Why Do Wealth and Peace Exist?

A friend asked this question, and I wrote an answer.

Wealth exists because we invented agriculture, which gave us year-round access to stores of food from which some people can exclude others. This is why poverty exists, too, incidentally. I see wealth and poverty as two aspects of the same thing: scarcity. Foraging societies (like the Hadza in Africa) don't have the artificial scarcity that we civilized folk have, because every individual (including even fairly small children) knows how to go out into the bush and get food, shelter, and friendship (the basics we all need for survival: they don't call this wealth; it is simply life).

Peace exists when depopulation (from disease, famine, or war) gives agricultural societies breathing space to grow their wealth without having to protect it from other people. I see peace and war as fundamentally the same thing, complementary expressions of agricultural demographics. When foraging societies settle down to live in villages and cities, they become more fertile (producing more people in less time: this is peace--e.g. the Ara Pacis in ancient Rome, with pictures of motherhood on it). More humans (the outcome of greater fertility) means we need more stuff (wealth). Since we are sedentary and can only get wealth by access to land that we own (fence and work extensively)--we have to go out of our native habitat (overcrowded and overworked as it is) and occupy other land (virgin land). Eventually, we encounter other people--and the outcome of that meeting becomes war (not just the feuds of individual hunters and clans, which transcend agricultural society, but the organized genocide that is civilized war: we don't want mere revenge or justice or whatever; we want your land, and its wealth). 

Mercantilism and colonialism (or in their latest guise, globalization) allow us to enjoy peace and war, poverty and wealth, simultaneously. I send troops to Peter's land to take it or its wealth for me, and then sell that wealth on a "free" market to Paul, who has no idea that his diamonds come from the death of child-soldiers abroad. Poverty and war are outsourced to the frontier of civilization, so that the rich urban center can enjoy wealth and peace. To quote one of my favorite historians on the essence of peace: Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.  

In sum: wealth and peace exist because somewhere someone died (often miserably and involuntarily, sometimes voluntarily or otherwise nobly).

Real Education

The power of degrees to draw salaries wanes as more people obtain degrees: this is one viable lesson that they still teach in economics, though many PhDs seem to have missed it (or to think that creative mathematics can make it disappear, more or less the same way astrology used to correct character flaws).

What matters more than "education" is the right kind of education (i.e. training in a viable, sustainable method of living). Given our current circumstances, this sort of education is really unpopular: it does not put money or influence or raw power into the hands of established interests (who consequently found few institutions to teach it, endow few scholarships or professorships to facilitate it, and use whatever political and social clout they possess generally to mock and undermine it). The right kind of education requires a student able to imagine living a life unlike that of his parents (or the rich people of his parents' generation, whose mores he is constantly bombarded with as desirable insofar as they make him easier for established interests to manipulate--via debts, social obligations, and desire for "nice things" made in a sweatshop somewhere). It requires radical freedom of thought--not the kind of regimented bean-counting that stops short of articulating any idea remotely threatening to established interests (who understandably position themselves as pillars of social and political and economic stability, even as history reveals that they are built upon sand that is shifting as we speak).

Real education involves living, not just thinking. It cannot come from a classroom, not even when that classroom has been outfitted with all the best technology that a committee of experts can imagine and acquire. Real education teaches us how to adapt and survive along an entire lifetime--and beyond. (One utility of studying history is that it reminds you of a time when people didn't think in terms of single generations, let alone market and election cycles measured in terms of a few months or years.) Real education does not teach us how to get and maintain jobs in a narrow market defined by scarcity and fragility. It teaches us how to maximize independence rather than servility. It costs a lot in terms of effort, and little in terms of cash (the reverse of many degrees offered by modern universities). It incentivizes process over completion, independence over employment, integrity over profit, and virtuous failure over depraved success.

Modern Economics: A Quick Look

The reduction of economics to science has destroyed the ability of people to see value that is not monetized, to the gross impoverishment of society (even when material profits have never been higher). People who cheerfully tout the superiority of "modern" to "ancient" society are dealing mostly in caricatures, which they turn into facts by manipulating mathematics. Also, I observe that many of them assume a view of "modern" that is incredibly narrow (excluding the 19th century, for instance, and even much of the 20th): "modern" society thus becomes the latest vision of a "return to Eden" that has yet to occur. 

People who want to make money these days in the US become, by and large, administrators (with degrees in economics, business, political science, communications, and various related fields that are all aptly euphemized under the title "marketing"). Administrative work consists largely in creating opportunities to squeeze money from people and institutions for spurious value (no "value added" to justify the expense that administration requires).

Why does college tuition continue to rise into the stratosphere? Administration. The people taking the money are not your professors, your instructors (who will soon outnumber the professoriate), nor your janitors and groundskeepers. They are deans, sub-deans, vice assistants to the provost, etc. Why do banks and car manufacturers require public money? Administration. The people taking the money are not your line-men, your mechanics, your bank-tellers. They are mostly middle management (with CEOs and CFOs and their like representing the flower of the cancer, not its root). Why are healthcare costs so large? Doctors and other providers are not hell-bent on making large sums: many of them work appalling hours for less money than the people who trained them (and the trend is to pay less and less to the providers, who are increasingly forced to avoid private practice and become the mercenaries of large corporations). Again, the people raking in the dough are middle managers, who sit at desks and fill out forms and pass absurdly high bills back and forth (from the middle manager in the hospital to the middle manager in your insurance company to you, and your jaw hits the floor when you realize that your ER visit cost $7000, and you must pay it all out of pocket).

When you investigate closely what it is that this middle management does to justify its increasing (and in my view unsustainable) expense to society, you find that it is engaged in a kind of legal piracy. Where it used to be "economical" to deal directly with the people you wanted something from (e.g. with a professor, a doctor, or a local banker--even a local politician), you must now call upon some middle manager (or a call center run by middle managers), take a number, and wait for a bill that will always cost as much as possible (and will cost more over time: next year, it will more expensive). You become used to this phenomenon; indeed, some of you are so used to it that you don't bother to wonder why it is that aspirin, tuition, cars, houses, justice, and basic healthcare cost so much more all the time. You don't stop to look at the deals other people (including some "poor" and "Third World" people) get from their providers (largely by having no time or infrastructure to impose the costly regime of middle management upon a public understandably eager to avoid paying a pirate for the right to live their lives). You accept the regime of extortion as "the way things are" even when you go to "fix things" (usually by voting for a change in the identity of your extortioner, as though swapping one face for another were the crux of the problem: it isn't).

