuality.  The danger of lumping individuals together is not merely an evil characteristic of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.  This habit of viewing people through the lens of race is a defining characteristic of the left as well.  In fact, the left is obsessed by the postmodern tendency to define individuals according to the tribe they were born into.  

Let us remember that it is wrong to judge individuals by factors they can't control.  Our skin tone and eye color at birth, like the very time and place of our birth, are outside our ability to control.  Any matter that is outside the realm of personal choice is therefore outside the realm of morality.  Whether a person's actions are right or wrong depends crucially on that person's ability to choose one action or another.  Choice is therefore a crucial element in judging a person as good or bad.  But the left seems to think of people only in terms of their race, class, and gender, all of which are beyond anyone's ability to control, at least at the time of one's birth, transgender surgery notwithstanding.  

Let me amplify the point: judging people according to standards that are outside their ability to control is a bad thing, just as bad as old fashioned racism, insofar as it fails to regard people as fully realized and unique individuals.

Thomas  Sowell is an economist and prolific author who does scholarly work at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.  He is, not incidentally, a black man who grew up in Harlem and graduated with honors from Harvard University at a time before affirmative action made it possible for minorities to be admitted to prestigious schools without measuring up to the admissions standards traditionally required of everyone. 

One of Sowell's academic specialties, on which he has published many books and a flood of articles, is precisely this matter that white populations tend to have higher IQ's than blacks. 

This statistical fact of higher IQ's among whites should give no comfort to  the Klan bigots who feel superior to blacks, because this statistical difference is highly correlated with environmental factors such as nutrition and the socio-economic accident of the time and place of one's birth. 

In sub-Saharan Africa, where nutrition is as abysmally lacking as electrical power and safe drinking water, IQ's in some of these countries tend to average around 60!  If we take any of those kids at birth and rear them in an affluent, educated home, their IQ's will certainly become dramatically higher than their siblings' and parents who were left back in Africa.

Among white men tested as Army draftees during World War One, IQ's were very significantly lower than today.

When white Europeans began sailing to the far reaches of the oceans and came upon all the backwards peoples of the world, they falsely concluded that Europeans were inherently superior to all those tribes that had never invented the wheel or developed any technology more sophisticated than open fires and  canoes. 

These Europeans didn't know that Homo saps have been on the earth around a 100,000 years (or, for what it's worth, is the true number closer to a million years?  For the point I am making, this question does not matter much, in the context of Biblical literalists who believe that God created the universe around 6,000 years ago.)  Until roughly 10,000 years ago none of our ancient ancestors had risen any higher than the primitive peoples of today. 

The Europeans also could not know that the DNA evidence discovered in just the last two decades proves beyond the slightest doubt that all of our ancient ancestors are from Africa!  In other words, all human beings come from the same stock.  We are one species.  There is no essential difference, certainly no moral difference between us, insofar as the biological roots of our most ancient ancestors.

These matters of race need to be put into a proper context. 

These same Europeans, in their great age of discovery, starting around 500 years ago, could have thought about their own ancient ancestors.  One thing they might have pondered is that just 2,000 years ago, almost all of the northern Europeans were living in a condition of poverty that was as abysmal as the poorest populations on the planet today.  These were people who wore animal skins and lived in twig and log huts sealed with mud, who slept on dirt floors with their domestic animals beside them.  They burned animal dung and wood for heat and fuel to cook, and so must have suffered horrible lung disorders from all that toxic smoke, just as modern primitives in Africa do today.  Their lives embodied the very essence of that condition described by Hobbes as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.  Life expectancy was not even 30 years.  I would not think that their IQ's could have surpassed by much the poorest populations today.

So the proper context here is to note that the difference between the savage  populations of Europe and Africa is a separation of around 2,000 years.   So what?  Two thousand years is a long time!  No, it's not ... not by  the measure of how long man has been on the earth.  Consider the following idea, which I heard in a lecture some years ago by the great economist, student of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, and Objectivist scholar, George Reisman:

It's clear that Homo saps have been on the planet for around a million years (backwards Biblical literalists to the contrary notwithstanding, who believe that the God of Abraham "created" the earth around six thousand years ago.) 

Let's put this very starkly:

During most of his million years, man was a hunter-gatherer.  It was only  around 10,000 years ago that man first began to develop agriculture.  So, 10,000 of 1,000,000 years equals one percent of the time man has been on the earth.  In other words, it was only in the last flash of our existence that we developed agriculture.

Still briefer is the percentage of the time since our ancient northern European ancestors wore animal skins, compared to the time that man has been on the planet:  2,000 out of 1,000,000 equals just one fifth of one percent of the time Homo saps have walked the earth. 

  

Think about that. 

Finally, the insanity of judging people according to their race is confirmed by the facts assembled by such scholars as Thomas Sowell which prove that the differences among people of the same race are vastly greater than the differences between the races themselves, regarded as groups.  In other words, there is a vastly greater difference between the brightest and and dullest specimens within each race than the differences between the races, measured as groups.

In short, to be white, black, yellow, or red does not reliably predict anything about an individual's intelligence or potential.  But, as usual, the collectivists are  obsessed by the differences between groups, and are blind to individuals and individualism.  

Collectivists are pixilated by the evil fairy dust of group membership, which is to say membership in groups into which individuals are born.  Collectivists do not seem to know how to consider people as the unique, precious, irreplaceable individuals that each one of us is. 

Collectivism is a dull and coarse way of viewing the world, and, ironically, it is just as characteristic of the liberal left as it is of the Ku Klux Klan. 

In fact, the Klan's crude bigotry is based just on the one criterion of race, whereas the liberal left adds class and gender to this evil collectivist stew into which they drop all people. To an even greater degree than the Klan, lefties regard people not so much as individuals, but as members of the groups into which they were born.

 

Shame on all these collectivists!  

To be human is to be an individual first, and a member of a group only secondarily.  
 
The only groups that matter, morally speaking, are those in which one's membership is a matter of an individual's choice, and such choice is politically open only to those who live in societies which enjoy some degree of freedom.

You may argue that this concern with individuals versus groups is as pointless as wondering whether the chicken or the egg came first.  

My answer is that this question of individualism versus collectivism has life-and-death importance.  

Collectivism, treating people as good or bad according to which groups they belong, tends to promote totalitarian political systems that lead to the death camps which were the very emblem of the 20th century's worst problems.  

By contrast, individualism unleashes the creative power of Homo sapiens where it lives, which is inside each person, and thereby animates this astonishing eco-system of peaceful cooperation and production, which is the free market, where we enjoy voluntary trade of values to mutual advantage.  This freedom has improved the quality of life on earth as never before.

