Nine short notes concerning Wealth

Wealth is evil, it preys on its own.

Only when it is also benevolent can Wealth be logical.

Justice, and freedom, can only be achieved if Wealth is benevolent.

Wealth needs to be recreated in order to make generosity an essential ingredient of it.

Wealth can only be truly generous when it has no enemies.

Wealth needs to learn how not to be greedy and selfish.

The wealthy need to learn how to overcome envy.

Envy can only be overcome when there is no need to be envious.

Wealth can only be good if it creates admiration rather than envy.

An Eidetic Reduction of the Economy

1: PHENOMENOLOGY

In order to achieve proper and objective understandings of things, we need to disclose all the subjective or cultural presumptions we have about the particular thing being studied. This is one of the prime objectives of phenomenology, a branch of philosophy conceived by Edmund Husserl to be a scientific approach capable of achieving such a disclosure. Phenomenology for Husserl was a “presuppositionless” discipline, which he called “the science of all sciences.”[1]

In order to do this, Husserl proposed a method of investigation that would take the philosopher’s enquiry into the realm of pure essences, where an intuition of the eidos (Greek: “shape”) of a thing could be uncovered. The reduction was designed to reveal an essential structure of things, apart from all that is accidental to them. He called this approach eidetic reduction.[2] It is a transempirical process, and its methodology can be juxtaposed against the empirical sciences.

In eidetic sciences, the ultimate grounding act is not experience or experiment, but rather the seeing of essences.[3]

 

2: THE ECONOMY

The economy is a science. The economists themselves tell us so and they win Nobel Prizes for Economic Sciences. So, it must be a science. But it works more in an engineering fashion than in a descriptive way of unveiling facts. It is used to construct the Matrix that we are immersed in, it drives political policies, motivations and will, and it seems more like a doctrine than an investigation – but surely, science cannot be a doctrine; so, is it really a science?

If it were a pure science, the economy as science would necessarily have to preclude any incorporation of cognitional results yielded by an empirical understanding of the human experience of labour and exchange because people are never truly predictable. But this is absurd, the economy can never be separated from the human factor that drives it. In fact, the essence of the economy has to be people exchanging things, and yet there is a sense that this fact has been forgotten and the fundamental purpose of the economy is to control society via the economic matrix it builds around them. It has its weapons – debt, interest rates, risk premiums – all of which control national policies with all the subtle and non-subtle effectiveness of a dictatorship. Because of this economists call the economy a social science, although the laws of economy are not very scientific, and, we would argue, the goals of economics (for it is structured to serve a predetermined purpose) are not very social. Yet, if the economy is neither a science nor a social science, what is it? Didn’t we say at the beginning of this section that it was a science? What kind of science can be a science and not a science at the same time?

Well, let’s see what happens if we look at it from a philosophical viewpoint, in an eidetic way (albeit briefly).

Eidetically, the science of the economy can be understood as the eidetic science called economics – the market is observed, not by watching people going out and buying things, but according to a study of charts and figures applied to formulas with a hope of making some essential or eidetic prediction. The essence of the science of the economy lies in its own denomination. If the economy is to be studied it should be done economically. The only conclusions or predictions that can be made are those that have validity as an essential factor in essences originally seen or else inferred from the axiomatic model of itself by pure deduction. There is nothing matter-of-fact about economics. The fact that the predictions made by economists affect our daily lives does not make economics a matter-of-fact science any more than the 90º that is always in the right-angle at the end of the street makes geometry a matter-of-fact science.

According to Marshall’s Principle of Economics[4] the purpose of economics is, firstly, to acquire knowledge for its own sake, and, secondly, to throw light on practical issues. Yet for most of us today, the idea of the macro-economics narrative throwing light on practical issues and the day the day problems of having to make ends meet is laughable. From an ethical stand-point, Marshall was right. If we are to have an economic science it should be geared toward helping humanity by illuminating the practical issues that affect us all. However, Marshall’s 19th century view of economics viewed in the context our current global-economy environment sounds naïve. When national economic policies are determined by the IMF and the World Bank, our economies obfuscate reality rather than shed any light on it.

Positive economy-spin tells us that the aims are “sustainable growth” and “increasing wealth” or the establishing of “economic opportunities” for as many people as possible, but these ideas become quite abstract when applied to hundreds or thousands of millions of people, and economic data becomes a weapon of war between the sectors competing for political power; each one attempting to convince the people of the healthy or ill state of the economy … because the economy wins votes; probably more than any other factor in contemporary politics.