The solution is both simple (to understand) and difficult (to apply in a practical fashion). Simply put, you must avoid doing business with middle management. Don't waste time talking with them, paying them, reforming them, voting for them, etc. Instead, you must build alternatives to them. Recreate relationships with service providers who exist without middle management. This will not be easy (or even "cheap" in the short-term; in the long-term, however, it will be much cheaper than any scheme that involves paying the pirates their protection money). You must put away the notion of being a consumer. There are no passive customers in a real market: instead you have to offer something to get something. You have to be trustworthy yourself, and have the acumen to recognize for yourself when someone is trying to take you for a ride. No "consumer protection" agency is going to help you (unless you give them real money, and even then, I would not trust them--whether they were public or private). You have to realize that abstractions are meaningless without some kind of concrete environmental referent. I don't care what the GDP is doing: it is a meaningless thing, since its rise might just indicate the proliferation of piracy rather than the creation of something really good (real value). Growth is ambiguous that way. I care what is growing, how it grows, more than that some growth occur. Middle management is eager to sell you growth, without drawing your attention to the fact that it wants to grow at your (and the world's) expense, via a process of piracy whose moral ethic is, "Make more money, no matter what: more is always better, no matter what the fallout is." If you like that ethic, then buy into it with your eyes open, instead of falling for the commercials that repackage it as something less brutal or short-sighted (like Adam Smith's capitalism or Karl Marx's humanism).

Lessons from Abroad

The following essay comes from a discussion about the nature of healthcare policy in the United States.  I started out wanting to talk about healthcare, and wound up addressing the entire Spanish economy as an illustration of problems we deal with in healthcare, education, employment, and government--i.e. economic and politics generally.

My personal feeling is that the USA is simply too large to have a coherent, consistent public health agenda that extends nationwide. Europe benefits from smaller administrative regions, with more homogeneous culture(s). In my experience, Europe is a gated community built to exclude outsiders (who respond by seeking to replace rather than assimilate: immigrants from the Third World do not become French, or Spanish, or Scandinavian, by and large). America is the opposite (though we keep trying to repent and become more European; unfortunately, we need cheap labor, too).

When I was living in Spain, there were serious political movements in every place I stayed whose central goal was complete autonomy. I did not meet a single population in northern Spain (over two years, I lived in these provinces: Castilla y Leon, Galicia, Vizcaya) without a significant minority who wanted nothing to do with Spain or Madrid. Some parties even wanted autonomy for smaller regions (there was a party that wanted to get Castilla out of Leon). People grew up in small regions, in neighborhoods where they could point to the house their great-grandparents occupied (which often as not was a cottage predating modern civilization). There was a very strong trend to shut the world out, to suspect "growth" and "progress" as cloaking devices for "rape" and "pillage," and to distrust outsiders permanently (because they are not from here, they do not know this place, they will take our stuff and make good with it somewhere else, somewhere we cannot follow). In America, I can move thousands of miles to a neighborhood where people have never seen me before, and the common reaction is, "Hello! Welcome to the block!" In Europe (Spain anyway), this reaction is still there (particularly if I am talking to foreigners or people who live in the city), but it is supplemented by another: "You're not from around here? Fuck you! Go back where you came from. We don't need foreign shit. It is hard enough to deal with all our own."

Everything is different (healthcare, economics, religion) in areas where people have deep-seated distrust of the novel, the foreign, the unusual. America thrives on imagining the novel optimistically: "This new treatment could work wonders for me! I might survive this illness and even come out stronger than before!" In my experience, Europeans imagine it pessimistically: "This new treatment is probably going to make me die even faster than I was already, smoking two packs a day. Fuck it, and the white horse it rode in on." My experience is colored by the reality that I have never lived in the "really cool Europe" that American Leftists like to gush over. While I met plenty of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian tourists (who were invariably tall, healthy, and very articulate in English), the local populations I met were Iberian (short, not so healthy sometimes, and incomprehensible in English). I know that Spain is not Germany, or Holland, or Sweden (or Finland: man, I love that place, though it does have a rather high suicide rate for being so awesome in so many other ways). If there is anything I learn from my limited experience with Europe, it is that poor people (in particular) do better trusting authority and novelty less. The less we aim at "wealth" (move to a big city, get a nice job and a fancy-ass house, settle down) and the more we aim at "competence" (move to a quiet place, acquire skills that make any particular job unnecessary, and live in the cheapest hovel you can afford)--the happier we will be.

Happy Spaniards knew their neighborhoods (their grocer, their doctor, their teachers), and were busy building those neighborhoods themselves--they did not trust you to come in and fix them. Even when your motives were entirely pure and you had no evil track record, they wanted you out of the way so that they could keep planting and building what they wanted, not what you wanted to give them. My purpose living in Spain, as readers of this blog know, was offering folks a chance to become Mormons. Needless to say, that did not go over very well. But I learned a lot--including two really important things about myself: I am a terrible salesman, and I hate sales. I did not sell the Spanish on Mormonism, but they certainly sold me on hating sales. That visceral distrust and dislike of advertising is something I think Americans could stand to learn.

To end this interminable comment en pointe: the official policies coming from Madrid make Spain sound like utopia (or at least, like France): free healthcare, job security, political democracy, etc. But the reality on the ground is rather different. You see, making this utopia real requires more economic strength than the nation has (leading some of the least economically depressed regions, e.g. Catalunya and Vizcaya, to produce large numbers of citizens who openly, loudly, and even militantly desire to secede from Spain). This is because there is a high ceiling for legal employment (meaning that employers and the state together have to be able to guarantee healthcare, wages, votes, and acceptable living conditions to legally employed persons, such as I was during my stay). But crap jobs still need to be done, so as we do in America, the Spanish hire foreign slaves (Africans and South Americans, and some Eastern Europeans)--who are willing and able to work for pennies that people have as opposed to the euros that dreamers (officials, humanitarians, managers, EU bureaucrats, Spanish bureaucrats) want to give them. There is this perverse dynamic at play whereby native Spanish youth have nothing to do (employing them would be exploitation, i.e. illegal and punishable as a criminal offense), so they must sit around on the street and in their parents' basements collecting pensions from the state (mostly; it occasionally cannot pay!) while Africans, Arabs, native Americans (many from Ecuador and Colombia), Bulgarians, and Albanians keep everything running for wages. The Spanish folk in my age bracket, while I was there (as a 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old) spent most of their time walking around town, smoking, making out in street-corners, getting drunk, playing video games or watching TV, and harassing people like me. Were they better off than I, health-wise, job-wise, education-wise (tuition was cheap)? In some ways, yes. In others, no. 

