GENIUS FORUMS

Do you really see much to be gained, Leyla, from continuing to hash these things out?

Perhaps you are right, about a defintion of the unconscious, it might be a good topic. But why ever would you and I engage with such a topic?

Leyla, I have so much compelling male-oriented business to attend to here, reaching for the very stars of spirituality and truth, I just don't know if I will have a great deal more energy to devote to...whatever this is. (Just joshing. If you want to say what you think about 'the unconscious' in Freudian or Jungian seense, please do so, I will try to respond).

(You have perhaps heard the play on words uttered by James Joyce about his daughter Lucia who had mental problems and was analyzed by Jung at one time: 'She's very jung and freudened'. His daughter disliked Jung and called him 'that materialistic Swiss witch-doctor'.)

I was actually sort of hoping that Neil would follow up on the topic he'd begun.

Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals" chap XI
"A word should be said here against certain recent attempts to trce the notion of justice to a different source, namely rancor. But first of al, let me whisper something in the ear of psychologists, on the chance that they might want to study rancor at close range: that flower now blooms most profusely among anarchists and anti-Semites- unseen, like the violet, but with a different odor."

chap XXVI:" I have no patience with mummies who try to mimic life, with worn-out, used up people who swathe themselves in wisdom so as to appear "objective", with histrionic agitators who wear magic hoods on their straw heads, with ambitious artists who try to pass for ascetics yet are, at bottom, only tragic bufoons. And I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators in idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude."

It is a testament to the lack of scholarship on all those legions of Liberal opponents of Hilter that they never actually read Neitzsche to catch the Nazis at it.

As for Marcus Aurelius, yes. He was no doubt aware of another time when a philospher was given power, and what a mess he made of it. By his time, the Roman republic was ancient history, and he was put in charge of what we'd now call a military junta.

One of the main tenets of stoicism is the position on slavery. We see in St. Paul's letter to Philomon how he beseeches him to take back the slave Onesimus kindly. But Epictetus, in that same era, pointed out that you did not make your body, the divine did. You are therefore not the owner, merely steward; wherefore do you claim to own the body of another? He would've told Philomon to shove it.

But Marcus, at the head of the empire, did nothing to end slavery. However, he saw that Christianity made it worse. For, if Jesus is going to reward the slaves in heaven, there's no need to do so on earth. The more the slave drivers made them suffer, the more easily Jesus would welcome them. The slave drivers were happy to oblige.

And archeology shows the result. The women's skeletons of Christian masters were so malnourished that they were infertile, and the population of the empire was in steep decline. The earlier pagan graves had slaves in much better condition. There was still some sense of noblesse oblige.

The boonies of Finland was never Christianized; Ugarit shamen are still there, as they've been for millennia. The graveyards still have 'pagan' markers. Did Fins try to build a colonial empire or oppress anyone or try to make them have the same religion? Nope. Are they hard pressed by crime and social predation? nope. Do they treat each other honorably? Had they not done so, they would've been conquered by the Soviets.

There were damn good reasons to repress Christianity. Gibbon counted up all the martyrs as a result of the order of the emperor. Then noted that when the followers of Bishop attacked a French city with the followers of Bishop Arian, more Christians were murdered in a single day than all of the Roman emperors had ever done in 200 years of active repression. The tradition of hypocrisy goes back a ways.

daybrown wrote:

As for Marcus Aurelius, yes. He was no doubt aware of another time when a philospher was given power, and what a mess he made of it.

Agreed. The type of life he lived contradicted his entire philosophy. Stoicism in its purest form is similar to Taoism in many respects. This is probably why he suffered considerable anguish leading up to the moment of his death, as he probably began to truly behold the extent of the suffering he inflicted on others.

Ryan,

For instance: If I have a mystical experience, which can happen, and I don’t have the reasoning skills to deal with it, I may conclude something ridiculous afterwards such as: “I’m the most special being in the cosmos, or I can feel the energy of Jesus, or I am Jesus….