E  P  N

Revised 2015.0801

Gandhi v Lamb Chop: Philip Glass & Shari Lewis

Gandhi versus Lamb Chop:

Philip Glass and Shari Lewis

My Everything-but-Wife, Terri, and I drove to Danbury last night to see the encore broadcast in HD of the Met Opera's new production of Philip Glass' groundbreaking opera, Satyagraha.

Incidentally, in case you're not familiar with this development, the Metropolitan Opera has been broadcasting via satellite to movie theaters around the world live performances in high definition of some of their productions, and then rebroadcasting an encore performance a couple weeks later.  We've been attending these Met Opera Live in HD performances for two years now and we find these broadcasts are absolutely stunning and wonderful experiences, like nothing available live in the opera house!  The singers are big enough on the movie screen to see every nuance, the sound is marvelous, and there are interviews with musicians and staff backstage.  I highly recommend these performances.  And they're dirt cheap compared with attending Lincoln Center live!

I could easily have devoted this essay to praising one of the other operas that moved us deeply and filled us with appreciation and wonder for the astonishing work of the Met Opera.  But here I am again, wearing my curmudgeon's costume, and singing with ire and bafflement at the spectacle of Philip Glass, this gloriously gifted composer who, in my humble opinion, appears to have sawed off his talent at the toes and put it to sleep in a Procrustean bed made up in the sheets of postmodern philosophy.  Allow me to explain.

Now, Satyagraha presents not so much a story about Mohandas Gandhi, as perhaps something like a musical montage, a meditation on passages from the Bhagavad-Gita that Gandhi read daily for inspiration.  These words, sung in Sanskrit, are the only source of lyrics in the libretto (and I'll bet that the big chorus of the Met Opera, having learned the libretto, doubled the Sanskrit-speaking population of the world!)

This work can hardly be described as a story, given the paucity of action and conversation, not that operas are best known for the brilliance of their books.  Instead of a story, the characters sing with reverence and awe all these abstract phrases, pronouncements mostly on a theme of denying selfishness to uphold the common good.

The big exception to this reverential atmosphere is the opening of Act II, a long scene crafted to  beat up on all the rich and greedy people, and do so with a spirit of mockery that would be worthy of an old tub-thumping Marxist.  I've read that these beliefs are on the same side of the color spectrum as the politics of the composer.  Very odd piece, this.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Knock, knock.

I say, who's there?

Knock, knock.

Well, who is it, for crying out loud?

Knock, knock.

Damn it all to hell, who is it?!?

Philip Glass.

Now, to my ear, the only thing groundbreaking about the musical minimalism of Glass is how such little musical material can be inflated to such proportions as to make a jelly bean look like a Macy's Day balloon.

I don't want to tar all minimalists with this same dismissive brush.  We just watched another Met opera production by another composer who is widely associated with musical minimalism, John Adams' Nixon in China, and found it to be an engaging story set to music of far greater variety and imagination than that of Philip Glass, in my opinion.

I remember the first time I heard something by Glass, a piece called "Facades."  I was freshly arrived at New College, at Sarasota, in the Fall of 1980.  I was up studying after midnight, listening to the local PBS radio station.  An arresting phrase of music filled the air.  I froze, fascinated.  Then the phrase was given out again.  And again.  And then again, and again and again.  I thought, surely the equipment was stuck in an endless loop.  But no....

Now Glass is a top drawer talent of superb training and accomplishment.  He was in the last generation of students in the legendary Parisian atelier of the great Nadia Boulanger.  So how could such a well-trained and marvelous talent drive into such a ditch?

Philosophy, of course.  Philosophy, as always.  Philosophy, the mother of everything, the bedrock (or quicksand) on which all knowledge must rise (or sink).

So it was no surprise for me to learn that Glass majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago.  I will not now wander off into my baleful thoughts on the crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses of postmodern philosophy, but suffice it to say here that I will put a tall stack of dollars on the proposition that it is this bizarre contemporary philosophy that steered Glass' very great talent into this postmodern musical sausage machine.

Glass has the ability to create eight measures of beautiful and arresting music and, by a process of extrusion, squeeze out 20 minutes of musical catatonia.  At the end of this soporific exertion, there is no evidence of the man's wanting to go hide in shame.

I imagine that it is his crazy postmodern philosophy that has so stripped him of aesthetic conscience that his heartless musical cranking leaves him stripped of the ability to feel guilt or any desire to atone for these crimes against his own talent, this sad abuse of his shimmering gifts from the gods.

Instead of going into a thoughtful few pages on this baffling postmodern philosophy, let me offer instead a little meditation on Philip Glass and Shari Lewis, the creator of the hand puppet, Lamb Chop.

Consider Gandhi and Lamb Chop ....

The last act of Satyagraha ends with an empty stage, but for the character of Gandhi, who is singing a rising scale passage again and again and again, and then endlessly again and again.  And then a few more times, for good measure upon measure upon measure.  Oh, and did I mention that the phrase repeats itself?

The tune is in triple meter, say 3/4 time, in 8th notes (except the last note, which is a dotted half note), with an upbeat before measure one; it's a rising scale passage from mi to mi, if you know these solfege syllables:

mi fa sol la ti do re meeeee ...

(on the white notes of the piano, this passage rises from an E to the E an octave above, which is the C major scale, beginning and ending on the third degree of the scale.  The upbeat is on mi, or E, the first beat on fa, or F.)

As I did my stretches and calisthenics this morning, this passage from the end of Satyagraha wrapped itself around my mind and refused to let go.  Words kept setting themselves to this musical passage that recalled Shari Lewis and her hand puppet, Lamb Chop.  Do you remember this Shari Lewis song? --


     This is the song that does not end,
     It just goes on and on, my friend.
     Some people (clap!) started singing it,
     Not knowing what it was,
     And they'll continue singing it forever just because
     This is the song that does not end....


sol la ti do ti la do ti ... (G A B C B A C B, on the white notes of the piano, using the moveable doh system of solfege.)

This song, made famous by Shari Lewis, starts on the 5th degree of the scale, and the first line ends, hanging expectantly on the leading tone.

Back to Philip Glass' concluding passage (although it may be a misleading overstatement to call this phrase "concluding.")

These are my words to fit this phrase from the end of Satyagraha:

(Remember, it goes, "mi fa sol la ti do re mi," with mi an upbeat to fa, the downbeat.)


Miss Shari Lewis would be proud!
Because this song will never end!
But surely Death will intervene?
And take this song away from me?
Before I die and lose my chance,
I need a chord from Five to One.
But what's it mean, this Five to One?
The odds against a closing theme?
God help me find a way to stop,
Before the Union locks the door
And leaves me here to starve to death!

