The Cure for Poverty

A generation or two of American school children have grown up without a clue about how wealth is created. If they ever think about the people who organize and create businesses, the people who actually create wealth and carry out the innovations that cause the rest of us to prosper, they think in terms of responsibility for bad things like pollution, discrimination, and other crimes.

Entrepreneurs are the heroes of capitalism, the brave risk takers who see a need and fill it. Most fail, but those who succeed provide jobs, products, innovation, and tax revenues to the rest of us. But because they are so little-understood, it is easy to portray entrepreneurs as a selfish and greedy lot. With a president in office who wants to spread the money around, we are in for open season on successful entrepreneurs, who often earn enough to become "rich" in the eyes of Obama & Co.

Fortunately, there is someone who can help begin to vanquish some of the illusions about wealth and its sources in a way everyone can understand. That man is Herb Meyer, the creator of The Siege of Western Civilization (see my review here), and How to Analyze Information. I admire Herb as a writer because he uses very concrete examples to explain complex concepts. Never pompous, never condescending, but straightforward and deeply grounded in reality and experience. He writes and speaks compellingly and clearly.

“...there are no causes of poverty, being that it is obviously the “natural condition.” There are no wealthy animals. Poverty “is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy.”

Excerpted from:

Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Cosmic Forces and Terrestrial Farces

We live in a world of forces.

Duh. What an insipid way to start a post.

No, wait. I don’t just mean physical forces, but mental forces, spiritual forces, and even “wealth forces.” For example, at American Digest there is a quote from the Adam Smith Institute to the effect that there are no causes of poverty, being that it is obviously the “natural condition.” There are no wealthy animals. Poverty “is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy.

Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. For most of humanity’s existence on this planet, poverty has been the norm, the natural condition.”

Poverty just is. It doesn’t become an actual force until the left takes over and begins to magically “create poverty” with bad ideas. There are no wealthy animals, and human wealth only began to exist on a widespread scale in the past couple of hundred years. There are forces that result in wealth, such as human creativity, initiative, vision, risk, etc: “We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them. When you ask the wrong question, ‘What causes poverty,’ you end up with wrong answers.... Instead of trying to take wealth away from rich people and redistribute it, we should be seeking to implement the conditions in which as many people as possible can join in the wealth-creating process for themselves.” Thus, the first law of wealth is “get off your ass.” The second is “get the government off your ass.”

In the mental realm, truth is a force. In fact, it is without question the most important force. Some people — mostly aging hippies and addle-brained youths, who represent the two main constituencies of the left, wacktivists and hedonists — will tell you that love is the most important force, but love is a derivative of Truth, not vice versa. I do not worship “the God of love” unless he is first the God of Truth, for who besides a leftist would worship a lovely liar like Marx or Obama?

Hmm, I read something to this effect just the other day.... Where was it.... Yes, here it is, by you-know-who, Mr. Gnosis-all: “God is ‘Light’ before He is ‘Heat,’ if it may be so expressed; gnosis ‘precedes’ love, or rather, love ‘follows’ gnosis, since the latter includes love after its own fashion....” Schuon goes on to explain that “one can love something false, without love ceasing to be what it is; but one cannot ‘know’ the false in a similar way, that is to say knowledge cannot be under illusion as to its object without ceasing to be what it is; error always implies a privation of knowledge, whereas sin does not imply a privation of will.”

Although the lie — being a privation — has no “absolute” existence, it does represent a potent “counter-force” on the horizontal plane. In fact, if you think about it for even a moment, it has possibly had an even greater impact and influence on the world than truth. Or at the very least, it is a constant battle. Truth is always embattled on all sides, just as light is surrounded by darkness. Only by positing something “fundamentally wrong” with humans can you explain their constant attraction to the Lie. The bigger they are, the harder we fall.

You’d think it would be uncontroversial to utter a simple truth, but you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you? I am reminded of Obama’s shamelessly opportunistic and manipulative “dialogue about race,” when the whole reason we cannot say anything useful or productive about race is that the left will brand you as racist if you do. It seems that to carry Truth is to pick up a cross and paint a target on one’s back.

Animals cannot lie. While they can have certain naturally selected mechanisms of deception, they certainly cannot live a lie. But living a lie is in the normal course of events for human beings. Someone said that language was given to man so as to conceal his thoughts. Interestingly, this problem is fully recognized in scripture, as the very first conversations recorded in the Bible are lies. The serpent lies to the woman, the woman transmits the lie to the man, and the man lies about it to God, and then a rebellious angel leaks it to the Times. The very emergence of self-consciousness seems to be inseparable from lying.

