Slaying A Few Austerity Myths.

BRITANNIA WAS LATIN & WESTERN. JERUSALEM WAS NOT.

When Austerity Is Too Great Even Reason Shrinks:

Abstract: Austerity can go way too far. Austerity in finance, austerity in military matters, austerity in logic, or in one’s emotional system (“Puritanism“), can be a disaster. For individuals, or civilizations.

 Austerity is why Britannia collapsed, 16 centuries ago. Austerity in logic is why one prefers to cover that fact up, by denying the evidence: English is a  Latin language. Not a Germanic one. The latter “fact” is sheer propaganda.

 A similar situation one tries to cover-up was the take-over of the Greco-Roman world by the Jewish religion, and its criminally sectarian aspects. Making us believe Jerusalem was a “pillar” of our civilization is a form of austerity of evidence.

 Whereas the wealth of evidence is that Christianism was the cross on which civilization got nailed, and that there is nothing loving about brandishing a cross, let alone threatening to kill a child.

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WHEN MENTAL AUSTERITY ALLOWS MYTHS TO DOMINATE:

 May First. A celebration, a remembrance in honor of workers killed in a conspiracy in Chicago. (Modern Americans will tell you there are no conspiracies in the USA. They have been trained to say this.)

A conspiracy involving the police, judges, industrialists. A conspiracy long forgotten in the USA, but not in the rest of the world. Someday, maybe the Americans will realize how they were led where no dignity deliberately goes… And that they stayed there, because that was the lazy thing to do. The austerity of little minds, in full evidence.

 Visiting Rome was enlightening. I am writing essays on the subject. The first one breaks new philosophical ground. It has proven difficult to write. A kind critique told me to rewrite it before publishing it, and I have been obeying ever since she grated her teeth in a persuasive way.

 In the meantime, let me handle a few tidbits. They are apparently unrelated, but the misfortune of righteous empires unites them.

 They are erroneous ideas, one should actually say, erroneous moods. Grown from austere, all too austere, minds.

 One of these lies has to do with the myth that there is something as a purely Anglo-Saxon economic model. Verily that model is half Dutch. Great Britain is a Dutch plutocratic fabrication.

 Twelve (12) centuries before, Britannia, left by Rome to its own instruments, collapsed in all ways, as it fell victim to Anglo-Saxon invasions. That was a real holocaust that killed most of the population. England was created by a French counter-strike, much later.

 Another myth is that the West has three pillars: Rome, Greece and… Jerusalem. Please don’t laugh. What does that forsaken small city in the middle of nowhere have to do with great civilizations? Verily, the West has more pillars than that: Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Germania (not to say Francia!). All these places created ideas we use to this day. But Jerusalem is not of them. A pitfall is not a pillar. A primitive mother of a prehistoric child could not be sure that a turtle did not support the world. But she sure would have told you that a guy called Joshua did not invent love. How come so many people are not that smart? Do they have an agenda?

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WHY A PLUTOCRATIC INVASION IS CALLED  “GLORIOUS”:

 I have long subscribed to several British media. And it riles me up when I read disinformation emanating from London, that speaks of Britain as if it were on the other side of the Earth. Many English media deplore the unthinkable “Eurozone crisis“, decrying anemic growth, and huge deficits.

 Meanwhile Great Britain enjoys negative growth (it’s in a recession), and has at least twice the deficits. It is intriguing that English media fail to notice that the conditions on planet Britain are strangely similar to those on the rest of the same continental plate, 30 kilometers away.

 But the credit rating agencies, owned by Obama’s guru, Mr. Buffet, give a triple A to Britain, presumably because Britain is their friend, just like Buffet is friend to Obama. And that no doubt would come in handy, should Obama go the way of the crazed Sarkozy rushing to hell in his Sarkophage. Friends take care of friends, that’s what friends are for. Each Obama needs a buffet to splurge, like a Sarko, his sarcophagi.

 What are these misinformators trying to do? Hide the total failure of the “trickle down“/plutocratic model, by insisting instead that the Eurozone is disaster. (OK, right, the Eurozone is a disaster, and it needs to grow out of it, as Mr. Hollande, to be elected France’s next president in 5 days, insists).

 This is part of a general mood that the world’s largest continent is isolated, while Britain and the plutocratic model thrive.

 In truth, Britain thrived, because a highly leverage financial system entangled with the Royal Navy and the Bank Of England was imposed by the Dutch, three centuries ago. Nothing very glorious about being successfully invaded. So to prevent examination of this sordid affair, the term “Glorious Revolution” is used to depict the invasion and usurpation.

 Ironically, the aim of the successfully invading Dutch republic was to use the British bulldog to attack France (France was the Netherlands’ creator, it is another case of ingrate child). But that cost a huge amount of money and effort on part of the Dutch, and by 1712 CE, a quarter of a century later, the Netherlands was a shadow of its former self, and stays so, to this day. Britain, though, profitted.

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ROMAN  BRITANNIA FELL, & SO DID EUROPE TO THE NAZIS, BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY:

 Britain was a part of the Roman empire that was cut-off, without a battle, as part of an austerity program! I hope the word “austerity” sounds familiar. That is what is evoked much nowadays. Nowadays that the banks have spent all the public money in the world on themselves and their friends, especially the ones in white houses.

 This observation is nothing really new: for decades in the last century, or so, the defense of the West has been pretty much reduced to France, Britain and the USA. Some will say it does not matter anyway. Wrong. Remember Auschwitz?

 Europe fell to the Nazi invasion in 1940 in part because massive austerity throughout the democracies had left the entire West with just 110 French divisions to face 153 fanaticized Nazi divisions.

 The USA and Britain had basically no armed forces, because they were practicing austerity. The Netherlands and Belgium were even more stingy on defense, as they believed that France would protect them from much admired Germany… And it was most profitable to contradict neither the German, nor American, anti-French drives.

 The “Occidental Part” of the Roman empire fell without a grand battle.

 Whereas in the Orient the Roman army suffered catastrophic defeats at Adrianopolis (Eastern Thrace, presently, European Turkey) against the Goths (378 CE) and against the Arabs at Yarmouk in Syria (636 CE).

 The defeat against the Goths allowed them to roam the Western empire, until the Franks and the Romans bottled them in Spain. The defeat against the Arabs allowed the latter to quickly seize two-thirds of the Roman empire, before they were mauled by the Franks (721 CE to 748 CE). The Franks did not practice austerity: they nationalized the church, and rose the largest army since republican Rome, complete with professional soldiers.

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ENGLISH IS A LATIN LANGUAGE, OR, MORE EXACTLY, A TYPE OF FRENCH:

 The old Britons, like other old Celts, learned to read and write… From the Romans. Mostly. This explains why the Roman civilization was accepted so well, and so durably (it lives on in these lands, to this day).

 Indeed, the Romans taught much of higher civilization to common Celts, such as how to read and write, and why law was better than gods. The Celtic religion had forbidden that dangerous knowledge to the People. That was a deliberate trick of Celtic oligarchies, as the Celtic civilization was very advanced in other important ways, for example in metallurgy, or ocean going ships.

 One reason for calling English a Germanic language is pure propaganda. Many common Brits talked, read and wrote Latin for at least four centuries, no Jutes, Angles and Saxons involved. Those savages did not read or write.

 The smashing of the Oriental Roman army by the Goths in 378 CE had far reaching consequences. The legions of Britannia were soon withdrawn, to save money. Fascist Catholic terror was cranked up by a new emperor (a Spanish general), throughout the empire, in the hope of stopping the Goths.

 Learning that Britannia was defenseless, the Angles and Saxons crossed the North Sea in ever greater numbers. Civilization collapsed in Britannia, war blossomed. Most people died. Finally, in the mid-Sixth Century, many Romans from Britannia fled to Gallia (Gaul) giving its name to Armorica (now known as Bretagne). 

 In fact 70% of English words are of French (a third), Roman (a third) and Greek origin. The same words of Greek and Roman origin are also found in French (French is degenerated Latin, where much of the efficient Latin grammar was replaced by little prepositions, German style; meanwhile the Franks latinized the Germanic language’s grammar).

 Hence the common content of French and English is roughly 70%. (In truth much more than that, because French and English have many words of common Germanic, Celtic, Arab, Indo-European, Semitic origin, for example algebra, algorithm, amen, etc.)  

 This is a second reason not to call English a Germanic language. English is Anglo-Norman, one of the three languages of the French middle ages… It’s not because the language of the Parisians, the Langue d’oïl , came to dominate, Langue d’Oc, and Anglo-French, through the most brutal means, that we should pursue the oppression.

 This point of view refutes the Franco-French bigotry of viewing English as the enemy. The correct point of view is to use English for what it is, a French language, to foster one of the oldest and most complex civilizations.

 Another myth, another lie, is that, somehow Jerusalem brought something positive to the West. If so, what? Believing in something that never was? How come historical records don’t mention Jesus, how come his bible is full of horrors?

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 JERUSALEM BROUGHT NOUGHT: 
Some say “monotheism” is a pillar of the West. But a close inspection shows that most religions had a principal god. Moreover, Christianism and Islam use several super natural entities that god is unable to submit (Satan and the Djins in the case of Allah… Besides the Moon, and entities in the Satanic Verses).

 Monotheism was invented in India and Egypt, well before Jews appeared on the scene. Vishnu, is the supreme god with many Indian avatars (26?). For example Krishna. 1,000 years before some Jews wrote some book in Baghdad.
Before Indian and Egyptians, there was Cybelle and the cult of the Great Mother. For 10,000 years. The Christians have (re)produced “Mary” from this fundamental religion. A religion which is, altogether, more natural, than the “jealous” god of the Bible (that god is “jealous” is revealed in the second commandment).
 
 ”Deus” by the way has the same root as “Zeus”. By the time Jews wrote the Bible, the Greeks considered there was one main god, a version of the 15 centuries old Ahura Mazda.
 
  I do not see what Judaism brought to the antique civilization that was sorely missing. The biblical Jews claimed they stole the land of their enemies the Canaanites (that is the inventors of the Western alphabet, the Phoenicians). However, archeological and textual evidence shows that early Jews were actually Canaanites. So they are liars.

 When one examines the situation in 70 CE, during the great war of Judea, it is clear that the Greco-Roman civilization is completely formed, universalist, tolerant. OK, it’s also a bit fascist, but not as much as the fiercest of the Jewish leaders, such as Simon (who is also completely crazed besides; he was later whipped to death in Rome).

 The enormous population of Jews in Alexandria, next door to Jerusalem, thought the sectarians in Jerusalem were crazy to have treacherously assassinated 600 legionnaires. They did not take part in the revolt… which killed one million, many of them Jews at the hands of other Jews. During the siege of Jerusalem, to make fun of Jewish superstition, Roman artillery bombarded the city with thousands of ripe pig heads…

 Josephus, the most competent and supreme Jewish general, came to the conclusion that the Jewish revolt he had himself led, was not wise. He retired in Rome, where he wrote his extensive memoirs, which provide ample indirect evidence that Jesus existed only in Saint Paul’s head (as the latter admitted).

 The contribution of the Jews to the antique civilization, was, roughly, nought. Okay. the followers of one of their sects, Christianity, have acted as if said sect had discovered, invented and promoted love, first to do so, ever. And there are some naïve, or cruel enough, to believe them. When, obviously, altruism is the essence of civilization. Civilizations had existed for millennia before Jews were invented. (Yes people are invented: Romans, Gauls, Celts and Germans are example.)

 But the doctrine of the “Chosen People”, chosen by jealous (and murderous) god, no less, central to Jewish tribal theism, has caused a havoc. See Fourth and Fifth Century Christianity, busy exterminating, in the best Bible style, everybody, as if everybody were a Canaanite. See Auschwitz. The coup of the apprentice sorcerer? What is Nazism, but for the cult of the Chosen People? “Gott mit Uns”, said the SS, fundamentally.
 
 The Christians say Christianity discovered love and altruism, but it is not the Christians who outlawed slavery.

 Instead it is the “Merovingian” Franks (Imperium Francorum) in the year 660 CE under the “regency” of (English born) queen Bathilde who outlawed slavery. Christian bishops were from the richest families, and they were very appreciative of their armies of slaves.

 Meanwhile, the Christians had burned books, libraries, philosophers, free thinkers, “people who had made a choice” (“heretics“), academies, science, etc. … All this made directly the bed of Islam, another religion that celebrates the myth of Abraham, the guy who ties up his son to cut his throat to please his boss!

 OK, Abraham was right say those for whom exploitation is the highest value. Indeed bible god then gave Abraham the land of the Canaanites. So the fact that Abraham was willing to kill his child was highly profitable to Abraham. And for those who believe profits should overlord it all, have there, all the god they want.
 
 I categorically refute the myth of the would be slaughterer of a child as foundational for our civilization.

 OK, that perverse foundational myth obviously explains why so many priests imitate Abraham, and engage in child abuse. But is this the civilization we want? A civilization where daddy ties up the child, threatens him with death, so that he can satisfy his boss’ strange desire. Is that a civilization we can afford?

 Oh, some say they did not look at it this way. Sure. Willful blindness is most profitable. Mental retardation is the ultimate soporific. Austerity of thinking, indeed. No emotions involved.

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Patrice Ayme

WILL TO VICE.

Power Is One Thing, Cruelty Another. Willing Them, Human All The Way. Something Civilization Cannot Ignore Anymore.

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 Questions: Nietzsche made the “Will To Power” famous. Is it enough to explain the Dark Side? I claim it’s not.

 Indeed, why is there a “Will To Power”? Is it because there is, in human minds, a natural state of tranquility, and power is not a low hanging fruit, but it has to be willed? People have to decide to acquire power, first?

 Why not a “Will To Love”? Then? Does not the fact that there is a need for a Will To Power, but no need for a Will To Love, show that Love is more primordial than Power?

 And is the “Will to Power” enough to explain all the vice found in history, or is there something even more terrible, something the great religions all guessed? Yes, there is! So roll over Nietzsche!

 And I say: What about The Will To Vice? (In French: Volonte’ de Nuire, which is actually better because more encompassing.) Power gives the ability to deploy force, thus to act. Vice is the desire to hurt. And, if there is such a thing as striving to inflict pain, why is vice so alluring?

 We have to dig deep in the psychobiology of the genus Homo to answer these questions.

 The meta-psychology of power and vice are actually born from the most practical considerations, evolutionary speaking: one can see them at work in many a place in the Middle Earth, where the two largest continents, Eurasia and Africa meet. All and any of the combatants fanatics and other occupiers will tell you that they fight for excellent reasons, and they are right. Such is the Will To Vice. Always right. Greed is good, and so is cruelty.

 Power and vice arise for reasons, thus causes, that one can understand, it turns out. They are even deeper than evolution, because they inflected it. Some are exposed below. The need to effective leadership, and to do what is necessary, ultimately rule, and animate those reasons. Understanding this will go a long way to steer civilization correctly. 

