The First Church of Mises

Miscellaneous General
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Clayton, another way to think of the Major Arcana is as the journey of a man’s life. The zero card, the Fool, represents the querent/innocent/blank slate, and the remaining cards can be divided into three sets of seven cards representing three epochs of his life: the establishment of his external character, mental strengths, and spiritual wisdom. Or in another way, the three levels of initiation into a mystery tradition.

You see what you’ve got in a Tarot deck is primarily 19th-century Golden Dawn symbolism. For slightly older arrangement, look at the Italian Tarrocci decks-but even so, these symbols are Medieval, not older. Their association with spiritual themes or with oracular use is definitely of Early Modern and later origin.

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@Lady Saiga: Well, the Sephiroth is interesting in its own right… at the top is the “Crown” (head, mind) which divides left and right to the Fool (passive receiver of events/blank-slate) or the Magus (actor, creator, imposer of order onto the world). Either one leads to Wisdom or Understanding which suggests that, for the Wise, there is a time for everything… a time to be the Fool and a time to be the Magician.

Anyway, that’s just my own very superficial understanding of it and, while it is a very interesting way to organize things in its own right, it all strikes me as ad hoc, hodge-podge. And I suspect that’s just because I’m not plugged-in to Jewish culture. Perhaps if I had been raised in that culture, it would “click” with me… but it just doesn’t. Not like the beautiful map of the heavens traced out by the astrological traditions, especially medieval European astrology.

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Clayton -

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Hermetic Qabalah is more monotheist in a Neoplatonist kind of way (which is complicated) and is not appropriate to my liberal polytheist worldview. While I know my religion borrows with both hands from Golden Dawn ritual structure and symbolic language, the focus is entirely different.

I still use Tarot. It’s not strictly necessary to apply the meanings of the cards to the Qabalah. I find it’s simpler to consider them this way:

The Major Arcana describe the stages of life, as aforesaid. I can explicate each if you want but this is looking like a pretty long post…

The Minor Arcana are the moderating worldly forces that act upon them. They are grouped into four suits that correspond to the elements of Western ceremonial magic-this is a language utilized in Wiccan ritual, too.

Pentacles = earth/physical concerns

Wands = air/mental concerns, reason

Swords = fire/Will

Cups = water/emotion

If you have a look at the little book that probably came with your deck (I assume it’s a RW deck) it will show you one difference from the above. The suits of wands/swords were publicly associated with opposite meanings because the Golden Dawn has oaths of secrecy and the RW deck was meant for public consumption. Some modern decks return the suits to their more rational meanings, and some don’t. I interpret as I listed above, and this is because in Wicca as in Golden Dawn those ritual tools are associated with those elements.

Each suit has ten pip cards, one for each number of our base-ten numbering system/finger on our hands etc. Each number from one to ten has a somewhat well established meaning of its own in Western thought at least as far back as Pythagoras. So the number when considered against the elemental associations of the suit itself results in a possible array of meanings.

1=basic, beginning, lowest common denominator, a gift

2=polarity or choices, separation

3=shared experiences of conflict or challenging power balance, opportunity, growth

4=stability or logic

5=passage of time, movement toward a goal or end result, challenges to overcome

6=balance, cooperation or coordination, a stable system

7=creative change, action, possibility

8=stable cycles, predictable change

9=ripening, completion

10=Excess or fullness

The court cards traditionally represent people in the querent’s life, or aspects of the querent’s personality, each corresponding to its suit in the nature of the card’s title if you understand me. Meanings can come out of considering what “kingliness” would have to do with each of the elements, etc.

So you see the Tarot actually does correspond quite well to a cohesive worldview whether Qabalistic or otherwise. The images on the cards can help associate certain ideas with them, and when the cards are laid out in a particular spread where each place has an additional significance, the spread as a whole can inspire some very exciting and creative thought regarding the issue or need that inspired the reading in the first place. I use Tarot for brainstorming.

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I perceive two different orientations within philosophical discussion. The first - and I think one of the primary preoccupations of much of philosophy - is an orientation toward being right, particularly in the sense of winning arguments. In this orientation, philosophy is about being irrefutable. Another orientation toward philosophy has to do with getting to personal truth, that is, “making sense of the world.”