On the Ennui of Civilized Man

One of the great problems of our times is how to deal with the angst of civilization. We used to be happy to survive, back when food and shelter were our main concerns. Then, we invented ways of mass-producing necessities, and discovered "free time" (time that could be spent doing something other than looking for food, looking for shelter, or recovering from that search). Free time allowed us to play around more--to do things like build, trade, and make war.

The ancestral economy makes sense to us. Assuming you survive, it is not hard to live and be relatively happy while you are looking for food (that you expect to find), looking for shelter (that you expect to find), and recovering. Primitive, uncivilized people we can observe are often happier than their civilized counterparts, particularly as you look toward the bottom of civilized social hierarchies.

Civilized "free time" provides many benefits, of course, but these come at the expense of significant social and psychological turmoil. I don't know how to get my own food. I must rely on someone else to get it for me. I don't know how to get my own shelter. I need someone else to provide it for me. If I am living in a cultural backwater like the Middle East (or Africa or many parts of Eurasia and the Americas), then I am keenly aware that everyone really close to me lives subject to the whims of people we never meet. People with power. People who inherit a long tradition of free time, complete with awesome ways of making food, shelter, and war. I have three choices: abject worship ("please, god on earth, don't kill me! you want these shiny things? please, take them!"), avoidance ("better to avoid dealing with gods altogether: I think I will take up residence in a mountain cave and chant with some beads"), or revolt ("death to the evil gods who run my life without my consent!"). The choice between fight and flight is one that each person must make for herself, and we all make it differently. But some of us always choose to fight. Fighting is part of human nature.

For me, the really interesting question becomes one of finding ways to manage the fight-response to civilization. Can I take the urge to revolt, to burn civilization down for its crimes (which would be a crime, of course, but that did not stop the Mongols, and I am guessing that it will not stop the terrorists today), and turn it into something good? Can I build a cure for civilization into the death-wish that it spawns in certain people? We are always trying. (Politics and economics historically involve warfare: they struggle to contain and suppress and redirect it towards less destructive outlets, so that instead of burning your house down with fire I do it with bankruptcy in a court of law. It is easier to recover from bankruptcy than from war, on the one hand; on the other, going bankrupt too often will eventually drive people to war.)

The angst of civilization ultimately comes from lack of control over one's own life. The more you can convince people that they make decisions that really matter to their individual lives (and deaths), the less eager they are to blow themselves up (and seek another life beyond the grave, whether as glorified Homeric heroes or mujahideen copulating with crowds of virgins). The more invested people become in civilizations' games as active players, the less they want to burn every game to the ground (and start over, building new games--new ways of occupying people's "free time" that always resemble the old ways in time). When I hear people calling for more education (as a solution to problems of civilization), I think this is really what they are aiming to do: they want to show the desperadoes--the outlaws, rebels, and terrorists--that there is a productive place for them in existing civil games, that society has a nice place for them right here, if they would just put down their arms and play cool instead of fighting. Part of the problem with this idea, however, is that civilization is dynamic. People always lose its games; you have to lose (sometimes, something) in order to win. There is no such thing as a civilization that endures unchanging and perfect ("with liberty and justice for all," blah blah). If you play civil games (the market), you will get burned. Eventually, you will die. Confronting that reality is too hard for many of us (not just the poor or the outlaws), and some people cannot see it without going berserk. I don't have any easy answers for this problem. All I can do is observe it closely, and then take what measures are available to insulate myself maximally from its harmful effects (as I observe them in myself and the people around me).

Musings on Market Share

I hear people talk about there being an 'asset bubble' in the Western education market, similar to the one in the US housing market that popped around the turn of the century.  I agree that there is probably a bubble in education, and here are some thoughts I had about it, and about asset bubbles (or "economic growth") in general.  In sum, I do not believe in progress without regress, life without death, up without down, etc.

Every commodity can be over-valued. I think many people pay far too much for education right now--largely because they confuse education with institutional affiliation, as though learning or professional vocation were somehow inextricably dependent on possessing the imprimatur of a particular institution. The more the latter becomes true, the closer to collapse the market is. The more institutions corner the market on education, the more they invite the kind of corruption and abuse that sow seeds for a regime change that will severely depreciate the social value of their imprimatur (which may go extinct as a valid way of offering credentials, the way Bear Stearns is extinct as a means of managing finances).

Why do I oppose Monsanto? Not because I don't believe in science (or evolution, or agriculture). I don't believe in putting all eggs in one basket. I don't believe in cornering markets. I would like to find the smallest margin of profit I can maintain without going under (as an individual or institution), and then seek to maintain that (as long as the environment supports it)--not grow it to the point where I dominate (and invite the lightning-bolt of Zeus).

I oppose Monsanto because I see them doing to agriculture what universities aspire to do to education, what GoldmanSachs aspires to do with banks (and the nations that rely on banks), etc. To control all shots is dangerous, semper et ubique. I want minimal control (enough that I don't die), not too much (so much that I become "too big to fail" and wind up dragging entire communities down with my inevitable failure). Whatever we build must eventually fall down. I want to engineer institutions with this reality in mind--with the mortality of all companies clearly present in the mind of those creating them and working for them. We should aim not to live forever (nobody has achieved this, and you are not smarter than the guys who built Rome), but to die with minimal harm to those in and around us. We want to minimize corrosion, not maximize utility (or profit or advantage or brand or control or market-share or whatever anyone wants to call it). Losing well, over a history of multiple market-cycles, is more important than winning in any individual cycle (and there is no such thing as winning over all cycles).

Virtue

There is an interesting choice that civilization makes possible.  We can choose to be sick and weak for an extended period of time (rather than dying in short order as we would in nature). 

Going back to the old Greek fable, civilization puts us at a strange crossroads.  We can head downhill toward Pleasure, who will make our wasting and waning momentarily sweet (and chronically painful as we lose mobility, strength, flexibility, and eventually our lives).  Or we can head uphill toward Virtue, who will make our growth and stasis satisfying and fun in the long-term (while she gives us hell in the short, as we practice mobility, strength, flexibility, and living--hard tasks that really beat us up).  Heracles went up, of course, but his choice is not very popular. 