Abandon Hope, who hopes to find
In Philip Glass, a work succinct!
Instead, we have much brilliant work,
Created by this best-trained man,
Where tunes that ought to last a breath,
If written by a Brahms or Bach,
When written by this Philip Glass
Go on at soporific length!
A little tune that ought to have
Proportions of a toy balloon,
Are Zeppelins, the Hindenburg!

So what explains this so sad turn
Of brightly burnished talent spoiled?
Postmodern academic thought!
Philosophy should help us find
Life-serving purpose, sight, and joy!
Philosophy should clear the mind
Of Bullshit no one can believe,
Just like the cant that poisoned Glass,
Extruded, endless sausage link,
But tangled as a tumbleweed:
Postmodern surf that drowns the mind.


(Sorry ... if you don't know any music theory, I should briefly explain that "Five to One" means a harmonic progression, the movement of chords built on the 5th and 1st degrees of a musical scale.  In C major these chords would be built on G and C.  The chords are triads here, namely three notes sounded simultaneously at the interval of a third, like the distance from C to E, with each chord rising up from G and C.  Roman numerals denote the scale degree on which these triads are built.  So the notes of the V chord would be G-B-D, and the I chord is C-E-G.  The I chord is the home key, called the Tonic; the V chord is called the Dominant.  The significance of this progression from dominant to tonic, from V to I, is a transition from tension to relaxation, of musical struggle to the serenity of arriving home, which is precisely what this passage at the end of Glass' opera singularly lacks.)

Or how about that Neil Diamond song ...

"Song sung blue, searching for a cadence ...."

No, no, no, I'm not going there.

All right, enough for now.

     *  *  *
revised 2013.1118,
and 2015.0828

What's a Pilot Worth?

I've been thinking about the pictures I just saw, taken on 28 September, of some 700 uniformed airline pilots picketing on Wall Street.

This marching band of brothers and sisters (sporting no trombones or piccolos)   wore sandwich boards proclaiming the rhetorical question, "WHAT'S A PILOT WORTH?" Below the slogan was the famous photo of that US Airways Airbus A-320 in the Hudson River with all those passengers calmly standing cheek-by-jowl on the wings, awaiting rescue by boats from the nearby shore.

The headline said the pilots had joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but these protests were entirely separate events. The pilots had been planning this informational picketing for months, this event had nothing to do with these other protesters, and the pilots kept to themselves. I know this is true, because it was my company's pilots who planned the event.

What's a pilot worth?  Surely there is some way to measure such value.

I have been an airline pilot for 34 years. This is my tribe up there, picketing on Wall Street. Even with our pay cuts and the pensions stolen by the most predatory leaders of the worst of the airlines, it's a little hard to feel too sorry for us, when most of us earn considerably more than average. Yes, it's right to wonder what a pilot is really worth. Yes, it was a most inspiring sight to see Captain Sullenberger and every one of his passengers lined up on the wing of that US Airways Airbus he safely landed in the Hudson. The lives of every one of those people was saved that day by the pilots'  inspiring display of judgment and skill. Our world often seems to be lacking in such good judgment and skill. It's hard to measure this kind of value. Afterwards we learned that among other costly indignities, the pilots of US Airways have suffered the theft of their pensions by greedy management.



So really, what is a pilot worth? On a day like that one in the Hudson, a
pilot's worth appears to be as much as life itself, indeed, of many lives ... a pilot's worth is incalculable.

The concept of value has more than one aspect. Economic value is not the same as moral value or our personal valuation of the stuff of life and love.

We can't put a price on the moral worth of Captain Sullenberger's good judgment and skill.

And yet, we must calculate the economic worth of pilots if individuals are to be attracted to work as pilots. Indeed, we must calculate the economic value of  every other factor of production too, if the economic system is to generate the signals by which, as Mises always put it, the flow of scarce resources is to be directed into those lines which stand the best chance of satisfying the most urgent demands of consumers.

These signals are called prices ... and in a free market, it is the consumers who reign supreme and, by their free choices of where to spend or not spend their money, dictate the fate of every firm. A price is not just an arbitrary sum dreamed up by the boards of bored, bureaucratic commisars of central planning, sitting in an office in some far-flung city, flinging darts across the room at a price chart on the wall. A price is the sum of all the choices of every individual in the world on what to spend or not for which goods and services. In a free market, a price thereby democratically captures the preferences of everybody in the long chain of factors that bear on the production of each good or service.

Every government intervention therefore robs the consumers of their choices. That's what this intervention is ... so why isn't this obvious to anybody with a brain? Because we LIKE our governments to intervene on our behalf and give us all the goodies we want, even though the funding for such goodies must be taken out of the hides of other people. Or created out of thin air, which is what central banking does, which in turn is still taking it out of the hides of the citizens because printing phony money dilutes the value of the currency and in effect steals the value of the money in the hands of the citizens.

Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist of the early 19th century, had it right when he wrote, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

My opinion is that many airline owners and leaders are indeed big jerks of a greedy, grasping, and predatory bent, but they nevertheless know they have to please the public well enough to stay in business.

By contrast, the unions are clueless, self-serving ninnies with their minds
marred by cognitive dissonance ... the unions' and the pilots' beliefs tend to be a nasty broth of diluted Marxist dogma (although few of us recognize it as such because most of us don't know beans about philosophy) and this far-left rhetoric is mixed with a vestigial respect for free markets that still faintly wafts like a whiff of perfume through the minds of many Americans.

When young people ask me if they should become pilots, I tell them what my parents, who were symphony string players, told me about becoming a professional musician: if you can imagine yourself being happy at another job, do that other job instead! If you can't imagine yourself being happy doing anything else, then and only then should you go into music (or flying.)

So the lesson is that you should do what you love ... figure out what you love, then go live your life and be happy. Nothing else counts so much. And anything goes, so long as it's peaceful and respectful of the equal rights of others to their own lives and dreams.

The airline business is among the craziest and most chaotic lines on the planet! If you don't love flying, you'll never get through the early years of the profession, when the greatest danger is poverty. There are even some regional airline pilots based in expensive hub cities, flying little jets, who qualify for food stamps!


Commercial pilots' starting pay is absurdly low because so many people want to be pilots, and because the economic reality is that a worker's pay can never be more than a fraction of the revenue stream that the worker, using the capital at his or her disposal, can generate for the company. We begin flying little airplanes, and this capital cannot generate much revenue for the companies, so our pay can't be higher than this revenue.

But ... we remember the halcyon days of yore when airline pilots lived like fat cats! And we yearn to have all that again!

Of course, there is more to the story.

And here we are again: what is a pilot worth?