The two are obviously related to a degree since you cannot make much sense of the world if you’re completely factually wrong on everything. But I think this is an overly black-and-white view of the nature of truth-seeking; the human mind already has a formidable repertoire of factual knowledge about the world, some of it in-born and some of it acquired through the experiences we all go through. So philosophical investigation is really dealing with truths “on the margin”, so to speak.

I think the “being right”-orientation toward philosophy takes an overly extreme view of the nature of being wrong - “If you don’t get this right, everything else you think will be arbitrary or even false.” The fact is that people hold all kinds of factually wrong information in their heads and still get through life just fine. This is true even of specialists who do what works even when they do not really understand why it works or perhaps even hold beliefs that contradict the operations they are performing, in the final analysis. In other words, the human mind is a very fault-tolerant environment and the parameters in which most of us work most of the time are also very fault tolerant.

Where the being-right-orientation is particularly pronounced is in the area of ontology. “What exists” as a matter of ultimate fact, that is, a theory of ontological fact that will never be disproven by our descendants. The “making sense of the world” approach leads to a gentler approach to ontology - “What exists as a matter of practical significance, particularly as it relates to causality?”

The use of models and metaphors can be a method of getting to the truth.

Morality (can be thought of as the philosophy of decision-making) is primarily a matter of the mind because deliberative decisions are reached in the mind. The majority of the factors that contribute to even our non-deliberative decisions also reside within the brain. In order to construct a morality, then, we need some kind of anatomy or map of the mind itself. Some kind of theory of how the mind - in the most general possible sense - works.

By contrast to psychology, anatomy is a fairly straightforward science and allows medicine to make “natural” divisions within the subject. Skeleton, muscles, nerves, vital organs, etc. etc. The mind, however, is quite different. First, you can’t dissect a mind because a mind only exists while the individual is alive and awake. Second, there is an “observer effect” in attempting to analyze the mind - you change the very conditions of the mind by trying to observe it. Even with “objective” third-party observation, you can’t recreate the natural conditions in which the mind operates. An fMRI is hardly a non-intrusive device.

Trying to develop an anatomy of the mind is like trying to do medical anatomy without being able to cut inside to see the structural and causal relations. We can see the net effect of the causal factors in the mind, but we can only hypothesize regarding the buried causal factors.

However, there is at least one useful metaphor for the mind that throws significant light on the operation of the mind and which has its basis in the physical anatomy of the brain: a neural-net computer. In fact, it isn’t even a metaphor, the brain just is a neural-net computer but we do not know if that fact alone is the sufficient cause of the mind and conscious experience (and it seems unlikely that this is the case). So, we are in a position of being able to say that the mind is a computer in the same sense that an arm is a lever. The arm is not a hydraulic, even though a hydraulic is a kind of lever. Similarly, the mind is not a web server, even though a web-server is a kind of computer.

Even though this is a very general kind of information about the mind, it is still much more specific and much less arbitrary than what was known before. We can establish limits to the capabilities of the computational (discursive) aspect of the mind. We can form hypotheses regarding the computational organization of the mind based on certain high-level facts that must apply to any computational system (e.g. Amdahl’s Law). It has also thrown light on psychology itself as the evolutionary picture of the brain as an agglomeration of dedicated, special-purpose modules has helped focus psychological methodology. Culturally universal behavior is evidence of the existence of a special-purpose module responsible for this behavior.

This brings me back to the idea of using the cardinal virtues as a “mnemonic map” or model of the nature of human decision-making. I think the idea of a “cover set” of virtues gives a hint toward a more scientific approach to discovering something like a science of decision-making (scientific morality).

Language is one example of a behavior of the human mind. It is a “skin” - an output of the mind that is more or less objective and can be easily observed. An extremely large list of virtues and vices can easily be constructed with nothing more than a dictionary and some free time on a Sunday afternoon. Such a list is useful in that it gives an inventory of virtues which can then be taxonomized. In combination with some of the techniques of evolutionary psychology, it is conceivable that a fairly robust positive moral theory could be constructed.

This approach is not complete because language is not the only behavior of human minds. Nevertheless, the general idea of how to proceed is contained within this approach and is extensible. A great deal of morality and decision-making actually has to do with “the unspoken” (unspeakable). Nevertheless, evolutionary psychologists have had tremendous success in analyzing even these aspects of human nature.