The thing about Pleasure is that it really wants to look like Virtue.  These days, it goes to the gym and the office.  It eats right.  It passes easy judgement on people who don't do the right thing (i.e. whatever it happens to like doing in the gym, the office, or the dining room).  If you don't look carefully, it wears a very compelling mask of Virtue.  The thing that gives it away, semper et ubique, is its focus on aesthetics over ethics.  It wants to look good.  It wants to win medals.  It wants to play, not work.  When its regimen gets hard, it goes home (and complains about "austerity" in the office, "chalk on the floor" in the gym, etc., while noshing some sweet snack--approved once by some nutrition guru--in the dining room).  It does not see value in learning through loss (what the old poet Aeschylus calls "suffering into truth," the bequest of gods to humanity).  It does not know how to value the suffering that outsiders do not see or recognize (with some external reward, some outward sign of approval that must become ever louder and more extravagant to keep people's pleasure-sensors firing wildly).  Virtue is different because it can take pleasure in defeat, and in victories that the outside world does not see (victories too small to be rewarded with money and prizes and shit, but they are some of life's most important gifts to humanity).

Virtue does not mind if you like to look at yourself in the gym, if your job at the office is mostly make-believe and pretend ("well, the boss needs this BS, so we will give it to him in the best order we can"), or if you indulge in the occasional "bad" food (all food is poisonous to somebody at sometime).  But if you never strive to live beyond your "comfort zone," if you never push away from the apathetic pleasure of relaxing into the active (and pathetic) pleasure of acting, then you will not know Virtue.  Your strengths will decay into weakness, your pleasure into slow pain, and you will live and die prematurely senile (rotting like untreated grapes rather than aging like fine wine).  If you live in the artificial world of civilization, the world in which you are not starving or homeless, then this choice is real for you.  Will you suffer here and now to feel better for years to come?  Or will you kick back and feel good here and now to feel like crap as you move into "the golden years" (which will be pleasantly unpleasant, punctuated by intrusions of chronic illness)?

The mind and the body are not separate in our human environment: we use both, and we use them together.  Naturally, we must exercise both if we want to retain function (and push our little envelope of blood and guts up Virtue's path).  What applies to your muscles applies to your mind, too.  Keep reading.  Keep learning (new information, new languages, new applications for theoretical understanding).  Keep looking for ways to integrate thoughts with action.  Keep looking for inconsistencies in yourself, in your environment, in whatever fantasy of reason or unreason you have constructed to make sense of the world.  The path of Virtue is a path of relentless inquiry--a process of defining, honing, perfecting, breaking, and discarding the self, which must then be built again, and again, and again, over and over as many times as possible until death. 

Some people, devotees of Pleasure, want you to build "the one true self," preferably when you are very young, and then carry it unscathed from adolescence to old age.  This is a recipe for avoiding Virtue.  You must banish "the one true self" from your life, if you take Virtue's path.  You must take a sledgehammer to that self, prove its weakness (for it is always weak), and build another.  There is no end to this process, no perfect self creatable that can withstand everything you or the world might throw at it, but the end-result of a lifetime building and breaking selves is that you become much better at the process.  You still tell lies.  You still make weak selves, mortal selves that disintegrate as you wish they wouldn't.  But you do it so much better--so much better than you did as a little kid, when you scarcely knew what it was to be coherent, to make a self.  

Science against Religion

Has there ever been an instance when religion and science came into conflict and religion legitimately won?  Imagine the reverse of the flat-world idea, e.g. science posits that the world is flat and religion argues it is round.

I think this is an unfairly loaded question.

Science, on my reading of history, exists as thoughts that people hold in a certain way. To put it crudely, the thoughts of a scientist that constitute Science are thoughts that can be transmitted clearly from one person to another and that can be proven false upon critical observation. I am annoying to some real scientists (and almost all science journalists) because I don't believe in scientific truth: for me the process of science is an accumulation of skillful lies about reality, skillful lies which exist as we become aware of our fundamental ignorance about how things work in a particular environment and learn to make that ignorance minimally poisonous. The theory of gravity, to my mind, is a skillful lie about how bodies relate to one another in space. It is skillful because its precision allows us to notice clearly where it ceases to work (e.g. in very small spaces). Much that passes for Science in the popular mind, and even in scientific journals, does not rise to this level of rigor (and skillfulness). This is particularly true of modern scientific publications dedicated to medicine and soft (not to say hopelessly squishy) sciences like psychology or economics (which latter I regard as the modern version of ancient astrology).

Religion is different from Science in comprising more (and more incongruous) things. Historically, scientists practice religion (along with other mortals), which is just a kind of organized human behavior that is more often than not explicitly irrational. (Why are we met on this field to sing at the top of our lungs, dance naked, and drink beverages that might make us live longer or kill us quicker, depending on which scientist we want to believe? That is a question that only an idiot would think he could answer definitively, it seems to me. And yet you will find some scientists--the ones I scoff at--trying to give definitive answers, explaining how the history of the universe makes rock concerts or Catholic masses inevitable.)

More often than not, what we call Science arises out of people reflecting on Religion (asking what we are, how we exist, what happens when we get drunk together, etc.). A more honest assessment of the relationship between Science and Religion, to my mind, would be that people generally have ideas (more or less clever) about what the heck Life is, and that some of them then go on to make these ideas falsifiable while others follow an opposite trajectory. Neither group of people (the generally skeptical or the generally dogmatic) argues pure Science or pure Religion (historically never simply theology, which is to Religion proper what Science is to medicine). Both tell clever lies, and both live a Life that refutes their lies constantly, whether they choose to notice or not.

Now, in light of all this, I come to the question: has Science ever gotten wrong what Religion got right? If we limit Religion to theology, historically a kind of Science (as I just noticed), then the answer is probably not.  But let this be no comfort to thee, Science, for (as just noted) Religion contains much more than just the rambling thoughts of a Plato or a Thomas Aquinas (let alone hacks like Ken Ham). It also includes years of practical experience, which is often incredibly wise where Science is naive and stupid.