The reality of a pilot's economic worth is catching up to the former glory of the profession, when pilots' pay was determined, not by competitive markets, but by the machinations of the late lamented CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board (can you believe that a government agency was once disbanded? Yes! With the airline deregulation act of 1978.)

The CAB granted all airlines permission for every detail of their existence; which companies could serve which cities, charging what fares, etc. The unions would say, "More pay please," the airlines would then go to the CAB and say, "Higher fares please," and the CAB would grab their rubber stamp and presto! Higher fares. It was an unholy cabal between the government, the crony-capitalists, and the unions, run very much like medieval guild socialism ... which was fine, if you were the unions, the government, or the airlines. Under this system, pilots pay was enormous ... far more than we could have made in a more competitive system, and, as I said, pilots lived high on the hog.

The only trouble with this delightful cabal was that nobody could afford to fly the airlines regularly except rich people and big businesses with expense accounts! Now that there is more competition among airlines, pilots' pay, like every other factor of production, has had to fall more in line with economic reality. Sorry, guys.

Today, even in the middle of this terrible economy, the airlines serve three times as many passengers as they did before deregulation of routes and fares. Airline flying is now the normal mode of transportation, and replaced automobiles, busses and trains because of the lower fares that resulted from all the vastly increased competition to serve passengers.

Of course, all this competition has put a lot of airlines out of business. It ain't the good ol' days, in the eyes of pilots.



I myself have FOUR bankrupt airlines on my resume (call it six now, if I
include the two bankruptcies at the airline with which my company is just now
merging!) ... and this story is not merely anecdotal evidence, it's not just my
own cloud of bad luck, because there is a high percentage of pilots with this
many or even more bankrupt airlines on their resumes!



There are other challenges to being a pilot too. For example, I loathe, hate, and despise being treated like a criminal when I go through airport security (except in Israel, where they actually know who the bad guys are, and aren't afraid to name them) ... but still ... when we finally close the main cabin door, when we get away from all the ninnies-in-charge (except for the inescapable ATC ... don't get me started on ATC!) and shove off the pier and get airborne ... I still love the job! If you've got to have a J-O-B ... and you don't have a trust fund to support your precious little fantasies ... it doesn't get much better than this. And nobody in the world has a better view from their office than I do!

What's a pilot worth? What's it to you, the passenger? What are you willing to pay? That's what a pilot's worth.

Don't tell the pilot picketers ... it'll just make 'em mad.

Civil War: Occupy Wall Streeters v.Tea Partiers?

Civil War Between Occupy Wall Street Protesters and Tea Partiers?

I worry that the Occupy Wall Street protests veer closer to violence every day. The press reports suggest a fundamental clash between left and right, with lefties among the OWS protesters and Tea Partiers on the right.


Thomas Sowell had it right, decades ago, in his book, A Conflict of Visions, when he showed how conservatives and modern liberals are rendered deaf to each other's views by their fundamentally irreconcilable opinions on the nature of humanity and the universe itself. This difference of opinion poisons their attempts to talk with each other about any matters of political policy. The left and right talk past each other without hearing the essence of the things which worry them. The rhetoric becomes increasingly hostile now, in our day of Tea Partiers and would-be Occupiers of Wall Street.

One of the websites I follow is Agora Financial's. They are a source of much wise advice about investments in a crazy world. They create many products, including films (such as "I.O.U.S.A") books (Empire of Debt), and, to the point here, e-letters by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin: The Daily Reckoning, and The 5 Minute Forecast, with commentary on culture and the economy of the world.

This week a reader's letter to the editor of The 5 Minute Forecast spoke of his fear that a civil war may be coming between liberals and conservatives. If a civil war does break out, he thought the conservatives would win because "they have all the guns." I disagree.

A civil war would be ruinous to all of us. Moreover, I doubt that the outcome would be determined by the fact that conservatives are armed. Gun-toting conservatives have neither "all the guns" nor the biggest guns.

Remember, the gun-control advocates on the left have their very own man in the White House, and he, say many conservatives, is the "Commie-in-Chief" of the military! The military's fire power dwarfs any small arms in the hands of Tea Partiers.

When our president barks orders, our military is duty-bound to march forward, equipped with all of modern warfare's frightful arms of mass murder.

But sheer fire power is not decisive in itself. In the west we possess overwhelming firepower, but we are so addled that we lack the moral confidence even to name our poorly armed enemies in any terms but politically correct euphemisms, much less to mount any effective effort that might actually cut off the head of this snake. Looking at our terrorist enemies in the world, we dare not quote the countless pages of the Quran that inspire terrorists to kill us. (We are mostly just as blind to those many pages of the Bible which once provided Christians with all the moral authority they needed to go spill oceans of blood in the name of God.)


On the domestic scene, we are so addled that we are unable to name the active ingredients that have brought about the economic chaos that so riles the Occupy Wall Street protesters.


And what might these active ingredients be? 


My usual suspects for all the craziness in the world are these:


1.) The tension between crazy contradictory religions, each claiming to have the absolute word of God on their side; 


2.) Crazy postmodern philosophy, which denies the possibility of our having any confidence that our knowledge of anything can be objective, and that, indeed, all "knowledge" amounts to nothing more than social conventions agreed upon by the tribe into which one is born;


3.) Ignorance of any sound economics (indeed, to the contrary, the most powerful political cells of the chattering class are barking mad, infected by that intellectual virus which is the economics of John Maynard Keynes);


4.) Greed that finds its wings through the unholy marriage of big business and big government, which is another description of "crony-capitalism," and is not to be confused with any actual, unhampered markets, or real economic freedom. 


But, in my humble opinion, the "proximate cause" (as the NTSB describes the last thing that causes an airplane to crash) of so much of this economic misery, is ... the Fed, and of course all the things that gave us the Federal Reserve System in the first place, and endowed it with so much power to wreak havoc in the world.


In my opinion, it is central banking and the evil machinations of our Federal Reserve System which has infused the economy with all the phony money needed to pump up one damned economic bubble after another ... and the underhanded political chicanery that is both cause and beneficiary of this process.


But the Wall Street protesters have another idea of what is causing their misery.


So what are the protesters themselves saying? What is it that has fanned these flames of protest?


At the website of OccupyWallSt.org, it says that the protests are the complaints of the 99% of the population against the rich and powerful 1% who run the world by using the political machinery, the banks, and the "unaccountable multi-national corporations" for their own predatory benefit. 


Wall Street appears to be the symbol of the system the protesters revile and want to bring down.


"The solution is World Revolution," says a banner on the home page of the OWS website. The "About Us" link says, "The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future." 


Given that this "Arab Spring" looks like it is delivering Egypt into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, parent organization of Al Qaeda and other delightful champions of peace, I worry about any group that finds inspiration in those Arab uprisings.


