Once and again I am surprised by people's profound ignorance of how things work. Take water: people take for granted that water flows out of the wall and they show indignation when it does not. I thought that this attitude was a pose but this week I started to understand that it is not, they simply do no conceive that the water-from-the-wall is not a natural phenomenon like a spring in the rock, they cannot imagine that there is an intricate man-made system behind it. In other words, they are not posing or pretending stupidity - they ARE stupid. Why?
The evolutionary answer is that people evolved in a natural system, where water was a natural phenomenon and never man-made or man-controlled. Rain, springwater, rivers, all existed and proceeded in the natural or divine realm, out of the human sphere. In that situation, the mental module to understand a non-natural thing like a faucet - simply could not have been evolved. People has the module to identify the faucet as a natural spring, and they cannot understand that it is not. They evolved in an environment where understand water supply was not necessary for survival, so they lack the mental tools to deal with it. For them, the water from the wall is and always will be a spring in the rock.
The attitude of the Palestinians regarding water is the same: they simply cannot understand that the water flowing from the pipes in Israel is not a natural thing, that it a human creation that takes place in desalination plants built with much effort and investment. When they demand equal division of resources, they are thinking of a well in the desert, a well unjustly monopolized by Israelis and not shared on an equal basis with them. And it is not a pose of misunderstanding, they truly misunderstand it because they had not evolved the mental tool for understanding something different from what exists in nature. If we call stupidity this inability to deal intellectually with a modern society, then we can call them stupid. It is not their fault. The evolved in an environment where intelligence was not needed for survival and reproduction.
I realize that people goes through life in a city without ever realizing that it is not a natural environment. They think (without ever thinking about it) that the tall buildings are natural formations, that walls are natural rocks, that water flow out of the walls, that cars move as animals move, that streetlights appear at night like the moon, and so on. They are stupid and it is not their fault.
For the great mass of the people the goodies the government provides them is a gift of nature, and if they dont receive them it is because bad spirits or bad people are against them. When people rules, they will tax profitable enterprises to death, they will nationalize foreign-owned industries (like oil companies in Ecuador) without understanding that things are not natural, that by expropriating an oil well and taking physical posession of it, it will not make them "owners" of the oil that has been - apparently effortlessly - sprouting from earth. Stupid people cannot understand how things work and like children, they will always try to take them away from others and when they see that it is not working, throw it away and forget it.
Illustration: Bocassa, President of the Central African Republic. The pic is unrelated to the note, I just liked it.
23 comments:
When people rules, they will tax profitable enterprises to death, they will nationalize foreign-owned industries (like oil companies in Ecuador) without understanding that things are not natural, that by expropriating an oil well and taking physical posession of it, it will not make them "owners" of the oil that has been - apparently effortlessly - sprouting from earth.
I have to disagree. The people as a mass may not understand how individual technical systems work, but they can understand the concept of private property. Generally these type of redistributist movements only occur either in multiethnic societies or in countries under the sway of leftist religions, with Africa being the exception.
Second, intelligence does cause the average person to respect another man's property and refrain from trying to take it. There are plenty of intelligent leftist activists who despite their intelligence work to undermine the social order.
I'm afraid that free markets and private property are not solely the product of intelligence, but are also cultural as well.
How one can explain selfdefeating actions like Venezuela's nationalization of almost all foreign industries? Or Bolivia's expropiation of foreign mines and forbidding them from exploring and exploiting its minerals? They believe the manna will continue falling from heaven.
I disagree with your premise. Motor cars or telephones did not exist naturally and people have the same attitude toward them as they do toward the plumbing. I think the real answer is this: there are two kinds of people in the world. Some people (me) are curious and want to know how everything works. Other people (my wife) don't care how things work at all, as long as they work. If they break, they call a specialist in that field to deal with it. They are very intelligent in their own field and they believe that such things should be left to experts in other fields as well.
I heard an interview with Blankfein of Goldman and he said exactly this - as long as the water comes from my faucet, I don't care to know how it happens. I know there must be all sorts of pumps and filters, etc. but I don't know the details and won't take the time to learn the details unless there is a problem. (Similarly, he understood why the average person does not understand the financial system and does not concern himself with it unless there is a problem).
K
How one can explain selfdefeating actions like Venezuela's nationalization of almost all foreign industries? Or Bolivia's expropiation of foreign mines and forbidding them from exploring and exploiting its minerals? They believe the manna will continue falling from heaven.