Some of the most telling examples of Religion winning against Science occur in the area of diet and exercise. Religion gives people seasonality (rest at least once a week, observe holy days), where Science gives them lab schedules (work 7 days a week, night-shifts, etc., and when you get sick we'll hook you up to a fancy CPAP to see what the heck is wrong). Religion gives people fasting (the real secret behind many "miracle diets" that look great when native cultures practice them and terrible in clinical trials), where Science gives them whatever idiotic nonsense the US Department of Agriculture and the American Medical Association are currently shilling. I don't level the charge of nonsense lightly. If you care to dig into real Science, i.e. medical research, you will find a growing field in the study of iatrogenics, which reveals that much "cutting-edge" medical science (particularly in the realm of diet and exercise, and the cure for things like obesity, metabolic syndrome, and CVD) is dangerous bullshit.

If we move outside medicine to say, economics, we have Science offering people complicated mathematical formulae "proving" that debt is safe, whereas Religion tells them it is evil. In light of recent events, I am personally inclined to give this one to Religion (though others, notably economists, politicians, and bankers, will put in a bid for Science--and demand taxpayer money for further trials of their beautiful theories).

On Radicalism

The following are some thoughts I jotted down that seem worth preserving (as stimulants to further cogitation).

An authentic radical looks to his radices, seeking to know them, to acknowledge them, to incorporate them as intimate and familiar parts of himself.  Most people don't go the very roots of their existence. They are happy to identify with externals that they can purchase without really owning. Shall I buy this jacket or that one? (It never occurs to me that I might make my own jacket, with materials I create from an environment I live in.) Shall I vote for this Tweedledum or that Tweedledee? (It never occurs to me that strengthening my family, strengthening community values, etc., might require more than voting--especially when the same T and T are always running for office.)

The true radical is someone who sees his roots, the roots that nourish his life, as most of modern society in the West simply does not. Not only do we fail to see our roots, we make a virtue of this failure. To be ignorant of our roots (in the countryside we visit only on vacation, in the foreign factories where our goods are produced cheaply, on the battlefields where our security--ignorance?--is defended by people we never meet) is a sign of culture, civilization, sophistication, even education (what is the university? many things to many people, but for too many it is a set of blinders shutting out reality, e.g. the reality that its life is built out of death: too many folks eat at the table without noticing where the food comes from, or where the shit goes after we are finished digesting it). People want to appear engaged, busy, productive, useful, etc., and that is understandable (even something good, at least as an aspiration). Unfortunately, the appearance of value (degrees, cvs, certificates, quarterly profits, money) is much easier to create than the real thing (value that endures, that respects the death that its existence causes--and makes that death apparent rather than hiding it where people can ignore or avoid it).

"Radicals" in society are mostly just adolescent poseurs (who resent their parents for being stodgy and dull and mean, etc., but still expect regular checks in the mail to pay for weekend benders with their fellow "radicals"). The real radicals are too busy living to waste time posing.

"Radicals" camp out on Wall Street and complain that it should be a garden. Radicals move to the country, get a job (ideally from themselves), and make a garden, forgetting that Wall Street exists (because they couldn't care less: they don't need it, for anything).

"Radicals" complain that healthcare is too expensive. Radicals round up doctors to found healthcare co-ops (and/or charity clinics that they themselves will patronize, waiting their turn in line with the homeless).

"Radicals" complain that education is too expensive. Radicals don't go to school (unless you count the school of hard knocks).

"Radicals" think that the solution to every problem involves lots of talk (angry talk, happy talk, sad talk, solemn talk, papers, conferences, symposia, social media, journalism, political meetings, religious gatherings, etc.). Radicals think that talk is cheap, even when they speak.  

A Personal Economic Manifesto

A brief diatribe summarizing my take on contemporary economic policy in the United States of America (particularly, but my outlook has relevance elsewhere).

As long as we the people are stuck playing on Wall Street, its insiders will always have us by the throat. It does not really matter what their motives are, whether they are philanthropists or misanthropists or psychopaths or sociopaths. People like me will always be invisible ciphers to them, chips to move around in games where the outcome is some profit or goal that is remote from my experience. They cannot relate to me personally, humanly, or humanely--not even if they try. All the courses in good business ethics in the world will not change this. All the bureaucratic red tape in the world will not change it, either. There is simply no substitute for creating a street small enough for the individual to interact with people who see his personality, who respect it because they see it as the peer or mirror of their own integrity.

We don't need to fix the Street. It is irredeemable. We need to walk away and build new Streets (not one Street to rule them all: that is precisely the problem with our economic system as it exists right now; it is too unifocal, too centralized, too big not to smash little players like me to smithereens). The rhetorical dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street is too neat the way most people conceive it. Main Street is not a unit the way Wall Street is. It is a bunch of incommensurate and incommensurable stuff, an incoherent plurality that resists reduction to monotony. How it looks in one geography is no indication of its appearance elsewhere, and there is no prescriptive blueprint for building it the same way everywhere (to make regular profits for all people on it, implementing the same principles the same way). Saving Main Street is impossible, because no matter what anyone ever does, some Main Streets will die as others live. Wall Street is just the biggest Main Street trying to avoid its own death, unnaturally, by making all other Streets die prematurely so that it can harvest their organs to keep its defunct carcass breathing (barely).

There is no economic recovery because the Street is dead. It already died. It doesn't matter who killed it (Republicans, Democrats, greedy businessmen, bankers, ignorant suckers pouring their money into business they didn't and don't understand, etc.). Passing the guilt, and there is plenty to go around, will not patch Humpty Dumpty or get us moving on toward cleaning up his mess. We need to build new Streets. And we need to consider that each and every one of them will be mortal the way Wall Street was. I want to puke every time I hear people talk about the economy (in the United States of America), only to discover that they conceive that entity as Wall Street and (mehercule!) they have a plan to save it. I don't want to save that sack of shit. I want to drop it like a hot potato, burn it, and never look back (except to remind myself what not to build, what not to carry, what not to care about).

Intelligent Design Gets Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Every moment of my life, I make bets with the universe.  If it is cold, I bet it will stay that way for a certain amount of time, and I wear warm clothes.  If I need to get somewhere, I bet my car will work (or take the bus or the train).  If I enter a relationship with another person voluntarily, I bet its overall effect on my existence will be more positive than negative.  If I feel hungry, I eat something (or don't), betting that eating (or fasting) will make me feel better.  Sometimes, my bets pay off: I get more upside than downside from exposure to the reality I don't really understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me feel good.  Other times, my bets do not pay off: I get more downside than upside from exposure to the reality I don't understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me sick.