But what we do not learn from this economic-science is what the final-cause of a global economy is. What is the final-cause of continual, sustainable growth? What is the final-cause of increasing wealth? What is the final-cause of “economic opportunities for all”?

In reality, the final-cause is always the next election, just as in sport the final cause is this year’s grand-final. The economy is, through our so-called democratic system, twisted into a game. Or, economics turns democracy into a game, albeit a perverse game that is rigged so that the same owner always wins. While on the national level the people are praying to see their team (national economy) win the championship, on the universal, human level, the real economic engineers are busy building the great economic network, a huge, invisible mesh which has entrapped us all.

What can be the final-cause then of that global matrix: Perpetual acquisition of increasing wealth for the world’s elite; An aristocratic-type dictatorship hidden behind a veil of promises of economic opportunities for all? In any case, the final-cause is conservative and non-progressive, because its main intention is to preserve the status-quo of Wealth. In that sense, it is aristocratic. It is bolstered by the great lie of democracy that it itself created and uses to perpetuate itself with. It knows that democracy is only a name and a superficial fantasy to thwart the revolutions that the real plutocratic system that exists would engender if the demos were fully aware of its condition.

[1] From the New World Encyclopaedia online: Eidetic Reduction https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Eidetic_reduction

[2] Ibid

[3] Edmund Husserl, IDEAS, p. 16

[4] Albert Marshall, PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMICS, 1890

Society and Causes

Our cosmological-philosophical investigation has led us to the conclusion that our Universe is driven by a final cause: the comprehension, appreciation and preservation (love) of itself. From this, we conclude that the final cause for humanity has to be the same, i.e. the comprehension, appreciation and preservation of the Universe — beginning with the comprehension, appreciation and preservation of our ourselves in the world, not only in the physical sense, but also in the social and ideal (artistic) senses as well. The final cause of humanity, and all human societies, should therefore be the comprehension, appreciation and preservation of itself, with the understanding that that same final cause is necessarily entwined in the cosmological final cause of the comprehension, appreciation and preservation of the Universe.

On causes, Aristotle proposed that once a final cause for anything has been established, then other causes, which he grouped as material, efficient and formal, will follow by necessity. For example, the final cause of a table may be dining; the formal cause would be its design; the material cause would be the wood its made from; and the efficient cause is the carpentry needed to fashion the table into the form from the design and the material.

Now, if we apply Aristotle’s four-causes to society what do we see? The material cause of any society should be the people that constitute it; but, if this is so, what is the efficient cause? Who are the builders of society? Isn’t it the people too? And, isn’t the formal cause, or design of society, also done by the people? If so, this would mean that society is a purely democratic, self-sufficient autocracy: but it’s not. So, something is wrong.

In fact, in the real sense, none of the causes of our societies are the people that constitute them. The final cause of our nation-state societies (and our global village community) is an economic one; an accumulation of wealth. The final cause is Wealth. The material cause, therefore, is Money, which is the material (albeit abstract material) used to define each individual’s status within the world and subsequently it is what Wealth consists of. The formal cause is the political and economic systems that work together to design ways of moving Money ever-upward for the preservation and benefit of Wealth. The efficient cause are the organisms created to exploit the masses, an exploitation needed to preserve Wealth, and, in general, we can call the conglomeration of these commercial and industrial organisations Power.

Power is constantly changing its forms, but the essence of its objectives is always the same. Its identity is based on facilitating its own ability to acquire most of the fruits of society for Wealth and Wealth’s enjoyment.

Nevertheless, because society is a thing that is constantly becoming, there is always a potential to change the final cause and by so doing change all the necessary other causes it engenders. A new kind of society with different causes is both logical and fundamentally desirable for its members, and this makes it not only possible, but logically necessary.

Remember, in order to be harmonious with existence, the authentic causes of society have to be based on the comprehension, appreciation and preservation (love) of itself. Once this is appreciated, true revolutionary action can begin to take place.

 

What is the Meaning of Life? Part Two (WHY THERE IS NO AUTHENTIC MEANING IN OUR LIVES)

(If you haven’t read Part One yet, you can find it here: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/what-is-the-meaning-of-life-part-one/ )

HUMAN IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITY – WHERE SHOULD WE GO NEXT?

