Saturday, December 11, 2004
Apocalypse This Way Comes
A smattering of today's mainstream pundits is beginning to understand that what economically plagues us today is something quite different from the standard inflationary-recessionary cycles that have prevailed since World War II. But the great majority of talking heads and financial columnists remain clueless -- dutifully accepting the establishment line that depicts the nature of recessions from past models. The error in this view is that all recessions since World War II have been the result of Fed credit tightening and naturally were quick to respond to credit loosening. But this time around our malaise is not caused by Fed engineered high interest rates. It is far deeper and more systemic. It stems from the great Keynesian theoretical flaw that will always manifest in the long run: central bank credit expansion leads to "debt saturation" and "malinvestment," which reverses the boom that the credit expansion was meant to perpetuate, but does not do so until the latter stages of the Kondratieff cycle.
This is because central bank credit expansion brings about healthy growth like cocaine brings about well being. In the early stages of the Kondratieff cycle, businesses flourish, but once an economy becomes "debt saturated," borrowing drops off drastically, which causes the rate of money supply growth to decline by negating the central bank's multiplier effect. This brings disinflationary pressures, which then lead to actual deflation. In addition, Keynesian credit expansion also creates widespread "malinvestment," i.e., capital expenditures for which there is no genuine demand and which cannot be sustained once disinflationary pressures set in.
Thus, what is different this time is that large loads of debt and malinvestment have built up in the economy. They must now be worked off (i.e., liquidated) before demand and growth can be restored, which will require many years and considerable hardship.
As the renowned economist Ludwig von Mises warned us decades ago: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." [Human Action, Regnery, 1966, p. 572.]
Despite this irreparable Keynesian flaw, our statist planners continue to believe that the Federal Reserve will be able to wave its magic "liquidity wand" and rescue us as it always has. We are governed by obtuse bureaucrats guided by neo-fascistic academics. Is it any wonder that dogma is being used to confront problems that require acumen? Those mired in "paint by the numbers" policy approaches are always historically blindsided. Such a destructive hit now awaits us.
"Something ugly this way comes," writes brash and brainy Jim Willie in his Ass-Backwards Economics series. But the bovines in our establishment pasture are not cerebrally independent enough to grasp the horrific financial collapse of which he speaks. Lacking the contrarian attitude necessary to see truth coming down the pike, they drone out Pollyannish bunkum about the economy that pacifies the herd and reinforces the dogma to which they subscribe. What they should be stocking up for, however, is the devastating "mother of all bear markets" that is now beginning its attack upon our lives in the manner that bubonic plague begins its contagion by first striking isolated victims, then later explosively metastasizing throughout the whole of society with pervasive death and ruin.
This has become our fate because our pundits cannot see the big picture and how ideology drives the engine of life. Human civilization is structured in rising and falling waves -- economic, political, technological, sociological, religious, artistic, etc. These waves all interact to make up an existential pattern that we call history. Most times these historical waves, while socially disruptive, are not catastrophic. They bring about steady progress in society through the phenomenon that Joseph Schumpeter dubbed "creative destruction" in his prophetic treatise, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. But every so often in history, there comes a time when one or more of the waves become TIDAL in scope and effect. They become catastrophic. This takes place when the ideological freight train of society gets thrown off the tracks into gargantuan fallacies at the fundamental philosophical level, which then causes prominent pundits and thinkers to drag their nations into disastrous policies.
Our ideological freight train got thrown off the tracks at this fundamental philosophical level 90 years ago with the advent of World War I and the end of the classical free-market age that our Founding Fathers and Adam Smith had initiated. Marxism and moral relativism descended upon us to unleash the hounds of hell. They destroyed the idea of natural law and its manifestation in a constitutionally limited government -- the combine that had sustained free civilization since the days of Magna Carta 700 years prior. Law became whatever government (and its 51% herd) said it was. This began the demise of the American system -- this rejection of a natural law transcending government that is discovered by reason, and acts as the overseer of the positive law that is formed by government and its majority will.