Some time near the dawn of my adolescence, I picked up the idea that there exists out there in the universe a betting strategy that would provide only upside--no downside at all (or at least, no downside worth considering: the upside would be so good that it would always pay gamblers like me more than it cost).  This idea was intuitive--it was a story I was inclined to tell myself by nature--and it was reinforced by my education, especially my religious education (which told me that my perfect betting strategy existed and was the restored gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the Latter-day Saints).

The LDS church (that I was brought up in) offered me a fixed strategy for making bets with the universe.  If you reduce this LDS strategy down to its essence, it looks something like this: (i) never do anything you feel bad about (bad feelings are a sign from God that a bet is evil); (ii) follow the prophets, no matter what (the prophets will never lead the faithful astray: their bets will always yield more upside than downside).  I placed many bets with this strategy over the course of my adolescence and young adulthood.  Some of them paid off (more upside than downside).  Others did not.  I was told that the downside from these bad bets would even out eventually, that losses did not matter, that they were Satan trying to mislead me (away from the one true strategy for making bets with the universe).  I should just take my losses, no matter what they were, and have faith that the upside would appear, eventually, and erase the debts that were starting to destroy my life's accumulation of moral capital.  For a while, this rhetorical placebo worked ("eat your losses, and God will make them up to you"), but there came a moment in my life when it didn't--a moment when my losses were too catastrophic to be ignored, a moment when it was painfully clear to me that I needed to change some of my bets with the universe or go morally bankrupt.  I had a moral crisis, what some call a crisis of faith.

Nassim Taleb tells my same story, in a different environment: Wall Street.  In brief, some Wall Street traders are kind of like religious fanatics (of the species I represent).  They make bets with the universe, as we all do, and when their bets are bad, they double down.  "My betting strategy is perfect.  I have constructed it painstakingly, rationally, conscientiously--and any losses I take will ultimately be offset by even larger profits!"  Blah, blah.  The worst of these traders were those who traded with others' money (e.g. investment bankers attempting to game the market with the life's savings of ignorant bank customers).  These guys could lose all their clients' money several times over (as some of them did), still believe in the truth of their bad betting strategy (which after all remains as logical, precise, and mathematical after losing money as it was before), and (worst) walk away with their own fortunes intact (even if they could never get employment as traders after their catastrophic losses).  These smug SOBs screwed their clients over, big time, and felt absolutely no compunction about doing it--because they believed uncritically in the absolute truth of their betting strategies.  Every time I read this story I am struck with how relevant it is--not just to my religious life, but to life in general.

As a result of my personal experiences, including my encounter with Nassim Taleb's work, I have realized something important about myself.  I don't trust any fixed betting strategy to deliver more upside than downside.  I don't care who tells me a story: I do not ever want to bet on a single story being so true that I can accept it without criticism (without taking out insurance somewhere, for when it turns out to be false).  When I was young, I believed in a universe of order--a just world that makes sense, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (eventually).  I no longer believe in that universe.  I have seen too many good people go under, and too many successful morons (including evil morons).  And I have learned that people all have different betting strategies (even individual LDS take the generic Mormon model and use it differently) and that these are all more similar than different.  Mormonism is more like Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam or Buddhism or even atheism than it is unlike them.  All -isms originate as ideas in the human mind, which leaves recognizable generic traces (no matter what particular story it tells in any given instance).  When you look honestly into history, it is patently obvious that the human mind is not a key to clear understanding of absolute reality.  Ideas are cheap.  Logical, linear ideas creating logical, linear maps of reality are cheap: they appear all over the place (in Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism, and any other -ism anyone can think of ever).  Results are what matter.  Change your ideas to match the results, not the other way round.  Ideas are like quicksand, inherently unstable and dangerous (no matter what they are or who has them or what methods he claims to use to get at them).

There is a fundamental insight here, something deeper than the silly ideological wars between competing -isms.  The fundamental insight is that reality is an open, chaotic system, not a closed, orderly one.  No matter how nice some story sounds in the classroom (or the chapel or the lab or the boardroom), it is guaranteed to be false in some way.  Logic is nice, and we should use it, but we should also use our eyes.  You can lie with logic (and math and science as these exist among human beings) as easily as with any other language (logic is a language, like math and Spanish and Latin).  Some lies are more harmful than others.  The worst lies are those that people don't question, those that escape recognition and get accepted as some kind of absolute, fundamental truth.  The worst lie is the one that says you can make bets with the universe that have no downside, no unexpected results, no risk for doing real damage.  Historically, there is no such thing as a bet with the universe that life wins unconditionally: all species go extinct, like all companies, churches, nations, and -isms.  But the successful people never see this.  The gamblers who staked it all and won don't realize that they win because they are lucky: they preach about how to succeed ("just make bets like I did! playing Russian roulette worked great for me, and if you have the right moral fiber, it will work for you, too!").  The losers know to question their strategies.  They see that their smarts don't work, that their logic is flawed, that reality remains opaque to the human mind (whether that mind approaches it through Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, atheism, or any other -ism: it doesn't matter which ideological horse you ride, you are never guaranteed to find happiness, at all).  But the winners don't get it. 

The winners talk about "intelligent design" as something real, and verifiable by recourse to simple observation.  "See this awesome company I have built," Dick Fuld says of Lehman Brothers.  "My partners and I had this great vision, and the brilliant piece of work you see before you is a result of our intelligent design" (the same kind of intelligent design that produces Paley's watch or Behe's cell or any other complex product of any process anyone wants to imagine).  Then the thing unexpectedly goes bankrupt.  What happened?  Where is the intelligent design?  Here apologists for the really just world I used to believe in typically come up with some kind of rational, logical deus ex machina to save their Intelligent Designer (whom we may as well call God) from being dumb the way all intelligent designers we see in history appear dumb.  "My CEO is not fooled by randomness the way Dick Fuld was.  Fuld was a loser, but my CEO is a winner.  Read his latest book!  It will show you how his design is really intelligent, fundamentally different from the flawed logic used by idiots like Fuld."  You can ride this train as many times as you like, picking a new guru (a new Intelligent Designer) every time your old one blows up.  If you're lucky, yours may never blow up (in your lifetime, anyway): you might be able to use his strategy to place bets that turn out well for you, randomly, because sometimes bets turn out well.  Success happens (I almost added "unfortunately").  You can play Russian roulette and win--even win big: that doesn't make it a good strategy to recommend to others who want to enjoy your kind of success.