  I know people have little time. Those who want to cut to the chase, can avoid the preliminaries on the domination of cruelty in all religions, and the section on how the Will To Power grew in primates from evolutionary pressures. The meat of the essay are the sections HUMAN IS TO BE LOVED and WILL TO CRUELTY. 

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WISDOM OF THE AGES HAS INCORPORATED VICE (However Poorly):

 Viciousness is prominent in all the great religions. And not just to condemn it, but to advocate it: after all, if the gods do it, why not us? I am not just alluding to the Aztecs and their industrial cannibalism and the Incas, and their propensity to spill the blood of virgins on top of volcanoes. The Celts, and Carthage, which were most advanced civilizations, also practiced human sacrifices (even the Romans dabbed in them).

 Viciousness is fully obvious in the old Norse religion, or Hinduism, which were prone to burn young women alive on the slightest pretext. The old Babylonian religions made the universe into a giant arena for the fight between light and darkness, truth and lie, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. Of course in the Abrahamic religion, the genocidal god is so much into his criminogenic and megalomaniac “jealousy”, that he wrote a few books to advertise them proudly. One of the Abrahamic sects even made a torture instrument of death its very symbol, and then called it love (OK, it worked. Charlemagne would point at the crushed Angles and Saxons and Hungarians…)

 Buddhism, although milder at first sight, does not escape the vice of vice. Buddhism is so obsessed by viciousness, that it throws the world out with the bath. Buddhism claims that nihilism (“nirvana”) is better than living in the world, by the world, for the world. Instead, to flee that horror, the world, it promotes detachment from it (but not so much detachment that its priests do not go begging in the streets !)  

 The mildest of the great religions may have been the Egyptian one, and may be that is why it lasted 4,000 years. But it is also why it found itself unable to resist enemies with more ferocious, extraverted gods, starting with the Libyans, the Achaemenids and finally the Christians, thoroughly rabid from god as they were.

 So can one safely say that old wisdom has fully integrated the Dark Side, the set of behaviors and knowledge associated with “hell”?

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TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE LOVED (At Some Point): 

 Maybe one should ask first where the expression “Dark Side“, as incarnated by the tenebrous Lord of the Underground, comes from? OK, it fully belongs to the Greek and Babylonian mythologies. The idea is at least 4,000 year old. But that does not explain what it is.

 In truth, it’s very simple, and that causal relationship reveals the hierarchy of emotions within Homo Sapiens. One speaks of the “Dark Side” because one does not like to look inside at what is lurking down there. A fortiori one does not like to talk about that Dark Side. 

 Why such reluctance? First, man is a social animal, and the social group holds together from love. It’s a bit like the nucleus of an atom held by the strong force. The strong force in human groups is love. It is needed, or there would not be a social group. (At a far distance, love does not reach anymore, thus huge social groups cannot be held by love, except if the state manufactures a form of love which carries far, and that is how nations hold together.)

 Understanding promotes love, whereas hiding one’s true brainwork promotes the opposite, misunderstanding, hence conflict. So what is in full sight is appeasing, whereas the ambush from the dark, just the opposite.

 Another reason to eschew the Dark Side is that, man is anywhere, and always, born out of love. [See the note on the errors of Christianism.]

 How does love come first? Simple. Nearly all and any baby, anywhere, and always, is loved, for quite a long period. Years. The first years, the ones during which one gets imprinted. Without enough love from enough people around the baby, the baby would certainly die. The same holds for young children. 

 Human children brought up by wolves prove the point. Certainly they would have been devoured, had some wolves not been overwhelmed by love (that wolves become more loving at some point during their massively fluctuating hormonal existence is a case in point; even in wolves, love can overwhelm all; human beings do not have such huge hormonal fluctuations and are more permanently loving).

 So love comes first. It is the base layer, emotionally. Vice comes first as a transgression (later it can become a habit, in individuals or a culture in countries, something some Germans try to mask by accusing Hitler of all the vices old style German culture infused him with).

 The Dark Side is thus condemned to be a second order effect. But, in some cases, it is the only ensemble of behaviors and knowledge that will provide with a solution (an obvious reference: the Bible, when the Chosen People comes onto the previous occupants of the Promised Land, and has to eradicate them, to occupy it in turn; this is the scheme reproduced throughout the (ex) British empire, allowing to eradicate indigenes from a godly portion of the Earth, hence the importance of the Bible throughout the Brutish thing).

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THE WILL TO POWER IS HOW PRIMATES MARRY LOVE WITH COMBAT:

 Nietzsche talked about the “Will to Power”. Why would this be? Why a “Will”? Does one talk about a “Will to Thirst”, a “Will to Hunger”? (OK, a “Will to Sex” exists among those who purchase aphrodisiacs, but that is a recent perversion, with no evolutionary meaning.)

 So is there a “Will to Love”? Most of the time, and more prominently, not at all. When love is there, it is overwhelming. One does NOT need to will it. A normal parent does not will to love her child. The parent just loves. Love is fundamentally an hormonal state. The strongest love is not something one decides to engage in. One can decide to love, true, but this is a secondary, weaker form.

 Nietzsche is correct that searching for power is a conscious decision, something one wills. It’s not as natural as love.

 Wolf packs are led by alpha couples: other animals in the pack are not just subservient, they just don’t get to eat first, and the best parts. They also don’t have sex. They are subservient, otherwise they will be attacked with lethal force.

 However, primates are not wolves. Primates are less on a war footing than wolves. They don’t need to live in a fascist state with absolute rule all the time, as wolves do. In primates, although sex is the object of conflict and impacted by hierarchy, (most of) the whole group reproduces. Thus not only primates do not need to be leaders, but they can perfectly reproduce without brimming with the utmost domineering characteristics. Thus primates do not reproduce domineering characteristics in an overwhelming manner. They also reproduce other sorts of manners.

 In wolves, those who reproduce have been selected, by the struggle for power, to be particularly domineering. So baby wolves tend to have the power drive genetically engineered, because only the dominant ones reproduce. Only domination to death reproduces. Wolves are born as topmost domination machines.

 Baby primates are not genetically pre-selected for so much domination, since non domineering members of the group also genetically contribute. 

 However some primate species need leaders. Why? Because they have evolved to live in primate hell, namely the savannah park, where trees stand among grass, as if they had been planted in a park by a divine gardener (most of Africa was endowed with that landscape, in combination with a web of narrow forest gallery where water and predators lurked). 

 The savannah park was, historically speaking, ten million years ago, no place for primates. Primates evolved in the trees, in the age of dinosaurs, from ancestors we probably have in common with squirrels. In the forest, monkeys have few competent enemies. After primates left the equatorial trees, and their huge juicy fruits (up to 50 kilograms), though, primates became dependent upon sources of fresh water. Moreover, primates were the object of gustative desire of a magnificent panoply of carnivores, from dogs, to many species of hyenas, giant cheetahs, leopards, lions, and saber tooth cats, let alone giant carnivorous baboons, boars, and bears. 

 Primates, to be present in the savannah, had to develop military psychobiology. It was a necessity, not an option. Primate sociobiology evolved into the sociobiology of armies. That is blatant when one observes baboons in the wild, as I had the good fortune to do as a child. Baboons need water once a day, so they have to organize a military expedition to get to the water hole, everyday. Stealth does not work. What works is military organization, and terror in the heart of all and any potential enemy.

 A baboon army on the march is a terrifying spectacle of sound and fury. They shake trees. They bark furiously in unison. Lactating females and their children are inside the formation. In front, demonic big males flashing their eyelids and giant canines, brimming with the threatening insanity of their obvious will to tear into whoever or whatever would dare stand in their way, proceed irresistibly towards their objective. Lion prides rise, and decide to go somewhere else sniff the grass. Leopards disappear in the darkest bushes.

 Armies function because they are the many acting as one: “E Pluribus, Unum“. Forming an army allows to constitute a super beast, with just one mind (that of the leader) and the total mass of the individuals which compose it (total mass matters: in combats between lions and hyenas, the group with the largest total mass generally wins).

 That primate army is endowed with the spirit of the leader. That leader has to be domineering enough to be accepted as the mind of all, and combative enough to look towards combat, when there is no choice. And that leader has to pretend to love combat enough to make the group it leads appear dangerously insane to third parties (thus making way, as needed, the way baboons have to do it, to exist).

 To become a leader, one has to fight, to get to that position which has obvious advantages. This has the interest that not only fighters get selected to lead, and lead into combat, as needed, but the very process of selection develop the leaders into ever more aggressive minds. Evolution found the trick that if the groups were led by individuals more aggressive that the common members of the groups, the groups would battle better, and how to develop a process to increase the combativity of the leaders. 

 So here is the picture: primate groups in the savannah can exist if and only if they are large enough, bound by love. While at the same time, primate groups need to be led by particularly aggressive individuals, capable of leading the group into combat, and making other animals believe that the groups they constitute are the most dangerous thing on earth.

 Thus savannah dwelling primate species have developed, had to develop, a psychobiology which favors the “Will To Power”. Primates are rendered more ferocious by undergoing the power struggle to reach power, and that is obtained only after “willing” it. “Willing it” transmogrifies soft individuals in the loving groups into the hard edge tyrants needed for the victory of the group.

 Some scientists have determined that most of the large animals’ mass, for millions of years, was made of lion sized carnivores (as lions can take down a giraffe and survive on rabits). It’s no more the case now, thanks to the great primate offensive for savannah park supremacy. The war between monkeys and lions has ended with the victory of the monkeys, thanks to the militarized fascism of the latter, as needed.

 By the way, this may be why Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary, from his ferocious debate performance: the voting primates perceived in him a greater warrior, the product of a greater Will To Power, promising a harder edge to solve the problems the country confronts, and that too “cool” an attitude of the seducer in chief, with his huge smile, cannot address.

 Let’s recapitulate: love is a necessity, a fundamental imprinting. Ferocious leadership is obtained in a contrived way, through the constructive “Will to Power”.

 But what of the cases when combat is not enough? Say the enemy has been defeated. But now the enemy needs to be eradicated, because there is not enough food to go around, or simply because not eradicating today, means being eradicated tomorrow. Just as chimps do in the valley over there. 

 Genocide of his own species has been, historically and evolutionary speaking, one of the characteristics of the genus Homo. Genocide is what the most domineering hominids have had to do, and did, for millions of years.

 Is the “Will To Power” the answer to impose eradication? No. It is more oriented towards combat. The “Will to Power” wants to overpower, not massacre. The “Will To Power” is about exerting power on others. Will To Power needs the continuation of others to be exerted. And indeed, although baboons kill baboons in power struggles, sometimes (their canines are like small daggers), power struggles among baboons do not result in extermination in the famed chimpanzee-human style.

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THE WILL TO CRUELTY:

 Thus the interest of the Will To Cruelty. The Will To Cruelty is what motivates the ultimate, all too human activity, genocide.

 Genocide: when man becomes like the legendary god of Abraham, ready to want the worst one can possibly imagine, and turning it into a religion (what is worse than asking a parent to kill his child, out of love for one’s superior, as the Abrahamic god does with Abraham?)

 Omitting the presence of the Will To Cruelty is one of the greatest failures of conventional humanism. It is also a failure of standard economics, and, in particular of the free market fanatics. And a failure of all of those who deify some of their superiors. All human beings have potentially Pluto inside. But those who have the greatest power in their hands have fewer checks left to restrain them, and thus are more inclined to transgress into vice. Thus, admiring leaders is fraught with ethical peril. Leaders, threatened by temptation, ought to be viewed with suspicion.

The only transgression left to those who have most power, the only challenge left, is to cultivate the Will to Cruelty, so they do. It attracts them irresistibly. So they informed their academic servants that it would be best never to evoke the subject.

 Indeed, some of these observations are not really new. Sade was first.

 That grotesque cruelty motivated leaders all too much was de Sade’s main point. They were not keen to hear this, all the more since the People was listening carefully, at least in France. This is why king Louis XVI, and the dictators Robespierre and Napoleon kept Sade in jail for decades. Sade was saying that Robespierre and Napoleon were… sadistic brutes motivated by inflicting pain, they had to be, that is why people like them did what they did… and sadistic brutes they, indeed, were!

 Funny how many busts of Napoleon there are, with rabid Napoleonophiles on their knees lauding that cruel monster, considering most of what he did was to bust the great revolution for human rights, in general, and the republic, in particular, besides ravaging Europe, all the way to Moscow, while destroying his great European army, and killing, among others, millions of Frenchmen… Do they admire the cruelty? The arbitrary assassinations? Keeping Sade in jail?

 Why is genocide so central in the evolution of hominids? Because hominids represented, for millions of years, the ultimate power, and had to use their ultimate power on that ultimate power to keep humanity in check. Only terminal force can master terminal force.

 Left to themselves on (parts of) South Georgia island, reindeer devastated the ecology to the point their population, after booming, having run out of vegetables and lichen to eat, starved, and crashed by up to 90% (in parts).

 But it does not work this way with human beings. Human beings, just like rats, are sociable, and help each other, when their populations are at sustainable densities. Beyond that, the worst enemy of man becomes other men, and there were plenty of thousands of centuries to select for human beings who could get the job of culling of other hominids done. Actually, they self-selected. Not only human beings have an inclination, a will, to cruelty, but they selected themselves this way, because that was most advantageous, evolutionary speaking. So the cruel ones reproduced, and the sweet ones did not. A consequence of this has been the (semi-demented) love for tribalism and nationalism (with major inconveniences such as Nazism, and now neutralized in modern times by team sports).

 The Will To Cruelty, ultimately, protects an optimal version of the planetary ecology. It is timely to remember this, as the greatest attack against the ecology is proceeding ever more. Logically, and evolutionarily speaking, it is only a matter of time before cruelty comes to the rescue of the biosphere.

***

 Patrice Ayme

***

 Note on some fundamental errors of Christianism: Christianism made a big deal of love, as if Christ invented it. Well love is clearly a necessary pre-condition to human life. The fact that Christ had such an unloving relationship with his own father, should not lead us astray about the necessity of that pre-condition.

 Thus Judeo-Christianism was wrong with its theory of original sin! Men are not born bad, quite the opposite: they evolve that way. Such an egregious error can only have been committed deliberately. The manipulators of the Dark Side probably felt that “original sin” made common people feel bad about themselves, thus weakened their resolve. Moreover, if man was born bad, the leading plutocratic miscreants were excused to do whatever nasty stuff they wanted, since they were born that way! 

 Of course Christianism was not chosen by the Latter Days Tyrants of Rome because it was right, but, precisely, because it was wrong.

Borrowing For Nothing. Twice.

PLUTOCRATS LOVE UNEMPLOYMENT.

