“I feel to warn you that one of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions. There is more than one reason why the Church is advising our youth to attend colleges close to their homes where institutes of religion are available. It gives the parents the opportunity to stay close to their children, and if they become alerted and informed, these parents can help expose the deceptions of men like Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, John Keynes and others. There are much worse things today that can happen to a child than not getting a full education.” (The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p. 307.)
Brigham Young on taxation being theft..
I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property from one man and giving it to another who knows not how to take care of it… I do not believe in allowing my charities to go through the hands of robbers who pocket nine-tenths themselves and give one tenth to the poor… Would I encourage free schools by taxation? No! (Journal of Discourses Vol. 18, p. 357)
That works. Fortunatly anyone who has grand theories of “ultimate” history narratives, or people who care about religion are being marginalized. Both subjects are jokes.
I’ve considered the idea of a new spiritual organization based on Misesean ideas. One of the problems people face in digesting the concepts in economic theory and (sound) social science is that it is all so impersonal. Yet our brains are not wired to relate to each other impersonally (I think this is probably a good thing!) Hence, I think most people cannot access the truths of sound social science unless it is restated in more personalized language, that is, in the language of morality and spirituality (self-development).
Tradition is the dominant force in religions which are the usual vehicle of spiritual and moral instruction. This makes them very slow to respond to changing circumstances and new (sound) ideas. But tradition is a feature, not a bug. There are people who go around giving self-development seminars (for a speaking fee) and the customers of that industry might actually be a good target audience for this kind of “spiritualized” Misesean theory.
Don’t confuse my use of the word “spiritual” to be about intangible beings. Rather, I’m using it more in the sense of that which can’t be measured, that which lies solely within oneself and may as well be a “soul” because of its inherent unsuitability to the impersonal methods of science. Can integrity be studied by science? Maybe, but not by today’s science. Is integrity not a crucial virtue which people of sufficient maturity realize they need to learn? This is what I mean by the spiritual: that which concerns “the whole person.”
Take, for example, the division-of-labor. The spiritual side of the division-of-labor is learning to overcome one of two possible responses to it that both result from a character flaw or spiritual deficiency within oneself. On the one hand, there is the tendency towards introversion and self-sufficiency… rejection of the existing division-of-labor by attempting to satisfy all one’s needs without exchanging with others. On the other hand, there is the tendency towards managing the division-of-labor by imposing unwanted organization or management onto others and forcing them to either exchange when they otherwise would not have (excessive division-of-labor) or forcing them not to exchange when they otherwise would have (insufficient division-of-labor). This is the opposite of the introverted response to the division-of-labor; it is the self-aggrandizing response to the division-of-labor.
The spiritually healthy response to the division-of-labor - that response which is consistent with good character and a healthy spiritual disposition - is to allow others to decide for themselves whether to trade or self-produce, while exchanging for things produced by others whenever it is advantageous in the satisfaction of one’s own wants. That is, it is spiritually health to participate in the division-of-labor as a peer with respect for others and without imposing one’s vision of what is the right amount of division-of-labor onto others.
I’m sure this approach could be extended to many other topics within Austrian theory and even further.
Haha, I’ve thought that myself too. But limits of this strategy always make me to think is it worth of time it needs. Totally new spritiual movement could be started from the fresh, empty paper, but this will come with expense in the numbers of followes. That’s why I’m leaning towards reforming current movements. Example with Catholic church many theologists started to follow Aristotelianistic lines of thought in middle ages, and created a reform in the Western culture. Rothbards ‘nature of man’ and self-ownership are good philosophical insights for religions - I think for every single one of them.
Catholics in Southern Europe respect their family more than the state
Southern Europe is also hecka socialist (Spain, Italy, Greece)
I’ve considered the idea of a new spiritual organization based on Misesean ideas
giving a new meaning to “Paulites” and the like, inciting the fears of leftists who think that free-market thinkers are people who offer gold coins at the altar of Rockefeller and Bill Gates. Injecting such ideas into religion and social teachings is certainly a good idea, but giving leftists another target, not so much.
