Man's Faith in God's Faith in Man

Some interesting comments yesterday about divine foreknowledge, free will, the nature of prophecy, etc.

In rereading the post, the following passage caught my attention: "Rather, I can only provide some general outlines and directions, but I hope to begin fleshing things out on Monday. Anyway, don't jump to any conclusions just yet. It will all make sense in the end."

First of all: Napoleon, like anyone can even know that.

But... I do know it, at least in a kinda sorta way. I mean, I don't know it like I know the sun is shining outside, but I have this intuition that a number of diverse strands will somehow come together and make sense.

So, it's not yet knowledge. Nor is it foreknowledge, because it's not like a mathematical equation, which, given the variables, has only one solution. You know the feeling. Call it... faith.

Faith is always a kind of unKnowing, because it's not just blind stupidity or flat ignorance, but an irreplaceable mode in the search for meaning, guided -- or lured -- by an invisible gradient of deepening coherence. Faith points and we follow -- it's analogous to our natural compass that points us toward foodsexgrog, but on a higher plane. It's a supernatural compass.

The world is full of “particulars,” of loose ends and bits of disconnected information. The deeper philosophy will be the one that connects the most fragments into a unified whole. Therefore, reality is both “present” and hidden from us, depending on our skill in weaving our own psychopneumatic area rug and pulling the cosmic womb together.

But this goes to what one commenter said yesterday vis-a-vis the differences between present, past, and future. These three are so different that it is difficult to see how they relate to the same word, time.

For the past is fully real (or realized), the present is the space of possibility, and the future hasn't happened at all, so it is not "real" in the same way as the first two.

Anyway, you might say that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unSeen. Thus, it is both substance and evidence, but not a physical substance and not empirical or (merely) rational evidence.

This got me to thinking: faith is said to be such a commendable virtue, I wonder if there is something analogous with God?

Again, I go back to the principle that man is in the image of the Absolute, so if this modality is so critical to our existence, why wouldn't it also be present in God, albeit in some analogous fashion? (Or, more properly, our faith would have to be an analogue of God's faith.)

So, is there any evidence that God has faith? Or is there some kind of reciprocity going on, whereby we have faith in God and God has faith in us?

You biblical scholars out there will be better at this than I am, but my first impulse was to check out my concordance in search of God's faith, and there it was, all over the place. For example,

Even with the Holy One who is faithful (Hos 11:12).

But as God is faithful, our word to you was not Yes and No (2 Cor 1:18).

He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it (2 Thes 23:24).

... for He who promised is faithful (Heb 10:23)

He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 Jn 1:9).

So, it's almost as if we are called upon to have faith in God's faith in us. If God's faith is analogous to ours, I suppose it would mean he "hopes" we do the right thing, just as I hope this series of posts will make sense.

In both cases, the faith is not just "passive"; or rather, it is passive in the sense of opening up an unsaturated space of freedom and possibility in the now, but active in the sense of movement toward the source of our faith, which in turn is the "vector of coherence," so to speak, or the density and interconnectivity of wholeness. Our faith is the shadow cast back and down by the light of this wholeness.

This again touches on the issue of God's omniscience, and whether it is possible to have the same sort of omniscience vis-a-vis the past, present, and future.

It seems to me that omniscience of the past is not especially problematic, because it consists only of "what happened." And knowledge of the present would flow from God's interior prehension of the whole -- or in other words, there would be no coherent whole, no cosmos at all, in the absence of God.

But what of the future? When God "prophesizes," I wonder if it is, in a way, analogous to my "prophecy" that this series of posts will somehow "all make sense in the end." Thus, it wouldn't so much mean This is going to happen, and I know exactly how, but rather, Don't worry. This is gonna happen, even if the particulars aren't all worked out yet.

Thus, this would allow for genuine surprisal in history, and God's ongoing "adjustment" to it, so to speak, to bring about the "ordained" outcome. In other words, there are many roads, none of which were built in a day, all leading to home.

Well, that's about it for today. Still no time to get into the unseen substance of what I was hoping for.

A Creative God of Information vs. A Predictable God of Order

As promised, I want to try to relate information theory -- as discussed in Gilder's Knowledge and Power -- to theology.

It's a little frustrating, because it's a huge topic, and I barely have enough time to scratch the surface this morning. Rather, I can only provide some general outlines and directions, but I hope to begin fleshing things out on Monday (not sure about tomorrow). Anyway, don't jump to any conclusions just yet. It will all make sense in the end.

First of all, do we have any reason to believe that the structure of the cosmos reveals anything about God? I don't see why not; there's always something of the creator in the creation.

That word: creator. If God is a creator, then that alone is full of implications. For as Gilder writes, "creativity always comes as a surprise to us.... It is a high-entropy event. Innovations are not an expression of equilibrium and order, like crystals or snowflakes," but rather, "disruptions of it."

The question is, does creativity come as a surprise to God? Well, only if he is a creator. If he is not surprised by his creation -- and by the creativity of his creatures -- then he is something other than a creator, perhaps an "orderer," or mathematician, or playwright, or puppet master.

A God of this sort doesn't play dice with the cosmos, or with anything else, for that matter. In fact, he can't gamble at all, because he knows the outcome ahead of time. Sounds a little boring to me.

Furthermore, if God knows the outcome ahead of time, this erodes our free will, revealing it to be an illusion of temporality. Many Christians are fine with this, but I personally have issues with this type of omniscience.

Indeed, I think one of the most shocking implications of Christianity is the idea that the Creator submits himself to his own creation; that God genuinely offers himself to history, with no foreknowledge of what is going to happen -- because he is free, as are the human actors involved.

Isn't the whole pathology of the left encrapsulated in the pretext of foreknowledge of an open and undetermined future? Again, they try to impose order at the expense of information. But since the cosmos is in fact informational, this means that leftism fails because it doesn't comport with the nature of reality. As Gilder writes,

"No rational determinist scheme can encompass entrepreneurial entropy," because it "begins beyond the boundaries of settled rationality. As a form of new discovery, it passes Gödel's threshold, the point where all logical systems, including mathematics, exhaust their completeness. Entrepreneurship transcends certainty and enters the always-evanescent realm of creation."

So God is some kind of businessman and not just an isnessman? Not just O, but CEO?

Before you laugh -- or wince -- consider the fact that the essence of the trinitarian God involves transactional giving. Let's not idealize the individual businessman, but let's just consider why the free market works. It works because of "an imaginative sense of the needs of others," which, in aggregate, constitutes "a pattern of giving that dwarfs in extent and essential generosity any socialist scheme of redistribution."

As mentioned yesterday, I've been reading a book on process theology (not raccoomended to the casual or maybe even formal reader). I've always had problems with process theology; or perhaps it's just with the most prominent process theologians, who tend to use it to undermine orthodoxy and to promote radical environmentalism, hysterical feminism, Marxist liberation theology, and other pneumopathologies. These vertical activists blatantly use theology to legitimize their political and economic preferences.

But I think a genuine understanding of process theology goes in the opposite direction, for reasons alluded to above: because the cosmos is more like an informational organism than it is an ordered machine. This is why the cosmos is full of surprising developments that cannot be deduced from, much less predicted by, prior states; or as Gilder writes,

"[C]hemistry cannot be reduced to physics -- the density of information is much higher," just as "biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, or human creativity to biology." To simply shout evolution did it! is to beg the question entirely. Such simplistic notions "stop thinking rather than stimulate it."