Abstract: The government of the USA has borrowed enormously, when it was expensive to do so, to enslave its population, instead of raising taxes on the hyper rich, and tax corporations (many of the largest, instead, get more money from the government than they pay in taxes).

Obama was full leader of this apparent madness: as he was in total control of the USA, he spent his time pleading with the republicans that he was the adult in the room, and there was enough blame to go around, so he won’t play that blame game. Such circuitous logic in outer space, very cool, allowed him to do nothing, but ingratiating himself with the plutocracy, personally, while the pundits could claim it was all beyond them.  That apparent madness does make sense, underground.

Now, however, that the government of the USA can borrow for nothing, to create jobs, it refuses to do so. Both maddening ways of mishandling debt are fruits of the same logic, I claim, and it is all entirely natural, considering who truly lead the USA. Expanding massively on Krugman’s pondering, we explore that apparent contradiction psychoanalytically, and find how to make sense of it all.

***

***

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents. We are going to think about what this means.

Professor Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico argued in July 2010 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that farming made no sense when it arose. Or, more precisely, makes no sense within the conventional “Better Mousetrap Theory“. That says that new technologies evolve, which are more efficient, and thus they are adopted for narrow, purely economic reasons. And that adoption modifies society in turn.

Instead, Bowles found that a much bigger picture is needed. I have advocated such a bigger picture for a very long time. Most drastically, purely philosophical changes can have direct predatory effects. This is found in several guises, in the rest of this essay. why to insist on predation? Well, predation primes evolution, as the one who has been eaten cannot evolve as a free agent anymore. Plutocracy often devours the very society, country, even the civilization, which has given birth to it. Rome and the Mayas are examples.

Textbooks tell us cultivation and herding came about because they allowed humans access to more abundant food. But an analysis from Bowles shows that they were much less efficient than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they replaced in terms of producing food. I believe that Bowles may overstate his case a bit. However, early farmers ate less well, and there were more of them, and both of these are known facts, from direct archeological evidence (see Bowles’ abstract reproduced in the note below.)

Why then did humans make the switch to agriculture? More children and more war capability is the answer arrived at by Bowles. This supports one of the great philosophical themes of this blog. Namely there is more to economy, and to civilization, than what activates conventional economists.

In particular, the switch from the Greco-Romans to the Franks was, first a philosophical switch, from the enslaving, sexist, superstitious, obscurantist to less sexist, secular, free, in other words, frank, system. It also boosted military performance, just like the switch to agriculture. As the USA deviates from the philosophical principles of the Franks, it deviates back into obscurantism and plutocracy.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents to do what? To be the imperial power of the world, the super power, with a total military plus “black operations” budget close to a trillion dollars, bases all around the world, and countless useless military programs (new aircraft carriers, F35, all known not to work before they even sail or fly, etc.) Plus several totally useless, counterproductive wars (and I am counting Libya as a useful war, and it’s mostly fought by France, seconded by Britain, anyway).

Useless wars? The wars are against, or between variants of Islam. So they are, in first order, theological debates. The only correct position for western democracies, looking in, is secularism. Instead, Obama has posed a mullah in chief, telling us some variants of Islam were not really Islam, and that is why he fights them, etc. Ridiculous.  

One true reason for the wars has been the support, by the West, to get oil, of feudal regimes resting on obsolete, fanatical Islam. When Obama says there is nothing wrong about (THAT) Islam, he feeds the pump. And the animosity. Nothing wrong with Wahhabism? Says the legitimately furious: “Let me show you!”

Counterproductive wars? By striking unlawfully populations by missiles fired from robots often operated by non military personnel, without a UN authorization, Obama has put the USA out of the law in several ways. That Bush started it is no excuse. Bush knew it was wrong, for the reasons I cited, so did not do it much. Now, of course, idiots have said it was highly productive. The same idiots, or the same sort of idiots used to say that the relationship with Bin Laden was highly productive. Then there was 9/11, and they forgot all the idiocies they had said before, and Obama told us the USA did not start it. Start what? The relationship with bin Laden? If Obama makes war in Yemen, said war should be made legally, officially.

Western democracies are not, or were not, and are not supposed to be, piratical regimes operating in the dark on a massive scale. If we have grudges, they should be legitimate, so they should stand in the light, for all to see, and our cause ought to be just, for all to see, and that is why and how we stand in the light… We cannot do this, because our cause is not just. Obama loves to do everything in the dark, not to say the black (since he prefers red), and that is fundamentally antidemocratic, as his campaign argued, following closely my various sites.

So this is what Obama and its USA do with its trillion dollars on war, spent annually: make enemies who have been treated really badly, and then lose wars. Indeed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are total losses. All what comes out of it, is thousands of enraged, fanatical, aggrieved warriors, ready to visit many 9/11s on the West.  At first sight, it makes no sense. But that is because one is looking above the ground. Underground, where Pluto dwells, it makes sense. Therein another true reason for the military madness.

One can compare with France, which was able to fight and win an Ivory Coast war, after obtaining a UN mandate. (Well, in truth, France attacked first, and, because the cause was just, got the UN in, later; the USA cannot go to the UN about Yemen, because the USA’s cause in Yemen is not just!)

France operates on a military budget which is incredibly lean relative to that of the USA. However France engaged as leading actor in the two wars of 2011, in Ivory Coast, and Libya. France had been the leading actor in the war against Serbia in the 1990s (no, it was not Clinton! France was followed by Britain, under a UN mandate, and the USA intervened decisively, but years later). And was the only actor to finish the civil war in Rwanda (the USA just gave a logistical support to France). Of course France was the leading, sacrificial, actor against Hitler, and that is no coincidence. All these wars were, ultimately, big wins, and they helped France, as a nation. Not just her military-industrial complex. It extirpated fascism incompatible with French democracy. And that is why Britain often follows. It does not have to do with materialism obsessed imperialism, but  with the imperialism democracy needs to survive (examplified by the wars the Roman republic led in its heydays).

The difference between the French and American war spending right now, is that the French military is supposed to win wars, at this point, not just being a big pork barrel (France has been there, and done that, way back in the 1930s, leading to the astounding defeat of May 1940).

The American war in Afghanistan was never fought to be won, as letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora proved. It was just fought to justify the American military expenses. The same holds for the ambivalent conspiracies subterraneously manipulated by American services in Pakistan. One cannot escape the conclusion that, when the USA paid for Pakistani nukes, under G. W. Bush, the aim was just to create a potential justification for more military spending by the USA.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents from whom? Most of them, from the Chinese dictatorship. Those who don’t know history, nor economics, nor common sense, argue perpetually that this is an insurance policy, as China will never attack who it is owed money by. Right. 1 + 1 = 0. Too! This is literally right, in base two (not in the conventional numbering system, which is in base ten). Nearly all statements can be viewed as right, if one tweaks their context enough.

Right, just as China will never destroy American aircraft carriers, although, in its naivety, the Chinese army believes it can do so, with new special ballistic missiles. Who is naïve there? the Chinese military, or American pundits and lobbyists? With the future F35 defending American carriers, with its puny range, half of that of the existing French Rafale, and its minuscule payload (whereas the Rafale can take off with nearly three times its empty weight!), we can be sure that the Chinese do not feel too scared.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why? Because it makes the American population into serfs. As simple as that. This is exactly how serfdom arose. From debt. And this is the effect that the American oligarchy is looking for. Because it is inferior, and tries to prove to itself that it is not so, by piling up material goods, with bigger planes, bigger mansions, more islands and beaches, privately owned, more servants… And by piling up power and influence, like Murderoch, to forget the ugly hearts and feeble minds they are affected with.

In the Eight Century, the empire of the Franks, the Imperium Francorum, was the richest, but less defended, part of the world. So it was invaded, from the North (Vikings), from the East (Avars, a sort of Huns or Mongols), and from the South (Arab and Berber Islamist armies, foaming at the mouth, which had created, undefeated, the world’s largest empire, by the sword, in less than a generation, extending from India and China to the Atlantic).

The Franks not only resisted, but counterpunched. They freed Northern Spain from the Islamists, conquered Hungary, pushed civilization east of Berlin, rolled back the Muslim out of Rome and Italy, “Christianized” the heathens up north, etc.

So the Franks had huge military spending. They did not borrow from China, or other hostiles, to pay for it. Instead they nationalized hyper wealth, namely, their piggy bank, the Christian Church.

Then the Frankish military borrowed heavily from the peasants, and made them pay, in turn, for their services. A weird communist organization with lords on top came out of it all: the feudal system. It was highly effective to create military supremacy, as the Franks not only conquered England, Sicily, Cyprus, and crusading armies not only fought and conquered the Balts or reconquered Jerusalem, but the Spanish crusader army, which was supposed to finish Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, for good, got diverted, to the just discovered Americas, and conquered that. (The conquest of North America was stopped by emperor Charles V, on the ground that a holocaust had been committed.)

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why can’t the government of the USA find the money elsewhere than China? Because American plutocracy, basically, wants to turn average Americans into serfs. That may sound counterintuitive. But it is not. (Moreover, it has a little plot plus conspiracy going with the Chinese dictators, although Immel, head of GE, right arm of his little boy Obama, has screamed stridently recently that it was not so: the louder they scream, the more obnoxious they are.)

The Very Serious People leading the USA are plutocrats and their obsequious servants (contemplate Geithner for obsequiousness). The plutocrats want to keep on flying private jets, live in mansions, etc. They want hordes of servants, and domestics. They want the ear, not to say the beck and call, of the White House.

Krugman attracts the attention (July 31, 2011) upon the fact that borrowing now comes for free, so, presumably, one could borrow massively, not to fund useless pursuits, such as the military-industrial complex all around the planet, but to give people jobs.

However the plutocratic party has insisted to cut spending, just when it should be maximized to put people to work. The true employment rate of the working age population in the USA is now less than what it is in France, the archetype welfare state vilified by Murderochs and other plutocrats. And this is a general effect relative to Europe, see the graph in Krugman’s “The End Of Eurosclerosis“. The USA looks better in employment, only when one puts the elderly and children to work in the statistics (putting children to work is against UN law, and only Iran, North Korea, and the USA think it’s a great idea).

Americans are heavily in debt: when the Greater Depression started, thehousehold debt was 100% of GDP. Now, in 2011, it’s 90%. In 1982, at the depth of the recession then, household debt was only 45%. So people need jobs to get out of this hold, and this hole. The goverment can force private industry, which sits on 2 trillion dollars of cash, to spend it, by ooffering jobs.

Example of legislation enforced economic activity: not just refurbishing schools, bridges, but, say, burying utilities by law, which would be quite useful in areas of the USA threatened by fires, quakes, tornadoes, storms and hurricanes… which is most of the USA. Let alone making housing efficient. The European Union has such laws, and they will make the Union ever richer.

So why don’t the plutocrats want Americans to work? What plutocrats don’t want is to share equally. That would defeat what they are all about, which is their personal splendor, made more prominent by comparing itself to misery. Putting everybody to work would spoil the fun, they want an unequal society. So they do what enhances their glory to themselves: deciding the fate of the world, their way. By doing their biding, Obama hopes to keep on being their aspiring boy, and share their fun, one of the dreams from his father, invited to their houses, eating their dinners, sleeping in their sheets (all of this against old Roman republican law).

Now that all the plutocrats have lined up in Washington in the last few days, reminding their domestic politicos who was the boss, no doubt things will advance their way some more.

What should American progressives do? Or, let’s say, what should those who don’t want to regress do?

Well first get rid of their Trojan Horse, and its black operators. The dark horse speaks one way, and acts the other. He bemoans the tax cuts, but he set them up. One cannot fight war in the front, when one is stabbed, in the back. Better to lose an election, and regroup. The best wars can start with the best defeats, as nothing can increase the motivation better.

So throw out Obama and his plutocratic groveling, to start afresh, with a better idea about what the correct attitude is. don’t worry, he will be alright: the masters know how to reward their operators, “pour encourager les autres“.

The correct attitude is not to grovel to the masters. The masters have proven that they were full of it, in 2008, for all to see, after a decade of decreasing real family median income (a point I have made, long ago, now captured in turn, by Krugman; I used that point to argue that we are in a GREATER DEPRESSION, and the plutocracy has caused it, with its increasing feudal, colonial regime, served by its little boy-servants).

Offering, as Obama did, apparently, to take the first bite out of Medicare and other social programs, vastly inferior, as they are, to what is found in the European Union, just so that the plutocrats can keep on flying in private jets, is within the realm of clear betrayal. How many stabs in the back do we need?

Obama and his predecessor and apparent mentor, G. W. Bush, borrowed for nothing. OK, I am unfair to Bush: he borrowed for covering drugs to seniors. It is Obama who has really nothing to show for it. Even Hoover started a whole bunch of massive employment projects, including several huge dams which have paid handsomely since. Obama, in a much graver economic situation than the Great Depression, has understood nothing. Why? Maybe he is too stupid and full of himself. But he also has no interest to understand anything deep, as it would compromise his literal sleeping with the hyper rich in the Silicon Valley for example (I was there, I saw it). To argue that Obama had a recession, so he could not put people to work is dysfunctionally stupid: so did Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. Those tow disagreed on the extent of public spending. Obama and his Tea Party believes cuts is what is needed. It is not because Obama claims that he is not in the Tea party that he is not it’s, de facto, leader. He is. Don’t read his lips, read his record.

Then what? Differently from Rome, which stood alone, the USA has plenty of competition. So some shrinkage of this whole circus is in the offing (not all nations have been captured by plutocracy, gagged and bound, hand and foot).

As agriculture and herding rose, another activity did, too: civilization, the art of living in cities (the first cities, found in present day Turkey, depended partly upon foraging). So did the plutocratic effect, because capital renders it possible (roll over, Marx, and don’t bother me).

I have argued that the plutocratic effect is a great danger to civilization. Nevertheless, it is not all that simple: indeed war societies do best when led by a well fed warrior class (well fed means taller, bigger, fiercer, better neurology). In other words, a plutocracy.

Highly successful long lived societies in Europe, India, Japan were led by ferocious plutocracies which towered, tall and fair, above the dark, small peasants, while protecting them, as shepherds protect the sheep they eat and fleece. The implicit argument the reigning American extreme right is making is, implicitly, that one. But it is wrong, in the present circumstances.

It is not just that more intelligent societies will, probably, predate on the more stupid ones. And that too much plutocracy promotes and is only compatible with the stupidity of the masses. It is also that the world environment is collapsing, and that making the American population more stupid, a crucial ingredient in the rise of the plutocracy, has contributed considerably to this collapse.