But all of these conclusions are the result of an immature thinker that hasn’t developed the sound reasoning necessary to adequately and humbly dismiss the worth of these experiences. A sane thinker is able to forget and move on, without any sort of ego-boosting conclusions.

Why would you rather be sane than insane?

daybrown,

Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals" chap XI
"A word should be said here against certain recent attempts to trce the notion of justice to a different source, namely rancor. But first of al, let me whisper something in the ear of psychologists, on the chance that they might want to study rancor at close range: that flower now blooms most profusely among anarchists and anti-Semites- unseen, like the violet, but with a different odor."

chap XXVI:" I have no patience with mummies who try to mimic life, with worn-out, used up people who swathe themselves in wisdom so as to appear "objective", with histrionic agitators who wear magic hoods on their straw heads, with ambitious artists who try to pass for ascetics yet are, at bottom, only tragic bufoons. And I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators in idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude."

I could find passages that oppose these. Nietzsche is all over the place, we have to try and get him in context.

Interesting that in the first case it is anarchists and anti-Semites. It is easy to see that Nietzsche is opposed to all anarchists ("equality for all!"). Most of the "herd" today is the next closest to anarchist. I'm not arguing that Nietzsche was anti-Semite or that he supported the movement, I'm just suggesting that Nietzsche would view Hitler in a respectable light because of his will to power; Hitler has a goal and wages a war for it. Zarathustra: "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause."

Neil wrote:

Why would you rather be sane than insane?

Sanity is measured by many factors. But generally speaking, people who believe that there is a separate self that thinks independently of the world’s causal factors tend to fall into the insane category, whereas the ones that realize that free will and choice are an illusion tend to behave in way that is much more sane.

Ryan Rudolph wrote:Sanity is measured by many factors. But generally speaking, people who believe that there is a separate self that thinks independently of the world’s causal factors tend to fall into the insane category, whereas the ones that realize that free will and choice are an illusion tend to behave in way that is much more sane.

Doesn't answer the question: why would you rather be sane than insane?

As for the terms, they are simply ways of comparing an individual to other individuals; does he meet the mark and agree with them(/you), or is he deluded?

Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals" chap XI
"A word should be said here against certain recent attempts to trce the notion of justice to a different source, namely rancor. But first of al, let me whisper something in the ear of psychologists, on the chance that they might want to study rancor at close range: that flower now blooms most profusely among anarchists and anti-Semites- unseen, like the violet, but with a different odor."

chap XXVI:" I have no patience with mummies who try to mimic life, with worn-out, used up people who swathe themselves in wisdom so as to appear "objective", with histrionic agitators who wear magic hoods on their straw heads, with ambitious artists who try to pass for ascetics yet are, at bottom, only tragic bufoons. And I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators in idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude."
Note, this is a late work (1887), and in the beginning, he mentions the misinterpretations of other works which he tried to clarify here.

By his lites, the will to power to do any good always assumed *rational* leadership. Hitler's anti-semitism and the Nazi party's use of new media, film and radio to demagogue with was just the kind of thing Nietzsche was afraid would happen. He seems perfectly aware that much of what was in Zarathustra went right over the heads of most readers, who missed the sarcasm.

Perhaps I should have continued the cite from chap XXVI:
"a moral attitude. (The ease with which any wretched imposture succeeds in present day Germany may be attributed to the progressive stultification of the German mind. The reason for this general spread of inanity may be found in a diet composed entirely of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagner's music. Our National vanity and hemmed in situation and the shaking palsy of current ideas have each done their bit to prepare us for such a diet) Europe is extremely rich in stimulants; in fact, it depends entirely on stimulants and distilled spirits. This may explain the prevalence of counterfeit ideals, those most rarefied distillations of the spirit, as well as the quasi-alcoholic fumes one breathes wherever one goes. I wonder how many cargoes of fake idealism, fake heroism, and fake eloquence, how many tons of compassion liqueur (Brand: La Religion De La Souffrance), how many stilts of "virtuous indignation" for the use of the intellectually flat footed, hwo many comedians of Christian morality Europe would have to export to clear the air..."

[his parens] and we all know who bought all the exported bullshit. If anyone can find any later work to clarify or repudiate any of this, I would be most grateful.

Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, seems to draw on Nietzsche's 1872, "The Birth of Tragedy" when he observed that whereas Dionysianism (archetypal Native European religion) was based on works of theater claiming allegorical truth, the Levantine religions were based on works of literature claiming literal truth. If you just dont get it, it makes perfect sense to prefer the Levantine traditions.

In "The Birth of Tragedy", Neitsche chap III, says in reference to these artistic works:"And the beholder may find himself dismayed in the presence of such overflowing life and ask himself what potion these heady people [the Greeks] must have drunk in order to behold, in whatever direction they looked, Helen laughing back at them, the beguiling image of their own existance."

Well, RG Wasson, "The Road to Eleusis" tells us what the potion is:"Kykeion" it was made of barley all right, but what Albert Hoffman of Sandoz labs pointed out to Wasson looking at the data, is that this barley was infected with Claviceps Pupurea [aka ergot]. and what they were doing during Komos at the famous Eleusinian Mysteries was drinking a brew laced with Lysergic acids.

Neil wrote:

Doesn't answer the question: why would you rather be sane than insane?

Well, sane people make more sense, their thoughts are clearer, consistent, and grounded in reality, whereas to be insane is undesirable to me because one’s conclusions, thoughts, and way of perceiving the world doesn’t correlate to how the world actually is.

It is merely the desire for superiority, intelligence, truth, and a masculine mindset that makes me value sanity more than insanity.

What makes the spiritual life so challenging is that we are genetically predisposed to behave in ways that are insane.

Ryan,

NM: Doesn't answer the question: why would you rather be sane than insane?

RR: Well, sane people make more sense, their thoughts are clearer, consistent, and grounded in reality, whereas to be insane is undesirable to me because one’s conclusions, thoughts, and way of perceiving the world doesn’t correlate to how the world actually is.

This is how society defines sanity. Perhaps they are wrong though, the sane ones.

daywhatever,

Please read this it should be pretty self explanatory.

From Genealogy of Morals, Part 1:

16

Let’s bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. If it’s true that the second value in each pair has for a long time had the upper hand, there’s still no lack of places where the battle goes on without a final decision. We ourselves could say that in the intervening time the battle has been constantly drawn to greater heights and even greater depths and has become continuously more spiritual, so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature,” a more spiritual nature, than that it is split in this sense and is truly a battleground for these opposites.

The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome Against Judea, Judea Against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, the contradiction between these deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jews were something contrary to nature itself, something like its monstrous polar opposite. In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred against the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.

By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat oneself again to the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience. (Incidentally, we must not underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct, when it ascribed this very book of hate to the name of the disciple of love, the same man to whom it attributed that wildly enthusiastic amorous gospel—there is some truth to this, no matter how much literary counterfeiting may have been necessary for that book to make the point).

The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then—or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what was doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of resentment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality. Just compare people with related talents—say, the Chinese or the Germans—with the Jews in order to understand who is ranked first and who is ranked fifth.

Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there’s not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is people bow down to today in Rome as the personification of all the highest values—and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, all the places where people have become merely tame or want to become tame—in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (in front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet worker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary).

Now, this is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered. It’s true that in the Renaissance there was a brilliant, incredible re-awakening of the classical ideal, the noble way of evaluating everything. Rome itself behaved like someone who had woken up from a coma induced by the pressure of the new Jewish Rome built over it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called “the church.” But immediately Judea triumphed again, thanks to that basically vulgar (German and English) movement of resentment, which we call the Reformation, together with what had to follow as a consequence, the re-establishment of the church, as well as the re-establishment of the old grave-like tranquillity of classical Rome.