So let's start thinking about this surprising cosmos of ours. Let's do like Hartshorne, for whom metaphysics was a "solemn vocation," involving "as a philosopher, the pursuit of the nature of reality, and as a theologian, the search for a rational foundation for religion" (McMurrin).

The Unboreable Lileks of Bleating

Reading this book of essays by and about Charles Hartshorne in conjunction with Knowledge and Power has been mutually illuminating. Hartshorne was the most famous acolyte of Whitehead, refining and extending his process philosophy, especially into theology. Both information theory and process philosophy describe a world of ceaselessly flowing information.

Again, mere order is not information. I hadn't appreciated this subtle point, but Gilder reemphasizes it in a section on fractals. Fractals are a form of order that reveals similarity across scale, but they actually contain virtually no information.

For example, I remember reading a couple of decades ago, about how researchers were attempting to predict the stock market by looking at the fractal pattern of day-to-day and year-to-year movements of the entire stock market -- as if its future were constrained by some macro-fractal pattern, or strange attractor.

But that makes no sense from the perspective of information theory, which again produces unpredictable novelty. Gilder compares the above approach to "analyzing water by focusing on the bubbles as it boils," on "trivial patterns yielding small or chaotic effects that are divorced from the actual substance of causes and consequences."

But one "cannot predict the future of markets or companies by examining the fractal patterns of their previous price movements," because "there simply is not enough information in current prices to reveal future prices."

It reminds me of an app Lileks has written about, which tracks his movements throughout the day. It produces interesting patterns that essentially depict the phase space in which Lileks lives, moves, and bleats.

But is he really constrained by that space? Does it really mean he has only the illusion of free movement? No, not unless he's severely OCD. But he's only a little OCD. Not to mention the fact that the exterior phase space doesn't say anything about his thrilling interior adventures. Another person running around in the identical phase space as Lileks would be totally boring.

But Lileks always manages to transform his low-entropy peregrinations and encounters into high entropy, entertaining bleats. It's called art -- a little like Joyce's Ulysses, only intelligible.

I mean, that's what art does, right? It takes the same materials available to all of us, but uses them to create novelty. Unlike Tom Friedman -- who always wants you to know that he lives in a very big phase space that takes him all over the world -- you never know what Lileks is going to say. Thus, there is no relationship between Friedman's expansive exterior phase space -- which seems so "free" -- and any meaningful pneumacognitive freedom.

For Gilder, "markets are more analogous to biological phenomena," which immediately calls to mind Whitehead's organismic approach to the totality of being: in short, reality is much more like an organism than it is a machine.

Hartshorne was a relentless critic of reductionism and determinism, because "chance and causal indeterminacy" are "negative but necessary aspect[s] of" of our freedom. In contrast, determinism "is a doctrine of the total insignificance of our freedom, giving human beings no greater scope of creative options than the lowest of creatures."

Thus, with the emergence of man, there is a huge ingression of freedom, novelty, creativity, entropy, and unpredictability into the cosmos. Where did it come from? To say that it comes simply from a prior state of low-entropy order makes no sense at all:

"Neither pure chance nor the pure absence of chance can explain the world" -- to which I would add that neither pure order nor the absence of pure order can explain it. Rather, "there must be something positive limiting chance and something more than mere matter in matter."

But what?

How about creativity? "Nuts and bolts cannot evolve," because "they have no intrinsic creativity. To have creativity is to have, in some sense, a goal or purpose. Future possibilities are causes in the present, both in sustaining the entity and enabling it to evolve." Conversely, determinism "is a theory of cosmic monotony, not of cosmic beauty."

Ah, now we're getting somewhere, because future causation is also vertical causation. Jumping ahead a bit, one of the essayists references Josiah Royce, who said that The best world for a moral agent is one that needs him to make it better. But how do we make it better unless we are lured by the attractor of a superior mode of being?

Or in other words, "The divine orderer works with entities that each have their degree of freedom to respond or not to respond to that influence. This may be tiny at the level of the electron" or the New York Times editorial page, but "is highly significant at the level of the human person."

And this is a very Raccoonish sentiment: "God, instead of being the all powerful manipulator of the creation, is its great persuader, providing its entities with specific goals or purposes and coordinating the activity of all."

In fact, this is where all the human information comes from -- in particular, I'm thinking of the "orienting" or "anchoring" principles that make a meaningful human existence possible.

A dog, for example is oriented by very simple attractors, e.g., food, sex, and companionship. But what is so surprising about man is that, the moment he becomes man, he is oriented around an entirely novel set of attractors, things like love, truth, beauty, virtue, nobility, courage, creativity, etc.

Where did these come from? From the past? From mere order? No. From the future -- or from the upper vertical (the former in time, the latter in space). In the absence of orientation to this upper vertical -- consistent with Voegelin's main point -- our lives are absolutely meaningless.

And ironically, this applies quintessentially to science, in that "the very sense of intensity in scientific activity is essentially bound up with the unpredictability of future discoveries and the frequent surprises in experimental results" -- for example, the surprising result that the globe hasn't been warming for the past 15 years after all.

Notice how the so-called scientists are attempting to characterize this as noise rather than information. That's not science. Nor is it religion. Rather, it is just the illicit attempt to impose a specious order upon surprising information so as to make it go away.

Gotta run. I'll leave you with another quote:

If becoming does not create new quality and quantity, new determinateness, then, we argue, it creates nothing and nothing ever becomes. And if nothing ever becomes, then there is no temporal passage from past to future. Everything simply is all at once.

Or in other words, history is just the time it takes for nothing to happen.

(The Sipster is another guy who can fling low entropy bits of his life onto the Internet floor and turn them into art. Few people can do that, and I'm not one of them. I always need to dialogue with high entropy folks like Gilder and Hartshorne in order to extrude a little novelty.)

Socialism Would Be Easy If Not for F*cking Creativity

"The very nature of creativity is that it always comes as a surprise to us" (Gilder).

Right? An antiquated machine that extrudes the identical lame product over and over -- say, Tom Friedman -- is the antithesis of creativity. If something can be predicted by its antecedents, it isn't a creation, it's a mere effect of something else, fully reducible to predetermined causes.

Science, strictly speaking, explains everything but creativity. Not only that, but in its reductionist mania, it generally attempts to explain the creative via the uncreative, the intelligent via the mindless, freedom via necessity, and the living via the lifeless. It just waves a magic wand over the ontological discontinuities and pretends this is an explanation.

I noticed this yesterday while thumbing through a recent Scientific American in the orthopedist's office. No matter what subject they touched -- the Big Bang, the origin of life, the intersection of ideology and science -- every author had the same adolescent tone of smug superiority to go along with their dull absence of style and their one-dimensional shallowness of thought. The magazine seems to exert a heavy editorial hand that banishes seriousness of thought; or that affirms a frivolous certainty.

To put it another way, their minds are entirely lacking in creative surprisal, so perhaps the metaphysic they embrace is just a massive projection of their own experience and limitations. As the left likes to say, they are indeed speaking their truth. Which no one should confuse with Truth. Rather, these are just fairy tales for the tenured, chicken shit for the scientistic soul.

