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Yes and it was discovered and described in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States among other documents. For the first hundred years it more or less worked because We the People chose to use reason and to remain free and acted accordingly.

There might be a few Indian tribes with differing opinions about who were the brutes during that time, and differing opinions about what constitutes living free. Very difficult to find a golden era that was golden for all concerned.

The tremendous technological advantages that allowed the early US settlers to be successful were mostly imported from Europe anyhow (along with those settlers). The US didn’t become a technological world leader until after WWII, and in that particular case got a boost from the waves of highly trained refugees fleeing the old world for the new.

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Yes and it was discovered and described in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States among other documents. For the first hundred years it more or less worked because We the People chose to use reason and to remain free and acted accordingly. Since man has free will, he can choose to be irrational as well as rational. We the People have long since lost contact with the thinking behind those documents and have chosen leaders who are leading them to the abyss.

When the bulk of humanity is irrational, the most the rational can do to protect themselves is to go John Galt. I contend THAT is exactly what is in the process of happening sans the existence of a Galt’s Gulch.

The consequence is that the brutes will end up consuming themselves after they have consumed anything else they can grab. While this “solution” may turn out to be the only one possible, it’s much less than practical. That is if by practical you mean supports surviving and thriving. I don’t call one to ten thousand years of dark ages practical. Yet that is exactly where our so called leaders are taking us.

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Let’s not get into a mine is bigger than yours argument. I have been in the technology “game” since the mid 1950’s and as a trained and productive professional since the mid 1960’s. Do a patent search on my name as inventor. That will give you some insight into my fields of activity, its intensity, and its duration. Also, the history of science and of human thought has been one of my special studies. Check out my Intellectual Ammunition web site for more information

While we might agree on the historical facts, we don’t appear to agree on its interpretation nor on the practicality of that interpretation. I suggest that the reason is we start from a very different set of first principles.

My position is that theory and practice must be a unified whole. Theory without practice is mysticism. Practice without theory is magic. That reality and the nature of man and his relationship to it can be known and understood. That you need not know everything to KNOW something. That words are more a tool of thought than communication. That clarity, precision, and consistency of word usage is critical. That words must refer to things and relationships among things but not foggy internal ill-defined feelings of shape shifting intent.

I should also point out that it is not possible to make a complete communication within one blog post nor even in several. Hence, there is much left unsaid that constitutes context of what either of our posts. Much of that unstated context can be inferred from the basic principles implied or explicitly stated.

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Once the brutes have consumed the men who do live by reason…

I would have thought that the primary objective of living by reason was to discover ways to protect oneself from brutes. Maybe your reason is more real than mine, but when the brutes come for me I’ll just make do with what I have.

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“I am an intelligent person (Oxford science degrees) and I find the whole financial world extremely hard to comprehend! Knowing that I am not that stupid, I am starting to look at this world as a deception – and how it is disguised by linguistics. I am not doing too well – and David Evans book may help.”

Your exactly right Peter it’s a tower of babble I would suggest you take a look at http://mises.org if you have not already done so. I hit the work a day world in 1975, could not figure out why I never felt I was getting ahead in spite of the fact that my income was increasing nicely. That’s when I got introduced to inflation. It was then that I started to realize that thing were not as they seemed to be. I began to understand it much better by 1998 through some self study and finally happening on to the http://www.mises.org website. Then I studied Murray Rothbard who as far as I am concerned has no peer when it comes to cutting through the crap and exposing what is really going on. It’s a fun area of study but be prepared to be pissed off.

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I have been directed to your site because I have just published a sceptical book on climate change: ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ – it is well reviewed on Amazon.co.uk

Reading through the above posts, I want to tell you that although the science community (to which I belong) studiously ignores the book, some of the most interested people have come from the banking community in London. They know how much money can be made. And they are worried about the carbon bubble bursting – just like the housing bubble and the current inflated asset bubble – but the ones I am meeting are a revelation to me – they do actually care about planetary ecology and they want to know the truth.

I was already aware of the huge carbon credits scam – but when I researched the book I only touched upon it – now I am having to do more homework – and its really disturbing – I am an intelligent person (Oxford science degrees) and I find the whole financial world extremely hard to comprehend! Knowing that I am not that stupid, I am starting to look at this world as a deception – and how it is disguised by linguistics. I am not doing too well – and David Evans book may help. It is therefore refreshing to find such straight-talking and clear evidence that the whole system is deliberately obscure!