Once unhinged from the higher natural law, the positive law of our legislatures and our courts became like paper money unhinged from gold. It could now go wherever it wished, and that is what it proceeded to do. As a result, legislative law and judicial decree are being used by the collectivists to mandate outrageous dictates and usurpations of rights to swell government into a devouring monster. This monster now treats its citizens like manipulable X's and O's on a graph to create what its henchmen tell us will be a "great planned society," but in reality is nothing but a gross game of privilege and power lust on the part of a neo-fascist ruling elite of bureaucrats, bankers, corporate moguls, and academics.
Since there is a delay between the onset of ideological fallacy among a society's intellectuals and its manifestation in the everyday life of the society, it is difficult to perceive the connection that our troubles today have to the fallacious ideological venom unleashed decades prior. But the connection is there even though the venom takes many years to filter out among the people in the form of ruinous policy.
The poisonous ideas that resulted from the philosophical train wreck of the 1900-1920 era have been seeping into our culture ever since to create a whole series of destructive historical waves. The first of these destructive waves was the Great Depression and its resultant Keynesian-New Deal revolution. Following thereafter were others such as the "new-left hippie revolution" in the sixties, the "compulsive consumerism" of the eighties, and the hallucinatory "new economy/market bubble" of the nineties that Greenspan, Clinton, and Rubin bestowed upon us. But because the ideological train wreck was so momentous 90 years ago, we are now entering a TIDAL era of history in which the waves will become epochal and apocalyptic.
That is to say, they will end our world as we know it.
As a result of the philosophical train wreck and the waves it set in motion, numerous dangerous factors now prevail in America that are driving us and the rest of the world toward a political-economic maelstrom. These factors have entrenched themselves over the decades because of our greed and shortsightedness as a people. There are four of these factors that transcend in importance all the others and now act as a guarantee of catastrophic times to come. They are what I call the "New Horsemen of the Apocalypse." They are, like their biblical namesakes, precursors to disaster.
What follows are thumbnail sketches of these new apocalyptic horsemen that threaten our society today. They are grimly portentous realities that our establishment pundits are either misinterpreting, or ignoring, or simply cannot grasp in their severity. But these four hideous horsemen are wreaking havoc in our society. And they will not go away; so we must confront them. How we choose to cope with them in the upcoming years will determine what manner of society we will construct in the aftermath of the worldwide breakdown toward which they are propelling us. The Four New Horsemen of the Apocalypse are: 1) Keynesian monetary policy, 2) Demopublican political control, 3) the Pax Americana mindset, and 4) the Kondratieff Cycle. To understand more clearly the dangers involved, let's examine each of them.
Horseman #1: Keynesian Monetary Policy
The Keynesian paradigm was presented to the world in 1936 as the salvation to "mature" capitalism's alleged inability to produce sufficient demand to bring about productivity. In actuality, however, it was one of the components of Karl Marx's dual strategy for world revolution: Debase the language and the money, and capitalism will fall like a ripe plum. Keynesian economics is nothing but academic humbuggery to justify a sophisticated counterfeiting scheme in order to debase a nation's currency so as to circumvent the laws of nature and get something for nothing (the goal of all collectivist tyrannies since the dawn of civilization). It has brought about massive amounts of paper dollars that work their way into the world's myriad market interactions to wreak havoc like computer viruses worming their way into the world's myriad computers. The Keynesian paradigm has helped to bring about the tyrannical overreach of our Federal Government, it has brought us our present fiscal deficit of $450 billion, and it has given us annual trade deficits that now exceed $500 billion, and show no signs of lessening.
Keynesian policy has created the terribly warped "U.S. centric" globalized trading system that dominates us today. Dollar hegemony rules the world and forces all nations into dependency upon exporting to the giant American Consumption Machine, which itself is grotesquely dependent upon the oligarchic group of FOMC bureaucrats in Washington spewing out ever increasing amounts of paper dollars to "stimulate aggregate demand" at a rate unparalleled in history. This has brought about immense imbalances in international trade and currencies, which feed back on themselves to expand the problems with each new round of "liquidity injections" from the Fed. (For an introduction to Keynesian irrationality, see my article "Contrarians and the Keynesian Myth.")