But to be trapped in that sort of mind would be a kind of living hell for anyone who has made it to freedom, or who has rotated in Plato's cave.

Freedom means nothing to someone who has never experienced it, which is why it is so difficult to export it to places where it has never existed, e.g., Islamistan. For such peoples, freedom has an entirely different connotation, meaning essentially the freedom to live in their traditionally unfree manner. For them, the alternative to such oppression is social chaos. What we think of as individual liberty doesn't enter the equation.

My own racket of psychology is no more a science than is global warming. Psychologists have no difficulty explaining something after it has happened. The trick is predicting the event before it happens, which is what a genuine science does. The best historian in the world cannot predict the future.

What this means, of course, is that man can never be exhaustively described scientifically. True, it is useful to consider certain human parts in a mechanistic/deterministic manner, but the soul -- or a person, if you like -- is quite clearly beyond any human calculation. A person is not reducible to an ape, just as taking a shower is not reducible to rubbing oneself with hydrogen and oxygen.

The same is true of the climate, but for different reasons -- not because the earth has a soul (although it may have some analogous, emergent large-scale interior unity), but because of the infinitude of variables, i.e., because of the complexity and non-linearity of the system. Climate cannot be predicted for the same reason we have no idea what the global economy will look like 100 years hence. In both cases, the researchers simply don't know what they don't know -- which swamps what they do know.

Scientism is afflicted with a bad case of WTSIATI: what they see is all there is. How sad!

If we could predict surprise -- a contradiction in terms -- then we could organize and plan for it. Nevertheless, despite the intrinsic contradiction, this is precisely what leftists presume to do, i.e., control the uncontrollable and predict the unpredictable. In short, socialism would work beautifully if only creativity didn't exist.

Or, to paraphrase Larry Sanders' self-serving agent, "our job would be so easy if it weren't for fucking talent!"

"In a free economy," writes Gilder, "a high degree of apparent randomness does not mean actual randomness. An apparently random pattern is evidence not of purposelessness but of an entrepreneurial economy full of creative surprises."

Again, it's just like a person, only worse. If you kick a rock, you can pretty much predict where it will roll. But if you kick a man, you have no idea what he might do. Freedom is a terrible thing. No wonder most cultures -- and most people -- hate it.

One of the most succinct definitions of a person is provided by Nicolás Gómez Dávila; it is simultaneously the least and most you can say: a person is the permanent possibility of initiating a causal series.

Now, to initiate a causal series is to create, since an "initiation" is not preceded by anything else. In other words, it arises in a genuine space of undetermined freedom of choice. This, of course, is one of the deeper meanings of being in the image and likeness of God, for only God and man have this power to freely initiate a causal series (God absolutely, man in a relative analogue).

So, just as knowledge and power are intimately related, so too are freedom and creativity. Only in a free-market liberal democracy are they all present and accounted for. The left wants the power but not the knowledge, the freedom but not the creativity. Mere power + freedom results in precisely the type of lawlessness we see in the Obama regime. e.g., Obamacare for thee but not for me. (Or Clintonworld, where the powerful trade their StupidPower for more of it.)

Ironically, the most important scientific developments of the 20th century should be a lesson in epistemic humility, not an excuse for promethean omniscience. Gilder catalogues some of these:

"In physics, mathematics, cosmology, and psychology, reason collided at every turn with an insuperable barrier of incompleteness, uncertainty, paradox, incomputability, or recursive futility."

Raccoons know the drill: Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Bohr's complementarity, Polanyi's tacit knowledge, Matte Blanco's symmetrical logic, the irreconcilability of quantum and relativity theories, the irreducibility of Slack, etc., etc.

It takes a big mind to know little -- or to unKnow a lot, to be precise -- the reason being that the largest spotlight has the largest area of surrounding darkness. But in a way, that darkness is a measure of our freedom, or at least makes it a permanent possibility. It certainly means that no one can shove us into their little prefabricated boxes -- boxes of class, or gender, or homophobia, or white privilege.

Perhaps the simplest and most suggestive definition of entropy is as a measure of freedom of choice: the higher the entropy, the larger the bandwidth or range of selection (Gilder).

On My Careless Linkage of Obama and Manson

First of all, about that last post -- I must apologize for implicitly linking Charles Manson to President Obama. An inexcusable lapse of judgment.

Rather, the link is much more explicit than I had realized. You might say there's just one degree of separation between the two, in the form of Obama's Chicago buddy and all around ghostrotter, Bill Ayers.

Guinn points out that in 1969, many on the left instinctively sympathized with Manson's anti-establishment credentials, and that the most radical among them "took it a step further; the presumed guilt of Charlie and his followers made him admirable."

No way. That's just another right-wing HateFact, isn't it?

Well, at a December 1969 meeting of the Weather Underground, Ayers' bitter half, Bernardine Dohrn, was unstinting in her praise of the Manson family:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even stuck a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!

These lovely friends of Obama, Ayers and Dohrn, "probably had the most authority within the Weatherman." Thus, their tasteful salute became "four fingers held up into the air to signify the fork jammed into Leno LaBianca's abdomen" (ibid.).

Stay classy, Bill!

There's no point in refighting the battles of 2008, and besides, if Leno LaBianca had lived to see it, does anyone doubt that Obama's tireless work to jam socialized medicine down our throats "would have brought comfort to her in her old age"?

That's what you call even Steven on the left. We're all familiar with Joseph Stalin's omelette recipe, which begins with appropriating the power to break eggs and ends with no breakfast for you. Way it is.

Speaking of HateFacts, here is a helpful piece on how the left dupes its useful LoFo idiots into supporting its illiberal agenda. It is impossible to understand the left -- or Obama -- without the key of cultural Marxism.

Returning to our main theme of information theory, "the key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power." The free market does this spontaneously.

In contrast, the state not only aligns power and ignorance (of which it is ignorant), but is then shielded from the consequences. Power corrupts what is supposed to be a low entropy carrier -- the state -- with noise. Obamacare, for example, has to be the noisiest legislation in the history of the country.

"From the perspective of information theory, regulation is mainly an effort to replace knowledge with power" (Gilder).

But the most complete regulation can never overcome its "epistemic futility," i.e., Hayek's knowledge barrier. Regulation is of course necessary, but it "should be a low-entropy carrier" rather than a high-entropy barrier to commerce, as is Obamacare.

Remember, for the left, politics is, and can only be, about power, if only because it lacks the information necessary to govern rationally. It is certainly not about universal truths, or ordered liberty, or human nature, or natural law, or limited government, or classical soulcraft.

But real effective power is always the result of a pneumasynthesis of natural resources with supernatural ones, i.e., with human intelligence and creativity. Power minus information pretty much = the left.

Thus, for example, in 2009, Obama-Reid-Pelosi "turned up the power to compensate for the lack of information. The most readily available lever of power was federal spending."

In short, "seeking to ordain outcomes from the demand side, the blind side, without information and by dint of dumb money, politicians sought to control investment by brute spending" (ibid.).

But "federal spending based on borrowing from banks that is loaned at 0-percent interest from the Federal Reserve is the epitome of dumb money" -- i.e. Stupid Power -- and "devoid of information and deadly to the real assets of the nation." Rather, "all the relevant information is on the supply side."