A college professor's demographic survey this week reveals that roughly 2/3 of the OWS group consists of political Independents, 1/3 are Democrats, and less than 2% are Republicans. Almost all of the group surveyed has at least some college, 1/5 of the protesters have post graduate degrees. This is an educated group with its political center of gravity well left of center, and, to my ear, their complaints sound like the anti-capitalist rhetoric I hear among environmentalists.


It's interesting that "Wall Street" is the symbol of the protests. I think this captures the nature of many complaints I hear about the world. In the movie, "Wall Street," naked greed is the villain, and this predatory grasping is embodied by the mere "paper pushing" which is depicted as the sole activity of Wall Street, and which is depicted as having no economic benefit to the world. This view of Wall Street is a caricature purveyed by the ignorant, and would be laughable, if it weren't such a politically powerful meme in the real world and believed to be true by so many economic naifs.


So what does Wall Street really do? The crucial activity of financial markets is to direct the flow of capital into those ventures that attempt to satisfy the most urgent demands of consumers. To bring down "Wall Street" would be equivalent to opening a vein and letting the blood drain out of a person. But it takes a little knowledge of sound economics to understand a higher abstraction such as the idea of capital to fund new ventures.


Now, how would anybody come to have a clue about the nature of sound economics, when the mainstream of economics has been taken over by the Patron Saint of Central Banking, John Maynard Keynes, and his latter-day acolytes, such as Paul Krugman?


Keynes was a privileged graduate of Cambridge who cherished the goals of the  Fabian socialists, that turn-of-the 20th century English group which championed the ideas of Marx, but advocated the institution of these ideas not by violent revolution, like the Bolsheviks, but by gradual takeover of such institutions as the schools and the monetary system. 


Krugman, of course is the celebrated New York Times columnist, an MIT PhD in economics, Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner, and a man who continues to purvey such asinine fallacies as the notion that the destruction of the World Trade Center was good for the economy because it "stimulates" consumer spending. (For why this notion is so completely idiotic, see Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, for his summary of Frederic Bastiat's brilliant little essay, "On What is Seen and Unseen.") 


Take control of a country's currency, Keynes understood very well, and you have the means to steal the value of all the citizens' money and thereby to take over the whole economic system, just as Marx envisioned.


Moreover, this theft of the citizens' money is done by the central bankers in a way that almost no one will begin to understand.

The citizens will know only that their economic situation is bad, and they will blame capitalism and cry out for ever more control of the greedy capitalists by the wise public servants at the helm of government.

Hmm ... sounds just like the Occupy Wall Street protesters.


What else can they mean when they call for "democratic" takeover of the greedy 1% by the hapless 99%?


Now, it seems clear that the occupiers of Wall Street are lefties protesting capitalism. So this is essentially the usual conflict of visions between liberals and conservatives. You may argue, and I would agree, that left and right offer logically false alternatives that do not exhaust all the political possibilities (which would have to include at least the addition of libertarian and objectivist opinions.) But we are nevertheless looking at the Wall Street protests as a more or less conventional, if heightened, conflict between liberals and conservatives.


So what happens if, as I fear, these protests turn violent? Already the New York City police have bashed a few heads of protesters into the fenders of automobiles (as they did on the day the protesters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.) Around the country there are reports of protesters defecating on police cars and utterly trashing parks where they sleep.


There is another factor to think about, if there should ever be another conflict between conservatives and liberals that is violent enough to warrant calling out the Army (which happened during the New York City draft riots of 1864, the murders of civil rights marchers at Selma in 1964, the hippie era students shot by the National Guard at Kent State University, and with the riots and destruction at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, among countless other examples.)  This other factor to consider is that our military tends to be strongly conservative.


Remember that duty does not require soldiers merely to jump when ordered to jump, but to obey orders mindfully and with conscience. Duty compels soldiers to disobey an immoral order.


I mentioned earler that the military tends to be strongly conservative. If the Army is called out and ordered to shoot American civilians, at some point we can expect that the military's conservative conscience may step in, perhaps with the ugly memory of such episodes as Lt. Callie's behavior at My Lai, during the Vietnam War.

It may happen that our soldiers will disobey orders to shoot American citizens of the Tea Party whose only "crime" lies in calling for the government to respect the core American principle that all individuals are endowed by their nature with the right to their own life, liberty, and property. Perhaps I give the military's conscience too much credit. (As a Vietnam-era veteran myself, I am allowed to say this.)

Yet another factor to think about here is that any conservative war of Resistance against politically entrenched lefties would surely be a type of guerrilla war, against which standing armies have a poor record.

And what about a leftie war of resistance against a newly ascendant conservative government?  Hard to imagine, given that the gun control advocates on the left have already turned in their grandparents' guns.

How about secession?

What else was the American revolution, but secession? Americans widely debated secession shortly after the revolution. Lincoln's assertion, a few decades later, that "a house divided cannot stand" makes a nice bumper sticker slogan, but it is purely metaphorical and makes no real argument for the nature and structure of a good social order. Lincoln's justification for the Civil War was the preservation of the Union, and this idea is out of step with the ideas which animated the American Revolution, where the only moral justification for establishing a government was as an instrument for the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property. (Well ... there was Alexander Hamilton's big government vision for the new republic, and some other significant contradictions built into the system, but I think most would agree with what I just said about the essence of the ideas which animated the American founders, namely, individual rights.)

Notwithstanding our Civil War, the idea of secession has more recently been floated from New Hampshire to Texas. Our American founders believed that when in the course of human events things get too damned awful, people have the human right to revolt and secede from corrupt governments.

Maybe Texas will secede, in the end, which might light a beacon to attract many of those disaffected Americans who are unhappy with America's morphing into a European style socialist order--a direction in which the US has been sliding since at least the late 19th century, a time when generations of American students went to Germany for a university education and came home in a raging fever of enthusiasm for collectivist and Kantian idealism.  Politically, this generation of Americans came home enamored of Chancellor Bismarck's welfare state and public schools, and they became our first generation of American progressives, such as John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson.


Moreover, it is largely the great grandchildren of those progressives, the new
so-called progressives who are showing up as the would-be occupiers of Wall Street.


So ... I continue to worry that the Wall Street protests will turn violent, and the solution will be even worse than the condition in which we already find ourselves.


Ending on a happier note, one that offers some explanatory power for what is going on in the world today, have a look at Murray Rothbard's books on Keynes, the Man, and, America's Great Depression. 


                                     *   *   *
revised 2012.0810,
and again, slightly, in the paragraph on how economic naifs believe that Wall Street engages merely in meaningless "paper pushing." 
2015.1123.