I gave my answer in the post above and I repeat it here since you didn't see it:
RELIGION
Almost half a decade ago my mother was watching one of the evening newprograms on PBS (McNeil-Lehrer?) and the newscast did a short ten minute piece on Venezuela. One of the points mentioned in the film was that Chavez's support was strongest in those neighborhoods where the Catholic Church was most active. When you were younger you had to have seen Liberation Theology sweeping Latin America. Despite all of the ink spilled on Jewish Communists, LA has turned to leftism on its own accord without the need for Jews. And this Catholic leftism extends into the United States as well. Those states that have large concentrations of papists (White or Brown) repeatedly either vote Democratic or choose to split their vote, allowing Blacks in their states to determine the outcome of elections.
You could claim that this Catholic leftism is a reaction to the poverty in "Smokestack America" and thus is recent and justified, but if you look at how Catholics voted in the past you will find that they have voted Democratic in most years since WW2. I actually found the data on how all Catholics combined voted and posted the results here. If you look at my table there are a few years in which the papist vote went overwhelmingly to the Democrats and other years in which the papists merely split their vote. If you look at the Protestant vote (all races combined) you will see that the Protestants are about ten to fifteeen points to the right in most elections. The problem is that if Protestants merely give 60% of their vote to the Republicans they will still be overwhelmed by voters from other religions and races who either vote Democratic in overwhelming numbers or merely refuse to commit to either party. If you look at the year 1960 you will see that Catholic voters gave 78% of their vote to the (Catholic) Democrat that year.
Anyway, back to Venezuela. I don't mind if the Venezuelans nationalize foreign property. What the Venezuelans do in their own country is their business. Having said that, I don't want the Venezuelans to be protected from the consequences of their own greed and stupidity. There are natural consequences to Venezuela's actions, and since the people of Venezuela supported those actions they deserve to bear the consequences. Allowing the Venezuelans (or Mexicans) to emigrate to greener pastures instead of living with what naturally follows from their own decisions is to protect them from their own folly, and thus to prevent them from learning their lesson.
Incidentally, papists attempt to flee the consequences of their actions in the US too. North Carolina used to field an arch conservative senator named Jesse Helms and once he retired he was replaced with the Democrat Jonathan Edwards. What happened in North Carolina is that many Whites in failed Rust Belt states moved to NC, but once there continued with their leftist voting. These Northern transplants, combined with Blacks and some native White Southern liberals helped get a Democrat like Edwards elected.
John Edwards' first name is not Jonathan. Actually his real name on his birth certificate is "Johnny" - one of the sure signs of low social status (aka white trash) in the US is to give your child a nickname as his given name.
There was an economist that did a study of the names most associated with wealth in the US. The highest were Israel type names - Ari, Tzvi, etc.
K
You are correct K, I googled JE's name and I ended up confusing JE with the Puritan Johnathan Edwards.
K,
Your wife and people like her re not stupid - they know water is a human product and there are professional people behind it. They call the plumber and debate what is to be done and the price.
There are other kind of people who look without understanding why the water stopped flowing, and never even call the plumber or try to repair it by theirself. They expect a higher being - Government, God - to use their supernatural powers. These people see the world they live in as natural, they cannot imagine that it is product of human effort.
I once (after the fall of the Soviet Union) thought that socialism was thoroughly discredited - even the Chinese no longer believed in it. The only ones left were Cuba and N. Korea and who would want to emulate their poverty? But I misunderestimated the Socialist impulse. It is like a religion and does not depend on evidence for its survival (despite it's pretense at being "scientific socialism"). No matter how many thousands of years go by without the Messiah (or a successful socialist society) appearing (or returning, depending on religion) He (or It) is always about to come tomorrow, if only we do the right thing (pray harder, expropriate all the capitalists, etc.) If you view it as a religion then it makes as much sense as all the other religions, which is to say, not much. Just as the human brain is hardwired for language, humans are also wired to believe in some Higher Power who will intervene for them in the heavens. This must be some glitch in our programming that had positive survival value. Humans are very good at pattern recognition - perhaps so that we can see that those little dots on the horizon are a pride of lions. We are so good that we "see" patterns that don't really exist, such as the constellations of the stars which are really just randomly distributed dots.
K
I can't provide a source for this, but I remember reading an article that claimed that when Marx called his variety of "Scientific" he meant realistically achievable, which it was.