Many governments around the world are increasing spending on real investments, or have created conditions for such by private industry (a consortium of French private companies and banks announced July 30 the construction of a very high speed, 250 mph, train line towards Brittany, to cost 5 billion dollars). The American government is nearly the only one to act against the most basic logic, and to confuse the cancerous growth of Wall Street and its banks with something good. Hopefully, those dangerous delusions will be restrained to its little courtyard, looking forward.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: The picture of being “stabbed in the back”, was suggested ironically by a British general to general Ludendorff, effective commander of the Prussian army in 1918. Ludendorff, a Nazi before Hitler himself, found that name, jumped on the concept, and the Nazis ran away with it, claiming  that the Versailles Treaty (not signed when the Brit made fun of Ludendorff) had stabbed them in the back.  This being said, as the tale of the Trojan Horse has it, it is entirely possible for a nation to be stabbed in the back. This is what Napoleon did to France, as he turned from defender to exploiter. Actually the declaration of war of a few Prussian generals, to the world, in 1914, stabbed Germany in the back (as it was highly unlikely that Germany could defeat France, Britain, and Russia).

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Note 2: Bowles speaking, 2010: Did foragers become farmers because cultivation of crops was simply a better way to make a living? If so, what is arguably the greatest ever revolution in human livelihoods is readily explained. To answer the question, I estimate the caloric returns per hour of labor devoted to foraging wild species and cultivating the cereals exploited by the first farmers, using data on foragers and land-abundant hand-tool farmers in the ethnographic and historical record, as well as archaeological evidence. A convincing answer must account not only for the work of foraging and cultivation but also for storage, processing, and other indirect labor, and for the costs associated with the delayed nature of agricultural production and the greater exposure to risk of those whose livelihoods depended on a few cultivars rather than a larger number of wild species. Notwithstanding the considerable uncertainty to which these estimates inevitably are subject, the evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the productivity of the first farmers exceeded that of early Holocene foragers. Social and demographic aspects of farming, rather than its productivity, may have been essential to its emergence and spread. Prominent among these aspects may have been the contribution of farming to population growth and to military prowess, both promoting the spread of farming as a livelihood.

4% Inflation Best

ECB, FED, BAD.

Summary: The psychological effects of inflation are misunderstood, and misemployed, causing underemployment. Gentle inflation is best, ultra low inflation is bad and dangerous. There are philosophical, and technical, reasons for that.

Gentle, but significant, inflation stirs the economy as needed, and advantages advancing technology relative to the forces of sedimentation of the obsolescing past.

The inflation target of the European Central Bank, 1%, is way too low. The US Fed is just as bad, with its zero interest rate policy, which mostly serves its friends in the plutocracy. As it is, the zero interest rate policy does not provide money to the real economy, and other things need to be done.

One of the things to do: target inflation around 4%.

***

EURO SINKING, EUROPE RISING:

The European constitution enshrined the erroneous notion that the European Central Bank could enforce the value of the euro without worrying about the European economy in general, as if one could have a currency without an economy (the mandate of the Fed of the USA is to watch over the currency, and the economy).

This conceptual imbalance, a currency with an economic disconnect, led to an overvalued euro, while putting the Chinese economy on steroids, and allowing American plutocrats to splurge through the elaborated web of corruption they sneakily set up for themselves worldwide, leveraging themselves on the strong euro.

The Sino-American circus at the Copenhagen climate conference pretty much torpedoed decades of European evolution towards greater efficiency. It was pretty obvious that Europe’s entire strategy to switch, at immense cost, to sustainable energy and low CO2 production, was a casualty of plutocratically driven Sino-American expediency.

Europe was condemned to keep on sacrificing itself while China rips its intellectual property (example: duplicating Siemens Very High Speed trains!), demolishing moreover its industry by unfair competition, due to the undervalued Chinese currency, and the USA could keep on enjoying quasi free energy, while polluting the entire planet with its addiction to deadly fossil fuels, while rampaging militarily throughout Central Asia, looking for more, as it enjoyed the protection of the overvalued euro.

Something needed to be done. The Sino-American arrogance was enabled by the overvaluation of the euro. European products could not compete. The European economy was stagnating, and its substantial essence was invigorating Chinese and Americans, whose economy progressed by leaps and bounds.

The euro had to go down, European advisers concluded. Miraculously, suddenly, Europe observed the presence of Greece in its midst. It was always known that Greece was a desperate case, as it converted its drachma into euro at too high a rate (making the Greeks instantaneously rich and unemployed). But it had not been observed yet, as it deserved. It’s good to have a desperate case in one’s closet, to frighten the vampires with.

So now the euro is going down. Patriotic Europeans ought not to be satisfied until it reaches parity. Come to think of it, a few years as undervalued as the euro was overvalued, should do wonders for the European economy. (Let see what happens to the plutocratic USA, as it faces competition from correctly priced European products!)

This being said, the ECB inflation target of 1% is deeply erroneous. Inflation actually spurs demand: it is no coincidence that so many German products were sold to the parts of Europe with the most inflation (the PIIGS). Without that inflation, Germany would be doing much less well.

Just an example: Spain has bought Very High Speed trains from Siemens (which reach 250 mph, 400 km/h on the Madrid Barcelona line). Spain could have bought equivalent VHS trains from Alstom, the French company which is the competitor of Siemens. So now Spain has a deficit, and some Germans whine. Would they prefer Spain to have bought French trains? (By the way, the Chinese deconstructed and mass produced Siemens VHS trains, in an apparent violation of intellectual property… and now they propose to sell said stolen property to the USA).

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THE EURO: A MINIMUM WHICH NECESSITATES MORE.

After 1,000 years of intra European wars between people who wanted too much, the meta principle of construction of Europe is to proceed minimally, as needed. No more, no less. The euro was established because one cannot have dozens of countries each with its own currency, in a small place: that was the necessity.

Another more drastic reason is that the French and the Germans (and the Benelux, Austrians and Northern Italians) do not see why they should not have a common currency, although they see plenty of reasons to have one. As far as the French and Germans are concerned, to have different currencies is as smart as having West Texas with a different currency from East Texas. But then France, Germany and the Benelux, that’s 180 million people.

So now 16 countries are in the Eurozone. More are in it informally (such as Romania). Estonia should formally join in 2011.

The euro was established as a currency, without governance, except an honorable promise, that everybody would be saintly, and keep yearly budget deficits below 3% of GDP (and 60% GDP for total state debt). That promise was broken, as soon as France and Germany found it was in their best interest to break it. At that point a crisis was certain: the magic spell had been broken. If France was going to allow a 8% deficit, Germany 6%, why should not Greece have 9.4%? After all the paragons of financial supremacy, the USA, has 11% deficit, and Britain, 12.8%…

So the crisis exploded, after the Copenhagen disaster. Greece was called a disaster, and the money manipulators scurried for their little lives, unknowingly doing the work of French intellectuals. The euro finally went down. A bit too fast, though: scary interest rates of the order of 21% on some Greek government debt were seen. It was time to slow things down.

The French have long promoted ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE. The way many see it in France, French taxes act as a subsidy for many other European powers. And not just because of the completely independent French nuclear umbrella; Britain has long behaved as a less regulated extension of Wall Street, with plenty of fiscal paradises attached to itself (Anglo-Normand islands, Isle of Man; arguably all of Britain was a tax heavens for non UK plutocrats), something that exploded in 2008: the AIG unit that cost US taxpayers around 180 billion dollars was based in London, to fully enjoy deregulation, New Labor style.

The trick to lower the euro degenerated in a sovereign debt crisis, and Europe finally reacted to it. Merkel went to Moscow to celebrate victory on the Nazis with the Russian leaders, as NATO forces paraded on Red Square in front of the Kremlin, as they should. Sarkozy cancelled, stayed home in Brussels to handle the debt and fiscal crisis, leaving French troops to parade without their president.

That was the Franco-German duo at its best: France, seconded by a trusting Germany, in command, making the Lisbon Treaty instantaneously obsolete, as required by the crisis at hand. The European Central bank was suddenly given powers it never had, and that the Lisbon constitution excluded (but which all real central banks have), such as buying bonds from member states (the US Fed has long been selling and buying its own bonds, in a gymnastics incomprehensible for those not abreast of these mysteries… but it is crucial; the Fed also bought for no less than 2,400 billion dollars of mortgages.)

France and Germany together are a superpower. Others have to join. This is how the EU works, how the Schengen Treaty and the Eurozone work.

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CONTROLLED FLIGHT INTO TERRAIN (CFIT):

Inflation is collapsing:

BLS, Cleveland Fed.

This is bad: should this go on a bit more, there is no way out.

*

American economists ought to worry about deflation, instead of penning anti-European rants with no deep philosophical underpinnings. The European Union had deep philosophical roots, 2,000 years before there was Hitler, and he got crushed, he and his fascist racist ideological company. As soon as Germany and France became again politically identical, there was no reason left for the Verdun Treaty’s partition (August 843 CE). So now we have a united Europe, and American economists should worry about depression in the USA, not worry about fostering disunion on a continent far away, in the apparent hope that the USA will triumph once again.

Uncontrolled deflation is flight into terrain, and low inflation targets invite it. It is clear to me that the 1% (!!!!) inflation target of the ECB is a philosophical, and technical mistake. Recently the ECB was congratulating Estonia for having achieved that target: bad.

First technically: inflation can be controlled, by rising interest rates. Once Carter had nominated Volcker to crush inflation, Volcker was able to do so by rising interest rates to 23% (causing 2 recessions and making Carter lose the election).

Deflation cannot be controlled, though. A simple analogy: in a plane, if one is high enough, one can go higher. But if one has gone down too much, one crashes into the ground. A plane can fly higher, but a plane cannot fly underground. Economists need to be brought back to earth safely.

To pursue the aeronautical analogy, an economic bubble is like a stall for a plane: one goes up too high, too fast, forward motion in the medium becomes insufficient, lift disappears and one falls.

Forward motion, in economics, is real progress made into the physical world (some of it Sisyphus style, as in repairing potholes, curing the sick; some of it grandiose, as when switching to new, more advanced technologies, some of it necessary as in teaching the young, and the deciders). The economy, as the plane, needs to provide lift, lest it crashes (the world economy is the largest machine, and, as all machines, it can fail). When the Soviet economy failed, lifespan, health, income and creature comforts collapsed. Economy is not just about profits, contrarily to what plutocrats think (supposing they think)

There is another more subtle effect illustrated by the aeronautical analogy. Applying the full power of zero interest rates when already crashing from a bubble gone wrong, can make the situation worse.

There was a strange crash of an Airbus A 330-200 in Tripoli, with a fatigued, sleep deprived crew, facing the rising sun, with a foggy mist on the ground. The pilots apparently mistook all too long the desert for the runway. After removing the last safeguards of the plane’s computerized brain, they came next to the ground, realized their error, and applied, too late, the full power of the Airbus, which is enormous. The plane reared steeply, more than 20 degrees, said the captain of an Alitalia jet behind, and roared up. But its tail hit the ground hard, tearing from the rest of the airframe. Still dragged fiercely by the engines at maximum power, the jet pitched down, and drove into the ground, pushed by its engines, disintegrating into remarkably tiny pieces.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain. What happens when you apply maximum thrust while crashing into the ground (A 330-200, Tripoli, May 2010).

***

Morality: if one has already started to crash into the ground, applying more power will only cause further damage.

Translating this analogy to economics: in a free market, fractional reserve banking system, the maximum thrust is given by the zero interest rates policy. The more one lowers interest rates, the more banks can lend (since they get money at zero interest, free money, from the state). Fine, that’s the theory. But to who do they lend, and for what? Absent government control, they will do what they have done best lately.

Unfortunately in the present morally corrupt system, the banks look for the strongest profit, for themselves, and that is not obtained by investing to optimize the real economy. Instead publicly financed private banks invented a casino in the sky where they attribute each other imaginary profits.

Thus, the stronger the banks, the more they do what they do best: giving to their friends, to their politicians, past, present and future, indulging their addiction to derivatives, shadow banking, and various other conspiracies between each other, to create fake profits, while the central banks shower them secretly with free money.

In other words, the lower the interest rates at which the central bank gives money to the banks, the more the banks do exactly what caused the crash. Or rather, the crashes: the financial crash of 2008, and the slower and more formidable crash of the entire social and economic system of the West (which has been going on for more than a decade).

This is true in Europe, where the enormous "private" financial institutions fed the economic imbalances of the PIIGS (Greek GDP per head is way higher than Greek earnings, through borrowing and subsidies). Thus the real economic and fiscal problems of Europe have nothing to do with not providing low interest rates (they are nearly as low as they can get), rather the opposite. The same holds in the USA.

Instead, the economic and social problems arise from the moral values of the main economic actors, what they do, and the activities which have been encouraged, creating imbalances, but mostly a lack of forward lift (hence the Tea Party, the return to no government, the early Neolithic).

Forward lift in economy is provided by better (more powerful, efficient, ecological) technology (necessary, as the old resources and methods get exhausted). So, to sustain the economy and the way of life, one needs to provide continually better, more complex, technology (this flies into the conception of Tainter that higher complexity kills; instead, it saves lives, and provides economic lift).

How does one provide more advanced, more complex technology? Well an ever more advanced thinking system is one necessary factor, dire need and regulation are others. One can even get a little help from the free, for profit market free enterprise as in Silicon valley, where greedsters mix with inventors to produce gadgets.

But INFLATION ITSELF CAN HELP TECHNOLOGY BY MAKING THE GENERAL POPULATION THIRSTY FOR INNOVATION.

***

INFLATION INFLATES THE DESIRE FOR BETTER TECHNOLOGY:

Inflation advantages the implementation of more advanced technology, because inflation forces people to continual reevaluate their old habits.

Conventional economic theory has it that people look for the cheapest product, or for better products, or a mix of these characteristics. Right. But, before looking, people have to WANT TO LOOK. Or have to be FORCED TO LOOK.

Conventional economic theory has forgotten that detail: if consumers don’t need to bother, they may well not bother. Inflation is a spur that forces economic participants to look, and makes actually the entire public into savvy , even philosophical, economic participants, lest they drown in rising prices.

Indeed, old habits depend upon old values, and old consumption patterns. When inflation permeates the economy, all prices rise, and create a dynamic ecology, by changing continually the environment, forcing speciation of new technology, that serve new habits. It is exactly what happens when speciation in biology is forced by environmental changes.

Increasing prices force people to continually look afresh at whether their old habits are WORTH IT. People see the costs and prices of what they used to like go up, and they ask themselves: why not to try something else?

Often they find the old less worthy than the new. How? New products depending on higher technology benefit from automation and simplification of production. The latest TVs have very few parts, several orders of magnitude less than the old ones, and this is true over all of engineering. Hence the prices of the most modern products rise less. Some will say that the price of these products and services would go down in a zero inflation world, and it makes no difference. Sure, they would go down, but there is a difference.

Te point is that consumers do not have to look at the costs of the new products and services, so they may, and will, ignore them, MUCH MORE than in a world where the products they are used to rise in price.