Credo

Credo

What I Hold Sacred

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Written on the occasion of my eldest daughter's 20th birthday, as a father's blessings for her to live a hale and happy life, with some tips and pointers by which to steer through Life's whitewater rapids, and offered here for the benefit of any other soul who might profit from it. Bless us all, who strive for a mindful, peaceful, and happy life!

1. Your life is your own property, the most important property there can ever be! You have a right to live your life for your own sake in any way you want to live, so long as it’s peaceful and respectful of the same right in every other person. 
     If freedom means anything, it means, as George Orwell put it, to say things that others do not wish to hear … even to offend others’ feelings as a consequence of the way you live or think. You do not have to justify your existence before a tribunal of misanthropes, misogynists, crabby homophobic religious absolutists, nor to nihilistic postmodern skeptics and totalitarians, nor to human-hating earth worshipers, nor to socialists, communists, fascists, or to any other moralizing or murderous busybodies or zealots who are eager to make you live their way, or to sacrifice yourself to them, or obey them, or otherwise keep you from pursuing your own happiness by your own lights!

2. You are not a sacrificial animal on the alter of Others’ happiness. 
     Your nature endows you with the right to be on this Earth to live your life and be happy, so long (it’s worth saying again…) as you are respectful of the equal right of every other peaceful person. This right to your own life also implies your right to defend yourself with appropriate force against any predators who would sacrifice you for any reason, no matter whether it is for their pleasure, their conscience, or their insanity.

3. The core of evil in the world is the use of other people against their will for predatory advantage. 
     Every horrible act I can think of is an example of this principle … murder, genocide, rape, slavery, assault, theft (including any profit by fraud to take advantage of another) … every one of these is an example of using others against their will for predatory advantage. Ironically, those who preach sacrifice for the benefit of others, and the ideal of sacrifice as the essence of the Good, often preach this altruism while demanding the forceful sacrifice of others against their will…which may be another description of the way modern politics is generally run.

4. Only the Mind can lead us rightly. 
     A lyricist insisted that what the World needs now is Love, sweet Love. But love is never enough. Love is an emotion, and emotions are automatic, psychological responses that bubble up during an experience to reveal beliefs we already hold. Emotions can’t yield new knowledge. Saint-Exupery famously said, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Saint-Ex got it backwards. Emotions can tell us only what we already believe. Only the mind can guide us rightly to discover what is true and false, and what is good and bad. Feel your feelings--don’t follow them blindly! Feelings are where we experience the glories of life, but they cannot substitute for the proper guidance of one’s mind--and it is crucial to stock the shelves of one’s mind with life-serving and effective beliefs.

5. Faith is not an alternative path to knowledge. 
     Faith means belief without evidence, which is essentially just another form of emotion, and a sort of wishful yearning, when it is not a willful evasion of reality. This means that, for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge, faith is as blind as any other emotion. Acquiring and validating knowledge is the province of reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience. It is often claimed that Faith is an alternative to Reason as a means of knowledge, but this cannot be true for the same reason that emotion is epistemologically blind, namely that emotions embody in a raw form nothing more than the beliefs we already hold. A related claim is that hunches may feel like a road to new understanding. While hunches may prove to be correct, a hunch is an emotion or a patchy, untested thought that arises at the intersection of two or more ideas one already holds, so again, like other emotions, hunches can’t be trusted without being tested by the light of reason.

6. Always pull your own weight and be generous. 
     I surely don’t need to counsel you, my precious child, who possesses the most astonishing compassion of anybody I know, never to be a parasite. But I’ll say this much anyway: while independence and generosity are key virtues, Charity exists only when it is freely chosen and given by a generous soul, perhaps in recognition of our own great good fortune in the Cosmic Sweepstakes for brains, health, and opportunity. I hasten to add that taking charity is right when we are truly unable to take care of ourselves.

7. That an idea appears in your mind does not make it true! 
     Philosophy is the Mother of Everything.  “Philo-“ plus “sophia” … these are ancient Greek word stems meaning love of wisdom, the search for wisdom. Of course, nowadays, in the mainstream of academic work, philosophy does not exemplify the pursuit of a love of wisdom, but rather the intellectual dogfight over The Big Questions. Philosophy provides answers to what is true, and what is false? What is right? What is wrong? Without answers to these questions, there is no guide to one’s actions. Philosophy should be an intellectual solvent to wash away the accumulated bullshit and insanity embodied in all those crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses that I’m always talking about. But philosophy took a terrible wrong turn hundreds of years ago and is in an abysmal condition today, in the mainstream of discourse on these matters, resulting in the insanity of postmodern, nihilistic skepticism (a dizzy topic for another day...) Still, philosophy remains the only means by which there is any hope for rational guidance in life. And philosophy remains inescapable. Why? We are all philosophers because even the attempt to deny this statement is already the product of an underlying philosophy. It is up to each of us to sort out what is true and false, and right and wrong, by the light of Reason, or logic applied to the evidence of experience. Therefore test every important or puzzling idea by reason!

8. Truth is not established by a poll of anyone’s Tribe to see who believes what. 
     Truth is a correspondence between one’s beliefs and the facts of reality. Truth means valid knowledge. This topic is vastly more complicated than this brief assertion, but it would take a book to defend this statement properly!

9. Objectivity is possible and does not presuppose or require omniscience. Reality is whatever it is, independent of our consciousness. 
     The facts of reality are grasped by the evidence of the senses, aided and tested by the light of Reason. Consciousness is the faculty that grasps reality; it does not invent the facts of reality, contrary to Kant’s categories of mind, or to Hume’s contention that the “slightest philosophy” shows our senses to be cut off from reality. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, ISA, regardless of anybody’s tantrums, wishes, fears, race, class, or gender. Survival and flourishing require valid knowledge, meaning objective knowledge, to allow mindful, successful action. Mystical, magical thinking by contrast is futile and ineffective. Her radical formulation of objectivity is one of Ayn Rand’s crucial accomplishments.

10. There are no contradictions in reality. 
     Contrary to the explanations (if not the equations) of subatomic particle physicists, Aristotle’s Law of Identity holds true: a thing is what it is, independent of any consciousness or feelings, wishes, or fears. A thing, A, cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same respect. A is A. Arguments for contradictions are signs of error, the leper’s bell of postmodern skepticism, and are self-refuting nonsense. The calamity of David Hume’s infamous epistemological torpedo, the Problem of Induction, is not a problem after all because Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action: entities can act only in accordance with their nature, which allows us to make valid generalizations about universals. By induction (contra Hume … and turning his very same words against him) we know absolutely that the sun will rise tomorrow. You can bet your life on it. (Of course we remain fallible minds, and we continue to have a multitude of enduring mysteries of existence yet to explain.)