The species learns to love itself as the way it sees itself to be, which is the function power has given to cultures, nationalities and religions. Evolution beyond the human therefore becomes a terrifying concept; an evolution into monstrous non-human forms.

The formation of a Sapiens-species identity, an identity which would make us value the very part of our nature which makes us so unique – i.e. our intellect – would be an evolution in itself, paradoxically taking us away from our present concept of our humanity. And this idea makes the conservative part of our nature, so embedded in most of our identity factors, tremble. In this way, a fear of what our intellect can allow us to be makes us cut our most marvellous feature away from the idea of our humanity itself. Too much intellect makes us cold and in-human. But how can a sapiens intellect make a homo sapiens the opposite of what it is? How can human intellect, that which defines us as Sapiens, be anti-human if human beings are homo sapiens?

The idea of a cold-hearted species of beings with enormous brains and weak limbs makes us shudder. Weak limbs and a diminished sexual appetite: perhaps psychology will see here the unconscious fear of castration generated by our anti-intellectual Eros souls. Yet, in our massively over-populated world, Eros will also have to be tamed. Its lemming-instinct pride in unbridled propagation will need to be mitigated, if humanity, perhaps all life on Earth, is to survive.

Furthermore, if our essence lies (as we proposed in the first part of this essay) in the spiral relationship between knowing and technology, how is it that humanity is distrustful of the intellectual side of our natures?

SAPIENS VERSUS WEALTH-AS-POWER

In order to understand this absurdity, we need to consider the relationship between Wealth-as-power and the essence of our Sapiens humanity.

Knowing and technology are caught up in a paradoxical relationship: knowing creates and enhances technology, but, at the same time technology creates and enhances knowing. Or in other words, we know enough to build things that help us to know more and build more things that help us build more and more things that … We’ve already tried to envisage this process, in the first part of this essay, and visualised it as a spiralling helix (like the DNA helix). Two pillars that are winding; parallel but interconnected. And the forward direction it is tunnelling through is what we called enhancement.

However, if this was all that was taking place, then human progress (its enhancement) would almost certainly have advanced far more rapidly and consistently on all levels. But this is not the case because enhancement is a double-pronged agent, pulled forward by two different forces. The social sapiens-animal, which we are, has two paths to follow: the Individual and the Universal path. This is the essential moral dilemma of all human beings.

 

It is within the area of this moral choice that Wealth-as-power steps in very heavy-handedly to take its own control of the Knowing/Technology helix.

The discourse of Wealth-as-power says that Universal enhancement is guaranteed by Wealth-as-power’s own enhancement. In fact, Wealth-as-power says, Universal enhancement can only come about if the enhancement of Wealth-as-power itself is guaranteed.

But, the effect of this intervention is to curve the helix around and away from forward-moving enhancement, into a circular, cyclical process.

Wealth-as-power needs its measure of man to ascertain its own enhanced position over and above humanity itself. The Universal makes Wealth-as-power essentially meaningless, because wealth and power only have purpose if they are always in a quantitively dominant position in which meaning is derived by the difference in distance from the rest. The question asked by Wealth-as-power is never “What can we do?” but “What can Wealth-as-power do that no-one else can do?”.

“If the Universe is to exist,” thinks Wealth-as-power: “Then it may only do so in the form of my own Universal Power.”

In order for Wealth-as-power to achieve this universality, it must divide, then conquer. But above all it must reduce the mass of humanity to the meagre realm of the people or the citizens; the flock or the followers. This flock is always subject to Wealth-as-power’s omnipotent systems and to the control of the Wealth-as-power-created reality.

Wealth-as-power appropriates enhancement for itself, and, in so doing, perverts the natural flow and unfolding of the meaningful essence of life. Within the singular truth/lie of the Wealth-as-power driven reality, Knowing is shackled and starved. Ignorance and forgetting are nurtured by Wealth-as-power to combat the essential nature of the Sapiens organism.

Wealth-as-power is a life-hindering force: an anti-life. Standing against the essence of life which is the enhancement gained through knowing and the technology that knowledge creates.

The essence, the meaning and the value of life is in the enhancement of knowing, but only when that enhancement is allowed to spring forward, unhindered, Universally.

This is not to deny or negate individual genius. Quite the contrary, rather it embraces the genius of all individuals and celebrates their discoveries in the collective process of the Universal-enhancement, which is an authentic, meaningful life-enhancement.