Also, as inflation works its magic, people will question MORE paying through the nose for traditional, hence less efficiently provided products and services. Basically a good measure of inflation forces the hand (manual labor) to compete with the mind (intellectual labor), and the hand is found wanting.

Gentle inflation continually swirls the economy, for higher performance.

1% inflation target is a clear problem: it risks to forever extend the Great Depression we are in. For all the preceding reasons, 4% ought to be the inflation target. This is not enough, but it will help.

***

PA

P/S: A well known interest of gentle inflation is that it makes sovereign (government) debt manageable, through nice and easy default, compensated by increased economic activity. This is all the more necessary since the present austerity packages will only make the deflation worse, and are untenable, if not compensated by significant inflation (which will have to be engineered by government programs, as during the New Deal, or with the help of national banks as in India or China; clearly these examples show what needs to be done, in the West, again).

Inflation can be compensated with subsidies for the poor, as France did in the pre-Trichet era (Trichet was head of the Banque de France for 10 years or so before becoming ECB head, and is an anti-inflation hawk of the excessive type).

PA

Nationalism, Superstition, Greed: Violins Of Evil.

 

HEAPING SCORN ON NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED IS A MORAL ABSOLUTE.

***

Abstract: Nationalism reinforces aggression, and thus fascism, which profits greedy elites. Mishandling reason is a must in the utilitarian perspective of the few on top. Superstition helps in that endeavor.

The USA would survive better, as a superpower, if it integrated the notion that unjustified nationalism is a disservice to the nation, although most helpful to the exploitative oligarchy. Europe has understood this the hard way: hunting down nationalistic behavior has become a moral absolute there. Time for the USA to follow.

***

ISLES MUCH DESIRED:

A nationalistic issue is resurfacing in the South Atlantic. There are a number of islands and archipelagos there. Their history is a bit complicated, in the sense that it is not clear who saw what first. When the Europeans happened on them, the largest land mammal was a very special wolf, the warrah. There were no indigenes.

The Spanish name of the main archipelago, the Falklands, is Islas Malvinas. It is a translation of the French name, "Îles Malouines", thus named by Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1764, after the first known settlers, mariners and fishermen from the port of Saint-Malo in France. Hence, just here, the islands ought to be French, and, therefore British, since, as the Queen of England, Isabelle de France, pointed out, circa 1320, she was France’s rightful sovereign.

For a while British and Spanish sovereignty was claimed. At the time, Argentina did not exist yet. Both Spain and Britain being now part of the European Union, it is one more reason for the natives of the Falklands to be European citizens.

When the United Nations was formed, in 1945, Argentina mysteriously claimed sovereignty on the Falklands. Great Britain coolly replied that it was a matter of the natives’ self determination. It is a general principle that, if a people wants to join the European Union, and the later agrees, it can.

Unsurprisingly, the Falklands natives opted to become European citizens rather than subjects to, what was, at the time, a banana republic dictatorship, albeit without any bananas. Moreover, it looks as if some in Argentina are made to eat bananas.

***

ARGENTINEAN NATIONALISTIC OBSESSION:

Some Argentines claim those enchanted isles are next to South America, their continent, a mere 480 kilometers away. By that token, Alaska belongs to Russia, the USA to Canada, and Korea and Japan, separated by a much smaller 128 kilometers, have serious ownership problems. Also Spain should claim all of Africa, which is in direct sight.

Some Argentines observed that the Falklands were sitting on the same continental plate as they do. This does not explain why Argentina when it invaded the Falklands/Malouines in 1981, also invaded other islands not sitting on that plate (South Georgia, South Sandwiches).

In particular the large island of South Georgia (170 kilometers long) is about 2,000 kilometers away, thus, by that Argentinean reasoning of sort, since Antarctica is much closer to Argentina than South Georgia, the frozen continent also belongs to Argentina, and should be invaded. Come to think of it, the Antarctica peninsula is a geological extension of the Andes, also implying that Colorado belongs to Argentina, as confirmed by its Spanish name, and its discovery by conquistadores.

After the Argentinean dictators invaded the Falklands in 1981, Britain reacted and defeated Argentina in a small but ferocious war. More than 900 soldiers died, 255 of them British.

Why did the Argentinean dictators invade? Mostly to distract their people from the oppression they were submitted to, and to re-direct their anger as a nationalist frenzy towards the big bad British. After its ignominious defeat, the dictatorship fell.

Now an oil rig is off the Falklands, as oil reaches $80 a barrel again. Operating one of these devices is expensive – about 200,000 euros a day.

***

ALL YOU NEED IS OIL:

According to some geological surveys the Falkland Islands may have the equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil in total.

By comparison, the USA has 21 billion barrels of reserve, enough for only…8 years. As another perspective, Venezuela’s reserve are 87 billion barrels. Iraq oil reserves are officially 115 billion barrels (3 rd largest in the world), and maybe as much as 350 billion barrels (first in the world, according to the latest estimates, a number I always held true and going a long way to explain why there are several hundred thousands American warriors in the Middle East, including 250,000 US soldiers…)

[The exclusion zone is where Britain wants no Argentinean forces to show up again.]

Argentina said earlier this month that it strongly opposed energy exploration on "its" continental shelf (that extends all the way to Florida, remember, and please observe that "Florida" is another Spanish name).

"What they’re doing is illegitimate…it’s a violation of our sovereignty. We will do everything necessary to defend and preserve our rights," the Argentinean Foreign Minister opined. Venezuela’s Chavez addressed the queen of England, informing her that "imperialism was over". Since his oil reserves are four times that of the USA, and relatively increasing, Chavez is ever louder.

A resolute British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, an eye to his incoming elections in spring, said: "It is perfectly within our rights to be able to do this. I think the Argentineans actually understand that."

***

SUPRANATIONALISM: A WISDOM FOR THE AGE:

A good consequence of the European Union construction is that Europeans have annexed each other, making their empire much more considerable, without much pain or effort. No need to attack, as Argentina did. Europe looks forward annexing Siberia, someday. With smiles, and plenty of checks, and ideas.

This new method, of tolerance, understanding and inclusivity is irresistible. This has become the European way. But it is a re-acquaintance with the basic Roman method of integration: after the extreme violence of total war, the Romans were very inclusive, and tolerant (and introduced the notion, and realization, of universal citizenship, with full equal rights, a notion which escapes the USA to this day, since it officially discriminates against some categories of its citizens).

Maybe Europe should annex Argentina. It is not because of a continental shelf, or distance. It would solve neatly the problem of the Malouines (and not "Malvinas" please!). Saint Malo is in Bretagne (= Britannia = Britain… because the army from Britannia fled to Bretagne in the 6C, hence the name; before this flight, the Romans knew Bretagne as Armorica!)

After all, Argentina is a rebellious European colony, and, come to think of it, if Argentina is not going to recognize the self determination of Falkland islanders, why should Europe recognize the self determination of Argentines?

***

OUT WITH RESPECT FOR INFAMY:

Since God is dead, morality needs to be re-established on different principles, and an absolute basis. (Replacing the absolute God.)

Morality has been corrupted with "multiculturalism", a doctrine that says that, if they worship it, it is right. Whatever "it" is, and whoever "they" are. And absolute moral progress does not exist.

Indeed it can be argued that different cultures are different forms of mental achievements, and they all bring something. That way I am a fanatical multiculturalist too. But it is important to de-fang local cultures first, when global cultural progress has exposed their poison, if any. Because primitive cultures can be highly poisonous. After all, that’s how they survived.  

For example,  Maoris ate people, and other Polynesians were known to keep captives alive for days, as they devoured them piece by piece (salted and freeze dried meat technology having not being invented yet in these regions… although they had long been invented in other parts).

But there is no doubt that Maori culture brought something to the rest of the world (although Maori ways such as tattoos were found in the rest of Polynesia, the late and massive, well documented practice of cannibalism in New Zealand ought to provide the most advanced philosophers with an excellent counter example to many naive theories in multiculturalism and human nature!) 

Unexamined multiculturalism may make you not worth living. (In case the reader did not get it, this is a play on Socrates’ "The unexamined life is not worth living"). By the token of multiculturalism, the Nazis ought to have been revered for their deeply resented feelings. And the Aztecs would still exchange human limbs with a grateful president Chavez.

Multiculturalism’s modern prophets of evil were Herder and Rousseau.

***

NATIONALISM IS A VARIANT OF ABSOLUTE EVIL:

An example of intrinsic badness is nationalism. Nationalism is very bad, it is nearly always bad. Nationalism is discrimination on the basis of origins, gone official, and made into a religion.

There ought to be no excuse for nationalism, except as a defense (Iraq, Afghanistan). Aside from this, as a pure defense mechanism, it should never, ever, be tolerated. OK, when meeting an Afghan who does not know any better, and who has suffered a lot, by all means respect his nationalism and gently explain how, and why you beg to differ. But when nationalism happens between first world people, who ought to know better, it should be trashed.

Nationalism is not a violin making an harmonious sound. It is the screech of barbarity unchained. The "Na" in Nazi stood for Nationalism… This is no coincidence. Auschwitz is what nationalism and associated tribalism do, when they are fully allowed to express themselves. Nationalism and tribalism, and other discriminations posing as secular religions, always did such things, and always will.

Nationalism is a form of tribalism that poses as an emotional ultrafilter, an emotion that dominates all other emotions.

That ought not to be tolerated.

The Argentine president talks nationalism, because her economy is lousy, and her people need some distraction, so she treats them as crocodiles, throw them some meat, in the hope, that, indeed, they will revert to the saurian condition, characterized by immense stupidity, carnivorous greed, and easy herding in some swampy pen. Too bad, I like her otherwise. But she may have little choice, as many are the dogs of nationalism howling to the sky…

Kanzler Merkel with the President of Argentina, Christina Kirchner, before the EU-Latin America summit.
[Photo: Regierungonline/Bergmann]

***

WHY TO CONDEMN NATIONALISM WITH SUCH ELAN?

As I said, the evidence of the extreme mass lethality of nationalism and affiliated feelings was plain by 1700 CE.

Weirdly, though, nationalism became ever more popular during the next 245 years in Europe. Nationalism festered already in the philosophy of Herder in the eighteenth century. Far from being repelled by the horror nationalism and its ilk brought in the late Middle Ages, under provincial and religious forms, Herder extolled the beauty of tribalism, singing its praises as an end in itself, a teleology he deprived the concept of progress from. Herder was the anti-enlightenment philosopher par excellence.

What had happened prior to Herder? Centuries of mayhem all over Europe, animated by petty misunderstandings of the sort people learn with mothers’ milk.

The civil war between France and England started comically with a feast of the Franco-English aristocracy, a big family, where each side insisted to eat its own food (roasted versus boiled, etc.), and drink its own beverages (wine versus beer, etc.). And sit at different tables. In the following generations, this comic posing ended with the durable devastation of France, and acts of war for more than 5 centuries.

Nowadays, the seven French religious wars, the century long war between France, the Netherlands, and Spain, the 30 year war in Germany, the war between France and… Savoy have all been forgotten, and so are the tribalisms that animated them. Those wars, plus the Crusades, durably transformed Europe into a battlefield for half a millennium. All very good, according to Herder, but his student, Goethe, disagreed.

Goethe was a universalist, he loved the (French) revolution: all men are brothers, as Ludwig van put it.

Herder thought it was his sacred duty to hate French universalism, and kneel at the altar of tribal difference. Herder founded multiculturalism (aka cultural relativism).

Multiculturalism, in Herder’s time, led straight to terrible wars: the Pitts Prime Ministers of Great Britain took it onto themselves to rabidly oppose the (French) Revolution, and the revolutionary reaction was terrible, as France fought all of Europe’s Ancient Regime.

In the end, after the terrible dictatorship of that spiritual dwarf, Napoleon (a direct consequence of British meddling, as PM Lloyd George would point out a century later), France was defeated, many millions died all over Europe, Belgium was born…

But the French revolution won the war: the ideals of the revolution now rules the European Union (including increasingly Great Britain, in an ironical twist). And even the United Nations (although the UN self contradicts its charter of human Rights by some mumbling on multiculturalism).

In any case Herder, plus Rousseau’s hatred for civilization, led directly to Hitler (the Prussian educational system, using these worthies and their philosophical clique formed generations after generations of Germans according to these erroneous doctrines of violence, race, savagery celebrated as PURITY OF ESSENCE).

I am not claiming here that Herder and Rousseau were worthless in all ways. But they were worse than bad in some most important ways (and Goethe, Voltaire and Sade were vociferous in their opposition at the time).

Why is nationalism so intrinsically bad? Because nationalism is tribalism on steroids. And TRIBALISM MEANS THE MAINTENANCE OF GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL BALANCE BY THE MASSIVE KILLING OF OTHERS.

That art of balancing the ecology through war is already practiced in chimpanzees (as documented first by the very Christian Jane Goodall, good-all around).

With weapons of mass destruction, and an enormous human population with its own delicate technological ecology, tribalism reborn would mean humankind dead, and no rebirth. Far from bringing the spice of originality, TRIBALISM CAN ONLY BE NOW THE END ALL OF BE ALL.

The Argentinean howling towards the Falklands would be funny, if seeing human beings reduced to the lupine condition by their cult of the primitive was funny. But it is less funny than French and English lords from the same families arguing about the merits of beer versus wine in the twelfth century. And that did not end well.

***

NATIONALISM KILLS PEOPLE, SUPERSTITION KILLS REASON:

Another emotional ultrafilter, that ought to be viewed as always bad, is superstition. Whereas nationalism means the gathering of evil feelings and ideas to promote the mass extermination of other human beings, SUPERSTITION EXTERMINATES FIRST REALITY ITSELF.

Superstition is also known, by abuse of language, as "faith". Faith is an excellent behavior, the milk of hope. Superstition is what pigeons do. Superstition hides behind faith, like a murderer behind a grandmother’s smile.

After killing reason, or torturing it, or making seriously fun of it, unsurprisingly, anything goes. Then an elite can kill whoever they do not like. Emperor Justinian used Christianism that way, during four long decades, and Stalin used Marxism-Leninism that way.

That is why superstitious religions can be tolerated only when their superstitions make themselves very discrete (Rome was very tolerant with any superstitious religion, as long as practical bounds were not breached).

Superstition is a natural abuse of the metaprinciple of causation that intelligent animals discover early on in their mental development. As the famous American psychologist Skinner observed, pigeons kept associating in their minds facts which are truly unrelated if they had happened together first in their experience. "Some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis."

Tell children that God wants this, that and the other thing, plus a few murders besides, if need be, and they will believe it all their lives. Advantage, if you are an oligarch; once your subjects believe this, they are ready to kill, and get killed, and you will stay on top, as the masses murder each other.

***

GREED, REAGAN’S ENGINE, LEADS WHERE HUMANKIND CANNOT GO:

Greed is called the "profit motive", in the present USA, and now, undeterred by the weak and scared Obama, the private health, military and banking industries of the USA are running away with greed, pushing around the naïve and overwhelmed young president.