But this is unacceptable to the Mansonoid left, since these evil supply-side piggies are precisely the ones who need to be brought down and punished in the liberal Helter Skelter of class warfare.

Charles Manson, Liberalism, and Information Theory

Okay, I get it. Information theory is not your thing. Well, I'm also reading a book about the life and times of Charles Manson. Would you prefer that we talk about him?

It's a really outstanding book, not the least bit sensational or exploitive, and very well written. Not the sort of thing I'd usually read, but it got a rave review in National Review, and I like to have something on hand that doesn't strain the Gagdad melon.

It's not just about Manson, but about the whole cultural milieu(s) that made a Manson possible -- not the least of which being the Haight-Ashbury scene of 1967, where he found himself shortly after being released from prison in March of that year (by then he was 33, and had already spent most of his life in reform schools or prison).

The chaotic environment of the Haight -- full of troubled souls in denial of their troubles -- was the absolute perfect setting for a sociopath to ply the emerging trade of self-styled new age guru. There, where reality wasn't real, his abnormality would appear normal. He began deepaking his charismatic chopra to vulnerable dupes, and the rest is history.

Charlie was never much of a student, but during his last prison stint leading up to his 1967 release, he took a deep interest in two prototypes of modern-day self-help snake oil, the benign clown Dale Carnegie and the malignant clown L. Ron Hubbard. He took formal courses in How to Win Friends and Influence People, and drank deeply of Scientology. Of course, the last thing on his mind was "self-improvement" in any ordinary sense of the term. Rather, his goal was "other-manipulation" for purposes of helping Charlie.

In short, he just wanted to learn how to exert power over others.

So in that sense, he was a huge success. Aside from new-age guru, the only other career path consistent with his skill-set would have been politics or self-help books, but he obviously wasn't straight enough for those paths. So instead he practiced retail politics on the people around him, manipulating them to his advantage and organizing his own little community.

Not to compare the two, but I am reminded of Obama's friction-free passage through the liberal education establishment, in which he seems to have assimilated little but the fashionable leftist pieties and cliches of the day, resulting in nothing left standing in his head but the will to dominate and control others via politics. You might say that leftist politics is sociopathy for conformists.

Thus, if Obamacare should remain the law of the land, rationing alone will be responsible for killing many more people than was Manson. Leftism kills. Always has, always will. We'll leave it to God to sort out whether such destructive ignorance is culpable or invincible.

The book is a real page-turner, but I'm only up to Charlie in the Summer of Love. Which sounds "ironic" -- what with the juxtaposition of love and mass murder -- but of course there was nothing healthy about that disease-ridden revolt against human nature. It carried the seeds of its own violent implosion, and one of the seeds that landed there was a charismatic guru named Charlie.

Does any of the above have any possible connection to information theory? Yeah, probably, since everything does -- at least everything made of information, such as a human being. (Perhaps a better way of putting it is that information -- i.e., the logosphere -- is made of person(s).)

"Financial crises," writes Gilder, "are no more a product of evil machinations than are hurricanes." Rather, "If you build your house with the wrong stuff in the wrong place, with the wrong algorithm, you may be hit."

Likewise, if you build your psyche out of the wrong stuff -- for example, envy, ideology, the will to power, etc. -- things may not go as planned.

Again, in order for the economy to function, we need to conserve low entropy carriers such as the rule of law, stable families, religious values, etc. But the same principle applies to the successful individual. In Manson's case, there was no stable psychic foundation whatsoever, and genetics -- i.e., temperament -- took care of the rest. Or in other words, if you nurture nature in the wrong way, you're courting disaster.

How and why did the economic *surprise* of 2008 occur? Well, it "suddenly made transparent the values that had been artfully rendered opaque when packaged as low-entropy money and debt instruments."

In short, what we thought were boring, low-entropy investments turned out to be full of turbulence and downside surprisal. Investors thought they had transparent information about them, when the instruments were actually quite opaque, and were suddenly revealed as risky ventures instead of safe havens. And when the low-entropy carrier fails, then you've got economic chaos.

It reminds me of the parole board that released Manson from prison in 1967. Interestingly, even Charlie knew that this wasn't such a good idea -- that while he might appear stable in the low-entropy environment of prison, left to his own devices in the high-entropy world of reality, he wouldn't be capable of ordering his life:

"At the age of thirty-two he was finally going to be free again after almost seven years.... The facade slipped; Charlie panicked and told Terminal Island officials that he didn't want to be paroled after all. He felt safe in prison; he didn't think he could adjust to being outside again. If they let him out, he'd end up doing things he shouldn't."

No dice: "the wheels of the penal system bureaucracy were turning. On the morning of March 21 [1967], Charlie found himself out on the sidewalk with a cheap suitcase and his guitar, not certain of where to go."

And to make the same pattern immediately relevant to the news of the day, check out Krauthammer's column on the Navy Yard mass murderer. Again, liberalism -- in this case, deinstitutionalization -- kills.

All We are Saying is Give Information a Chance

Gilder writes that "When law becomes high-entropy, the flow of information halts and knowledge withers."

Again, this is because we need stable boundary conditions at the lower level of any system, in order to create the conditions for upside surprise, i.e., growth, progress, creativity, and evolution.

Thus, when "the line of demarcation between conduit and content dissolves," everything is reduced to noise (or at least no one can distinguish information from noise).

For example, "When currencies float chaotically and financial rules gyrate unpredictably, finance becomes a high-entropy and a high-profit endeavor. The economy lurches toward a hypertrophy of finance and litigation" instead of growth and progress.

I was thinking of how perfectly this captures the present economic crisis when I read a piece at PowerLine called Why Such a Pathetic Recovery? The short answer is because of all the noise Obama has inserted into the economy, and thus all the information that has been destroyed or displaced.

As we all know, the “Age of Obama" has been characterized "by record poverty, declining incomes, unprecedented numbers depending on federal poverty programs, and millions leaving the labor force in despair." Why? Or, more to the point, why haven't we experienced the typical post-recession recovery?

For the scholars cited in the piece, the stagnation has been a consequence of the "poorly designed and implemented government policies [that] have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring."

Well, yeah. No shit, Bob. By the way, when are you going to get off economics and return to the more purely spiritual subjects you also pretend to know about?

First of all, there is a Connection between the two, but I first need to lay a foundation. Remember, we're trying to interpret the PowerLine piece in terms of information theory, not just partisan point-scoring.

In this case, the policies of Obama-Reid-Pelosi have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring, which is another way of saying they have impeded the flow of economic information that is needed in order to make such decisions and commitments.

The authors say as much: "These policies impacted many key economic channels, including monetary and fiscal policies, commercial and investment banking, manufacturing, housing, and the environment."

And "many of these policies have depressed growth by distorting the normal forces of supply and demand that are critical for a market economy to function well and create new jobs" (emphasis mine).

There it is: low-entropy economic channels have been flooded with noise, thus distorting the signals necessary to make rational economic decisions.

Note also that Obama's insistence that he can interpret and enforce laws as he sees fit, only adds additional noise to the system -- or contaminates information with power. If no one knows what the law is, then no one can rely on it as a low-entropy carrier of information. Rather, everyone has to try and predict what Obama is going to do. But that's not in the realm of rational economics; rather, it's in the occult realm of mind-reading.