At the end of the day, I really like paganism--the extinct Greek and Roman variety, especially--as an -ism for modeling the way I see the world.  The Greek god of just order is Zeus.  He makes sure that good guys win and bad guys lose.  But he is not omnipotent.  The rest of his family have will too (and often oppose him directly), and there are always Titans looking to rebel and destroy his fragile, temporal order.  In addition to all that, there lurks behind his throne the prophecy (preserved by Prometheus) that one day a son will overthrow him (the way he overthrew his father back in the day).  He is a realistic kind of intelligent designer--a gambler who places bets (attempting to effect order) that will not always pay off.  If there is a god ruling over the mess that is real life, this is what he looks like: he is not someone you can rely on for perfect stability.  From my perspective, there is nobody you can rely on uncritically for perfect stability--no person, no ideology, and no god (whether gods are real or not: it doesn't matter).  Real life is not about picking one strategy for placing bets and then insisting on that strategy dogmatically until you die (particularly if said strategy leads you to blow up: it would be sheer madness to continue killing yourself merely for an idea--no matter how pretty or logical it might appear).

I don't see myself as an opponent of religion or science, per se.  I don't have a problem with people placing bets that they like with the universe.  But I am a resolute opponent of people who think they have discovered "the secret" to winning Nature's game.  I mistrust priests and scientists.  I think it a virtue to doubt them, not embrace them and their (dangerous) ideas uncritically.  The best among them share my fear (and take measures to prevent their inevitable mistakes from hurting other people unnecessarily); the worst demand respect that they never earn (trying to bully me into making the bets they would on the grounds that they are "smarter" than I am because of some stupid ideology they like, an ideology which might be religious or scientific, Mormon or non-Mormon, skeptical or not: it doesn't matter, and I don't care).  In short, my moral crisis did not lead me to change allegiance from one god to another (who might be the devil).  What changed for me was the way in which I look at all gods, especially when they come to me strongly recommended by people looking to influence my moral behavior.  I mistrust people (including myself).  I think people are fools--lovable fools when they get their own lives wrong, dangerous fools when they try to make me make the same mistakes they are making because some god (or non-god) wills it.  Authoritarian bastards are authoritarian bastards, no matter what rhetoric they use to make themselves (and their followers) feel good about it.  I don't follow any of them (until I have to, because they will kill or ostracize me otherwise, and I want to live).  I don't love them.  I don't agonize over whether we should pick one over another (voting for the lesser of two evils).  They are all bastards.  They are all dangerous.  I am always against them, no matter what nifty rhetorical guise they use to cover up their bullshit.  They can be as religious or scientific as they please.  They can plead priesthood or democracy or logic or whatever the hell they want, and I will still refuse to bend the knee.  They can nail me to a rock and have the eagle tear my liver (as Zeus did to Prometheus), and I will die despising them for it.      

Funny Business

These thoughts occurred to me as I interacted with some people arguing that the solution to current economic woes is government intervention (1) to regulate fraud out of existence, (2) to create more jobs (e.g. "build more infrastructure"), and (3) to fix income disparity (e.g. with a "minimum guaranteed income").

(1) People are always going to be initiating fraud and/or making bad business decisions.  Unfortunately, that doesn't stop when they get elected, take an oath, and enter public service.  The fundamental problem with more government oversight as the solution to fraud or bad business decisions is that government workers are just people too (whether fraudsters or simply well-meaning fools).  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Because of the revolving door that Sorkin writes about (connecting the world of big business to the world of big government), the same bureaucrats (the Henry Paulsens, Tim Geithners, and Ben Bernankes) are always running the show, whether they happen to draw a paycheck from private profiteering or public service at any given moment in time.

The recent American housing crisis provides a useful illustration of this.  Proponents of more government regulation as a solution to our financial difficulties tell us that the crisis was caused by evil banks using dishonest tricks to make excessive profits.  There is definitely some truth to this explanation, but it misses an important detail: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were creations of the federal government, which demanded from them a policy like the one that they adopted (to our ruin) -- a policy that would allow and even encourage people to buy houses (give it up for the American dream!) regardless of their (in)ability to pay.  Now, would-be government saviors want us to forget their role in causing the mess (which they are blaming on private industry, conveniently overlooking that the private industry was just doing what they told it to).  This classic dodge is the same trick the LDS church uses to avoid being responsible for any of the uncomfortable things its prophets do or say.  Apologists for the Fed argue in effect that the recent financial crisis reveals our federal overseers speaking as fallible men (when they adopt policies that history reveals to be idiotic), but that we must all nevertheless continue to follow them unswervingly as though they were infallible prophets.  This naked appeal to authority without responsibility leaves me profoundly unconvinced.

The problem of government irresponsibility is a tough one.  Unfortunately, the existence of the Federal Reserve (as presently constituted) means that much of the government's (immense) economic power is entrusted to the jurisdiction of people who owe me (personally) even less than the periodically elected clowns-in-chief who answer to me as one person among 300 million (which in practical terms means that they couldn't care less what I have to say until I have at least a million friends: good luck getting a million people to agree on something that isn't hopelessly incoherent and/or stupid).  If Barack Obama doesn't really mind what I think about my money (any more than George Bush did), Ben Bernanke couldn't care less: he is not responsible to me at all, in any way, shape, or form.  I resent it when his decisions (to inflate the currency, to bail out businesses that I see as bad for society) control my purse more effectively than I do.  I don't make much money.  I am not very important to society.  But that doesn't mean that I don't have desires, that I don't believe in causes, that I don't want my two cents going to good things (things that I approve) rather than bad things (things I disapprove).  I resent it when the meager surplus that I have worked hard for and would like to invest in small businesses in Africa (or whatever) gets siphoned off by Ben Bernanke to keep Bear Stearns or GM alive.  And there is very little I can do about it except rant on the Internet.  (At least we have that!)  When people come to me arguing that people like me should be in favor of more government regulation, that it would actually solve all the problems I experience, I'm not sure how to take it: "Just give the hangman a little more rope!  A few more inches and it'll all be over."  Yeah, right.