To try and counter the deteriorating conditions with which the Keynesian paradigm has plagued us, our government is now reduced to exhorting the American people to cash in their savings (via mortgage refinancing) to shop till they drop. This is the horrendous and pitiful legacy of J. M. Keynes. We are now to consume our vital seed corn in a last ditch effort to try and keep our moribund economy afloat through blind, doltish "consumer spending."
From the Keynesian paradigm has also come our economy's massive jobs hemorrhaging to foreign countries. Fiat money inflation coupled with Keynesian consumption dogma has driven Americans to consume more than they wish to produce (which is what unlimited credit and "printing press wealth" do to people's desires). This has created our enormous trade deficit, which has produced the worldwide glut of dollars flowing to third world countries and the Asian tigers. This glut of dollars has led these nations to ratchet up their manufacturing productivity and join in the "export to America mania" as their way to wealth. After all, if the Fed is going to wallpaper the world with trillions of newly printed dollars via international trade, then those nations with cheap labor will naturally use those dollars to produce cheaper goods to export back to America and her Keynesian consumption gluttons. Thus, because the explosions of credit and paper dollars from our Fed are used by American consumers to purchase foreign goods from cheap-labor third world countries, it takes business away from high-cost American manufacturing. In a desperate effort to lower costs and survive, American industry is then compelled to shift large parts of their manufacturing capacity to the cheap-labor nations. Voila!
The giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas is heard relentlessly in our land, and will continue to be heard as long as the Fed stays in the monetary wallpaper business.
There are other factors also that contribute to our chronic uncompetitiveness and resultant jobs hemorrhaging. For example: 1) Monopolistic labor union control in the U.S. and its escalation of wages drives our manufacturers offshore in order to reduce labor costs. 2) Our government refuses to mandate reciprocity of product entry with trading partners, thus allowing foreign governments to close their markets to our goods while still selling their goods in America. And 3) Demopublican interventionists in Congress over the past 50 years have built a stupendous crazy quilt of regulations that drives up the cost of our goods and makes many of them uncompetitive.
All these economic problems, though, go back to Keynes and the Marxian induced philosophical train wreck 90 years ago. Keynes' dream to overthrow the classical order of Adam Smith was greatly influenced by Marx's poison. And Marx's poison was created by his gross misunderstanding of capitalism. Marx was a warped genius who let his hatreds dictate his premises, and consequently he erected a giant spider web of fallacies that lesser intellects adopted and sold to the world. Keynes was one of those lesser intellects. He began his career immersed in Fabian socialism in turn-of-the-century England. To the Fabian intellectuals, capitalism was the great evil of existence, and Marxism was the great savior, which they felt had to be brought about gradually rather than violently as Lenin was doing in Russia. Keynes' monetary paradigm fit the Fabians perfectly, and they in turn fit with his desires to insidiously overturn the classical free-market order via monetary debasement and progressive taxation.
Without Keynesian inflation of paper dollars and the Federal Government's consumption driven fiscal policy, our trade and currency imbalances, along with our pyramiding debt and offshore jobs transfer, would never have come into being. We would still be a creditor nation that consumes only what we produce. We would still have a manufacturing base that is capable of employing a growing number of workers. We would still have a genuine currency based upon gold. We would not be trying to TAKE from life by financial chicanery. Instead we would first be GIVING to life by free-enterprise production, then consuming proportionally in return.
Marx's influence on Keynes (as with almost all intellectuals of that era) was immense. Keynes played Rosemary's baby to Marx's philosophical Scratch. Prior to Keynes, socialism and its wealth redistribution had found scant enthusiasm in America. But Keynes smoothed over the harsh Marxist anti-individualism with artful sophistry and clever rhetoric into something salable to Americans. He created an academic shroud of respectability for the crude thievery of inflation. When the crisis of the Depression hit, he was waiting in the wings to whisper his enticements into the ears of a frightened and now receptive people who wanted to believe that the rampant statism he and Roosevelt were promoting would somehow be compatible with the freedom and sound money upon which America had been built. It was not to be, however. Keynes was one of history's greatest charlatans. His monetary paradigm was not compatible with individual freedom and limited government. And it did not cure the Depression; it cursed us with one of the apocalyptic horsemen now riding down upon us.
