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I was pondering last night, with a vague ache, that I have feared for the end of the world since learning of nuclear weapons. I was in high school at the height of the arms race, and feared often it would get set off.

More generally, though, I think many of us fear strip malls, too. We fear television. We fear packaged frozen chimichangas.

What do I mean by this? This: we fear banality. I remember growing up thinking “is this all there is?” Another cherry slurpee at Circle K? Another movie with Clint Eastwood shooting someone? Gilligan’s Island?

Then you finally score with the girl, and it wasn’t quite what you thought it would be. Somehow looking at all those girlie magazines you had conjured something–different. And the girls, of course, are always compromising, compromising, compromising. They think their love fantasies will be met if they just give the boys what they want. And they are almost always disappointed. None of us grow up with honor. We grow up with Sweet-Tarts, and playing video games, and cops and robbers. We are rude to our parents, who fall all over themselves trying to diagnose our moods.

We go to air conditioned moview theaters, and watch insipid humor, or insipid, morally meaningless violence, while eating popcorn and sipping on carbonated syrup.

We tend to marry for convenience, in something that might feel like love, but is really something else, and that first marriage fails at least as often as it succeeds. We have to find ourselves. We have to try new things, meet new people.

Then it is the same crowd, themselves recently dispossessed of someone else, so they, too, could “meet new people”.

Ennui, mid-life crisis: what to do? Take up yoga? Skydiving?

To my mind, this is another cataclysm, a soft one, a creeping one, a moral one. Evil easily enough creeps into this world. It has legs in this world, of people who longer know themselves or one another because they have been led by the hand through their lives by a sybaritic desire for easy pleasures, and simple decisions. They don’t exist, because they have never been asked to exist.

This is what political radicalism offers for many. It is the root of Nazism, Fascism, Communism. It is the root of black magic and actual sacrificial cults, of genuine Satanism, which I think we will find in our midst at some point, shocking the media and rest of us alike. But we will know, on some level, that all was not perfect in our land, the plastic facades and glittering showrooms notwithstanding.

We need to do better, and this starts with honesty and courage. It starts with taking the harder path because it is the right path. It starts with refusing the easy ride offered to you by a smiling stranger in his car, leading, he says, to a sense of purpose without effort, belonging without identity, and growth that results from no decision of yours.

We can survive. We can even thrive. We can build heaven on Earth. But first we must tell ourselves the truth about who we are and what we have built. We have built peace. We have built a generally kind, overly tolerant people. But inside I think many are alone, lost, despondent, and vulnerable.

Once a product has been created, it can move wherever it wants, in a free market. In a Command economy, decisions are made centrally as to what is going to be produced, and where it is going to be allocated. From there, local bosses can make specific decisions.

The Federal Government really doesn’t have the power to create money. It can BORROW money from the Fed, but it can’t, technically, create it. For appearance sake, our actual cash money and coin is printed by the Treasury, but it is placed into circulation by the Fed.

Banks are required to keep a certain amount of their “Reserves” (it’s not clear to me they don’t loan everything out every day, then “top off” using Federal Funds money to stay solvent at midnight; that process could continue forever if they borrow it at 0%, the current targeted rate, and loan it out at virtually anything higher than that, provided the Fed didn’t stop them) at the Fed. To get cash, they just convert ledger money to cash money. That ledger money still flows, sooner or later, from money the Fed created, either as paid out by the Treasury, or as it flows out of the big banking houses they finance directly with Open Market Operations.

Thus, ultimately, money creation and direction is in the hands of a very small elite, not elected by the People, and not accountable to any of our elected representatives. This is a Command economy. It is not different in principle from a small committee determining how much wheat will be produced this year, and who gets an allocation.

This situation is categorically antithetical to free markets, and to the transparency any self respecting, self governing people would expect of those who are empowered to do things, supposedly on their behalf.

I read yesterday that the Fed is considering a policy of “quantitative easing”. In no article I read did anyone discuss the actual mechanics of what is involved in this.

The Federal Reserve, our nations central bank, can write checks in any amount to anyone. The money for the purchases is created in the act of writing the check.