(2) Now for those folks who think we could solve all problems by hiring people indefinitely to just "build infrastructure."  The need for infrastructure is finite, as is the material basis for infrastructure in geographical space and physical raw materials.  We don't have room or materials for endless roads (to nowhere), endless schools (to house imaginary students), endless buildings (to be occupied by corporations that don't exist, serving needs for which there is no market).  The fallacy that we can just grow our way out of fundamental weaknesses in our economic system is an enduring one.  It shows up throughout history (as Marx's theory of value to give one notable example: unfortunately, the fact that I spend hours laboring over something does not mean that it automatically has value that someone else must recognize).  In the past, back when there were still acres of untapped wilderness waiting to be exploited, it made more sense: if you can't make it in the city, move to the country (the rainforest, the mountains, the jungle, the bush, whatever, and become a settler "building infrastructure").  But today, in a global economy where every nook and cranny of the world is being explored and exploited (more or less), it is patently absurd (especially when we add the expectation that settlers in the bush live with the ephemeral comforts and luxuries of civilization as though these were some sort of human right).

In this day and age, "building infrastructure" often means destroying valuable resources to make a quick buck.  One illustrative example would be Brazil cutting down rainforests to make fancy furniture and biofuels: the model of eternal economic growth pushes Brazil to exploit the forest (and destroy it) rather than leave it alone (and let it be a source of values and utility that cannot be turned into GDP to fund the entitled lifestyle expected by civilization).  Civilization labors under an historical naivete which assumes that all economic problems can be solved with increased production and consumption: it does not know the meaning of austerity; its vision of wealth is fundamentally skewed toward growth and waste as necessary, even good, things.  They are not.

(3) The problem with guaranteeing everyone a fixed income is that value in society (like value everywhere) is relative.  Prices fluctuate.  More money in more hands means that everything costs more.  Dictators have been fighting this reality for a long time (a famous antique example would be Diocletian's Edict on Prices, which failed as every attempt before and after it that I am aware of has failed).  Inflation is not a viable solution to ebbing liquidity, and increasing production is only a viable solution as long as we retain materials and space to exploit: when we tap out those resources, the Tooth Fairy does not come by to bless us with prosperity (even if we have PhDs in economics, which mean about as much to me as PhDs in astrology or voodoo, to be honest: Long-Term Capital Management was founded by bona fide, certified experts in the field).

Given the reality of our situation, it just seems wrong to me that Ben Bernanke retains the right to co-opt me as some kind of human resource.  I don't mind recognizing real risks in the world and collaborating with others to meet those risks (as best we can: some of them are inevitably going to rock us, with unpleasant results; c'est la vie).  But to me, collaboration means that I get a meaningful say in what my contribution is.  I pick where my two cents go.  I place my bets and let nature do her worst.  I hate it when "doing my bit for society" means giving up all (or most) of my agency to the Ben Bernankes of the world, renouncing my role as a decision-maker so that some bureaucrat in authority can use my money to bail out his friends (Bear Stearns, GM) while my friends get rail-roaded.  I admit that my own knowledge of economics is limited and imperfect.  I admit that I make bad decisions, but I cannot say that the bureaucrats appear any more capable.  Try as I have to catch them saving the world (as they always claim to be doing), all I ever see when I pull back the curtain is them using me as human capital to save their own fat ***es.  Punks.

The Nature of Language

An acquaintance expressed some frustration that a girl he knows identifies herself as a lesbian while pursuing romantic relationships with men.  This made me think, and my first thoughts are on this page.

From my perspective, language is demonstrative. It points at something: sometimes it points badly (in a way that other people have real difficulty following). If you use language too cryptically, I am left in the dark when it comes to seeing your meaning out there the real world as I experience it. You say words like 'lesbian' and I am not sure that you mean what I would mean if I used those words. I sit back and wait for more data from you (language or behavior) before deciding what you are getting at.

There is an interesting problem here: sometimes, especially when dealing with complex phenomena (like sexuality or the economy), we have a tendency to oversimplify. Words are part of that oversimplification. We use them to refer in a general way to specific circumstances that we are familiar with. Thus, one person says 'lesbian' when she means to say something like 'woman attracted to women but also to certain men, i.e. a woman like me.' Maybe for her the point is that she is not entirely straight, and 'lesbian' is the first word that comes to her mind when she wants to put a tag on that. If you listen to her carefully, notice how she uses the word (e.g. what contexts call it forth from her), and avoid projecting your own idea of lesbianism into her idea of lesbianism, then you can understand her (well enough not to be completely clueless every time she speaks about her lesbianism). 

But there is this thing out there known as logic, a thing which maintains such unnatural (and in complex contexts, frankly absurd) idea that A ('lesbian') cannot be not-A ('likes sex with men'). 'Free market' cannot be 'protectionist racket.' 'Too big to fail' cannot be 'too big not to fail.' And so on. Since antiquity, there have been people who thought that words were more real than other phenomena -- that words allow us to deal directly with pure truth, unclouded by pesky empirical data (which is full of logical fallacies and paradoxes, unlike the perfect world academics have historically imagined -- a world in which A is never not-A).  The great power of words is that they generalize, making individual experiences shareable across time and space.  This is also their great weakness, especially when they are used to generalize a particular experience that many people have never had (e.g. being a lesbian the way my friend's acquaintance is) -- and one word is used all by itself to define that experience for everyone, everywhere (logically, A is never not-A anywhere, so we should be able to invoke it as the same thing anywhere, in any context -- people who see problems with this are just fools attracted to 'nuance,' 'paradox,' 'ambiguity,' and other namby-pamby 'unscientific' and illogical things).

But reality is beyond concepts. Things like lesbianism, capitalism, and such resist reduction to simple formula. These words point: they don't define. In the real world, people aren't either homosexual or heterosexual: we exist on a spectrum. And capitalism isn't either the best thing that ever happened to society or the worst: human social behavior, like human sexual behavior, exists on a spectrum. As long as we use language to point at material stuff that historically resists reduction to real dichotomy (good/evil, positive/negative, up/down, gay/straight, A/not-A), we are speaking descriptively, not definitively (unless we want to join the prophets who speak as morons -- prophets who exist in and out of the LDS church). We need to realize the artificiality of our language: it is emphatically not prior to the phenomena that call it forth. Reality is bigger than our reductive efforts to define it (historically: maybe one day, God will come down to earth in the form of a great scientist and give us words that define all things perfectly; it is a cool thought, and I really doubt it).