So, with the porkulus bill of 2009, Obama infused the economy with a trillion dollars of borrowed money, hoping it would magically turn into information. Instead, it just remained noisy cash, which various interests pocketed; rather than being used productively, individual states mostly used the illicit gift to fund transfer payments to various interest groups and/or to reduce their own unsustainable debt.

Tax policy has also been distorted by noise, rendering it "highly unpredictable, which in turn depresses the incentive for business to make long-term investments in capacity and technology, and holds business back from significantly expanding their workforce." Again, when the tax code isn't a stable carrier, it diminishes information.

So, how do we get things back on track? Obama has attempted to use the Stupid Power of the state to get the job done, but again, power is just a substitute for his non-existent knowledge. Why not give information a chance, as did Reagan, or Kennedy, or Coolidge?

What would an information-based approach look like? Here again, I think the authors have nailed it. For example, it would involve "restoring transparency and simplicity to the tax code," which is an obvious way to return it to being a predictable, low-entropy carrier.

Likewise, "reducing the U.S. corporate income tax rate, and reducing marginal income tax rates, which now exceed 50 percent in some states." Doing so would result in less information being siphoned off by the state and converted to Stupid Power.

The authors also mention changes in labor, energy, and environmental policy that would "make it less costly to hire workers and reduce the cost of becoming energy independent." And of course, there is Obamacare, which has to be the most catastrophic injection of Stupid into the economy since LBJ.

Truth always walks with humility, while stupid tends to strut omnisciently. Why is this? Ace made an offhand comment about it the other day, that "the more you know the more you realize you don't know. And conversely, only someone who knows a tiny little bit could possibly be under the illusion he knows it all."

So, all we are saying to President Stupid is to give information a chance.

(More on the high cost of Stupid.)

On Building a Better Human for Fun and Profit

It is strange how one seemingly random book resonates with and expands upon the next, but I've long since stopped trying to figure out exactly how this works, and instead just take the cosmic hint and go with it. It's been happening for some 30 years, so by now I almost expect this kind of surprisal.

As it pertains to the intellect, the rule is simple: obey your thirst! -- just make sure your thirst is from the intellect, and isn't mere promethean prying, ego expansion, or cognitively concupiscent curiosity. In short, don't be an infertile egghead. This is not academia, to put it mildly.

The intellect knows what it needs, and if you abandon yourself to its Higher Whims, it -- or its proper Object, rather -- won't fail you. Many Raccoons can personally witness to this truth.

Of course, when you first drop into its precincts, it might appear as a dense jungle -- as indeed this blog may appear to first-timeless readers.

But as one acclimates to the fauna and terrain, one discovers all sorts of unsuspected interstellar highways, byways, low ways and HO! ways. Indeed, in the absence of this subtle arterial structure, the cosmos would be a pretty bland and boring place, no? Isn't this where all the action is?

In this case, America 3.0 might as well be Knowledge and Power 2.0, because it fills in a lot of specific detail that is missing from Gilder's more high-altitude view of psycho-economics.

In Gilder's case, he talks about the low-entropy carriers that are necessary for high-entropy economic signals to reach their destination. If the low-entropy carrier is too unstable, or filled with noise, or too slow, then it cannot perform its function.

This goes to the critical nature of human software, as embodied both in individuals and in institutions. In other words, in order for economic progress to occur, we must have the correct low-entropy carriers in place, both individually and collectively.

Perhaps this sounds a little abstract, but this is where America 3.0 fills in the details. Interestingly, the authors' ideas are not "new" per se. Rather, they have simply availed themselves of decades of research that supports the insights and intuitions of conservatives going back to Edmund Burke, at least. (I might add that this new biography of Burke is a kind of pre-commentary on the other two books under discussion; hopefully we'll have time to get into this later in the week.)

Again, we're grappling with this question of how a specific population of human beings vaulted out of economic stasis after so many millennia of stasis. "Why for almost all of that time is there nothing going on, and then in the last 200 years things suddenly just go nuts?" (Bailey, in Gilder).

One answer "is that we developed better institutions.... if you don't have the right institutions in place, it [the nutty growth] won't happen."

But that begs the question somewhat, since it requires better -- or at least less nutty -- humans to make better institutions. Afterwards the superior institutions can help to form more effective humans, but it must start with individual minds and souls.

I'm only about a third of the way through America 3.0, but this is precisely its point: how America evolved the institutions that made it uniquely susceptible to such miraculous economic growth.

Conservatives have always had the intuition that it had something to do with "family values," but America 3.0 demonstrates with historical, empirical, psychological, anthropological, and sociological evidence just how right they are.

"Family values" is just a shorthand way of pointing to a psychic reality that is full of implications. Americans are quite different from Africans, from Arabs, from Chinese, and even from Europeans (with the interesting exceptions of certain parts of Holland, Sweden, and Norway, where a number of prominent Raccoons reside).

Put the other way around, the wrong type of family and kinship structure will place a nearly insurmountable barrier to economic growth -- as we see so conspicuously in the Arab-Muslim world. Israel stands out as a beacon of economic sanity in that benighted region, but (ontologically) prior to that, it also stands out as a beacon of family, parental, and kinship sanity.

For this reason, you could give the physical territory of Israel to the Palestinians, but you first need to eliminate everything Israelis have built there, and reduce it to the wasteland that existed prior to their arrival.

Under such conditions, the worthless land couldn't support a fraction of the so-called Palestinians that have metastasized since 1948. In short, Arab institutions could never have created anything resembling modern Israel, and never will.

Very little time today. To be continued...

Cosmo-Economics and the Metaphysics of Surprise

Same post, just a better title. It's all I had time for today...

If the second law of thermodynamics -- i.e., the inevitable drift toward entropy -- is true, why then do so many processes wind up instead of winding down?

For example, we are told that the cosmos starts off in a state of such maxed out order that it will someday be possible to reduce its recipe to a simple equation or discrete tattoo.

And yet, the cosmic story doesn't end in an abyss of dissipation, nor arrive in a land of bland randomness. To the contrary: here we are as laughing proof, hosting the most irreducibly complex object in the entire universe right inside our very skulls.

Speaking of the guffah-HA! experience, this weekend I stumbled across a scientific explanation of it in Kahneman's provocative but not mandatory Thinking, Fast and Slow.

It has to do with the sudden intuition of a hidden coherence between seemingly unrelated words and concepts. When this occurs, "measurements of electrical activity in the muscles of your face" will detect "a slight smile."

He doesn't go into what happens with the experience of a BIG coherence -- the biggest of all known as God -- but the impression of coherence "appears to be mildly pleasurable in itself." No kidding.

And it can also work the other way around, a point we have made on many occasion, e.g., how a depressed mood dismantles our pneumacognitive links and plunges us into a space of lesser dimension.

Thus, there is explicit humor in this blog, but the most important comedy is implicit, always revolving around the inexhaustible punchline -- meaning it never gets old -- of cosmic wholeness. For it is written:

Lesson! My yokes are easy, my words enlight. Beholied!

At any rate, this question of complexification, of "winding up," is of course one of the recurring motifs of the ink and pulp version of the blog. One fine day, after nine or ten billion years of matter just doing what matter does, it suddenly comes to life. Wo. Didn't see that coming.