The “System”, itself–which is really a cartel–consists in banks WHOSE NAMES WE DON’T KNOW WITH CERTAINTY, as I understand the issue. Take JP Morgan Chase, which is certainly one of the members (a special stock is issued to member banks, which is non-transferable and non-negoiable; in essence, it simply represents a ticket to the party). They are a bank which makes investments in many things. They buy overseas securities, they fund smaller banks, they invest in industries, and all the other things banks do. Their charter may be slightly limited in some ways, but that is my understanding.

Quantitative easing must necessarily consist mainly in what are called Open Market Operations, which consist in the Fed buying securities (or whatever) issued by someone. They bought up a bunch of Euros, when Europe was in the worst throes of their Greek crisis.

When the Fed talks about quantitative easing, what they mean is, in effect, giving money to banks like JP Morgan Chase, to be used however they want. JP Morgan prints some bonds, say, then the Fed buys them. Both sides are in effect printing money.

So if they pursue their recently stated policy, then they will give money to very large banks, which those banks can then use however they want. In theory, they could lend it to Americans needing capitalization, which is why some fear inflation. This money wasn’t there, now it is there, so there are dollars chasing dollars, which decreases the value of each dollar.

But they could equally go buy up some African country, or buy gold, or short Wall Street, or whatever they want to do. There is, as far as I know, no regulation on this, outside of the normal restrictions on normal trading activity.

So, in effect, JP Morgan votes JP Morgan free money. If things work out, they invest it, make a handsome return, then pay the Fed back. If they lose it, they ask the Fed for a “cash infusion” to perk things back up, since they are “too big too fail.”

This system is fundamentally fraudulent and undemocratic. It is not Capitalism at all, since they neither invented anything nor saved any money up. It could be argued it is in fact a type of Imperialism, in which countries and companies are not invaded, but who nonetheless transfer their property and liberty to someone who did nothing but write them a check from money they created for themselves.

I was thinking about the growth of Imperial Rome. I listened a very long series on this topic several years ago. The net of it was that they constantly expanded their borders to defend from barbarian attacks. They would get attacked from the north of Italy, so they conquered that. They got attacked by the Carthaginians, so they took over Carthage. They got attacked by Carthages neighbors, so they expanded there. They got attacked from Spain, so they expanded there.

In the end, they had at their height an Empire that ran from south Germany to North Africa, and from the Iberian peninsula at least to eastern Turkey, and I’m not sure they didn’t get farther than that.

Of what benefit was all this? In the end, they still had barbarians on the frontiers, particularly the Parthians and the Germans/Goths. If memory serves they lost Caesars in both Iran and the Rumania area. They had the power to exact taxes, but they had in turn to keep up the roads, garrison the towns with soldiers, and provide a criminal justice system.

If they raised taxes to the point where they were making good money, they got revolts, which required more soldiers, which cost more money. They did forge a long term peace in the regions under their control, and as conquerors they were very enlightened. They allowed natives to do things their own way, and developed a legal code so advanced our own system is largely based on it today.

But of what concrete benefit was that to the average Roman? Yes, the elites lived well, but the ordinary Roman did not. They still had urban poverty. And to the point they lived under a tyranny, in which the Caesar could do substantially whatever he wanted, which made rebellions for power all the more common.

As I heard the history, the real reason for the decline of Rome was their frequent civil wars, which killed so many regular soldiers that their ranked had to be refilled by barbarians, resulting in a steady decline in loyalty and quality. Over time, the barbarians did most of their fighting, and Alaric, who sacked Rome, had been a Roman soldier himself. He was a commander, if memory serves.

Then the Roman Senate become the Holy See, and the Roman emperor the Pope, in effect. In that role, they held enormous power for more than another thousand years.

I guess I’m thinking out loud about the benefits and costs of Empire. Was it all worth it? How would our history have been changed if they had contented themselves with a life in Italy? They set up administrative structures which arguably enabled the creation of the Islamic Empire. Their Republic was the basis for our own.

