The Economics of Interior and Exterior Poverty

Here's one for the Glass Bead Game: what does idiom -- the unthought language of the self -- have to do with economics?

This question occurred to me while reading this piece on the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. The question occurred because I immediately recognized the implicit answer. Even now I haven't explicated it -- that's what the post is for -- and yet, I know the answer is there.

In fact, this is a kind of mini-example of idiom in action, or at least an analogous variant of it. It all has to do with recognition -- or re-cognition -- which is "the identification of something as having been previously seen, heard, or known."

Except that I hadn't previously cognized the connection, at least consciously. But the orthoparadoxical term "unthought known" precisely goes to this process of unconscious re-cognition. While it might sound annoying or cute -- like some overworked wordplay the B'ob might force into existence -- it's really the perfect way of expressing it: something we know in our bones but haven't consciously innertained in skulldom. You could call it the realm of the bone-known, but I think you'd agree that Bollas' term is preferable.

Let's start with a question; in fact, Shem's "first riddle of the universe,"-- "dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens,"-- "asking, when is a man not a man?" The winner gets "little present from the past."

Give up? "Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? -- when he is a... Sham."

So, are you a sham or are you the real deal? And how would you know the difference?

Reality is usually thought of as what is outside ourselves. But we couldn't know that reality unless there were something equally real on the inside.

Let's discuss de Soto's view of economic reality; he speaks of how "the Third World's poorest are relegated -- banished from their nations' official economies to what he has called 'the grubby basement of the precapitalist world.'" Now, why are they so banished to this psychopneumatic backwater? Because of "a lack of enforceable property rights."

Now let's go back to idiom, that is, the private language of the self. How is this language spoken? Largely through objects in the external world. You might say that culture is the collective sum total of "psychicized" objects for personal expression.

In other words, culture is in one sense "out there," i.e., exterior to the self. And yet, cultural objects have only the meaning we lend them. If I were to drop you in, say, Saudi Arabia, or interior China, or UC Berkeley, there would be very few objects there -- a very limited vocabulary -- for the expression of your idiom. You would be unable to find -- forbidden from finding -- the objects to express your unique idiom.

Not only that -- and this is a key point -- but your idiom wouldn't even be yours. Rather, with no strictly private property, what's yours really belongs to the state, plus the state puts sharp limits on personal expression anyway.

To take an obvious example, suppose you were an artist working in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany. If so, your idiom would have been restricted to socialist realism or classical kitsch. In Germany, for example "modern art was [seen as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit." And only Hitler decided "who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew."

Thus the tyranny of aesthetic correctness, which is ultimately enforced by the absence of any inviolably private property, right down to the first property, which is your soul.

As our fathers told us, certain truths are soph-evident to anyman to the right of the left, that we are endowed by our Creator with the liberty to discover and appropriate our own idiom; and that this right co-arises with -- for it cannot be actualized in its absence -- the right to property.

Looked at this way, "private property" is a kind of language, the idiomatic language of the self. You want what you want, and I want what I want. Liberals hate this idea, because they want you to want only what they want. They want to restrict idiomatic expression to their own idiom.

Or just say PC, which is really a pre-emptive attack on personal idiom, on our cosmic right -- and for Raccoons, our coonstitutional duty -- to be different. Have you ever watched MSNBC? The reason why it is a failure is that it is so dreadfully boring, frankly as boring and didactic as Soviet or Nazi art.

To paraphrase George Carlin, my stuff is your junk, and your junk is my stuff. In other words, stuff I like -- objects that speak to my idiom -- might just be a collection of junk to you, like my shelf full of vintage Barbies.

But on an even deeper level, this is the source of the energy of the private economy: I will give you this for that because I want that more than I do this. Simple as.

Which is not so simple in practice, and can even get you killed in most parts of the world. de Soto himself survived the bombing of his office by socialist terrorists in 1992. As Fox Butterfield might say, "Economist Targeted for Assassination by Leftists Despite Helping Lift Millions from Poverty."

One thinker -- who uses his words instead of bombs to express his idiom -- praises de Soto "for demonstrating how property rights -- often disparaged by left-leaning intellectuals as an instrument of the privileged -- help the poor:

"He has helped explain to convincible [heh] readers how radically egalitarian the rule of law and property rights are. Plutocrats, strongmen -- they have their muscle. They can take what they choose in lawless situations. But the poor and weak are protected by the rule of law and property rights."

So the krugmaniacal Obama, that phony Shampion of the Poor, has spent the last six years undermining the very thing that relieves poverty, both exterior and interior. If he had his way, the whole world would be as financially and intellectually impoverished as MSNBC.