In what is an even more decisive and deeper sense, Judea once again was victorious over the classical ideal at the time of the French Revolution. The last political nobility which we had in Europe, in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, broke apart under the instincts of popular resentment—never on earth has there been heard a greater rejoicing, a noisier enthusiasm! It’s true that in the midst of all this the most dreadful and most unexpected events took place: the old ideal itself stepped physically and with unheard-of splendour before the eyes and the conscience of humanity—and once again stronger, simpler, and more urgently than ever rang out, in opposition to the old lie, to the slogan of resentment about the privileged rights of the majority, in opposition to that will for a low condition, abasement, equality, for the decline and extinguishing of mankind—in opposition to all that there rang out a fearsome and delightful counter-slogan about the privileged rights of the few! As a last signpost to a different road, Napoleon appeared, the most singular and late-born man there ever was, and in him the problem of the inherently noble ideal was made flesh. We might well think about what sort of a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman . . .

17

Did that end it? Was that greatest of all opposition of ideals thus set ad acta [aside] for all time? Or was it merely postponed, postponed indefinitely? . . . Some day, after a much longer preparation, will an even more fearful blaze from the old fire not have to take place? More than that: isn’t this exactly something we should hope for with all our strength—even will it or demand it? . . .

Anyone who, like my readers, begins to reflect on these points and to think further will have difficulty coming to a quick conclusion—reason enough for me to come to a conclusion myself, provided that it has been crystal clear for a long time what I want, precisely what I want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the body of my last book: “Beyond Good and Evil” . . . at least this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.”

daybrown,

Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals" chap XI
"A word should be said here against certain recent attempts to trce the notion of justice to a different source, namely rancor. But first of al, let me whisper something in the ear of psychologists, on the chance that they might want to study rancor at close range: that flower now blooms most profusely among anarchists and anti-Semites- unseen, like the violet, but with a different odor."

So what? Once again I am not arguing Nietzsche is anti-Semite, only that he would have respected Hitler for his will to power.

By his lites, the will to power to do any good always assumed *rational* leadership. Hitler's anti-semitism and the Nazi party's use of new media, film and radio to demagogue with was just the kind of thing Nietzsche was afraid would happen. He seems perfectly aware that much of what was in Zarathustra went right over the heads of most readers, who missed the sarcasm.

1) Proof? 2) Hitler wasn't rational? He sure planned his war and conquest well. Maybe he lied and cheated, maybe his goal was different than Nietzsche's, but this is no reason for Nietzsche to not respect him.

Perhaps I should have continued the cite from chap XXVI:
"a moral attitude. (The ease with which any wretched imposture succeeds in present day Germany may be attributed to the progressive stultification of the German mind. The reason for this general spread of inanity may be found in a diet composed entirely of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagner's music. Our National vanity and hemmed in situation and the shaking palsy of current ideas have each done their bit to prepare us for such a diet) Europe is extremely rich in stimulants; in fact, it depends entirely on stimulants and distilled spirits. This may explain the prevalence of counterfeit ideals, those most rarefied distillations of the spirit, as well as the quasi-alcoholic fumes one breathes wherever one goes. I wonder how many cargoes of fake idealism, fake heroism, and fake eloquence, how many tons of compassion liqueur (Brand: La Religion De La Souffrance), how many stilts of "virtuous indignation" for the use of the intellectually flat footed, hwo many comedians of Christian morality Europe would have to export to clear the air..."

This was written when... 50 years before the Nazi's?


Please cut the random quotes out of context and unintelligible babbling.

Neil wrote:

This is how society defines sanity. Perhaps they are wrong though, the sane ones.

I think you are mistaken. Society, which are the majority of individuals despise truth, and truth is the only road to sanity, therefore I would suggest that society is mostly insane, as all their values contradict truth.

Ryan,

RR: I think you are mistaken. Society, which are the majority of individuals despise truth, and truth is the only road to sanity, therefore I would suggest that society is mostly insane, as all their values contradict truth.

Okay so truth leads to sanity.... You still haven't said why you would rather be sane than insane. Am I to assume it is because your parents and society raised you to believe that being "insane" is "bad"? Similar to how you want to be moral and wise at the same time....

Neil wrote:

Okay so truth leads to sanity.... You still haven't said why you would rather be sane than insane. Am I to assume it is because your parents and society raised you to believe that being "insane" is "bad"? Similar to how you want to be moral and wise at the same time....