They built roads which in some places continue to be used to this day. They provided aqueducts, some of which stand to this day. They gave us our law. They enabled Christianity to blossom.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it. It will come to me at some point, but not in the next five minutes.

Edit: I think where I was going with this is that I was thinking about the French in Vietnam. I don’t remember what resources they coveted, but I think it was rubber. Assuming it was rubber, we have this situation where the French are killing Vietnamese rebels so they can run slave plantations such that they can get the rubber for next to nothing. The rubber, itself, is cheap. But they have to supply huge quantities of military aid to make it happen. Aside from the moral question, this makes no economic sense. Why would it not have been cheaper for them simply to support the Vietnamese in making their own rubber, and then buying it?

So much misery flows from not factoring in all the costs of decisions. As Henry Hazlitt said, when dealing with economics you always, always, always have to look at the effects on EVERYONE, and at all time phases, from the short, to the middle, to the long term. It is quite easy to achieve a desired effect in the short term–what we might term the linear outcome–but much harder to make a desired reaction self sustaining over the long haul.

This is the principle difference between Leftists and Liberals on many levels. The former believe that peace, prosperity and social order can be imposed. Liberals understand human social systems as formally complex, and work therefore not to build political orders, per se, but moral orders that can be expressed politically.

The converse, then, is that Leftists seek to build political orders that can impose “morality”.

What effect did the “Bringer of Light” have on his world? His legacy: intermittent war from 1945 until 1980 (don’t forget the war with China and the invasion of Cambodia). 35 years of many his countrymen hiding in the shadows, assassinating their fellows directly, or by attacking civilians intentionally in terror attacks. Deaths that no doubt approached a million or more, if you count lost troops, civilian deaths, mass executions, deaths by starvation, and which clearly do get into the millions if one considers that it was the destabilization of Cambodia as a result of the war that enabled Pol Pot to take power.

For that, what? A crappy economy, a secret police that is worse than that of the French, and “independence”. He should go down as one of the greatest criminals of the20th Century, which is a substantial “accomplishment” when one considers the other names on the list.

This fact becomes particularly galling when one considers that he almost certainly could have accomplished BETTER ends had he used a counter-colonial policy of non-violence. The French, sooner or later, would have bowed to public pressure. The colonies never really paid out more in benefits than they required in men and resources to keep, for any of the colonial powers. It was pride that kept them at it.

Yet, he was a Cultural Sadeist. He relished power. He liked being the “Bright Shining One”. And so he led his nation to the slaughter, uselessly.

I’ve been reading some books filled with accounts of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese/Vietcong perspective, and a very common theme is that the revolution was “betrayed”. Somehow the revolution for which they gave so much wound up in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats. Somehow the People were forgotten.

Ignoring the obvious naivete which this betrays, one can with justice understand some people who follow the Communist way as motivated by what they view as sincere motives. These people exist. Yet, the fact is that such people are tools, pawns, nothing more, and their responsibility is to realize this.

Communism is a system which concentrates power in the hands of an elite. This is purportedly to keep power out of the hands of “Capitalists”, but the reality–to offer one very real example–is that Party members don’t have to pay membership dues at exclusive golf resorts in Vietnam. They get preferred seating in restaurants. They can and do demand kick-backs to authorize legitimate business activity, and work out all sorts of sweetheart deals for themselves and their friends and family.

It amounts, quite literally, to putting the Mafia in charge of the government, and expecting something good to happen.

To be clear, the system is one in which the people at the top are those who have proven the most adept at political in-fighting, which is to say those who are the most aggressive, amoral, skilled in deception, and opportunistic.

If you combine these facts–rule by the few, and a system which selects through the law of the jungle who these people will be–no positive outcome is POSSIBLE. Ho Chi Minh had hundreds of opponents executed outright. He had hundreds more jailed and exiled. So have all the eventual Communist dictators.

One will from time to time see primitive Christianity offered as a type of Communism. This argument is not wrong: but look who their leader was.