So lying is absolutely fundamental to human existence, a fact that wasn’t systematized until the early 20th century, in the works of Freud (the good Freud) and his followers. In particular, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion developed a sophisticated epistemology showing how a vital lie is at the basis of most all forms of psychopathology (at least those that aren’t mainly genetic and/or biochemical). Once the lie is in place, it causes the psyche to enter a sort of parallel universe, for it constructs itself on the foundations of that initial falsehood.

A mind parasite is essentially an internalized lie that takes on a pseudo-life of its own. I believe the term is an accurate one, for it is meant to convey the idea that a vital lie that lodges itself in the psyche is not static, but takes on the characteristics of the host, so to speak. I remember once discussing this with my analyst. I don’t remember the exact context of the problem I was whining about, but he said words to the effect of, “What do you expect? It’s as smart as you are.”

In other words, the mind parasite has available to it all of the elaborate machinery of the mind. Therefore, it can easily justify itself, elaborate itself, gang up on the truth, intimidate healthier parts of the psyche. It’s like a dictator who uses legitimate means to come to power, but then corruptly uses all of the levers of power to stay there and eliminate opponents.

Those who are in thrall to the lie are by definition slaves. While they may enjoy a subjective sense of freedom, it is an illusion. In fact, they have forfeited their freedom and are attached to a monstrous demon that they have generated out of their own psychic substance, in the same way that a spider weaves a web out of its own body.

Think of a vivid example that is readily at hand — the Islamists. Is it not obvious that they are absolutely enslaved by artificial beings of their own creation? And that they want everyone else to be enslaved by the same demon? Does this not demonstrate the insane power of demons?

There are personal mind parasites and collective mind parasites. Many cultures revolve entirely around monstrous entities that have been engendered by whole communities, such as the Aztec. Here again, it would be wrong to say that the Aztec had a “bloodthirsty god” — rather, it clearly had them. Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed to satisfy this god’s appetite for human blood, elaborate mechanisms set up to supply fresh bodies, the heart of the sacrificial victim cut out by the officiating priest who would himself take a bite out of it while it was still beating. A whole society of Jeffrey Dahmers trying desperately to allay anxiety by vampirically ingesting the life force of others. The Islamists are just the latest idition of this unconscious anti-religion. But you undoubtedly know some people in your own life who do the same thing — hungry ghosts who “feed” on the spirit or blog of others.

In all times and in all places, human beings have looked for ways to objectify and worship their self-created demons. This is preferable to having them run around loose in one’s own psyche. Take again the example of the Islamist. How would one even begin to tell him: “you have a persecutory entity inside of you that your life revolves around. You have placed it outside of yourself so as to make your life bearable, for it conceals a truth that is too painful to endure.”

To a large extent, this dynamic is at the heart of more mundane politics as well. For those who do not experience George Bush as a demon, it is almost impossible to understand those who do, any more than we can really understand the motivations of the Aztec. The collective mind parasite has a grammar and logic all its own, inaccessible to all but initiates into the Lie.

You don’t actually want to get that close to an intoxicating Lie of that magnitude. It’s not safe. Better to observe it from a respectful distance. Otherwise, you will find yourself pulled down into a false world of counter-lying rather than simple truth. You cannot create an artificial “good demon,” which is what secular leftists are trying to do when they aren’t creating bad ones. Those who criticize my “negativity” probably think I am engaging in the former — heatedly countering the lie — when I am calmly engaged in the latter — simply affirming the truth that is and has always been. This is the inner meaning of “resist not evil.” Resist it in the wrong way, and you come into its orbit.

For as old Anonymous points out, a demon operates through a combination of will and imagination. You may think of perverse will as the male principle and perverse imagination as the female principle. Together they beget the demon child that then controls the parents, taking over both will and imagination. C onsider how so much art and academic nonsense is nothing more than the elaboration of the perverse imagination — ideological superstructures giving cover to lies of various magnitude. Think of how much “activism” is simply the angry agitation of the perverse will, just the punitive hedonism of a corrupt superego.

This is the inner meaning of “you shall not make for yourself a graven image,” for Truth is a living thing, a Being, that cannot be reduced to the idolatrous systems of men, especially corrupted men who do not honor Truth to begin with. Most modern and postmodern ideologies and philosophies are opiates of elites too sophisticated for such powerful pneumaceuticals as Truth.

And this is the inner meaning of “honor your father and mother”: not rebelling against received truth and tradition in an adolescent manner, especially before you are even mature enough to understand what it means. But the Obamaniacs will always be with us in one form or another.

posted by Gagdad Bob at 3/25/2008 08:33:00 AM

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