Horseman #2: Demopublican Political Control
One of the most popular ideas taught in American civics classes is that the strength of the American political system lies in the fact that we have a two-party political process. This, I maintain, is akin to teaching that babies come from storks. It's a fairy tale we spin out to avoid messy details of reality we prefer not to face. The reality is that the Democratic and Republican parties, as distinctive parties, are shams. They have become nothing but two divisions of the Central Leviathan Party. This has been our political reality ever since Dwight Eisenhower defeated the "old guard" individualist Republicans under Robert Taft in 1952 and made the Republicans into a big government welfare-state party like the New Deal Democrats of Roosevelt and Truman. From that year on, there has been no voice in the world of politics for the original Founders' vision. The last vestiges of limited, decentralized government died with Eisenhower's capitulation to Keynes and the New Deal.
In the ensuing decades, the collectivists have skillfully established a deceptive ONE-PARTY dictatorial system, which their media lackeys spin to the public as "two parties" and which the collectivist power elites maintain by waging phony battles every four years, all of which the gullible public buys into. Yet every year no matter who wins at the polls, government grows larger and more fascistic. Therefore, all talk about which of these Tweedledum and Tweedledee institutions is better than the other is a game of "nonsense on stilts" (to borrow a phrase from the 19th century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham). Because both parties subscribe to the same fundamental premises, which manifest in the dictatorial paradigm of fascism, they both end up tyrannizing our lives.
To those Republican sympathizers who still hold out hope that the GOP can be some kind of a solution to the runaway lunacy of today's spendaholics on the Potomac, I offer exhibit A, Mr. Republican himself, President George W. Bush. Remove the scales from your eyes America! This man's spending proclivities (as a percentage of GNP) far exceed those of Bill Clinton's, or Jimmy Carter's, or LBJ's -- all prototypical "big spenders" that preceded him and set the standard for fiscal irresponsibility. George Bush Jr. is as Big Government as you can get! Socialism (or actually fascism) has come to America via a "conservative" administration! But this is the inevitable result when both parties subscribe to the SAME flawed fundamental premises. Those flawed premises are: 1) Government needs to be centralized and highly interventionist to be effective. And 2) it is permissible for political legislation to violate individual rights in order to convey special privileges to groups. It is upon these two dictatorial premises that both Democrats and Republicans structure the entirety of their policies. Arbitrary law has trumped objective law as a policy tool for each of them. Both have abandoned belief in a higher natural law. Both endorse the wholesale violation of rights. Consequently they both are driving us toward economic fascism and dictatorship.
This Demopublican "one-party system" has given us an insufferably oppressive Leviathan that now takes 50% of our earnings every year to disgorge on monstrous personal entitlements and welfare handouts, multi-million dollar congressional pensions, egregious pork barrel projects, farm subsidies, corporation bailouts, foreign aid giveaways, World Bank loans, energy industry subsidies, artistic grants, mass busing programs, regional development programs, revenue sharing programs, and hundreds of other needless projects and regimental bureaucracies. It has brought us a national debt of over $6 TRILLION that requires $300 billion yearly to service. It has saddled us with $43 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities that will need to be paid in future years. It has bankrupted us as a nation. It has eroded our will as a people. It has transformed a resplendent Constitutional system where power resides in the states and localities into a contemptible "majoritarian despotism" where all power now resides in a coterie of ruthless Washington power elites who buy the allegiance of millions of voting dupes every year with bread and circuses.
What a far cry all this overweening prodigality is from the Founders' original intent. Such a system is insanity incarnate. If not radically reformed, it will continue to consume our freedom and earnings like a swarm of locusts consumes a wheat field until we in America are no better off than the simple serfs of feudal times. If we do not gather the forces to stand up to this beast, it will swallow everything in its path until it has created a wasteland of irredeemable death. Demopublicanism's ultimate denouement is apocalypse.
There is only one solution. Americans must form a viable third (or actually second) political party that is capable of competing with the tyrannical monopoly of Demopublicanism. I have outlined an innovative workable strategy for this in my article, "Gold Money and Equal Tax Rates!" that appeared earlier on this website. Without a competitive political vision that exposes the nakedness of the Demopublican emperor, there can be no reprieve from the path to disaster upon which we are now traveling.