Being sane isn’t a choice, so it isn’t like I would rather be sane or insane, free will is an illusion, some are just genetically predetermined to be sane to a certain degree, it is relative. And no, my parents are not sane, they are dishonest and insane. and the views of collective society is the herd mentality, which I disagree with, namely that one should strive to get more status, more money, a pretty wife, children, a BMW, a vacation every year. The American dream is rather insane in the eyes of those who are sane.

It seems to me that we are evolving to be solitary and asexual, and technology will probably do our reproducing for us.

Ryan Rudolph wrote:I think you are mistaken. Society, which are the majority of individuals despise truth, and truth is the only road to sanity, therefore I would suggest that society is mostly insane, as all their values contradict truth.

I'm thinking it might be useful to talk about rationality and reason, and not use the word sanity.

If someone rejects rationality, then there is no point talking to them: you can not convince them of something with a rational argument, as they have rejected that. And the utility of rationality seems clear enough to me, and perhaps even most people accept it a good deal of the time (but most - possibly all - people have areas or times in which they act a-rationally or irrationally).

Sanity, on the other hand, seems more like a value judgement, and seems to have more to do with conformity to a set of accepted views than abstract rationality. It's possible to be quite rational, but for other people to consider you insane, if the product of your rational thinking varies significantly from the group consensus. Sanity seems like more of an opinion.

Rationality seems a bit more objective, and more applicable to particular ideas or statements themselves instead of to persons. An insane person could make rational statements, even if it is only accidentally.

Dhodges wrote:

I'm thinking it might be useful to talk about rationality and reason, and not use the word sanity.

In my opinion, we should be able to use the terms interchangeably. For instance: A sane person is a rational person, and an insane person is an irrational person. I agree that sanity is very relative. For instance someone in an insane asylum is very insane, but your mediocre John Doe working his 9-5 job is also mildly insane because if you speak with him directly, one soon discovers that he doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Ryan,

In my opinion, we should be able to use the terms interchangeably. For instance: A sane person is a rational person, and an insane person is an irrational person. I agree that sanity is very relative. For instance someone in an insane asylum is very insane, but your mediocre John Doe working his 9-5 job is also mildly insane because if you speak with him directly, one soon discovers that he doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Perhaps you are the flawed one wanting everything to make sense.

Neil wrote:

Perhaps you are the flawed one wanting everything to make sense.

Who said I wanted everything to make sense? I’m simply stating the fact that most people do not make sense. Do you understand that there is a difference between stating something as the case, and wanting something to be other than what it is?

<Europe is extremely rich in stimulants; in fact, it depends entirely on stimulants and distilled spirits. This may explain the prevalence of counterfeit ideals, those most rarefied distillations of the spirit, as well as the quasi-alcoholic fumes one breathes wherever one goes. I wonder how many cargoes of fake idealism, fake heroism, and fake eloquence, how many tons of compassion liqueur (Brand: La Religion De La Souffrance), how many stilts of "virtuous indignation" for the use of the intellectually flat footed, hwo many comedians of Christian morality Europe would have to export to clear the air...">
Catch Nietzsche's reference to *stimulants*? And now we know that Hitler and the entire upper echelon of the Nazis were a buncha meth heads.

Hitler got the reputation of a superman during election campaigns when he would run for 5 days straight, from breakfast lunches with the good old boys to afternoon and evening rallys, with radio bits fit in, and then all night strategy meetings that lasted til breakfast.

The Germans didnt know he was doing crank. Nietzche never imagined a nation could be beguiled by this kind of leadership; it'd never been tried before. As for the Romans, here again we have a biochemical problem he knew nothing of. But the lead levels in the skeletons of the aristocracy fit with the upscale the Roman had of replacing their cheap kitchen pottery with trendy lead pots. And even worse, their favorite fish sauce, that sat on every table like ketchup, was in a lead bottle, with the acid in the sauce dissolving the lead.

Thus, Augustus, the first "family values" guy tries to come up with ways to promote fertility in women. We know now what the problem was. And when you read Gibbon, you find out that only a couple of the successful emperors actually grew up in Rome. The few dozen of really competent leaders they had all grew up on farms out in the boonies.