Some health insurance jumped by 39% (now delayed by weeks, to Obama’s naïve satisfaction), and the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan tripled in the first year of Obama’s naivety, now having passed 1,000. The military budget of the USA, also augmented enormously, bigger than the rest of the world combined, has jumped up, in a country with 10% deficit. And bankers own the place, now that all taxpayer money, and more (borrowed from China), was sent to them to lose again.

Greed is another bad emotional ultrafilter, and it is related to nationalism and superstition. Greed basically asserts that having power on others is the emotion that matters most. In a sense greed stands above nationalism and superstition, because it is conducive to them both.

***

NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED ARE INSTRUMENTS OF RULING OLIGARCHIES:

When one has removed such bad emotional ultrafilters, as nationalism, superstition and greed, what are we left with?

Well, with those emotional ultrafilters resting and encouraging reason, and love, pure and simple.

Reason resting on animal and human nature, as they profit to individuals, and the masses. What is there not to like?

Why are such bad emotions, such as nationalism, superstition, and greed, fostered, instead, with such enthusiasm? Of course, ecological constraints can lead to the necessity of reducing considerably a human population, the hard way.

But sometimes the natural ecology is not to blame. What else is there? Well, the ecology of elites.

Oligarchies. Oligarchies are those mostly exploiting bad emotional ultrafilters. Why? Because they are bad, precisely, meaning bad emotions lead to mega death, thus activating the main defense mechanism in the collective psyche, in other words, fascism.

***

OLIGARCHIES LOVE ANYTHING CONDUCIVE TO STRIFE, HENCE FASCISM, AS LONG AS THEY STAY ON TOP:

Fascism is first an intellectual reflex, that of allowing a mass of individuals to operate as one: "E Pluribus Unum". Thus the mass of individuals is made by the fascist instinct into one super-organism, fighting as one: discipline is the strength of armies, because of this, precisely (and chimps on the war path behave very differently, as one silent well coordinated mega individual, and so do fighting baboon troops, fighting, or the threat thereof, being something that happens to baboon troops many times a day).

So oligarchies, be they the power elite in Argentina, or some religious-superstitious order, or the American financial military oligarchy have interest to activate those bad emotional complexes. Because that single mind at the top, it’s precisely them.

This could be viewed in the financial crisis of 2008: it was an economic and financial assault, and fascism, economic fascism, was activated. It was decided that the People would give all and support, as one man, its leader, and that leader was the same as the one that precipitated the crisis, namely the exact same group of corrupt financiers. The crisis augmented the economic fascism, because it reinforced the leader, as all crises do, if one is not careful.

This is why, as the disasters they provoked unfolded, Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin, and countless other demented leaders, got ever more support; disaster activates mental support for the one who leads the fight, whatever the fight is, and even if he started it. All independent thinking on the big stuff is shut down, and left to the leader. The mass just follows.

***

WHY THE USA IS MORE NATIONALISTIC, & EUROPE LESS SO NOW:

Bad emotional ultrafilters favor the exploitative leadership of the few, hence the great deference of the American power elite for bad emotional ultrafilters such as superstition (Christianity or Islam), greed or nationalism (remember Obama in the "State of the Union", telling us America invented the automobile, whereas the USA invented none of automobile technologies, at least in the first 150 years of the history of the automobile; but American oligarchs love this sort of national glorifications, to use them as emotional red herrings)…

The final enlightening step is to realize that greed, nationalism and superstition introduce themselves humbly always, in the small, and that is in the small that they shall be crushed most readily.

Here are concrete examples of nationalism light: When some Americans claim that the USA invented things they did not invent (the car, the plane, the transistor), that’s nationalism. When Americans claim that French cars are "crappy", that’s nationalism, or that France is basically a communist country, an American protectorate, where nothing gets done except wine, cheese, and welfare, that’s nationalism too. When Americans claim the USA is the land of the free (implying thus that other lands are not), that’s nationalism. When Europeans claim that all is bad in the USA, or that the USA is all about money, and private enterprise that’s also nationalism (but a mistake Americans themselves make: in some ways the USA is more public than the EU! Say about water…).

There are subtler forms of nationalism. Say, just from ignoring other people’s cultures, thus weakening one’s reflection on the very existence of one’s nationalism. An example of this is the USA’s discrimination against those of its own citizens not born there. No other country does that. It is a screaming example of natio-nalism: only those born there, in the USA, are fully human. Others, less so, with fewer rights. Thus establishing that principle that there are several types of human beings, even inside the nation.

Such screaming tribalism is rendered possible by being blind to American exceptionalism, through the ignorance of other countries. No other country has two kinds of citizens (but it is nothing new: think of the slaves). [After I wrote this, Roger Henry kindly observed out that this was not quite true, and he pointed at Germany. Although Germany had a multi track citizenship under Hitler, not so before, or since. The question of naturalization in Germany, although scandalous, was different, and has been addressed; for more details, see the comments. Muslim states DO have multi track citizenship, just like the USA.]

Being blind to one’s country’s major defects is a form of nationalism, unwittingly, or not.

The last infiltration of greed in USA society is charging ($300) for emergency calls: soon you will be asked for your credit card number if you want to live another day. Greed. Then, again, no other country does this, but for the USA (or, more exactly the great city of Tracy, California!). But a consequence of nationalism is that Americans do not know this.

One will have noticed that examples of nationalism gone mad abound in the USA. Am I exhibiting anti-American bias? Some will excitingly clamor that this is so. And they would be right, if I were wrong, but I am right. To deny the truth in national matters is also nationalism.

Some will say that this is my opinion. Yes, sure, but not just my opinion. My opinion is not coming naked and screaming. It is coming armored, intelligent, knowledgeable, and well escorted by facts.

The fact that the USA has a scandalous two-tracks citizenship, is hard, harsh, cold reality. The fact that the USA has the lousiest health care system in the developed world is also a fact, and the fact Americans mostly ignore this, and never miss an occasion to sing the praises of the USA health care system is a nationalistic fact. The fact the USA spends so with a "defense" system that girdles the world is undeniable too. In Europe, people would know what it means: nationalism out of control, foaming at the mouth. In the USA, American hyper militarism is nationalistically interpreted as American goodness, next to sainthood, as militarism used to experienced in Imperial Germany.

Europe learned that nationalism was conducive to the deadliest things around, the hard way. Whereas in the USA exhibiting strident nationalism is viewed as an indispensable part of the mien of a citizen in good standing, in countries such as France, nationalism is viewed as in poor taste. This, to look down on nationalism, the Europeans, and, in particular the Germans, have learned the hard way. Things have really gone a long way, because the Germans and the French used to be extremely nationalistic a few generations ago, much more than the citizens of the USA used to be.

After 1945, top intellectuals in Europe understood that nationalism ought to be abated. That ought to be a primary mission. A change people ought to believe in. And abated it was. It was even mutilated. a point was made that European superpowers ought to have no more rights than others (starting, of course, with Germany and its insufferable past tendencies). Malta (population: 400,000) and Slovenia (population, 2 millions) have, on paper, the same rights as France (population close to 70 millions). By 1945, Europe had learned something important: nationalism pays back, big time. But only in blood, sweat, and tears.

***

ENOUGH EVIL AROUND ALREADY!

Nietzsche famously pointed out that: "Verily, there is a future, even for evil." Well, there is plenty enough of a future for evil. New technologies open new avenues to evil all the time. So we have to be busy closing those we have identified, already. Nationalism is one of those.

The savage wars that wrecked Europe for seven centuries (1250 to 1945… after many centuries of quasi peace…) have been a lesson for Europeans in the dangers of nationalism. Nearly all nations on earth existing today are of recent vintage (even China ought to be viewed as recent, just as the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914 was only 44 years old, China is about 60 years old in its present philosophical nature). Fresh nations have learned nothing much yet.

It is hilarious to see the Americans furiously reproaching the Chinese the under-evaluation of, well, the Sino-American currency: talk about blind nationalism.

The fundamental reason for nationalism is the same fundamental reason for evil: too many people do not a world make. So, shall we rise above fatality and the weight of natural evolution? And impose man above fate?

As Voltaire said:"One must crush infamy"… And one should not miss a single occasion to do so. There is not just morality in crushing infamy, but the prospect of sheer survival for all concerned. Blind and unexamined nationalism is the most dangerous infamy. Let’s crush it, it’s good exercise.

PA

P/S 1: The notion of ultrafilter comes from topology, and has a precise meaning there, as a maximal element for inclusion. It basically corresponds to (being perceived as) ultimate concept.

***

P/S 2: I said nationalism was justified if and only if ("iff") a defense mechanism. Critiques will point out that offenders always claim to be defending themselves under some sort of perceived aggression. The wolf had to kill the sheep becomes the latter’s brother polluted the canine’s water last year.

For example, NATO claims to be defending itself during its occupation of Afghanistan, already much longer than WWII, and still killing completely innocent civilians there with wild abandon. Indeed, one has to be careful with the concept of defense. NATO is clearly under attack from hard core Islamism (just as the West used to be under attack under the extremely similar hard core Christianism) , but NATO is not under attack by Afghanistan… And never was. (Bin Laden and friends were put in Afghanistan by the USA, and equipped with fancy weapons.) Thus, differently from the WWII started by Franco-Britannia on September 3, 1939, it is not clear that the Afghan war is a just war. It will be just, only if well done. Which is not presently the case.

As far as the Afghans are concerned, though, their war against NATO is a just war of national defense. Thus, the real enemy of NATO is not just that reality, but also that perception.

***

P/S 3: The Chinese have pegged their currency to the US dollar. So, as the USA proceeded to lower its currency to gain unfair economic advantage (although the USA has 25% of the world’s industrial production, 2010). The Chinese peg meant that the Chinese currency went down with the American dollar, ruining the little American plot for gaining…unfair advantage. This is now over, as the European Union had enough, and found a way to ruin that unfair little plot. These could become tragic games, if people stopped seeing the humor hidden in them…

AMERICAN WET DREAM

TIME FOR AN ANTI-AMERICAN DREAM?
***

Abstract: For millennia, tyrants and plutocrats have hidden behind Aristotle. The US Constitution is mostly Aristotle, the philosopher of self happiness, and thus, slavery, as the lonely foundation of it all. We elaborate.

***

 

Overview: What went wrong with the USA? Why the extreme popularity of Bush while he was destroying Iraq? Why the massive heist of the financial crisis? Americans love to say that they have a young country, with no history, so there is nothing to analyze, please move on. But, in truth, the USA has the world’s oldest Constitution. And, surprisingly, the sickness of the USA may all boil down to the antique Aristotle’s paramount obsession with happiness as “the end and aim of human existence”.

Thus Aristotle took himself for such an accomplished accomplished human ethologist that he could draw political and metaphysical consequences from it. But, and it is an ominous fate, he was deeply wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. Happiness does not a human being make.

Ethology is a science, and that means that it is subtle, and Aristotle overlooked this (that is ironical, since his contribution in biology was to found it as a science, namely by finding out what was really going on; it just did not come to him to found ethology as a science too). So Aristotle was not observant enough, and too arrogant, to realize how wrong he was: human ethology is not just about happiness, very far from it, and that mistake he did, him, the servant of the monster Alexander, the USA has been doing, too, following him closely. OK, it was not a mistake for everybody, and thus not really an accident. Good things came out of it: the plutocracy profited handsomely, and, as we will see, that was the prime motivator.

So the US Constitution, following Aristotle, views “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as fundamental rights, forgetting not only breathing, and the pursuit of a big belly, but, more seriously, some fundamental, non trivial rights (equality, altruism). Aristotle’s obsession with his own happiness as the ultimate good for everything made him (and the US Constitution), extremely friendly to slavery.

Basically, the USA did not graduate from Aristotle’s animalistic, pleasure seeking, self centered idiosyncratic emotional arena (European thinkers left Aristotle behind during the Middle Ages, starting with Abelard, in the 12th century). Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander, who went on, applying his master’s creed, not to say greed, of personal happiness as the ultimate yardstick of all humanity, mass murdering Greeks yearning for freedom. -Hey, the freedom loving Greeks were in the way of Alexander sacred personal happiness. As a result of this troubling origin, English America allowed the rise of a tremendous plutocracy, and countless institutions to go with it, hand in hand (example: hyper elite for profit universities, the sort Socrates would have hated, and ranted about; another example, nowadays rather notorious: the entire financial system). The plutocracy and its servant institutions, in turn, redefined the sense of happiness of their subjects, to make it into an attendant to further aggrandizement of its own ever blossoming happiness as a class (since in Aristotle’s view, the “end and aim” being happiness of the individual or his group, not larger moral principles that most other philosophers believe hold humankind together).

This allowed, for example, the rise of the CEO class, constituting of individuals giving astoundingly gigantic rewards to each other by sitting on each other’s board, while workers, engineers, lower management and common folk below them suffered and faltered, and serious planning and investment they were nominally in charge with, was not allowed to get in the way of their personal pursuit of happiness. No morality got in the way: happy go lucky, especially with no worry. But mostly the plutocracy redefined the entire society as something tightly drawn around monetary transactions, hoping to take a cut each time one its subjects did whatever (hence the collapse of American medicine).

Thus, in modern American materialism, things have value if, and only if, they have financial, or monetary value. This produces human beings with restricted logical and emotional knowledge, and even restricted psychology, and an economic system with restricted capability.

All ail the USA, and the entire planet, which is on the receiving end. The planet does not know if the materialistic success of the USA should be emulated, and, or, the ways to get there, rejected. Confusion reigns.

So let’s be clear. This decerebration we now observe in the USA, by this kind of coinage centered materialism is how the Roman empire went down the drain of history. So it is not new. It is old, powerful magic of great evil power. Thus it is crucial to steer the rest of the planet away from it. Apparently, Barack Obama’s semantics (“Yes We Can!”) seems to be trying to do just that. As we said, American minds are shrunk, so Barack is trying to re-empower American minds, by telling them they could do much more (“Yes, We Can!”). It is a civilizational call, and a tough one.

When Rome was far enough down the psychological drain of history, it was unable to reinvent itself, and it kept on plunging, each attempted remedy making the situation worse. In the end, the reopening of the Roman minds did not come from inside, but from conquest by the Franks (the Franks built Western civilization in the West (~ 496 CE), before finally lashing out and annihilating Romanitas by sacking, capturing and dismembering Constantinople in the Orient (1204 CE)).
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HAPPINESS IS NOT ENOUGH, OR WHY THE DREAM TURNED INTO A NIGHTMARE:

What was the “American dream” all about? “Life. liberty, the pursuit of happiness”? That is how the US Constitution’s Preamble has it, repeating, word for word, the antique, not to say obsolete, philosopher, Aristotle. And that is the problem, right here: Aristotle’s simplistic dream of ethics grounded on hedonistic self aggrandizement was tried many times, by different civilizations, and each time, it failed (and as we will see below, for some very explicit reasons). In recent years, the American dream drifted, and shredded, as American happiness got increasingly defined by a mix of whatever led to, and justified, corporate profit seeking and plutocracy, towards ever baser materialism.