11. You possess free will. 
     Existentially, you are not merely a cork tossed about by cosmic forces. Yes, we can be corks tossed about by tsunamis and earthquakes, yet this is not the crucial difference between a Homo sap and tree sap. Yes, causality and determinism govern the universe, and yet it is this lawful realm that has given you, by your nature as a human being, this power of free will. What is free will? It is the power to choose to focus your attention on this entity rather than that one … and this makes all the difference between your being a free agent instead of a fluff of cotton on the wind, or a deluded stimulus-response animal who possesses only the illusion of free will. Any argument to deny free will must surely count on your ability--your free will--to choose to agree or disagree with the self-refuting and absurd argument that you cannot choose to agree or disagree with it.

12. Your attitude towards life is crucial. 
     IBD (Investors' Business Daily) made a study of great achievers across history among men and women in every imaginable discipline and area of society. This study reveals that their success is largely due to their embodying a small number of the same qualities and practices, at the top of which is this idea that how you think is everything! Furthermore, don’t disown your sad and bad feelings, but do look for the positive. Given a choice, think of success, not failure. Avoid those whose outlook is mostly negative. Optimism is not a sufficient condition for success, but pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy!

13. Self-esteem is a crucial personal achievement--it is not and cannot be a gift from others. 
     Self-esteem should not be taken to mean the treacly nonsense you were taught in school …that all of us are simply entitled to feel great about ourselves for no reason more impressive than that our blood is warm; or worse--that self-esteem comes from being liked by other people. A better definition of self-esteem would be, as Nathaniel Branden put it, as the sum of two personal achievements: 1.) of learning crucial life skills one needs to survive and flourish in the world; and 2.) of acquiring the deep conviction that one is worthy of happiness. Self-esteem, or self-respect, is the fuel one needs even to get out of bed in the morning. Looked at from another perspective, self-esteem amounts to a rational honoring of the self. And a right sense of honor, paraphrasing Ayn Rand, is a rightly earned self-respect made visible in action.

14. Your purpose in Life is your choice of the happiness that you want your life to be about. 
     This is Ayn Rand’s beautiful formulation of the concept of purpose in life. So let your imagination soar! What do you want? What do you love? If you do not now know what you love and what you want to do with your life, discovering this love should be your purpose in life until you find it!

15. Authentic happiness can be yours. 
     I get this formulation from Martin Seligman’s great and ground-breaking work, Authentic Happiness. As Seligman puts it, authentic happiness results from identifying and developing your signature strengths (so long as these are loved), and then showing up in the world while practicing and trading these accomplishments. The goal here is the unfolding of your gifts, at least those of your gifts that you love the most. [Since I wrote this, Seligman has published another wonderful book: Flourish, maybe even better than Authentic Happiness.]

16. Formulate your purpose in life as authentic dreams and goals: 
     Write down your specific goals! To develop a plan to reach them, begin by imagining the goal attained and ask, “What was the last step that produced the final success? Don’t know? Who would know? Still don’t know? Who might know? Ask them. What step would precede the final step before success? And the step before that? Proceed backwards until you reach the point where you are today and then begin to move forward, a step at a time, every day. Track your progress every day! Track it in a journal, a calendar, maybe on graph paper, if appropriate. This observation of our progress and behavior is like flying from point A to B, where we are at least slightly off course most of the time, but arrive safely anyway because we are constantly correcting our course. Behavior observed is behavior more easily changed or controlled.

17. Take action--daily, persistent, intelligent action! 
     As the IBD study puts it: goals are nothing without action! Don’t be afraid to get started--just do it! Among these actions, hold knowledge sacred and pursue it at school or from books. Get training and acquire skills. Focus your time and money. Don’t allow anything or anyone to distract you. Especially don’t abandon your projects to follow some lover across the world! Be persistent and work hard. Success is a marathon, not a sprint. Never, never, never give up! You can change your mind, and you can change course, but don’t ever quit just because a goal is hard. If it were easy, more people would have achieved success. Your willingness to persist in the face of difficulty makes it vastly more likely that you will succeed. Indeed, persisting is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of success. You cannot succeed without hanging in there even when you may not see encouraging results from day to day. This is another reason that tracking your progress is important, because it makes your progress visible over a longer term than the day-to-day. This slowly emerging character of success is in the nature of the amazing effects of compound interest, which I will turn to next.   Finally, remember that you can’t truly be said to fail until you actually give up!

18. Understand and employ the power of compound interest. 
     The astonishing power of compound interest is not immediately apparent, but it’s a key component in the engine of wealth creation.
     Perhaps you already know this example, of a penny doubled every day. On day 2, you have 2 cents; by day 10, it’s up to $5.12. On Day 20 your compounded interest has yielded only $5,242.88. Five days later it’s up to $167,772. On day 28, it’s over a million dollars; on day 31 it’s over 10 million dollars! If you follow this example a little farther, you find that by day 38, it’s over a BILLION dollars. By day 48 it’s up to 1.4 trillion dollars, on day 51, it’s 11.3 trillion, which is around two thirds the annual size of the American economic system. By day 53, it’s over 45 trillion, a number so incomprehensible that it begins to dwarf the merely astronomical and is almost halfway to the size of the unfunded obligations of the US government for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (seriously... it's true!) 

      Save and invest your wealth rationally, of course, but know that this important concept of compounding effects applies equally well to intelligent work, done daily, which, over time, also compounds enormously! Examples would be learning to play seemingly impossible passages on a musical instrument or learning higher math.

     You cannot understand human action in the world without knowing some sound economics. I recommend that you study Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, for starters, then Mises, Rothbard, and George Reisman.

19. Learn to think logically and to take account of the full context of every matter. 
     Study logic formally (I believe that David Kelley’s The Art of Reasoning is wonderful) and learn to spot logical fallacies. Sound thinking is a learned skill. All of us are fallible human beings, and we can profit enormously if we learn from our own mistakes and those of others. As Nietzsche (who I hasten to add is not always a reliable authority!) observed, what does not kill us can make us stronger and wiser, with the right attitude and perspective.

20. Learn to communicate well, and deal with people effectively: 
     No person can flourish as a lone Robinson Crusoe on an island. Learn to understand and motivate yourself and others. Leadership begins with self-mastery, which should include the following: be squared away and run your life ship shape! Make a place for everything, and put everything in its place.  Develop an efficacious mind in a healthy body.

21. Be honest, dependable, and responsible.  
     Honesty means nothing if it does not begin with oneself, in looking all matters squarely in the eye and acknowledging what is honestly so. Moreover, nothing else matters if others can’t depend on you to speak the truth and do what you say you’ll do. One becomes ostracized, cast adrift, shunned by the world. Nobody can succeed without the cooperation of others in this division-of-labor economic and social system.