Sorry I had a derp moment, I was responding to freedom4me and I responded to that, I saw you and it went from freedom —> Liberty. Lol so sorry for that
@Wheylous: I don’t really factor in the reactions of other political groups into such decisions. What really matters to me is whether other people would actually find it useful and instructive. Is there a spiritual void out there that could be filled, a bit like a business opportunity but regarding moral teaching in one’s spiritual self-development? Is anyone out there really talking about stuff like this.
I’ve seen George Carlin come close but he was always up-front that he’s an entertainer, not an instructor. I stumbled across this guy named David R. Hawkins on YouTube… he actually has some really good insights that aren’t far from these kinds of ideas but then he goes off into wacky stuff about meditating in higher chakras and opening your third eye. I suspect there’s a niche market out there of people who want a strong, logical foundation underneath their spiritual beliefs about how to go about living their lives - something a bit like praxeology. “If you want to achieve X in life, then you must do Y and you must avoid Z.” (say, X is satisfaction, contentment).
The body of knowledge regarding virtue and self-development is already vast. People have spent a great deal of time thinking about these things and writing down their conclusions, some of them are total crap but many of them are actually quite useful. But what is often lacking is some kind of “guiding light” to bring it all together… what’s the point of meditating? What are you trying to accomplish? Too much of what passes for spiritual teaching is just a lot of mumbo-jumbo muttered quickly enough to sound impressive and deep.
Clayton, that is a good idea that might indeed be a good business idea - a mentoring company composed of people who know how to achieve goals in life mentoring those who cannot do as much. Having a mentor really helps, as it helps to set goals and to focus efforts. I am really interested in how this could work out. A mentor company - teaching people how to succeed.
Indeed, it could prove the power of the individual - taking people in the middle of depression, lack of self-confidence, and turning them around and giving them bright careers.
Dont be so quick to dismiss things you havent experienced yet.
I agree
I agree there is a lot of crap. But many times it is unintelligible given your pre-existing premises. If you are a metaphysical materialist you wont find chakras interesting. Perhaps you would change your mind upon learning that each chakra corresponds with a nerve ganglia or part of the brain. But I agree that meditation is largely counterintuitive for a materialist. Think of it as reformatting the human hard drive.
Perhaps I’ve phrased it too strongly. I place in the “crap bin” anything that does not conform to cause-and-effect. If I look at an LED clock display while eating cheerios, the segments of the LED do the most bizarre dance (try it, if you never have, it’s a ‘psychedelic’ experience). I don’t understand the cause-and-effect nor do I need to in order to experience the phenomenon. I just need to know what to do to trigger the phenomenon. Much of what passes for “rationalism” in Western philosophy is dismissing phenomena for which we have no cause-and-effect explanation. But this is an overreaction. It is folly and arrogance to dismiss phenomena for which you have not yet found a cause-and-effect explanation, much like the Catholic Church dismissing Galileo’s results on gravity because they did not understand the cause-and-effect of it.
However, when a person starts saying things like “your chakras open a window on another world and when you enter that world you can do this and that and talk to the spirits of the deceased” and so on, I perceive a causal theory in the absence of phenomena, or a causal theory that assumes far more than is justified. If you take mushrooms and feel like you have a conversation with a long deceased guru, how do you know that it was a long-deceased guru you had a conversation with? Isn’t it possible that you were just f-d up on the shrooms and it just felt like you were talking to some long deceased guru?? So wouldn’t a more objective reporting of the phenomena be “when entering such-and-such mental state, you can experience the feeling that you are conversing with your long-dead ancestors”? And so on. I feel like the spiritualists often impart ontological reality to things that could just as well be explained by your brain’s circuitry giving you the feeling that something is real.