Let’s make this more precise: the particular US brand of materialism that came to reign is about whatever can be sold. That is what makes it different from loudly proclaimed materialism, Soviet or Mao style, where selling was not a criterion (those materialisms already failed, nota bene, although they have not been replaced by full democracies a process that is very long, since it involves the creation of special supportive institutions, and a change of in the national character).

US style materialism has become firmly tied to the US plutocracy. Materialism about whatever can’t be sold and cannot generate profit for the rich is not interesting, according to the modern US credo. Thus Disneyland came to define nature, and a ride there what defines excitement. It is the same with the fixation in watching corporate sponsored sports on TV, for hours on end, weekend after weekend. No need for the glorious spectacle of nature: US corporations have all you need, and king dollar will open their doors always. So be good, work, and pay, and the universe shall be revealed to you, inside a corporation somewhere.

When one pursues happiness for oneself, as the basic and ultimate motivator, as Aristotle claimed we should be doing, one helps the plutocracy to the maximum, as an individual, because that is where maximum happiness springs from (money can’t buy everything, true, and this is one point of this essay, but modern double blind studies show it helps; this is compounded by the fact that, according to the US materialistic credo, currency value is the only criterion for serious absolute worth). That superficiality in one’s global motivation is also why Aristotle attached himself to the plutocratic Alexander (the mass murderer of Thebes), while one of his more moral colleagues insisted to live in a barrel (and that Alexander get out of his sun). Thus, in the USA, the plutocracy grew and grew, and grew. From Washington’s immense fortune (a man who inherited 10 slaves when he was 11 years old, and left behind 316 slaves by the time of his death), to the modern heist of a few trillion dollars (as much, about, as the US government yearly budget, or maybe much more) with the contemporary “banksters” (to use Roosevelt’s drastic terminology).

There are myriad consequences of this predetermination that life is for the self centered pursuit of happiness. Thus, for example, the US power grid was let go: tremendous profit cannot be found in power lines as much as in other pursuits, so power lines are less important. Entire states (New York in the past) or islands, can go dark (O’ahu in December 2008). Better: California used to go dark, so that the late Enron, a corporation, could profit some more. With Enron gone, the power came back to California, sort of.

That coinage oriented materialism is not so much about what is intrinsically worthy, defined as an animal would understand it, rather than about the idea that what can be exchanged for a profit is the definition of what is worthy.

The same story happened with trains in the USA as with power lines: they can’t generate as much profits as suddenly and as effortlessly as other activities, for the ever greedier plutocrats (because trains can’t hide, whereas financial plots can be hidden, and with tremendous leverage), so they were let go (very little subsidies for trains to be had, differently from cars and planes’ massive subsidies). Although trains transport most goods in the USA, they are a pathetic sight, sometimes straight out of the nineteenth century. The USA has turned into a Jurassic Park of obsolete technology. Watching the single track train line coming out of California on its flat bed, one does not know whether to cry or laugh. Trains puff up the mountain in great belches of diesel smoke, one by one, desperately slowly, some in one direction, and, later, another, in the opposite direction. OK, the train line out of California makes a fine trail on which to hike. There is plenty of time to get out of the way, should one of the crawling behemoths come around a bend. It’s amazing to remember that all the produce goes to New York that way.

In recent years, the state schools were let go down the drain, too, all over the USA. For obvious reasons in the present conceptual set up we are developing here. First, state schools are not profit centers (whereas private elite universities are profit centers, so they are good, says the American dream).

Secondly, the word “State” has become dirty in the USA. Why is the “State” so bad now? Because the concept of “State” is alien to making a profit for the plutocrats. OK, the State is profitable for everybody, that is why it was invented. But it is not particularly profitable to the few, the better, the plutocrats, so the “State” is not worthy (that was one of Reagan’s great ideas, except when it needed the State for a big military built up).

Another problem with the concept of “State” is that “State” is about what is standing there, in the real world, not what is standing “above”, in the Great Beyond (the Latin status meant “manner of standing, position, condition”, coming from “stare” which means to stand). “State” is about what really, is. Instead most Americans prefer to justify everything, not by what is standing there in plain sight, but instead, by referring to “God”, an imaginary entity standing-above (super-stare, super-stition). Nobody has seen or talked to God, except a few rich and influential professionals, who are tight with the plutocracy (the usual arrangement observed in all primitive civilizations, before the invention of secular law as the new and real God). Thus, the American people feel. They scoff: “So what if what is standing there in plain sight is crooks leading the country, stealing trillions?”. In a country like France, or Greece, the youth would be in the street, demonstrating their unhappiness, requiring change.

But not so in the USA. Americans have learned to explain that absence of demonstration of behavior on their part by saying that it is because they are so “cool”, and they know how to stand-above (super-stare). The truth, though, is more prosaic: US plutocracy has taught the US mob to love the riches of the rich, and to get distracted by mass sports.

Those familiar with the Roman empire, “Pars Orientalis”, will immediately recognize the syndrome: by the sixth century, Constantinople was all about chariot races, and who was supporting which “color” (there were even huge, murderous riots about sports). That came in lieu of the demonstrations of the demos in antique Greece. The old, free Greeks would have not tolerated for a moment to be treated as decerebrated idiots, for the good and simple reason that they were not decerebrated idiots. The old, free Greeks, when they got together, like modern Europeans, talked politics. And if that was not enough, they took to the streets. Like modern Europeans (and present day Greek youth). In the USA, even the best educated people are obsessed by their American football teams, so they are not serious about politics, they are not in the streets, and the plutocracy is satisfied. Obama, once again, may change this. At least that was the hope, and it is very audacious, considering the psychological translation American minds have operated from the political to the superficial. As Aristotle himself famously wrote, “man is a political animal”. In the USA, man is in danger of becoming a corporation and plutocratic leveraging device, feebly feeding what is left of his animal instincts by watching steroid monsters bang into each other on wide screen TV. In the USA, man has become a superficial animal.

Thus one guy named Warren, a so called “Reverend”, is now becoming the spiritual leader, the super-stitious leader, of the USA. Warren is of course invited to be the big man at the next Presidential inauguration (hence assuming and confirming his leadership role). This is to insist that the USA is below God, and thus, beyond reason. God is apparently Warren’s concierge, as they talk everyday (according to him). Both Warren and his “God” just defeated adults who want to get married although Warren does not approve of their sexual activities. Warren says he “loves” them. Just, no sex, please. I love you, but only me can love, I do not recognize the love you have for each other. Just as in a wolf pack the alpha male forbids sex, so does Warren. In case you do not know of his superior social status, just admire the next presidential inauguration.

Once again, my drift here may surprise everybody: why does he talk metaphysics? Did we not start with what ailed the USA? Why should Jesus ails the USA? Well, I do address metaphysics, but only in the sense that I am describing the essentially metaphysical approach of the American psyche: pushed down to their foundations, most Americans evoke “God”, and their boyfriend, Jesus, as an ultimate justification in love and war. This is the twist: Aristotle’s was about pursuing happiness by pleasing Aristotle, and that was bad enough. But the case of the USA adds the element of Puritanism, which claims that, following Augustine, the real world is not pure enough, and that of “God”, the way of the plutocrat, is the real world (the first enforcer of Christianity, Constantine, was also the top plutocrat).

Whereas the Europeans evoke the good life, as an ultimate justification for all they do (the fundamental French approach, that even the Germans have now come to fully subscribe to). So it ought to be, as Aristotle pointed out, because people are fundamentally apes. But Europeans now have learned that when the listened to those who talked about “God”, they listened to the agents of the plutocracy (monarchs, etc.). And apes do not care if Jesus talk to them or not, because they have not seen his face (they don’t care if he stands-above, beyond the clouds).

But of course, when one is determined to let oneself be exploited, as the Americans have come to be, one can only evoke powers one has never seen, but that will exert great vengeance, in the Great Beyond (thus Americans tend to be resentful and unrealistic, that is why they were so happy to destroy Iraq, out of that resentment coming from their daily life). Whereas when and if one does not tolerate to let oneself be exploited, as the Europeans have come to know how to live their lives, one grabs the good life now. This has practical consequences: not just long vacations, good healthcare, powerful social services and economic stabilizers, but also, when confronted to financial thievery, one puts the thieves in jail now, or, at least, out of management, not trusting “God” to do it later. “In God We Trust” is not European anymore. Instead it’s “In Us We Trust”. “In God We Trust” is the opposite of “In US We Trust”, that is the paradox of the USA.

The obsession with what has become the American version of materialism is, at the bottom, why the USA spends so much energy (25% of the world’s energy with 4% of the world’s population). Spending energy, wasting it, is not something the USA does by accident. Instead, the USA does it by ethical design. Yes, ethical. Ethical, as in what passes for ethics in the American dream, that is. Just talk to Americans, and listen how righteous they become about energy: it’s their pursuit of happiness to waste it, and the world be damned. Ask Americans about energy taxes, and they will first scream, laugh, and look at you as if you were nuts. If you really insist, and they are quick to worry about their physical safety (remember: you are seriously demented because you talked energy tax). To soothe you, they will suggest that that no one will tell them how to live (so go back to Europe, and let us waste the Earth in peace, an oxymoron). Which is deliriously amusing since, in many ways, Americans are told exactly how to live, and why to live, all day long, and down deep in their emotional core, by the profit centers and their financial mentors. And that, to be led by the nose by profit centers and thieves, while not making waves, it seems, they do better than anyone else.

TRADE, FUNDAMENTALLY, IS ABOUT EXCHANGING ENERGY, SO AS TO GLOBALLY MINIMIZE IT. The exchange part is materialized by currency. This is good.

But, when the exchange part is NOT motivated by the global energy minimization, this is VERY bad. In the USA, the exchange part has come to be dominated by the Will to Power and even the Will to Evil. Both are parts of basic human psychobiology.

An aside here: yes, the Will to Evil, is a new Will we introduce, in a spirit of transparency, clarity, and genuine intellectual honesty philosophy is famous for. The WILL TO EVIL goes a long way to explain many behaviors otherwise mysterious in human beings. Tradition, in other places, of older civilization, hold those somewhat demented twin wills, to power and evil, in check. But tradition, in the USA, often boils down to the Bible, and the Bible is all about Power and Evil, so the Bible, far from moderating anything, makes everything worse. The Warren we talked about before, that new messiah of the “modern” USA, believes people are good only because they fear “God”, or at least, so he says. That’s what reading the Bible too much leads to. But it’s also making Evil into a religion. Because, ultimately, what Warren says is that people do not operate out of goodness, but out of fear, and fear is next to Evil.

Hence what has happened in the modern USA is that nature has been replaced by whatever can be purchased. If it cannot be purchased, it is irrelevant as a source of significant value. No money attached, no intellectual, physical, or emotional value, or then very little. Thus hiking is out, and golf is in. The more artificial, the better, because the more financial leverage can be attached to it, hence the more value.

In the end the present version of American materialism, of the American dream, means that, instead of being part of nature, one is accomplice, as a subject to the plutocracy, and busy seizing all pleasures of the hierarchy the plutocracy amuses its servants feebly with, to justify further its existence. Pleasure becomes: “have whatever is outrageous, while, and because, they don’t, and they can’t”. Wow: yes, IF they can’t do it too, we are happy, because they can’t, and it has true value! Everybody can go hiking, because it does not cost money, but not everybody can play golf, because it costs a fortune, so hiking is worthless, and golf is worthy.

Another irritating problem with hiking, is that it puts one in contact with nature (experiments in human ethology show that the contact with nature has measurable de-stressing effects). Thus hiking competes nastily with the artificial world the plutocracy wants to impose on everybody, that fake world the plutocracy thrives from, thus hiking should be forbidden (see P/S).

Not by coincidence, Barack Obama chose the exact opposite motto: “Yes, we can”! In Obama’s proposed alternative vision, pleasure does not come from having what people do not have, but from everybody being able to do what they could not do previously. Because those who support Obama now can, they can’t be exploited anymore, nor can they enjoy the deprivation of others. Instead they are supposed to enjoy doing what they did not do before. At least, that is the audacity of Obama’s hope.

Ultimately, this degenerated American dream brought pleasure so low down the scale of pleasures animals are capable of, that it got defined by spending more energy than anybody else … while deserving it less. It modifies all values into versions so degenerated that they can be traded with currency, evaluated with currency, defined with currency, leading to currency, extolling currency. This degeneracy creates people that define sport as something bringing competition and money, and renown, while other people watch, not nature and its beauty, its balance, and the appreciation for creation and modesty attached to it. It creates people that view intellect with contempt, and the rich with awe, affection, and inspiration. It creates a hubristic man made black hole of mental collapse, admiring those who have it all. This degeneracy defines the world as made by the plutocrats, for the plutocrats. It’s ideal, at the bottom, is the slave owner (and his name was Washington). Happiness is that of the owner, or the coolness of the slave, busy working, not making waves. (Or at least, so it goes, until a tremendous explosion happens: like a volcano that rarely erupts, the violence of America churns inside, just to erupt more fiercely: the American civil war was the worst civil war since the civil war that put an end to the Roman republic, and the mechanism (conflict of the People with the plutocracy) was basically the same.) Right now, the plutocracy has basically pointed a gun at the US, and world. economy, and requested more money. It got it, and got reappointed (see Mr. R. Rubin out of the shadows).

How did we get down there? How come the USA knew slavery, and then that further reign of plutocracy? With the unfolding of some of the threats de Tocqueville already identified, long ago, and that Polybius, two thousands years earlier, feared: the common denominator of the mob, in charge.

Some may have pause here: he is talking about plutocracy, or talking about the mob? Well, they go hand in hand. Having a mob means one has a plutocracy, and reciprocally (except in those rare instants in history, when the mob comes out and, out of unconfined rage, kills the plutocracy during a revolution). The mob, per its definition, is unable to resist the plutocracy, because all the mob possess is little change, relatively speaking, so it obsesses about it, and when it sees real big money, that is the biggest single thing in the world it could ever imagine. Because the paucity of the mob’s mind goes with the paucity of its possessions, so possession, for the mob, means coinage, having little mind of its own to divert towards higher pursuits.

Far from the mob, the contempt of the intellectual for contingency and whatever only small minds can conceive. Thus the mob mentality grows, hand in hand with the plutocracy dominating it. They need each other, they are codependent. Such is the basic history of the late Roman empire, the Christian Roman empire, over the centuries it took, degenerating until the Muslims and the Franks destroyed it all. The more time went by, the stupider and more impotent the Roman mob got, and the greater the wealth of the Roman nobility above it grew (bishops were big slave owners).