22. Think for yourself. Your Independence of Mind is of Supreme Importance! 
     There is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Tooth Fairy (except for the love your parents showered on you in the name of these harmless childhood fantasies!) It makes no sense to say there is a God bossing us around or telling us how to live, or who is there to reveal what’s True and Right, or False and Wrong. There is certainly no god of Abraham, or any other gods, and no arguments for the existence of God that will hold water, much less walk on water--unless, by “god,” one simply points to the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe, however yet incompletely understood.

     Don’t worry about what percentage of the world believes in God … that any of us shows evidence of independent and rational thinking gives hope for the world. Thinking for yourself helps you to know yourself and to show up in the world as the authentic, unique, and irreplaceable person you were born to be.

     Following any herd leads one to a false self, to mediocrity, and precludes the possibility of being innovative or uniquely yourself. Herds are vulnerable to the madness of crowds, and to swallowing crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses, such as the idea of the God of Abraham, or that the true nature of government allows it to be an effective and benevolent institution that is worthy of our trust. Don’t be one of the “Sheeple,” one of those hybrid creatures who is a cross between people and sheep.

23. There is no life after death, and no Heaven or Hell ... except on Earth. 
     There is no persuasive evidence for a second chance in a life to come, no eternal life to follow. This is it, here and now. Love it now or lose it forever. By the way, I suspect that Faith is wishful thinking that tries to make death go away--which Forrest Church always cited as the crucial origin of all the world’s religions … or, in other words, that our foreknowledge of our own death is the horrifying conundrum that challenges the very meaning of life and thereby inspires our pondering of the deepest matters of existence. If everything we have achieved in life disappears in the moment of death, what does this say about the meaning of life? Every human must come to grips with this matter.

     For myself, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put the problem in a way that gives me some comfort: “Where Death is, I am not. Where I am, Death is not.” I take this to mean that death is a threshold that a human consciousness cannot cross. In other words, we will not be there beside our own death bed, looking down at our own corpse and muttering, “Damn! I’m dead! Now what am I gonna do!”

     I would love to live forever! Imagine what wisdom and knowledge and skill one could acquire! But this is not to be, and one could argue that death’s limit is the most profound spur to make us appreciate life. And because it is likely that Epicurus was right, we, which is to say the consciousness embodied in the personal pronoun “I,” simply will not be there to witness the actual moment of our own death. There is nothing to fear. There is everything to make sense of, in the matter of choosing the things we value because of life’s inherent limits, and all the other standards by which we hold these values. Ayn Rand deftly addressed this matter in crucial essays on the nature of morality and ethics, which you should study.

24. Never fear these most powerful Magic Words: “I DON’T KNOW.” 
     Avoid oracular pontification like the plague! This godawful style of carrying oneself in the world is fascistic to the core, and is a characteristic of those religious and political leaders who shout slogans as short as bumper stickers and never defend their assertions with logic and evidence.
     When the ancients asked why the sun troops across the sky every day, they answered, “Ah! It’s Apollo, the Sun God who harnesses this brilliant orb behind his chariot and drags it daily from east to west.” With this crazy answer, the ancients closed off their minds to any better answers. They said, “Now I know! Yup, it’s the Sun God!” 
     But had these ancients simply acknowledged the true state of things, they should have said, “I don’t know the answer.” This statement of ignorance is a policy, a state of mind, that leaves open the possibility of finding better explanations as these emerge. Moreover, acknowledging that we do not know all the answers encourages the free and open search for knowledge and wisdom.
     Never fear the admission of your own ignorance. To say, “I don’t know,” when this is so, is an attitude that embodies magic words. No other attitude will allow the improvement of knowledge and wisdom! Knowledge must always be stated in the form of statements that can be tested by logic applied to the evidence of experience. We should hold all our knowledge in a form that remains open to the possibility of reexamination and revision in the face of new evidence. Anything less is not knowledge, it is dogma, unexamined, unanalyzable, pure and simple. Dogma is perhaps the principle means by which evil marches through the world.    

25. The Original Sin of Humanity is not Adam’s Fall, but Confirmation Bias. 
     Confirmation bias is the tendency of all Homo saps to live in their own echo chamber, deaf and blind to anything we do not already hold to be true and right. Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise captures metaphorically the human situation, that we can survive and flourish in the world only by acquiring knowledge and living consciously by the light of reason. Knowledge itself is not the sin, but any claim to knowledge, held as unassailable, unquestionable dogma, is indeed a sin. Confirmation Bias is the transmission belt of crazy destructive dogma. The only antidote is to read books with which we know in advance we’ll disagree and to do this reading with sympathy and interest, trying always to embody the innocent presumption that the author is a reasonable person who was persuaded by some logic to believe such “nonsense.” By this policy, I have actually come to change my own mind on some foundational issues. I highly recommend this policy.

26. Never forget that your father and mother love you as much as life itself. 
     Remember to leave the blinds open enough to let in the light and warmth of that love.

* * *

P.S.  In arriving at these precepts to share with you on life, love, and the cosmos, I owe many thanks: to Plato (because, even though his other-worldly speculations made him mad as a hatter, he was the first systematic philosopher in history, which makes him a genius of unique importance); to Aristotle (Plato’s more advanced and worldly student); to David Hume and Immanuel Kant (again, as foils for thought, these evil geniuses were even dottier than Plato, and Kant was even more other-worldly than Plato); to Ayn Rand (with but a few reservations, I hold Rand as a singularly important genius who, more than anybody else, radically improved the dithering condition of philosophy in its raggedy-ass, modern and postmodern insanity); David Kelley; Leonard Peikoff (about whom I have only one main reservation, which is that he does not admire David Kelley); to economists Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, George Reisman; to physicist and philosopher David Harriman (who collaborated with Peikoff on a brilliant book on physics and philosophy); to psychologists Martin Seligman, Aaron T. Beck, Nathaniel Branden, and Michael J. Hurd; to the worldly thinkers at IBD (Investors Business Daily), principally William J. O’Neill, who assembled their practical Ten Secrets to Success; and to many, many others too numerous to catalog here.

     In fact, there is nobody in the world with whom I agree completely, but so many have inspired me to search deeply and helped me telephone Celestial Directory Assistance so I could call my Better Angels for advice, and to assemble my own lights to see my path more clearly through life. Do you have that phone number already?

* * *

revised 2013.1119
(and again 2015.1103)
(and yet again, in No. 23. on 2016.0320.)
(and again, in the title, which was "What I Believe to Be Sacred." 2017.0316)