(If you haven’t read Part One yet, you can find it here: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/what-is-the-meaning-of-life-part-one/ )

PROGRESS VS THE GRAVITY OF WEALTH

PROGRESS

Progress is change with continuity. Revolution breaks continuity.

However, when the change gravitates into a cyclical motion, revolution is needed to reinstate progress.

In a positive, progressive sense, revolution is a poor term for the idea of this interruption of cyclical motion because it implies a new kind of cyclical motion rather than a positive redirection with a continual-change momentum. In a practical sense, however, all revolutions have in fact been redirecting-breakaways that have gravitated back into cyclical motion.

An analysis of this reality indicates a pessimistic vision of a never-ending cyclical reality. But, does it have to be so? And if so, why?

Nietzsche and Deleuze argued that this had to come about because ideals and purposes cannot be sustained once they are achieved. But, what happens if purpose has a deliberately unattainable objective? That purpose becomes the purpose of always becoming rather than the maintenance of what is? That it becomes motored by progress and creativity itself? Could this not be the basis for a forward pushing drive for humanity?

Yet, if this is possible; how is it that we’ve never been able to manage it before?

 

WEALTH

What is the gravity that has constantly pulled progress back around itself into a cyclical form?

That gravity is “wealth”. “Wealth” as a driving force within the libido of our very civilisation itself.

Any deep analysis of civilisation will always indicate (either positively or negatively, depending on the stand-point from which the analysis is carried out) the role of Wealth in the creation and maintenance of all civilisations. In other words, civilisation is a construct erected by Wealth in order to move all accumulations in an upward way that benefits Wealth itself. All revolutions, so far, have been simple replacements of Wealth without ever removing Wealth from the central position of society.

Wealth uses its own gravity to bend continuity, drawing it back and looping it in cyclical knots.

For this reason, the main foe to human progress is Wealth.

Cycles are necessary for the perpetuation of Wealth – and this explains why we have always had a cyclical reality. For Wealth to perpetuate itself it needs cycles. Wealth has always been the centre of Civilisation; therefore, Civilisation has always had a cyclical form.

If we now interpret Lampedusa’s famous political axiom: “In order for things to remain the same, things have got to change” from this point of view, we see the clever reversal that Wealth itself needs to bring about in order to maintain itself, takes place by bending the curve of progress so acutely that it can curl down and around and perpetuate itself as a cycle.

So, is continual progress impossible, or is it merely inconvenient for Wealth?

If progress is defined as economic growth, then continual progress is impossible; but if progress means an advance of humanity as a whole in the fields of learning, creativity and general well-being, then the answer is the latter – it is not impossible, it is only inconvenient for Wealth.

Wealth is diminished in authentic human progress, and maintained by a politics based on slave-creating economies that function in cyclical forms. For human progress to be possible we have to declare war on Wealth.

THE WOEFULNESS OF WEALTH AND THE LOTTERY OF LIFE

Wealth has always been a reactive and cynically pessimistic force, for it essentially raises and protects itself by stimulating and encouraging whilst at the same time destroying or negating the great hopes of humanity. In fact, through its manipulation of all the agents of power, it replaces humanity with fantasies of the national spirit, of religious crusades or jihads, of the glory of Empire, or, in the case of capitalism, with the illusion of individual freedom and the achievements such phantasmagorical freedoms can bring.

All of these fantasies have a common cause – to dehumanise the human and diffuse any common aims through separation and segregation. Wealth is about disconnection, the establishment of differences. The stance of Wealth is of Us against Them; of Master and Slave; of our Gain against their Loss.

The result of the accumulation in Wealth of the Few is an intensifying of the Poverty of the Many. Capitalism has long been successful in creating the mirage of satisfaction through the seeming great progress toward the technological man. But the price paid by Wealth in the mechanisation and digitalisation of society is one of an unveiling of its own trickery. As civilisation falls deeper into an unauthenticity, society becomes more and more scarred by the false, virtual reality imposed on them; a reality lacking in true potentials; where everyone has an opportunity to be successful, whether talented or not, but success depends on it being an elitist concept. Only a small few can be truly successful, even though anyone and everyone has a chance. Life therefore becomes a lottery, and as more players come into the game, the prize swells but the chances of winning it are less and less.

But the mirror of the simulated reality of false potentials that we are facing has formed fissures and cracks. The distortions caused by these cracks allows us to look past the false image in order to discover that everything is mounted on an empty blackboard. Below the fragile surface of the mirror there is … nothing.