Then, just as suddenly, life becomes self-reflective and enters a higher-dimensional space of truth, beauty, virtue, luv, laffs, wholeness, etc. And in the past few posts we've been discussing how man's economic condition suddenly vaults into a new space some 300 years ago, again, after thousands of years of stasis. In each case, the system breaks out of order and into a higher realm. But how?

All you metaphysical Darwinians and other tenured apes out there, why engage in the auto-pullwoolery of pretending to understand? In your case you really do need to read Thinking, Fast and Slow, because you're all laboring under a lazy and simplistic narrative fallacy, a theory-induced blindness resulting in the illusion of understanding, all revolving around a substitute heuristic (in which you totally beg the question of what Life is) and instead persist in your deluded state of WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is).

Or, as Gilder describes it, you need to abandon your "futilitarian, zero-sum view of the universe," which "reduces credulous biologists and neuroscientists to the intellectual penury of a materialist superstition that denies the objective significance of their own scientific thinking." So, crawl out from under your academic crock and into the light!

For the cosmos -- the real cosmos, not your dead and hollowed out abstraction of it -- "is an engine of ideas, an information system, like an economy." (Although I would put it the other way around: a functioning economy is a microcosmos.) "It is a singularity full of detailed and improbable information. It is a 'super-surprise.'"

Again: it is the ultimate guffah-HA! experience.

You might be asking yourself: how is all this cosmic happy talk, this odious pneumababbling, different from merely deepaking the chopra? Well, for starters, it results in conclusions that are exactly the opposite of his Obama-worshiping liberal fascism. For

"The supply side, with all its intricacies of goods and services, commands far more information than the homogeneous money-dominated demand side." Top-down order "means lack of surprise and absence of creativity." Which is precisely why Obama's LoFo base of useful idiots is so surprised at his economic failures. But that's not surprise -- rather, the opposite. Nor is the joke funny to its victims.

Now, we do need order in order for the order to yield upside surprisal. However, this order must be at the "bottom," so to speak -- better, the foundation -- not imposed at the top by an all-powerful state. But the left specializes in imposing order at the top, while destroying it at the bottom, resulting in social and economic disorder.

The stable, low-entropy order includes such things as "moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal discipline, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers," not to mention sane and sober leadership and orthodox religious beliefs. This is where the real exceptions of American exceptionalism lay.

Thus, "All the surprising singularities of creative capitalism depend on the boring regularities of political order.... The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies."

In short, conservatives defend the Permanent Things so as to engender real hope for improvement in one's material circumstance, and to facilitate benevolent change, i.e. progress. Conversely, progressives poison the conditions of progress at the root. They undermine and denigrate the Permanent Things that make progress possible, replacing them with their relativistic fantasies and malignant dreams.

Economics and the Noosphere

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we're inquiring into mankind's great leap forward, after thousands or even millions of years of economic stagnation (that is, if we want to include pre-Homo sapiens such as old Homo erectus and the like).

In fact, I wouldn't even call it "economic," since the rational underpinnings of an economy -- e.g., prices, secure private property, rule of law, etc. -- are precisely what we lacked; nor would I call it "stagnation," again, because every species is stagnant. Every species subsists on what is available in the surrounding environment. Truly, our great leap forward was an existential discontinuity, and not just a prolongation of biology.

And ever since it started, there have been people predicting it was petering out, or who warned that it would end in catastrophe, or who actually want it to end. Remember the Simon-Eherlich wager? How about the perennial myth of "peak oil?" Global warming hysteria is just the latest outlet for these hopeless pessimystics.

One commenter mentioned the centrality of energy to our Great LF. This is correct, except that energy isn't just energy.

Rather, it must of course unite with information in order to become useful. By way of illustration, Gilder cites a seemingly mundane example involving the history of lighting. Note how it parallels yesterday's sad story of man's long economic flatline:

"[F]or millions of years, from caveman's fires to the candles that illuminated the palace of Versailles, the labor cost of a lumen-hour of light dropped by perhaps 75 percent." But the emergence of gas light in the nineteenth century resulted in a a huge decrease in the price of light, and "the arrival of electricity in the 1880s produced another thousand-fold drop."

Now, the question is, how can we possibly measure the resulting improvement in our quality of life? We're talking about "a million-fold increase in the abundance and affordability of light itself," but that's just a number. The real impact is incalculable, and very few people take the time to think about what a miracle it is. And again, it is a miracle, if by miracle we mean a vertical ingression into the horizontally closed flow of time.

Note also that any leftist along the way could have proclaimed that we have quite enough light to go around, and that it's just a matter of redistributing it so that everyone gets enough -- say, three candles a day, or a bucket of kerosene, or whatever. In the 1970s it was gasoline every other day. The mentality never changes.

The other critical point is that no one -- certainly not any central authority -- planned for any of this benevolent progress. If they had, we'd probably still be using candles. No doubt manufactured by Solyndra.

Again, a free economy facilitates and protects information; an unfree one -- to the extent that it is unfree -- crowds out information with power. It "protects the centripetal power of kings, bureaucracies, politicians, and other purchasers of economic influence."

Obama-style krony kapitalism is just the latest version, but there are always going to be economic parasites and free-riders. Hemingway once called critics "the lice on literature." You might say that leftists are the lice on economics. They have no idea how to create wealth, only how to exploit it. The only difference is that they are not as intelligent as lice, in that lice at least have the good sense to avoid killing the host.

California is subject to the one party rule of such suicidal parasites, with utterly predictable consequences. Are they worried about hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded public pensions for their fellow bloodsuckers? Nah. What are they worried about, then? About making sure that sexually confused children can pick the bathroom they want. Progress!

I don't know about the sexually confused ones, but I do know that any healthy, sexually unconfused male will naturally choose the girls locker room.

I guess Jerry Brown wanted to shed the "Governor Moonbeam" image, and finally prove that he's not from this solar system at all.

Now, if we examine the deep structure of the economic miracle described above, what's really going on?

First of all, I would suggest that economic growth is only possible in an open system that is specifically open to entrepreneurial creativity, imagination, innovation, and most importantly, to failure. I was reading something just yesterday -- can't remember where -- that if failure is not permitted, then neither is success. We must be free to fail, which is why there is no such thing as an unfree launch in the econosphere.

Conversely, leftists view the total economy as if it were a closed system with a set amount of wealth. They "believe their mission is to seize capital for the masses," and just infuse a bunch of money at the back end -- i.e., the demand side -- to reinflate the balloon. Which is a little like taking water from the deep end of the pool and pouring it into the shallow end.

Our president, for example -- the noted constitutional scholar -- has pointed out that the founders got it wrong in not giving sufficient power to the state to seize property and redistribute cash from one end of the pool to the other.

The problem is, any elected idiot can seize money. But that doesn't mean he's seizing wealth.

Again, a million dollars in the hands of Bill Gates is very different from a million dollars in the grubby hands of some bum on the street or in the White House. As Gilder explains, "detached from a capitalist, there is no capital."

Rather, in order "to create wealth, knowledge and power must be merged." This infusion -- or vertical ingression -- of information into capital doesn't appear on any accounting statement, because it is qualitative, not quantitative. You might say it's "in the cloud" -- the cloud of the ultrahuman noosphere that surrounds the material world.