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First, thank you for making my point. You view it all as due to arbitrary whim, brute force, and accident. For you, the mind is essentially irrelevant and the conditions necessary for the mind to function as arbitrary. This last point is demonstrated by your statement I quoted above.

Have you ever invented a new technology? Have you ever moved one from initial concept to the market place? I have and I KNOW what it takes. It is anything but a matter of whim, brute force, or accident. It is especially NOT easy. It is particularly impossible in and environment of mob rule by thugs which you say have been so “successful”. Apparently we also have a VERY different view of the meaning of success.

Reality is real. That means humans are what they are. To live, they must be more than predatory brutes. They must live by using reason FIRST HAND. Once the brutes have consumed the men who do live by reason, they cease to be able to survive and begin consuming each other. THIS, I contend, is NOT successful.

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I suggest our difference is that you see morality as a matter of agreement based upon arbitrary whim. I see morality as founded on the facts of reality and objectively determined by the use of man’s reason. Hence, for you, rights are determined by the whims of mob rule. For me, they are determined by my fundamental nature as a living and functioning human being – ditto for every other human alive. That is if they choose to remain alive and to thrive.

On the whole, mobs living by “whim” of mob rule have thrived reasonably well so far, the Earth’s human population is still growing. If there was a prime morality determined by the fundamental rules of nature then it would surely have had time to become universal by now, or at least reached a reasonably narrow valley around this supposedly optimal moral code.

I would agree that there are some potential rules of morality that never work. For example, a moral code where everyone tries to randomly kill other people has never been the basis of a successful society.

Ignoring such extreme examples, other rules for morality have been quite arbitrary. For example, paedophilia is considered the worst of the worst in modern times, but was quite common in the ancient world. Sparta was a superpower of its day, considered to be the supreme force in land warfare, but they were also gay, and staunch supporters of slavery, and extreme socialists (not hypocritical equality-based socialists, but practical military hierarchical socialists). Rome also ran on the power of slavery and a great many other practices that would be outrageous in modern context but Rome operated one of the most successful empires in world history.

Hitler, Stalin and Mao each created moral/legal structures that were almost indistinguishable from each other — highly centralised totalitarian rule, small elite ruling committee, the individual exists only to serve the state and anyone who dissents must be killed. Hitler’s effort collapsed in a decade, Stalin’s lasted about 50 years but China is still running a centrally planned system, still delivers the highest numbers of death-penalty killings in the world but looks set to become another economic and military superpower (with some small drift towards capitalism and away from Mao’s original communist model).

On the other hand, the USA has drifted in the opposite direction, towards stronger and stronger central planning and greater federal interference in daily affairs. So far the US empire has not crumbled, although cracks are showing here and there. I personally expect the US to thrash wildly for a while then reinvent itself but it would be a bold prediction to claim to know what exactly it will reinvent itself into.

Let’s not forget that technology drives things forward, and the computer revolution is only in mid swing, the biotech revolution has not even really started yet. Many empires fall over at a crucial change in technology. Heavy cavalry could deliver the speed and punch to defeat a Roman legion, originally used to great effect by the Goths but before long everyone was doing it. The Samurai of Japan considered it unsporting and disgusting that a line of quickly-trained peasants with cheaply made rifles could rip apart a well trained warrior with the best equipment, best family and best horse.

That’s just how it is, times change, the balance of power swings around. Some ideas work for a while, then new ideas come along. From this point of view, ideas about morality are technology like any other and the agreement people make (more or less voluntarily) when they join a group is part and parcel to the implementation of that technology. So far no particular methodology has proven completely supreme, they have their advantages and disadvantages.

Libertarianism delivers well on invention and economic advancement, but requires people be tolerant amongst various lifestyles and people do tend to enjoy petty intolerance. Socialism seems to be vary adept at warfare, especially the sort of mass teamwork required to field large armies. If Hitler and Stalin had managed to cooperate rather than bashing each other then Western Europe would have been obliterated. Yes I understand that narrow elite power structures inevitably make blunders, but they could have dealt with many small blunders if they had avoided the Battle of Stalingrad.

Quite likely the age of large armies is gone now, we are moving towards hi-tech war so inventiveness is getting more valuable, but making new technology is so easy, expect to see a lot of change coming.

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