So what to do now with these USA that are going down the same path Rome knew? The USA is drifting, since the dream hit the shoals. The dream is all wet, as it sinks. It even stinks, as Mr. Madoff runs away with 50 billions, and Mr. Rubin is back on top, after potentially wasting more than 306 billion of taxpayers’ money (among other things). The world needs to correct the American dream, just as the world needs to correct Islam. It’s time to take a stance, not just on many outrageous statements of the Qur’an (or its fundament, the Bible!), but also to take a stance on many an outrageous deviance that comprises the American dream. Islam is probably an easier case. Islam, or more exactly the Qur’an, is clearly a Middle Age situation, and one can make a case that Muhammad would not have agreed about much that was made in his name (the case of sexism is blatant, as his wife Aicha pointed out). What we discovered here is that the USA is even an earlier case, the case of Aristotle in power, inspiring all.

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, OR WHY THE USA IS PRESENTLY PLUNGING:
The financial crisis is unfolding, and, as Paul Krugman pointed out, fifty governors, one in each US state, each acting like Herbert Hoover in 1932, are cutting public spending (California, for example, stopped all public infrastructure works, a sure recipe for transforming a malaise into a depression). All over the USA, State spending is being cut, because local States depend upon local taxes, and taxes from business activity have been plunging, hence so are State budgets, because they are supposed to be balanced by law. It’s a problem that should be extremely easy to fix: just augment local taxes. An energy tax is a no-brainer (so is an Added Value Tax, which makes tax evasion impossible). Both could be compensated for the poor (as they are in the EU). So why is this not it happening? Because of the pursuit of immediate happiness. Taxes, especially indirect taxes, involves the idea of sacrifice, and the idea that people are living, a bit, for others. But Aristotle is not living for others. Socrates did that, to some extent, and, as Aristotle pointed out with glee, it did not work too well. Aristotle is all into himself, and not others. Aristotle, thinks, hopefully, that his happiness will die last, and all others before him. That is naive, and it is in strict contradiction with human ethology, which evolved with group selection, not just individual selection.

The only solution will be for Obama to step in with more Federal revenue (energy tax and AVT). And it cannot be soon enough.
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LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, INTELLECTUALITY, DIGNITY:
It’s not all about freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, or tranquility. If you have got all of these, you have not got enough to make a sustainable civilization. Indeed, anybody pursues happiness, sometimes with even greater enthusiasm that they pursue breathing. The French motto of the republic “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is better than these pursuits that Aristotle gave us, because it insures that freedom does not come by denying altruism, and “equality” makes plutocracy impossible. The guard against plutocracy is what is missing in the American dream, allowing it to turn into a nightmare.

And what of Aristotle in all this? Well, as we said, the USA incarnated Aristotle’s dream of a republic. Aristotle reduced all of man to his own pleasure seeking. Thus, naturally, Aristotle was pro-slavery. And what of the founder of theoretical Christianity, Saint Augustine? He was also pro-slavery. Both philosophers were urgently against equality. Equality and fraternity were introduced by the Franks, and that is why they went beyond Antiquity, philosophically speaking. That is also why the USA went down the road of slavery, clinging to Aristotle and Augustine, down the undertow. (In truth, it’s probably the other way around: because the English American plutocracy wanted to use slaves and holocausts, it brandished the Bible to justify these tremendously profit making activities).

Oh, and what is the official American motto? Since 1956, it is the superstitious “In God We Trust”, which basically downgrades the USA to the level of the Aztecs. That nightmare mimicked Hitler’s similar “God With Us”, the motto of the SS. It, too, has got to go.

Another wished-for feature, that is so alien to the American dream, is not found, even in the French republican motto. It is intellectuality. Intellectuality is the essence of humankind. Plenty of social insects are more equal, more fraternal and more free, even, than we are (nobody orders a bee, or a wasp where to fly: they fly where they wish, and discover what they share). No social insect is as intellectual as man, though. Intellectuality is what makes us really different from millions of social insects species. Intellectuality is what humankind does best, and where its nature lays, and its hope, if any, rests. It’s high time to proclaim that INTELLECTUALITY IS HUMANKIND’S PRIME MOTIVATION.

Finally, to order and stabilize it all, dignity, or the closely related decency, are crucial. DIGNITY IS THAT PLACE IN THE MIND WHERE THE WILL TO POWER, AND THE WILL TO EVIL, CANNOT GO, NO MATTER WHAT. Dignity is powerful. The witch hunt of McCarthyism ended when one of the accused, Joseph Welch, uttered the famous words: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”‘ that heralded the end of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s cheap terror.

National mind sets established where opportunism and baseness reign supreme do not have dignity. As national treasures in Iraq were plundered, and the American public applauded, there was no dignity. Just like in McCarthyism before (and it turned out that just one man talking back with dignity was enough to stop it all! Just one man, one dignity!). As the Bush administration wrote extensively about the reintroduction of torture as national policy, there was no dignity. And as long as no prosecution occurs in that matter, there is still no dignity. (The British outlawed torture, officially speaking, since the 17th century; when the European Court determined that the United Kingdom was using torture in Northern Ireland, the UK immediately ceased and desisted;  non coincidentally, peace has broken out since.)

The world needs more intellectuality and dignity. But plutocracy hates them both. The USA needs a more modern philosophy to root its entire psychology. And so does the world. The audacity of hope, tomorrow, or the cowardice of despair, as now. One choice, two fates, and just one civilization to lose.
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Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.com
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P/S 1: That “all men are created equal” is in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776). It was translated from the Italian of a friend (as Congress officially determined!). But equality is NOT in the US Constitution, which explains why Lincoln had to refer back to Jefferson, and not the Constitution, when he attacked slavery. This omission is not accidental. It denotes the desire of the American plutocracy to go on with enslavement (which is obviously incompatible with equality). Martin Luther King mentioned equality in his I have a dream speech: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’.”    But it stays a dream to this day: Equality, in the French Constitution and Declaration of the right of Man since 1789, is still NOT in the US Constitution. From here to Guantanamo, or whatever horror is next, that loophole can keep on festering.

P/S 2: It is often forbidden to hike on state lands in the USA: the author, presently on Oahu, Hawai’i, found several valleys of public lands (such as Waimea), entirely closed, and guarded to make sure the People does not penetrate. The procedure of forbidding the public for grotesque reasons is standard in California, even on giant Federal lands. The reasons given are often flourishing with impudence.

P/S 3: Financial profit gathering is where it’s at, in the USA. Why? Americans will tell you, it’s because profits reward the best, it’s the American spirit, that the best be rewarded. And then they go to worship God, the maximal capitalist in the sky, extending the spirit. Indeed, that allows them to worship naturally smaller versions, such as all their billionaires, especially the greatest of them all Warren Buffet. Mr. Buffet reigns, as if he were their grand father to them all (although he made billions in health care insurance, skinning the raw hide of poor devils, selling the hides: but all that matters, all they know, those poor devils, is that Mr. Buffet is rich, hence successful, hence wise, hence everything that matters; by making Warren Buffet grand, they make themselves grand, because his exploitation of themselves have made him grand, and, by accepting this as the grandest thing, to the grandest thing in the universe they have contributed; in the Middle Ages, simple folks venerated monarchs for similar reasons: the lower they got, the prouder the monarch, hence the greater their pride in the monarch: ambition has no vision greater than deception).

P/S 4: Citigroup bailout is above 306 billion dollars. Mr. R. Rubin created Citigroup, and overviews it to this day. His students and various subalterns and their assistants dominate President Obama proposed cabinet. Nobody knows what it means.

P/S 5: Some have noticed that Obama is an intellectual. Well, he was a Constitutional Law professor, at one of the world’s most famous universities. That is hope we can believe in. But let’s also remember that Pericles, the great Athens’ statesman, was also an intellectual. But as his famous Funeral Oration demonstrates, he would have profited from some deeper philosophical analysis. Pericles’ incredible hubris (“Yes we can do whatever we decide to do”) was a major contribution to the war that killed more than half of Athens’ population, and forever removed her role as the torch bearer of civilization. That lesson, the USA should meditate. It’s ironical that the US president has a “Science Advisor”, when science is obvious. Namely put the one hundred top scientists in a room, and let them decide how much to spend on one, relatively speaking. End of the story; the president has just to fix the total scientific spending. The president does not need to be advised whether it would be better to spend more on the Quantum Computer rather than on Proteomics, or Spintronics. But the President needs a PHILOSOPHICAL ADVISER. Someone who can tell him how to think out of the box with the mouse trap in Afghanistan. For example. Or how not to behave like Pericles. A politician cannot spend too long with the issues (that is what a philosopher does, reflecting about the issues). A politician spends most of his time seducing the mob with mental short cuts (as Pericles did). This is very different from spending one’s time hounding the truth. Pericles would have doe much better if his work had been sharply criticized by full philosopher. But, although several philosophers got spectacularly involved in Athenian politics around those times, Pericles was obviously not moderated by any of them. Interactions in Rome between philosophers were many: Pompey the Great, and Caesar had philosophical advisers (too weak an adviser for Pompey, and Cicero’s thaw with Caesar, indicative of good things to come, was unfortunately interrupted by assassination). Seneca probably moderated Nero. Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Julian were philosophers in their own right. One has to wait the kings and emperors of the Franks to see many philosophical advisers, up to the prime minister level, and many times. They were all much more intelligent than Plato (in particular Buridan, the greatest mind you have never heard of, advised two French kings). In consequence of what, the Franks succeeded so far, where Athens failed spectacularly.

DO AS YOU OUGHT, NOT AS YOU FEEL.

 

ELECTING OBAMA: AN OPPORTUNITY TO LESSEN RACISM, TRIBALISM AND HATRED, WORLDWIDE. BUT WHITE AMERICAN VOTERS SHOULD REMEMBER THAT, ALTHOUGH HIS SKIN IS BROWN, THEIR HEARTS ARE BLACK.

Studies have shown that people who do not think of themselves as racist still behave as racists would. Some scholars have dubbed this “racism without racists” (see the P/S for a description of some of the flawed behaviors). Well, we beg to slightly disagree. Racism is racism, even if it’s just emotional.

Most US citizens are indeed not logical racist; they have come to the conclusion that only fools and bad people believe there is something intrinsically repugnant enough about people of different appearance to deprive them of some human rights.

But that does not mean that most US citizens are not intrinsically emotionally put off by the apparition of someone not like them, of a type they never had particularly positive experiences with. Maybe they are not personally at fault, but it’s not because it’s unconscious, and not deliberate that it is not here.

Unfortunately, indeed, there are three main types of racism, and emotional racism is one of them. One cannot legislate against it, though. If one wants to fight it, one can only vote for the “colored” person (if as obviously as qualified as Obama is, especially in light of his pale alternative… Or is that appalling?).

Racism is fundamentally an emotional response. When the object of love, right from the start, from a baby’s eyes is white, not brown or black, it’s hard to not be scared by the apparition of color. So it’s harder to love somebody of a different skin color, without a reconditioning on a logical basis, or through re-imprinting.

Then there is purely intellectual racism, often built as a justification of some hatred one has. Or one’s society has. Or has had. The Nazis used to believe the blacks and the Jews were inferior; in the former case, that was facilitated by the presence of fighting black and African professional elite combat troops enlisted in the hated French army. The hatred was reciprocal: during W.W.I, no prisoners on either sides were made during offensives by French Senegalese troops. The racist logic can arise as an emotional response to varied events: for example Hitler as a bum in Vienna felt doubly alienated and hateful when he saw rich Jews overlording him. The esthetically challenged Goebbels courted extensively a beautiful Jewish girl who in the end rejected him, etc. To Hitler and Goebbels all this could be explained, in one glorifying blow, by the intrinsic inferiority of the Jews, and the obvious conspiracy they had set up to compensate for that.

Then there is legal and political racism. Sorry to say this, but, to a great extent, it was an American Anglo-Saxon invention. True, the Germans became racist, but they were mostly tagging along. They thought the USA was so great, that white American racism, the most obvious distinguishing factor from Europe, explained it all. Of course legal and political racism reinforced the two more fundamental forms of racism above. 

Legal and political racism is now history in the USA. The USA has made a tremendous effort (“affirmative action” was even over the top!) to fight racism. But the fact is, many US citizens, or their parents were brought up in an amazingly racist society. Something racist is still up polluting heavily the emotional atmosphere (as proven by the incredibly racist pronouncements of J. Watson: he feels safe uttering them in the USA, but he was immediately driven out of Europe as he tried his luck there, and took refuge in his more racistically tolerant homeland!).

So most US citizens are not conditioned to perceive blacks and browns as objects of love, desire and admiration. In the secret of the voting booth, it will be hard for them to make a conscious effort to overwhelm their primitive emotional response with a conscious, non racist logic. Fortunately the presidential and good looking Obama presents us with an excellent occasion to help them make history. So they will have to remember that, even if they tell everybody, including themselves, that they are not racist, they still are, deep down inside, and that it colors their opinion of Obama negatively, whether they like it or not, whether they perceive it, or not (since around 90% of US citizens are not African-Americans).

Making this history, full of hope, they will create a model of inspiring brownness for the whole world to see. This should help a lot, because tribalism is a worldwide problem. To see that the chief of the most powerful democracy has been chosen, independently of his genetic origins, should be a stake in the heart of emotional racism, and rampant tribalism, worldwide.

As a result, fewer nuclear weapons may be needed to feel safe and less hateful, looking forward.
***

Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

P/S 1: As Kristof, New York Times, October 4, 2008, observes: “White participants recommend hiring a white applicant with borderline qualifications 76 percent of the time, while recommending an identically qualified black applicant only 45 percent of the time… a huge array of research suggests that 50 percent or more of whites have unconscious biases that sometimes lead to racial discrimination. (Blacks have their own unconscious biases, surprisingly often against blacks as well.) One set of experiments conducted since the 1970s involves subjects who believe that they are witnessing an emergency (like an epileptic seizure). When there is no other witness, a white bystander will call for help whether the victim is white or black, and there is very little discrimination. But when there are other bystanders, so the individual responsibility to summon help may feel less obvious, whites will still summon help 75 percent of the time if the victim is white but only 38 percent of the time if the victim is black.”

P/S 2: For J. Watson, a co-discoverer of the double helix model of DNA (from X rays studies of Rosalyn Franklin), there is no doubt that Africans are genetic idiots. Differently from the Nazis, who thought they had the proof that Jews, Africans, Slavs, Gypsies, etc… were so inferior that they polluted the superior race, Watson believes the proof lies in future genetics. Thus, he does not have the proof: it’s coming in a future imagination near him, but that’s good enough for him to be sure. In other words, of his own admission, he is a frantic emotional racist, whose logic got lost in the sands of alienation.