Horseman #3: Pax Americana
Pax Americana has been the unfulfilled dream of neo-conservative statists ever since the end of the Cold War, but with the advent of the War on Terrorism, the dream suddenly took a giant step toward becoming a reality. The Paul Wolfowitz doctrine, first hatched in the early nineties, has now become the guidelines for the expansion of American hegemony throughout the world over the next 2-3 decades. This doctrine states that America needs to abandon the conventional foreign policy model of national defense and actively pursue a reshaping of the world, in other words, to get extensively involved in nation building. [See my article, "Gold and Pax Americana."]
The Washington Post reported on April 23rd of this year that, "The administration hopes the US-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli occupied territories and Saudi Arabia....'This is a 25-year project,' one three-star general officer said." On the contrary, this is like Demopublicanism -- insanity incarnate. Human beings and their cultures are not hunks of sociological clay to be molded by foreign governments through the force of military technology and troop occupation. They are unique creatures and institutions that have the right of self-determination.
I love my country and despise the pacifist dupes of the left who automatically take to the streets to protest America's interventionist wars abroad, yet eagerly support the federal Leviathan's interventionist growth at home. I would never associate with their mindless ilk. But I believe with Edward Abby that "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its own government." It is our first duty, because the prime danger to a nation's freedom is always the nature of government itself.
Our government today has become the most lethal criminal agency in the country. Criminality is defined as the violation of individual rights, and there is no entity in America today more destructive of basic rights than the Federal Government in Washington. It matters not whether it's Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, or Clinton-Rubin-Talbot running the show. They're all Orwellian brothers of the New World Order.
They have decided to colonize Iraq through PREEMPTIVE WAR in order to promote what they call "benevolent global hegemony" which sadly the American sheep are prone to accepting as a legitimate goal of a nation's foreign policy.
"What is monumentally important about all this and completely ignored by the mainstream press," writes Richard Maybury, "is that the invasion of Iraq was the test case, a precedent. By attacking a country that had not attacked us, the [Bush administration] violated international agreements going all the way back to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. They got away with it, so they now intend to reconstruct the whole Mideast...in their own image and likeness, and not one American in a thousand understands enough about it to object." [Early Warning Report, July 2003]
As a result, we will now become bogged down in a tar pit made up of the tribal vestiges of the old Ottoman Empire that the Western powers broke up after World War I. The virulent animosities toward America and the West go back hundreds of years among these people. Their hatreds and animosities toward each other go back thousands of years. They see democracy as a violation of the law of their God, and American culture as the mother of all evils. Yet Washington's black limousine boys think they can go into this kind of hostile environment and just rearrange the people and their ideologies to fit the American way of doing things. This is unbelievable hubris and ignorance regarding history, humanity, religion, culture, and sane foreign policy. But the die has been cast; we are now in there, and no administration (liberal or conservative) will be willing to pull us out for fear of severely losing face. [For a good introduction to the mess we are in, see Richard Maybury, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast.]
Because we have launched Pax Americana with a preemptive war, we have opened Pandora's Box. There are sure to be other nations that will now follow our precedent in the upcoming years to settle myriad grievances with their neighbors through a first strike. Those who live by preemptive war die by such a sword. This grievous blunder on our part will be the trigger to unleash more serious conflagrations in the years ahead as all nations begin to suffer the pains of a worldwide financial meltdown and look desperately for ways out of their economic suffering? After all, it was the economic suffering of the German people, spawned by the Treaty of Versailles, that brought Hitler and his lunacy down upon Europe. The hubris of Pax Americana has put us on a path to apocalypse.
Horseman #4: The Kondratieff Cycle
The Kondratieff Cycle is a theory of how economies expand and contract. It was formulated by Nikolai Kondratieff who was a Soviet economist during the 1920's. He discovered, through extensive research on prices and other economic data along with sociological and cultural studies stretching back hundreds of years, that there was a 50-60 year grand cycle that capitalist economies go through. They rise, they level off, and then they decline and crash. Out of the decline, they then renew and start the cycle all over again. He traced this cycle back to 1789 and showed in rather convincing style that it was a credible tool of analysis as to how capitalism would progress.