Socialism is possible. Communism is possible. But only for a fundamentally moral people who CHOOSE to live that way. And nobody flying the Communist banner in public or deep in the depths of their souls wants the average person they want to rule to have ANY choice in the matter.

An essential element of my method is contextualization. People want to proclaim things right or wrong in and of themselves, for example murder and abortion. What I want to do, always, is look at claims in their specifics, and try and determine what is best for all in the long term.

Imperfection is necessarily an aspect of this system. Perhaps paradoxically, I think an intolerance for imperfection drives many people into nihilism. If perfect clarity cannot be achieved in moral claims, they believe, then NO clarity is possible. Yet, this is patently stupid. There IS a difference between a man executed for commiting a brutal murder, and a man executed for being a dissident or heretic. There is a difference between stealing because you are hungry, and stealing because you are simply greedy.

This is perhaps obvious, but it just occurred to me it might be worth pointing out in public that no true happiness is possible unless you tell yourself the truth about who you are and what you want. It is possible–as for example Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”–to live happily not getting what you want, but it is a fool’s game simply lying to yourself.

Authentic community, in turn, depends on people showing their real selves by being open to the point of vulnerability. It is, I think, a source of profound happiness to discover that having opened yourself, you have been understood and not judged. We are all flawed. It’s in the nature of true friendship to persevere anyway.

A core motto of mine for many, many years has been that I don’t want to live someone else’s life. I want to live my life, make my mistakes, be stupid and intelligent my own way. If I fall on my ass or soar in the heavens, I want it to be because of conscious decisions I made, based on my own perceptions, not second hand opinion or knowledge.

I think it would be accurate to describe me as a non-conformist, but I want to be clear: I don’t object to getting along with others, adhering to social norms and convention, and certainly don’t favor willfully ignoring or flouting them. It is simply that I am always asking the question “why does this rule exist?” in a spirit of scepticism.

As an example of the sort of analysis I do, I think it is obvious that clothing fashion is almost entirely arbitrary. What is high fashion in say, Dakkar, is not going to go over well in Boise. Yet from this observation does not flow any need to demonstrate what is possible by consciously flouting norms, for example by getting a mohawk, or going Goth, or any other of many variants.

In the same spirit, clearly lightning bolts do not rain down on us if we commit evil acts. This does not mean that we should, simply to show what is possible, as is seemingly demanded by many modern artists and radicals.

Always, I look to my organizational criterion: what works for the good in this world? My fashion sense makes little difference either way. My capacity to think might, and in that realm I am quite willing and able to tear down any and all idols.

My difference is on the inside. In the end, in my view, we all must judge ourselves, and as Albert Camus said, judgement day is every day. Choose wisely.

The following is a bit redundant, but I am sort of like an intellectual Roomba, trying to explore a large, dark room. Sometimes I cover the same ground, but usually from another angle, and often it leads to new places.

As I have said often, Socialism is a meaning system for the person who embraces it. As such, by my definition, it provides a reason to suffer–to work, beyond mere survival–and a paradigm by which to organize decision making behavior.

Given that the actual history of Socialism has been a sordid one, filled with horrific inhumanities, one must ask how people who embrace this doctrine reconcile its history with their own purported humanitarianism.

Here is a thesis I have not yet offered, I don’t think: they understand, on some level, that a sustainable world must include suffering, but don’t want to draw the conclusion that it is necessary for them. What they form, then is a sort of pain aggregation, that parallels in the cultural realm the centralization of resources in the economic realm. A whole new class of people whose induced slavery causes them pain is created, and in some inchoate way these “humanitarian” theoreticians believe they have solved some aspect of the human condition/problem.

This is what I have termed “Cultural Sadeism”, but one which is unconscious. They know there must be pain, and the “pain math” adds up.

Yet, a true Liberal would understand that in a truly just society, we would all pick up crosses of our own choosing, and work and suffer for ends we choose as individuals.

As I have argued in the previous post, true happiness requires a bit of misery, just as a varied diet requires some bitter foods, so we can read “pursuit of happiness” not just as “pursuit of virtue”, as I have said many times, but also “pursuit of voluntary deprivation and misery.” This is the necessary flip side of the coin.