A dream is the obvious case. When I dream, I sometimes feel like I’m really having a conversation with a particular person (someone who might never talk to me) or I’m really seeing some scene or drama unfold. But when I awake, I realize it was only “just a dream”. What I perceived was not real in the same sense that my perceptions of the computer monitor in front of me now are real.
I’m not a dogmatic materialist… with Mises, I am actually a methodological dualist. We may as well speak of a soul since, for all practical intents and purposes, we have one. But, at the same time, I plead ignorance of what it even means for something to be “supernatural”… it’s either real or it isn’t, it’s either part of your real experience or it’s not. What it’s “made of” and “how it works” are separate issues that need not be dealt with before differentiating between what is real (like computer monitors and souls) and what is not real (dreams, fiction).
I agree with your assessment that most of what passes for spirituality tends to treat what appear to be artifacts of the subconscious as part of objective reality. Witness the skilled clairvoyant ledbetter (who was the first to discover quarks) and his “masters” a collection of wise and ancient enlightened spirits that watched over humanity. For all his achievements, he could not master his own subconscious enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I think what is missing in religion these days is philosophy, specifically philosophy of science. Theories like evolution or buddhism are only useful as far as they allow one to understand data and make predictions. The fact of the matter is that the theories of modern society are generally unfit for explaining modern society. This creates dissatisfaction, because people do not get the results that match their predictions.
As far as your assertion that dreams are not real, that does seem to tend towards dogmatic materialism. The fact of the matter is that some people report meaningful information from these experiences that, I hope we can agree, can be said to occur on an ontologically different level. Here I am referring to out of body experiences, remote viewing, dreams, visions, and the like. Experiences of this nature have been a part of human history for hundreds of millennia and the recent (enlightenment and later) efforts to reject such for practical materialism have, in a few hundred years, marginalized a large part of the human experience. Early man wasnt an atheist. One tribe may have believed in the god that showed them how to track rabbits and pick apricots. Another tribe may have believed in the god who showed them where to fish and how to open coconuts. But it was not until man gained the wealth and leisure time for a large population to lock themselves away in man-made boxes, eat man-processed foods, and spend hours looking at nothing but man-made objects and discussing trivial (relative to long term survival) things with other men, that we started to ask ourselves if “god” really existed. I submit that the cultural wisdom to bring about those experiences and interpret them meaningfully has been lost.
The dream itself is real… it is definitely a fact that I am dreaming. But how can what I am dreaming about be real? If I dream I’m standing on the edge of Niagara falls, looking over, how can that be real when I’m in fact lying in my bed, asleep? I can’t be in two places at once.
First of all, to claim that dreams are objective and contain meaningful information is not to say that they are literal representation of fact. You could meet your cousin in a cafe and have him tell you to buy pork bellies on e*trade for him, in a dream. That doesnt mean your disembodied awarenesses met in an actual earthly cafe. Jung postulated the collective unconcious and while you may not agree right now, it is certainly noncontroversial enough to posit and doesnt violate any known laws of physics.
second, the idea of a disembodied awareness visiting earthly realms may be controversial, but it is also hard to dismiss, given the evidence. The cia/army remote viewing program in the 80s being one example of evidence.
third, and I hesitate to mention this because I dont want you to think I am trolling, it is not strictly accurate to say, in a philosophic/scientific sense, “I can’t be in two places at once.” we can say that you (and I) are unaware of any credible evidence for the existence of bilocation. But that requires us to dismiss your dream experience a priori.
Just the first result i got from Google (so you can read more). Maybe not so much anymore with china in control. But basically Tibet worked much like feudal Europe in its not so free ways.
Christianity, Buddhism, and a few others that are open to personal interpretation have the greatest ability to be be pro-FE. But, similarly they might be the direct opposite. Look for religions who’s holy texts or directives are individual and specific in directing a Religion to accomplish worldly goals; find this you find unfriendly religions to FE.
Otherwise stated, if you avoid tyranny, you avoid control, and progress free enterprise.
Or that is my take on it. Which I feel is a logical one.