Summary: An anatomy of the mind whose orientation is to “make sense of the mind” rather than “being irrefutable” and whose aim is to analyze the basis of human decision-making (morality) can form a foundation for a positive morality. At least one avenue of approach is to analyze human language itself and to construct a taxonomy of human virtue-words (praise-words) or vice-words (infamy-words) and then attempt to find a “smallest cover set” - a list of cardinal virtues. By restricting ourselves to the set of virtue-words and vice-words that are culturally universal, we can deal with the universal aspects of human nature.

Clayton -

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Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing Altucher article… the guy is downright Shamanic. I think I will copy this whole.

Clayton -

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Religious originalism and virtue theory

OK, so I want to tie together some of the thoughts I’ve put in this thread. Here’s a rough outline summary. Note that I’m not going to footnote. Some of what I assert can be backed up with specific historical citations, some of it is based on anthropological axioms (evolutionary assumptions about the early human environment) and some of it is based on logical deductions from these. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.

The modern social order exhibits many signs of dysfunction. There are two sources of this dysfunction, one natural, one artificial. The natural source of social dysfunction are the non-linear events in recent (in the evolutionary timescale) human history often termed the Agricultural Revolution. This displaced man from the environment in which he spent the vast majority of his evolutionary history and placed him into an entirely new and ever more rapidly changing environment. This has played a role in the rise of the parasitic State. The artificial source of social dysfunction is the active interference of the parasitic element within society to secure its position and to attempt to prolong its existence against the inevitable forces that drive all evolving systems to equilibrium, that is, the forces that eliminate organisms that do not sufficiently protect themselves against rampant parasitism. The parasitic element in society seeks to thwart these forces and to maintain the social dysfunction that makes rampant parasitism possible.

One role of religion in the human social order prior to the Agricultural Revolution - or, to be more to the point, in a tribal or clan-based social order - is the promulgation of virtue theory and moral instruction. With the Agricultural Revolution, the increased productive capacity of the individual meant there was greater scope for the division of labor in many areas of production and there emerged in some societies a full-time priestly class who specialized in the production of religious goods, that is, promulgating virtue theory and moral instruction. But as the Agricultural Revolution also displaced man from his natural environment and rendered him maladapted, it made him vulnerable to habitual expropriation by raiders and, eventually, rulers. The priestly class stood as a threat against stable rulers by generating constant moral criticism (and, thus, social unrest) of rulership and taxation.

Some rulers eliminated this problem by wiping out the priestly class altogether but found their problems compounded as the social order itself degenerated under such extreme measures. And the moral illegitimacy of toppling sacred temples and murdering priests was that much more strongly underscored in the minds of the subjects. Hence, other, cleverer rulers chose to corrupt the priestly class by finding allies within them and selectively eliminating those who would not sell out to the ruler. Thus was born the great theocracies of Egypt, of Rome, and so on.

The natural consequence of this infiltration is that the virtue theory promulgated by the priestly class was corrupted and the priestly class became just another organ of the parasitic Elites. The “virtues” taught by the priestly class turned to self-sacrifice, the duty to obey, the “collective good”, and filled people’s minds with cosmic concerns over which they could have no control even if they were real (e.g. the struggle between God and Satan) and displaced from their minds concern over those events in their day-to-day life over which they did have control, thus rendering the masses incompetent and weak, unable to mount organized resistance against the State.

The idea of “astro-liberalism” that I presented earlier would better be stated as a subset of religious originalism. Religious originalism is a return to the religious orders which predated the combining of the priestly class and the State into the modern system of brainwashing, manipulation and propaganda that forms the core ideological foundation of State power. This return is not meant to be an attempt to recreate older religious orders per se (ala Himmler’s fascination with German paganism), nor is it meant to be a “rewrite” of all religious principles since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. Rather, it is meant to be a principled skepticism towards all religious conventions which have arisen during the era since the Agricultural Revolution… that is, since before the dawn of history.

We don’t need to throw out all our religious heritage. I would contend that this is actually an act of insanity and is one of the reasons I oppose secularism per se. A great deal of our religious heritage can and should be salvaged and we can look to cultures which have preserved their tribal structure to modern times (e.g. the Somalis or the Afghan Pashtun) to see what we should be particularly skeptical about and what we should see as probably “natural”, that is, not just a ploy to soften our hearts and minds to accept organized parasitism. In Christian countries, one avenue of approach might be to extend the work of Ferdinand Baur and the Higher Criticism, which has been all but dead for over a century.