The Report from Iron Mountain is a staple in many conspiracy theories about a New World Order. It is taken by many to have been a seriously intended document, which in effect claimed that global peace was not desirable, that human societies function best in conditions of difference and violence.

Proposed enemies were aliens from outer space, and environmental problems, and there was also some support given for “blood sports”, which would presumably be something like football, but moving more towards Rollerball (whose author may have been influenced by this book, who knows?).

I don’t spend time worrying about things I can’t really research. Even if these ideas were real at one time, who is to say that whatever hidden movers and shakers there might be still hold to these ideas. Who is to say they can’t change their minds?

To the point, it occurred to me this morning that we seem to be born with a certain need for challenge and difficulty, particularly men. Our sense of self is born from making decisions, and confronting obstacles. We need, I think, a certain amount of pain and misery, and can only realize full happiness in the contrast. You need useful work to do, so that you can rest.

This fact can be internalized and accepted, or externalized through aggression. The identity dynamic of war is this: you cement your own identity as a member of group with specific attributes in the process of sharing pain fighting the other group. They do the same.

Sacrifice is much the same. Take the Aztec practice of ball games, following which the winning team was ritually–theatrically–killed in public. Those people become thereby a sort of Other; they become ritually different. Those outside their space become thereby defined in their acts of violence. The murders refresh and enable group solidarity.

In a much muted form, one sees this in sports fans, cheering their teams. Packers fans, or Steelers fans, or Vikings fans can all relate to one another, rooting for their team. Now, I have often argued for sports, the way we do it, as working to teach democracy. You have a rule defined system combined with open competition where the best team wins, but in the process of which everyone is made stronger.

Pro Wrestling gets closer to sacrifice. The more ardent fans really want to see their guy beat the snot out of the other guy.

I have to run, but I would like to propose is this: there are two types of order, the sacrificial and the post-sacrificial. To the extent the Report from Iron Mountain was ACCURATE–and we must consider that the conclusions may have had some validity–then they would apply to sacrificial systems.

For my own purposes I have discussed four types of political order: sacrificial, sybaritic leftism, cultural sadeism, and Liberalism. The first three could be conflated, where sybaritic leftism could be termed either Post-Liberalism, or a Pre-sacrificial order. Like the Eloi, sybarites lack the capacity to further their social order, so it must in the end collapse one way or another, as those in Europe will, if they are unable to embrace true Liberalism.

Liberalism is an order in which it is understood that not only is pain a part of this world, but that it is necessary for happiness, paradoxically. One must pursue difficult ends, master hard skills, take risks, and lose sometimes.

To truly love someone is to wish them a certain amount of misery and loneliness, because only in such conditions can they create themselves as the sort of person who can be happy. I have often prayed for my children difficulty and challenge, but only within a range they can handle and grow from. In no small measure, this is one roll that sports plays in our ritual order.

One sees in many tribal orders times when young men, particularly, must go out alone in the wild, to become men. We need something like this. Historically it has been service in the military, but if we think long term, we must think global peace.

When you look at history, long term stability normally comes with assigned social roles. Take the Indian caste system. It was in some respects a form of systematic cruelty. The bottom of the order was treated quite inequitably. Yet, since there was nothing to be done, they presumably dealt with it, and their beliefs allowed them to contemplate a better future life.

On one level, this system is acceptable, since it incorporates unhappiness and forces the rejection of self pity. On a higher level, though, I don’t think it is structurally conducive to moral development. It enables higher caste members to improperly think of themselves as better in an ontological way, and lower caste members to lower their qualitative horizons of what is possible for them.

Ultimately, what I want is as much freedom of movement as possible for all people. Towards that end, we all must be made accountable for forming our own identities. This can be a challenging process, so we need better means of doing it. The identity of “American” is a good start. Being connected to a place, family, and religious creed is good, but ultimately I see creating an identity as a lifelong process.

Again, this would be oriented around my notion of Goodness. Something like it is necessary to prove the Iron Mountain boys wrong, if they ever existed.