The first cycle he studied began in 1789 and ended in 1849. The second began in 1849 and ended in 1896. The third went from 1896 to 1945. Since Kondratieff was analyzing the cycle in the 1920's, this is where his studies ended -- halfway through the third cycle. But he saw that the decline and crash period was beginning for the third cycle, which we now know extended through the thirties and forties. Unfortunately for Kondratieff, he had discovered something that his communist rulers did not want to know -- that capitalist systems renew themselves rather than permanently self-destruct as Marx had predicted. He was sent to Siberia for his discovery, and apparently died sometime in the 1930's.
But his followers today, such as Ian Gordon, carried on the theory. They have divided the cycle into four phases, Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter, and have shown where the fourth cycle began about 1945-1949 and is now starting its winter close, due to end sometime around 2010-2015. The cycle has been slightly extended this time because it is tied into the inflation of money, human psychology, and the length of a human lifetime, and lifetimes today are longer than they were in the 19th century. They last around 70 years now instead of 60. So the winter phase of the fourth cycle is happening right now in 2003.
Technically speaking, the Kondratieff Cycle is not really a product of the Marxian philosophical train wreck like the other three horsemen above. It goes back at least 215 years to 1789. But since its origin lies with inflationary monetary policy, it has been greatly exacerbated since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. This is because the Fed greatly expanded the practice of inflation over what the decentralized banking system of the 19th century was capable of doing. Prior to 1913, only small Kondratieffs affected our economy. Since then, Big Kondratieff has descended upon us. This can be observed in the fact that the booms and busts prior to 1913 were milder affairs. But after 1913, the boom of the 20's and the following crash of the 30's were whoppers. And the recent boom of the 90's has been a gargantuan whopper. This is ominous, because it tells us that the crash period we are now entering will be the worst that history has ever recorded. Thus, because of the creation of the Federal Reserve in the U.S. in 1913 and its ability to explosively expand fiat money to levels never before dreamed of, we can say Big Kondratieff is a product of 20th century banking, which is a product of the Marxian philosophical train wreck of the 1900-1920 era.
What Kondratieff theory tells us is that the boom-bust cycle that inflationary monetary policy brings about creates prodigious amounts of debt that eventually overwhelm society. A period of liquidation then must follow in order for the economy to regain its health. When Kondratieff theory is integrated with Ludwig von Mises' Austrian analysis of inflationary monetary policy, one is presented with a startlingly clear picture of WHY and HOW our economic troubles over the past 65 years have come about. One then sees the connecting link of factors that cause the volatile boom-bust nature of modern economic life. [To learn more about Mises and Austrian economic theory, see www.mises.org. To learn more about Kondratieff theory, contact Ian Gordon.]
Inflationary monetary policy (through fractional reserve banking) is the evil seed that once planted will spawn some very noxious and destructive weeds. Fractional reserve banking began in the U.S. in the 19th century, but because we were still on the gold standard and still maintained a decentralized banking system, it was muted in its destructive effects. Our big troubles began when we created the Federal Reserve in 1913 and went off the gold standard in 1933. This greatly magnified the boom-bust nature of Kondratieff. Compounding these two disasters was our adoption of Keynesian economic fallacies and Roosevelt's New Deal government aggrandizement. The last 65 years have been a horrifying exercise in piling disastrous policies on top of the evils of Keynes and Roosevelt (e.g., Eisenhower's merging of the political parties, LBJ's Great Society, Nixon's closing of the gold window, Reagan's phony tax cuts, Clinton's pseudo strong dollar, etc.). The final coup de grace of the 90's has been the gift of Greenspan & Co. -- his wild, hallucinatory expansion of the money supply that culminated in the blow off top of the stock market. A long devastating Kondratieff winter now awaits us. This is the price that excess brings, and there has never been an era of history marked with more excess than the past 65 years. Every standard of propriety in every facet of our lives -- political, economic, cultural, social, sexual, artistic, etc. -- has been trashed. There are no rules, no ethics, no limits. Amorality dominates. Keynesianism corrupts. Government expands. Freedom recedes. Lives dissipate. The decline and crash phase is upon us. Somewhere Nikolai Kondratieff is saying, "I told you so."