Another avenue of approach is to start from a clean slate and attempt an “Exodus” from Christianity altogether and reconstruct religious communities from the ground up. It’s been done before (what else was the Protestant Reformation?) but this approach carries its own risks… fanatics are always attracted to social reconstruction projects. Astrology and paganism, in particular, are I think good starting points for reconstructing religious communities from scratch because these have proved to be durable vessels of folk wisdom, whence all religion really originates. One last point of caution here is that “hermeticism” is a secret-society knockoff of genuine astrological and pagan traditions and should be avoided.

It is this avenue of approach that I am exploring with astro-liberalism. I am working on a reconstruction of Greco-Christian virtue theory based on a blend of Epicurean ethics, Misesean action theory and evolutionary psychology (empirical theory of human nature) and framed within an astrological metaphor to make the theory practically useful. Any good theory of virtue must be succinct enough as to be practically useful, otherwise, it’s just theological, pedantic.

Overthrowing the organized parasitic element within society is not a proper end - it is not something that should be adopted as a battle-cry or a flag to be rallied around. Nevertheless, the entire sweep of collectivistic morality is based squarely on the trick of turning people’s eyes away from what they can know (individual satisfaction/suffering) and what they can control (their own actions in response to the opportunities in their own, individual lives) and onto what they cannot know (the mind of God, the “highest good of humanity”) and what they cannot control (the battle between good and evil, God and Satan, etc.) A necessary step in “striking the root” is to build a proper moral foundation for individual action based on individual knowledge, guided by the corpus of human knowledge regarding virtuous living compiled over billions of lifetimes, immortalized in our natures, in the languages we speak and recorded in detail over millenia. That’s where my attention is directed.

Clayton -

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Conceptual Outline

A brief outline of some high-level thoughts, hopefully on the way towards something resembling a cohesive theory.

  • Awareness; We experience life as an undivided whole, which can be called “consciousness” “awareness” “conscious awareness” etc.
  • Sense; The specific content of awareness. The capacity to be aware of specific things implies the capacity to distinguish this from that. Hence, distinction/discrimination forms the hidden foundation on which awareness stands.
  • Control; We have psychokinetic control of a portion of the world, specifically, the body
  • Choice; Moment to moment, we exercise the faculty of control to actualize a state of affairs and renounce its alternatives
  • Existence; “What is” is a shorthand for “what we know about the world with certainty” (or near-certainty); The theory of knowledge thus remains prior to theories of existence.
  • Knowledge; The “picture” or “model” that our brain builds of the world (prima facie knowledge)
  • Uncertainty; The state in which all human knowledge is held to one degree or another with the exception of “apodictally certain” propositions… that is, those propositions which must be true by virtue of speaking anything.
  • Time; The causal-ordering of the unfolding of events or “interactions” within the world
  • Causality; The relation of events by which we say that one event is “brought about” by another; in particular, we say that “A is causally related to B” if it matters to B whether or not A occurred. (Dharmic law)
  • Suffering; That aspect of awareness which comprises a deficient or unsatisfactory state of affairs and produces within the mind of the sufferer a “pang” or “goad” that impels him to exercise control in the world in order to alter the unfolding of events in such a way as to remove the conditions that are causing his suffering. (Karmic law)
  • Value; The subjective disposition towards a state of affairs, real or imagined. The value of a state of affairs to an individual is only meaningful relative to other states of affairs. The value of a thing can be thought of as its “rank” or position in a comprehensive list of states of affairs, though the human mind does not have an infinite capacity and clearly does not actually work in this way.
  • Purpose; The goal or end of a choice. Purpose can be short-run or long-run but ordinarily refers to the long-run.
  • Action; The application of means to the accomplishment of a purpose (end). To apply means is to exercise control in the world, which control manifests itself as choice.
  • Satisfaction; The longest-run end of all. The end which is implied in all others and which never implies any other end but itself. Satisfaction is the complete absence of suffering. In the wholly abstract condition of satisfaction, the individual would cease to act at all. Satisfaction can be defined as formally equivalent to: the end implied in every choice. Thus, satisfaction is the value which is relatively greater than every other value, for all individuals. Satisfaction is the end of man.
  • Scarcity; The finitude of resources, including the resource of cognition
  • Technology; The selection of the correct means for the attainment of an arbitrary end
  • Morality; The selection of the correct ends for the attainment of satisfaction
  • Human nature; What makes humans human - our anatomy, our brain, our language, our unique (from other animals) behaviors, and so on.
  • Culture; in its broadest sense, the expression of human nature; in particular, the residual “memory” of the outcome of innumerable living experiments as individuals and groups have attempted moral and technological arrangements with success or failure
  • Virtue; Specific prescriptions of a morality founded on a theory of human nature, informed by culture