The Aristocracy also engaged in monoculture, wheat, as the cheapest way to feed the largest slave class. But without the varied diet that the sons of the yeoman farmers had, they were not too smart. By the time of Claudius, the entire Praetorian guard was made up of Germans. (and thus we first begin to hear the phrase "Das Kaiser")

Jared Diamond reports that 80% of global agribusiness grows just 5 crops: corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, and cotton. And when you read the labels in the thousands of items in the stupid market, you keep seeing these first 4 over and over again. And today also, Robert Kaplan, "Imperial Grunts" reports that half of the Green Berets grew up on family farms. This is but 1% of the total population providing 50% of the nation's most competent soldiers.

Archeology has moved beyond the carved marble Nietzsche knew about, and on into the obscure rural areas, like the farms in Germany, where they see Roman tools. We can see that those men who would not be slaves, stole the tools needed to farm with, and moved into the Black Forest. And it is their competent sons who sometimes signed up for the "all volunteer" Roman army, and even ended up in Rome's Praetorian guard.

Nietzsche didnt know about this. He prolly did read Tacitus, and knew that at German Tribal meetings, even the women and slaves rose to speak. And he certainly know of the long period of German city states which Machiavelli praises so highly. Imagine the integrity. The man appears in the courthouse, and announces publically what his fair share of the taxes were when he pays them. Everyone in town knows who the cheapskates are, and do business with them accordingly.

Nietzsche didnt know that for hundreds of years after Caesar conquered Gaul, the men who would neither be slaves, nor slavedrivers, fled to Germany. Had he been more familiar with the farm economy, he would've given more thot to the effect of the Junker family's manipulation of the grain market which drove millions of these descendants of free spirited yeoman to America- who then later would come back and kick ass on the Nazis.

We dont now hear much about Noblesse Oblige, but he understood it as an integral part of the Ubermench. The Genealogy of Morals, chap VII:"It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that 'only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!'... We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish inversion of values... In reference to the grand and unspeakably disastrous initiative which the Jews have launched by this most radical declarations of war, I wish to repeat a statement I made in a different context [Beyond Good and Evil], to wit, that it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply because it has triumphed so completely."

And as he says elsewhere, they did all this with a Jewish religion, namely Christianity. He has no problem with the Jews as a people, a culture, as themselves; it is the adoption of Jewish values by the Gentiles he sees as the problem. We hear the hatred from the Christian pulpits, now focused more against the Moslems, who themselves have another Jewish religion. A pox on all their houses.

The problem he's getting at, is that you dont let the monkeys run the zoo. They hate the gorillas. We are beginning to unravel the human genome, and beginning to see the genetic endowment, or the lack thereof. Education is necessary, but its not sufficient. Without enuf intelligence and sanity, what you get is demagogic leadership.

i dont blame Marcus Aurelius for giving up Stoicism to be emperor; he was no doubt already aware of how bad leadership could make things so much worse. But he was only the titular head of what we'd now call a Junta, and didnt really have that many options to improve the situation. As for Commodus, I think Marcus had been cuckholded.

Ryan Rudolph wrote: For instance someone in an insane asylum is very insane, but your mediocre John Doe working his 9-5 job is also mildly insane because if you speak with him directly, one soon discovers that he doesn’t make a lick of sense.

I agree with that. Most people are both irrational and insane to some degree, and the two states are closely related.

It might may be more useful to not think about particular people, but to consider the rationality of particular statements, ideas, or views of the world.

An idea might be irrational because it does not follow from a given set of premises. Or an idea might be insane in that the premise is made up (does not correspond to an observable reality). An idea might have come from an insane or irrational person, but that does not mean that it is necessarily wrong (that's the argumentum ad hominem).

so- is there enuf sanity to keep the system functional, or is it so deluded that resource mismanagement will cause catostrophic collapse?

Daybrown wrote:

so- is there enuf sanity to keep the system functional, or is it so deluded that resource mismanagement will cause catostrophic collapse?