Consider all of the "quantitative easing" by the Fed, which simply removes information from the economy. Conversely, Reagan unleashed entrepreneurial activity by what we might call "qualitative easing," through which it became much easier for venture capitalists to unite with entrepreneurs to create "informational capital."

Again, no one planned the consequent technology revolution. Rather, it was just a matter of getting out of the way and letting the noosphere do its thing.

In any event, it is this openness to verticality that "is the source of restoration that prevents the circular flow from running down into inanation. When the circular flow seems healthy, it is only because we do not notice that it is being constantly replenished. Such constant replenishment and revitalization by new information and knowledge is the only solution to the dissipation and physical entropy that is normal at all times..."

The other day, reader Julie commented that this sounds a bit like "as above, so below." Precisely. We could take the above paragraph and say the exact same thing of the vertical flow of grace -- or of our tension toward the Great Attractor -- in the absence of which we are just absurcular tale-spinning Darwinian monkeys chasing our tails.

Busting Out of Our 99,000 Year Economic Slump

Williamson asks, "Are you so sure that your preferred model of education or health care is the right one?" Yeah, I'm pretty sure. What's not to like? It's less expensive, no government agents force you to do anything, you get to keep your own doctor (or pick your own school), and there are no death panels (or soul-destroying political agendas).

"So sure that you'd be willing to stick a gun in somebody's face over the issue?" Nah. I would prefer that both be rooted in consumer choice and voluntary transactions, i.e., freedom and information and not power and coercion.

Again, going back to Gilder's thesis, power is a substitute for knowledge. Political power has always existed in the world. What has been lacking is information -- usually due to political power blocking its channels.

One source of human information is the genome. Let's stipulate that for all practical purposes it hasn't changed a great deal in the past 100,000 years or so. We might call it a low-entropy carrier, in the sense that it is quite ordered, and doesn't contain sufficient information to facilitate or account for any human advance. In this way, we are like any other species, which settles into an evolutionary niche and then stays there.

Which would explain why there was almost no human progress for roughly, oh -- rounding up -- about 100,000 out of those 100,000 years.

Focusing in on just the past two millennia, "If you make a chart of the world's GDP from A.D. 1 until now, you will see a flat line that lasts for the better part of two thousand years. And then the line goes vertical around 1750."

So if we want to be perfectly accurate, Homo sapiens was mired in a deep slump for about 99,737 years. Not a promising debut -- and if you were a betting man, you would have had no earthly reason to believe anything would suddenly change after 99,000 years of stasis.

Even the Obama economic slump -- and the FDR slump before that -- hasn't lasted 99,000 years. It just feels that way.

But the underlying reason for the slumps is similar: power over information. Why is this distinction so important?

I would say it is because what is really unleashed after 1750 is freedom -- i.e., ordered liberty -- and therefore human creativity, the latter of which is more or less infinite. Unlike the genome, which is obviously finite, the human mind is boundless. All progress is human progress; and power is just one type of noise that interferes with it.

First principles are important. Duh! In reality, poverty is the universal condition. Again, it has been man's fate nearly throughout his existence. Deviations from poverty are the rare exception. Therefore, we want to study quite closely the conditions that make this possible. I mean, right?

The left either ignores such questions, or turns them on their head. The leftist's first principle is envy, i.e., someone has more than I do, or something I want. Never mind how he acquired it. I want it!

But envy is a prime example of an ordering mechanism that destroys information. It's easy enough -- assuming sufficient power, i.e., violence -- to make everyone equal. At the cost of nullifying all the information in the system.

For example, we could have "full employment" tomorrow merely by forcing everyone to grow their own food. Or, at this rate, Obama will achieve full employment by forcing a sufficient number of workers -- each one a module of information -- out of the job market. Well played! That's what I call an organized community. Idle, but organized.

Another point the left forgets is that the real minimum wage is always zilch. Sure, you can pay a fast food worker more than he's worth, but here again, this will only destroy information, for example, information pertaining to a fast food worker's economic worth.

So, exactly what happened at 1750ish o'clock? "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people... undergo sustained growth." And "Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before" (Robert Lucas, in Williamson).

Such a leap certainly can't be explained by genetics; it's not as if "we were monkeys in 1749 and Ben Franklin in 1750."

And yet, a certain ontological -- or at least existential -- leap did occur around that time. Surely it cannot be a mere cosmic coincidence that Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published the same year as the Declaration of Independence. For, taken together, these two texts delineate exactly what it took for man to finally bust out of his epic losing streak.

Seen in this context, we can see how a Karl Marx -- and all his intellectual spawn -- was the great echoing antithesis to the unleashing of human progress. You might say that he represents the voice of the primordial demon that would keep us shackled to our low-entropy state of existence, in which there is no income inequality because poverty is so evenly distributed.

More generally, everywhere Marxian ideas have reappeared in history -- say, in the figure of Obama -- it has been in the form of power trumping -- and humping and thumping -- information.

According to Gilder, the conventional account of our recent economic success doesn't even begin to do justice to the magnitude of the transformation:

"The central scandal of traditional economics has been its inability to explain the scale of per capita economic growth over the last several centuries. It is no small thing." He says that there has actually been "a 119-fold absolute increase in output in 212 years," and that conventional economic models can only account for about 20 percent of that.

What accounts for the rest?

To be continued...

The Secret of Left's Success: Speaking Power to Truth

Kevin Williamson's The End is Near reminded me once again of how the illiberal left is at an advantage, since for them politics reduces to power, and it's always easier to make people do things than to persuade them to do things.

I think this explains why left wing talk radio is such a failure. Who wants to be persuaded that he is incapable of making his own decisions? This is analogous to reasoning with someone to abandon his reason. Why not just skip the middleman -- logic, argument, and evidence -- and go straight to the power?

The purpose of political talk is to inform, to inquire, to question, to explain, etc. But leftism needs none of these things. Rather, it needs only power, so all the talk is just so much babbling as a prelude to the real issue: I get to tell you what to do.

We routinely tell three year-olds to use your words! Try that on an angry and entitled three year old in an adult body. With a loaded bazooka.

Thus, the state didn't need to convince anyone that socialized medicine is a good idea. Rather, it just went ahead and enacted it. "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it" -- which is just an extension of "you have to elect Obama to find out what's in him." Or "Please authorize my use of force, even though I need no such authorization. Rather, I just need someone else to blame for f*cking this up."

"The necessity of large-scale cooperation is what allows nonpolitical processes -- human action -- to learn and evolve. Coercion is the negation of cooperation, and the power to coerce is what keeps politics from learning" (Williamson, emphasis mine).

Take Keynesian economics, for example. Doesn't work, obviously. But it doesn't matter. The state doesn't need to convince anyone that it works. Rather, it only needs to hold a gun to your head and say, "it works, right?"

"Perhaps that seems too strong for you? If so, try the following experiment: Stop paying your taxes, or refuse to send your child to the local government school or government-approved alternative," or "feed the poor in Philadelphia without government permission," etc., "and then see how long it takes for the government to dispatch to your home a team of men with guns to enforce your compliance, seize your property, or put you into a cage."