Who reads nowadays Marx and Engels? No one. But there are no new ideologies in view.
But there are no new ideologies in view.
There are still some active communist groups out there, and I would imagine that they read Marx. On a side note I read an author sponsored by the John Birch Society named, I believe, Clarence Carson who claimed that Karl Marx was hired by a group named the League of Just Men to write the Communist Manifesto. I've never seen Carson's claim anywhere else
If you define ideology as an animating belief then a subset of ideologies such as religions are still out there spreading and influencing history. And as the old saying goes the more things change the more they stay the same, since Islam and animism are both making a comeback.
When I say animism I mean the belief that there are unnamed spirits within objects and animals that must be honored, since polytheism hasn't made a serious comeback.
What we are witnessing is the decline of Atheism as a serious force in world affairs. You could declare that northern Europe is atheistic, but a majority of those countries have fallen under the green curtain of Islam and greenism, thus indicating that they have no serious beliefs of their own. The atheists of the Soviet Union had no compunction about resisting either of those forces since they had a well developed belief system to counter Islam with.
Anyway, I need to go back to bed. Goodnight.
What we are witnessing now is socialist action without the ideology. Castro and Che were educated men of European extraction and could read and understand Marx and Lenin so they could couch their crimes in a sophisticated ideology. The mestizo clowns that have arisen in S. America are not capable of such high level thought but taking money from rich people is something the lowliest street thug can understand and implement.
K
There is a new kind of ideology, but it does not have a name; it is being practiced by Obama, by the EU types, etc; it is a conglomerate of World Government, anti-white racism, mass immigration into the West to weaken us, and, increasingly, anti-Semitism. It has it's roots in communism but it is somehow different.
More on this to follow.
Ronduck-ironic to confuse Edwards (as grotesque a hypocrite as you are ever likely to find) with a Puritan.
Anon.
By the way; I agree with J about Magical Thinking. I have lived in places where this is quite frequent.
It is , of course, a form of primitivism.
Sometimes it is amusing.
And sometimes it is not.
Anon.
I have lived in places where this is quite frequent.
Britain or South Africa?
There is a new kind of ideology, but it does not have a name; it is being practiced by Obama, by the EU types, etc; it is a conglomerate of World Government, anti-white racism, mass immigration into the West to weaken us, and, increasingly, anti-Semitism. It has it's roots in communism but it is somehow different.
More on this to follow.
Just now it is an amorphous, unfocused, leaderless movement. The Green parties failed to develope a truly hard-nucleus and were co-opted by the liberal-democratic parties of the West. I presume some young Jewish economist must be writing the new "The Capital" in the library.
There is a new kind of ideology, but it does not have a name; it is being practiced by Obama, by the EU types, etc; it is a conglomerate of World Government, anti-white racism, mass immigration into the West to weaken us, and, increasingly, anti-Semitism. It has it's roots in communism but it is somehow different.
More on this to follow.
Just now it is an amorphous, unfocused, leaderless movement. The Green parties failed to develope a truly hard-nucleus and were co-opted by the liberal-democratic parties of the West. I presume some young Jewish economist must be writing the new "The Capital" in the library.
"The Crapital", more likely.
But let us not be unkind!!
We need someone with sufficient powers of abstraction and intellectual depth to guide us in analysing this multi-headed monster, in naming it, in predicting it's next move (tax the Internet) and in exposing what really lies in the darkness of its heart (hypocrisy, greed, mendacity, anti-Semitism, and the enslavement of white people).
Anon.
The proletarians as a class have disappeared, so who is moving ahead the wheels of history? I dont find classes, I find ethnic groups. Nationalism. Where will this lead to?
The proletarians as a class have disappeared, so who is moving ahead the wheels of history? I dont find classes, I find ethnic groups. Nationalism. Where will this lead to?
It will lead to a million little zions, one for each ethnic group. Gary Becker asked sarcastically if American policy overseas was to give every tribe its own flag and territory, clearly Gary is more in favor of multinational empires. Gary saw the future, and I don't think he liked a world divided into that many countries.
The picture of Bokassa illustrates nicely how the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Hopefully, when Obama gets elected for a second term with an overwhelming majority, his re-inauguration will look something like this.
May I be so blessed as to touch his coat!
Anon.
Ronduck
Both Britain and Southern Africa, all over.
Anon.
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