In my opinion, that is happening now to very small degree. For instance: The War in Iraq, the failing US housing market and bad US credit is having global economic affects in places like Canada, Europe and Asia. However, Resource mismanagement will not be the cause of a total global collapse. If that sort of event is coming over the horizon, I think it will be caused by drastic environmental changes related to climate change, which could cause major cities to flood, destroy fertile farmland, and cause men to ultimately regress back into a sort of tribal primitive consciousness for a period of time. Basically, if things get bad enough, much of the world could start behaving like the people of Iraq – a fearful panic struggle for power, food and resources resulting in murder, rape and other unimaginable atrocities.

~And I think to myself….. What a wonderful world…~

Ryan Rudolph wrote:Daybrown wrote:

so- is there enuf sanity to keep the system functional, or is it so deluded that resource mismanagement will cause catostrophic collapse?

In my opinion, that is happening now to very small degree. For instance: The War in Iraq, the failing US housing market

What do you mean by 'the failing US housing market?

Are you basically referring to the phenomena of people buying houses for 'no money down' and then failing to achieve the net-income to pay for it?

Cory wrote:

What do you mean by 'the failing US housing market?

Are you basically referring to the phenomena of people buying houses for 'no money down' and then failing to achieve the net-income to pay for it?

Many Americans are buying oversized homes that they don’t need with money they don’t have, and their payback is dependent on the married couples staying together with each other, which is a precarious situation at best.

As a result, the American economy is experiencing record numbers of foreclosures and bankruptcies.

And from what I understand, the banks, and private financial firms basically sell their debt from the customers to other companies in other countries, which make money off of the interest. However, the whole transaction only works if the American home owners actually pay back their loans, which they are not doing in record numbers, so both the banks, and the international investors are losing a lot money in the deal, which is causing foreign investors to stop putting money, or taking the debt load of other countries like the US because they don’t trust them.

Also the Iraq war is leaving such a bad taste in people’s mouth internationally that many countries have stopped using the US dollar as its trading currency, and instead have switched to the Euro, Yen or some alternative.

So the American economy is definitely going through a slowdown. However, the economic growth in many of these international markets have been largely dependent on wasteful US spending and consumption patterns, so if the US deficit of 8 trillion dollars eventually sends the country into a recession, which many economists are saying is already happening, then this will definitely have a trickle down affect into many other developing and developed countries as well.

And finally, the Canadian dollar is actually at Par with the US dollar, which hasn't happened in thirty years, but this is actually having many negative affects on the Canadian economy because many US companies have stopped doing business in Canada because they aren't saving the money that they used to by going across the border.

Enron & Worldcom are just two of the more well known ways corruption on Wall Street has take a trillion in investments from the middle class. Pension funds have also been bled dry. One of the responses of the middle class was to invest in real estate, where they thot they knew what they were buying.

This created the housing boom that made them feel wealthier again. However, job losses from downsizing and outsourcing continued, which drove up the foreclosure rate and placement on the market, which has created a glut, driiving prices down, with another net loss of a trillion or whatever.

Which is now manifest as a decline in retail sales. Duh. You't think the smart bastards who ripping everyone off would figure out it would harm sales in other markets and ripple thru the entire economy.

So, now, the Fed has lowered interest rates to drive down the cost of credit to consumers hoping to keep retail sales going and reduce the AJM so that foreclosure rates fall. Its a damn moot point whether this will work in the face of higher oil & grain prices. The higher grain prices is resulting in corn fed beef being brought to market early, keeping meat prices lower, and chicken production has already been cut back. Tyson may have seen this coming, they cut back their contracts by 5% some months ago.

Much of the support for the dollar comes from grain export. There's been bumper corn & rice crops, and Canada had a much dryer warmer Global Warming summer that cut into their wheat, oat, rye, & barley, otherwise, the Canadian dollar would've passed the greenbacks.

There are unintended benefits and unknown risks all over this whole issue, and nobody knows if all the relevant factors supporting the dollar have been considered. Given the stupidity behind enriching the power elite at the expense of everyone else, I'd expect unforseen risks to emerge and create crisis.