There is a lot more to it but this completes the bare-bones arch of the argument - it is possible to construct a positive theory of virtue that does not rest on superstition and is not arbitrary, nor follows merely from “reason”.

Clayton -

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Uncertainty → Trial & Error → Discovery through Selection

This basic progression governs every process in the world, from the smallest to the grandest. We can use “information theory” to describe its laws with exactitude. Uncertainty is any deficiency of absolutely complete and certain information, a state of affairs in which everything but the Absolute itself must exist.

It is because of the fact of uncertainty that the telos of any acting being remains a matter of trial & error. Satisfaction, as I have shown already, is the telos of every acting being. Thus, the conditions of satisfaction can only be discovered through trial & error.

In the case of the self, I am not the only instance of a human being who lives or that has ever lived. Because people do not lie about everything, I can trust that some of what they say about the conditions of their own happiness is true. Hence, I can “shorcut” the discovery process by adopting the plausible reports of others as to the conditions of happiness. The vast majority of human beings have already lived and died. Thus the corpus of trila & error regarding the conditions of human happiness has already occurred and is a matter of history.

Nevertheless, discovering the conditions of satisfaction is complicated by two antagonistic factors.

First, there is man’s trek out of Paradise, that is, his leaving the Ancestral environment where he lived exclusively as a hunter-gatherer in a very low-population environment. This was the result of the Agricultural Revolution whereby man shifted his caloric base from hunted animals and foraged foods to cultivated crops and domesticated animals. This enabled man to become sedentary. This double boom in calorie-independence (greater caloric productivity and reduced caloric expenditure) created the conditions for a population boom but also fundamentally altered man’s environment and his relation to it in many other ways that have rendered much of his instinctual knowledge regarding the best path to the attainment of satisfaction irrelevant or even wrong.

Second, along with the Agricultural Revolution occurred the rise of the parasitic class - a permanent, professional class of parasites that exploits man’s maladaptedness to the post-Ancestral environment in order to secure its own sustenance on the backs of the productive class. This class actively obstructs the development and spread of genuine knowledge regarding the path to the attainment of satisfaction. It even “jams” the discourse by injecting superficially plausible, yet deeply misleading, alternatives to the correct path to the attainment of satisfaction.

The topics of “awareness” and “control” are key to combatting collectivism. First of all, to be able to alter conditions for the better, there must be an awareness of a deficiency - there must be a pang of some sort. Second, in order to effect an alteration of the conditions which are bring about a deficiency, there must exist sufficient control over the state of affairs.

Collectivism violates both of these conditions. In the first case, I am generally unaware of the suffering of others. When I say “unaware of the suffering of others”, the wrong picture may come across… I do not mean that I am never aware of severe privation, such as the homeless person begging on the side of the street. I mean that there is a categorical difference between my own, instantaneous and thorough knowledge of the deficiencies in my own satisfaction (aka suffering) and my knowledge of those deficiencies in others. The difference is as great as the difference between what I am seeing through my own eyeballs and what others are seeing through their eyeballs.

In the second case, I do not exercise control over the vast majority of the conditions which are bringing about even my own suffering, let alone the suffering of others. The heroin addict, for example, is the primary cause of his own suffering. I do not control his body and I am not able to prevent him from injecting himself with more and more heroin. The collectivist War on Drugs is built squarely on a mass delusion that “we” can control the conditions of drug production, distribution, consumption and addiction.

Clayton -

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Brown’s list of cultural universals.

Clayton -

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I’m about to watch this

[view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eO4nwXZ9GM]

i heard its distribution was constantly sabatoged so I’m doubly interested in it.