What Can We Conclude from This?
A mongrel form of Marxism took over America in the early 20th century and created a "collectivist curvature of the mind" among the reigning intelligentsia. Out of this collectivist curvature, came the philosophical train wreck of the early 20th century that has brought us today's New Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These four horsemen, Keynesianism, Demopublicanism, Pax Americana, and Kondratieff, are now riding down upon our society and driving us closer and closer to the horrendous maelstrom that will end the world as we know it.
Dust clouds of sophistry, propaganda, and gullibility still hide the horsemen from clear view by the people, but the salient and strong minded are not fooled. They see through the establishment's evasive tricks and perceive what is coming. They understand that men cannot continue forever to get from life more than they put into life -- which is the evil ideology that Marx and his Keynesian spawn have conned modernity into believing can be done. "You can be like gods," was the whispered enticement 90 years ago. "You can create wealth without work. You can have Utopia without strife. It will all be so easy. You need only to purge yourselves of the senseless anachronisms of the Founding Fathers. You need only to renounce gold and the free-market. You can have power and riches beyond your wildest dreams."
Never in history has a nation confronted a coalescence of tidal forces such as these. One must go back to the 4th and 5th century and the 200-year fall of Rome to find parallels. Since the speed of information transfer in today's world is greatly accelerated over that of Rome's day, we will not take 200 years to descend into the maelstrom and perhaps a new Dark Ages. My guess is that we will do it in about a third of the time it took Rome to collapse. Since it can legitimately be said we've been declining as a society for the past 50 years since Eisenhower's ushering in of Demopublicanism in 1952, we have precious little time left in my opinion.
Cataclysm is headed our way. I speak not religiously here, but historically, politically, economically. This is not an "end times" scenario. We will endure as a nation, but in what form -- slave or free? If freedom is to survive the cataclysmic times ahead, it will be because there are still those who can see the big picture, still those who understand that natural law rules all men, still those who possess the contrarian will to fight with word and deed -- not for what is popular, but for what is TRUE. The first requisite of all such contrarian fighters is to take dead aim at the four horsemen riding down upon our society today.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World
By Vaclav Havel
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible. Yes, everything is possible, because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its own spirit, its own aesthetic.
Science and Modern Civilization
This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the basis of the modern conception of the world.The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional faith in objective reality and its complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws, led to the birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first civilization in the history of the human race that spans the entire globe and firmly binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common global destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the first time, to see Earth from space with his own eyes; that is, to see it as another star in the sky.
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.
Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique "self".
And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth easier so in many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
When Nothing is Certain
This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires. The abyss between rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.
Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to ensure the survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time clearly multicultural. How can generally respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence be set up, and on what set of principles are they to be established?
These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by the two most important political events in the second half of the twentieth century: the collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of communism. The artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed, and a new, more-just order has not yet emerged. the central political task of the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races, and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization. This task is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary humanity brought about by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more serious all the time.
Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That is, they believe it can be accomplished through the intervention of new organizational, political, and diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.
This, too, is well known. And in searching for the most natural source for the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that - among other things - were first declared in this building (Independence Hall). I am referring to respect for the unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern democracy.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper. The point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we are in a different place and facing a different situation, one to which classical modern solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion that man - as a being capable of knowing nature and the world - was the pinnacle of creation and lord of the world,
This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy - that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
Two Transcendent Ideas
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again be found in science, in a science that is new - let us say postmodern - a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits. I will give two examples:
The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and adherents have pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge. This is not yet proof that the aim of the universe has always been that it should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else can this matter be explained?
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tine particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us.
Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him - in new clothing - his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.
The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth's surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet - Gaia - named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value - that is, life itself.
Toward Self-Transcendence
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
- Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
- Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
- Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
About the Author
Vaclav Havel is the president of the Czech Republic. The speech was made in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994.