POLITICS AS A DESIRE FOR NON-POWER

The cry for Real Democracy demands a reappraisal of the voting systems that undemocratically favour two major parties, nearly always the centre right and centre left. liberal-democratic parties, who themselves ensure a continuation of the dominant capitalist-economy of the global world civilisation. Most Western-style democracies have cheating mechanisms which are designed, according to their supporters, to provide “strong” governments.

From a point of view of political comfort, the cheating mechanisms seem to be necessary for maintaining a desirable stability. We have seen in the last few years how the arrival of more radical parties into the governmental scenario (e.g.: in Greece, Spain and Italy) has done little to make any fundamental changes to the system. Anti-capitalist parties have been castrated by the global capitalist-economy. Because of this, the System falls into an impossible paradox in which winning power becomes political suicide for radical parties.

But what if the objectives of winning the elections were radically opposed to power itself: that instead of gaining power, the objective of the radicals is to create non-power? Can we imagine a political party with an anti-power ideology? Of course this sounds like anarchism, but let’s ask why anarchism is so scarcely seen in democracies? Why do we think we need power so much when, over and over again, we see how greedy and selfish it is?

The reason is that Power in our economics-driven society is inextricably tied to the flow of money. Power makes and distributes the wealth. It is an underlying belief in our society that without money we would die, and this means Power is related to survival, and only when Power threatens our survival, as it did in 18^th century France or 20^th century Russia and China, will major revolutions take place. That Power is inextricably aligned with Wealth is no secret, but when that alliance is seen as a threat by societies to our welfare and as an endangering force in our lives, it starts to be questioned, and the seeds of revolution begin to sprout.

However, a real revolution can only truly hope to succeed if it attacks the real source of the problem, which is the relationship between Power and Wealth, and which stems from the inextricable bond between Power and money. In other words, only by questioning monetarisation and envisaging societies in which money as we know it no longer has to play a part, will successful revolution or purposeful political change ever come about.

But for this to happen, political activists have to enter the political scene not with a thirst for power, but with a desire for non-power.

Wealth: the Great Factory of Fear

The basis of culture lies in the acquisition of universal principles. Universal ideas inspire great art and they pull us out of the day to day to open much richer, deeper and more fulfilling life potentials.

History is studied as one of the humanities and, as such, it is also associated with universal principles of humanity. Nevertheless, the actual historical process, seen from the universal point of view, is a great mistake. Our historical process has been constantly pulling us away from universality and from humanity. It has been a contradictory process in which our only unification has come through a sense of opposition to other human beings.

Independence, in our historically constructed world, is won by adhering ourselves to a group of humans we can supposedly identify with, opposed to the rest of the human beings that we don’t identify with. What suffers in this process is the universal culture and our concept of humanity itself. Humanity becomes lost in the shallow, but very muddy waters that are created by so many fusing scissions.

Oppositions create alliances. Our enemies force us make friends with their enemies. Lack of harmony creates tension-full sub-harmonies. Fear becomes an impulse for living. Or, more than an impulse, it becomes the vital driving force of the dynamics of life. Social, political, economic life is all pushed along by fear. The fear of being invaded, of losing what you are, of the power to express yourself freely, of losing your language. A fear of losing your job, your means of paying bills or the fear of not getting enough to pay for your shelter and your food. A fear of becoming seriously ill, of losing your mind, of dying.

Threats come from without and within. Society seems to take responsibility for finding solutions to threats whilst exploiting the need for such solutions. Any legitimate power is sustained by an apparent need for solutions: solutions to apparent threats.

The greater the threat the more powerful Power can be. And Power with a capital P is Wealth with a capital W. Civilisation is plutocratic by nature: it works in favour of money, designed to make the wealthy wealthier. Threat is a necessary tool for Wealth. While Wealth drives civilisations, there will always be social and cultural stress.

Wealth itself is not decision-making, it is a greed for decision-making that pulls all resolutions through its hungry mouth. In order to get the fortunes it needs, Wealth must perpetuate fear. It must create necessities that only the power of Wealth can resolve.

Civilisation becomes an accumulation of massive-infrastructures, for in order to organise the masses, a massive organisation is essential, whether through private or public means. The Society is enslaved by all the necessities we can imagine to have our individual strings pulled. There is no better ally to the dictatorship of Wealth than fear-fantasised necessities. Fears manufacture necessities, but fear-made necessities are false-necessities.