It reaches into everyone and everybody -- for example, my racket, clinical psychology. Try helping a sexually confused adolescent struggling with homosexual urges. Again, the state didn't need to argue the case; like most everyone else, it has no idea what causes homosexuality. Rather, it will simply strip you of your livelihood if you should dare to get between the state and a potential lifetime Democrat.

"Political power cannot be reasoned with," and after all the intellectual posturing is over, "the philosophy is the same as that of the raptor in Ted Hughes's 'Hawk Roosting,' who proclaims: My manners are tearing off heads.... No arguments assert my right" (ibid.).

Or, in the words of the world's greatest orator, "I won."

Leftists who claim to cherish liberty are not even phonies: "The IRS" -- i.e., the teeth of the state raptor -- "has three times as many employees as the FBI, a much larger budget, and investigative powers" that dwarf any other agency.

"Imagine being asked to submit an annual statement to the Pentagon or CIA detailing your employment situation, living conditions, marital status, banking information, major financial transactions, net worth, travel records, etc."

You don't argue with the raptor, you just feed it: "Failure to pay taxes is routinely punished with sentences much more severe than those given for serious violent crimes such as armed robbery -- which is ironic, given the extent to which taxation itself resembles armed robbery: a man with a gun demanding money" (ibid).

Conservative classical liberals want less of all this state power, so as to have more genuine power over ourselves, i.e., self-rule. But in order to make the case, we are reduced to using the power of speech.

Yes, the truth sets us free. Which the IRS knows full well, hence its attempt to tear off the head of the Tea Party. It's what raptors do.

The Left has No Means of Becoming Less Stupid

Which, of course, I mean literally, not polemically, and certainly not as some kind of gratuitous insult. I am always here to help. It's what I do. So Back off, man. I'm a psychologist.

This is one of the theses of Kevin Williamson's The End is Near, although he is apparently too averse to hatemail to express the sentiment so candidly.

Rather, he demonstrates how government is intrinsically inefficient, dysfunctional, and irrational, because it has no means of becoming less wrong. In short, it cannot evolve. So it stands to reason that the people -- i.e., leftists -- who support this way of allocating our resources and organizing our collective life will suffer from the same deficit, either as a cause or consequence. They too cannot become less wrong about politics.

"In biological terms, the operative mechanism of evolution is... death. Species evolve because death sorts out the reproductive success of individual members of that species" (Williamson). But the state is more or less immortal. It cannot go out of business, no matter how wrong, how inept, how unsatisfactory its products. Obama is trying as hard as he can to prove this.

Take most any product in the marketplace, and see how it has evolved in recent decades. Williamson cites the example of the cell phone. I remember a friend in the late 1980s who had one of these gizmos -- it was the size of a car battery and didn't work especially well. But at least it only cost 10,000 in today's dollars.

I am not what you would call an early adopter. Rather, I'm a late-to-never adopter, but even my rudimentary cell phone is exponentially better than the Gordon Gekko brick-style model of a quarter century ago. Why is this? And why is the Post Office just as bad as ever?

Imagine if, in 1990, the federal government had decided that cell phones are so important a human right that everyone is entitled to one. They throw billions of dollars at the Cellyndra Company to produce millions of the BrickPhones we still lug around to this day. Because the company has been freed of marketplace constraints, it has no need to evolve, adjust, improve, reduce costs.

Williamson asks us to think about Social Security, which was instituted in 1935. What other consumer products from that era are still in use? Now try to imagine all the innovation that has been lost as a result of Social Security being spared the need to evolve. President Bush attempted one tiny innovation to bring the system up to date, and look what happened. An entrenched government system doesn't know how to improve, but it certainly knows how to defend itself. It does so by enlisting a legion of left wing crockpuppets and sneermongers to come to its defense.

It seems that everything improves except government and those things government deeply involves itself in (we'll leave culture and morality to the side for the moment, but there is a latent relationship there as well, if only because of the educational establishment's monopoly on access to fresh young skulls of mush).

Williamson writes of how "middle-class people have access to things that either did not exist a generation ago or were restricted to the very wealthy." And common consumer goods -- automobiles, for example -- are vastly superior to what existed a generation ago. Today's average car is much better than a luxury car of 30 years ago.

"But there is another class of goods that either stagnates or follows the opposite trajectory: lower quality, higher price. These goods include education, health insurance, and many basic governmental services" (ibid.)

Nor could you improve these things by having even the Most Intelligent Man in the Universe at the top, for the same reason that, say, the visions of Steve Jobs couldn't become reality in the absence of a competitive market offering a continuous stream of corrective feedback, so the company could become less wrong over time.

We again come up against Hayek's knowledge barrier, which the left, by definition, imagines it can break through. But as Williamson points out at the beginning of the book -- citing the famous 1958 essay by Leonard Read -- no one even knows how to make a goddamn pencil (i.e., has personal knowledge of forestry, mining, metallurgy, engineering, machining, chemistry, marketing, sales, et al), so someone who presumes to know how to remake the healthcare system is truly delusional. There's really no other way of putting it.

You might say that ignorance of complexity is a measure of the depth of ignorance. Thus, no amount of knowledge can replace the most important knowledge of all: that the system is too complex to be reduced to some pinhead's abstraction.

And in politics there is no penalty for being wrong, because you're always playing with someone else's money and shifting responsibility to third parties, and no one can see the connections unless they go off grid and exit the educational/media matrix controlled by the left.

I want to shift gears and enter into the cultural/spiritual aspect of this question. By coincidence, this weekend I read a couple of typically clueminous essays by Schuon, one called Modes of Spiritual Realization, the other The Anonymity of the Virtues.

In the first, Schuon highlights the axiom that there exist three principle modes of approach to God, i.e., knowledge, love, and action. Here we are concerned with knowledge, because naturally we want to become less spiritually stupid: less blind, less deluded, less lost in subjectivity.

As an asnide, imagine if government invented a religion!

You don't have to imagine. It's called liberal statism.

Anyway, let's say I'm some kind of presumptuous brainiac who wants to possess Total Knowledge of God. Well, first of all, if there's a knowledge barrier preventing total knowledge of pencils, what makes you think there's less of a barrier vis-a-vis God?

So, do we have to remain in total ignorance? Yes and no. Schuon writes that

"Strictly speaking, a man should not wish to 'acquire' a particular virtue" -- in this case, knowledge of the Divine -- "but to eliminate a particular vice; to realize a quality is to destroy the fault that is contrary to it..."

Now, speaking of Obama, "There are men with the vain ambition to be exceptionally intelligent, and this makes them all the more stupid." In other words, intelligence is rendered stupid if it is unaware of its intrinsic limitations.

Intelligence is a mirror, and a mirror doesn't require much in order to accurately reflect its object -- basically "purity," or lack of contamination. You could say that the mirror belongs to God, whereas we are responsible for the smudges -- insane passions, envious resentments, quests for domination, pretenses to omniscience, tenured stupidity, etc.

"In a certain metaphysical sense, only our faults belong to us; our qualities belong to God, to the Good as such. By eliminating the vices, we allow the qualities of God to penetrate our soul." Or, "from another point of view... it is we who enter into the virtue" -- in this case, intelligence.

So, as in politics, we become more intelligent by slowly ridding ourselves of the stupid.

Government: The Left Wing Noise Machine

I want to go back to the similarity between information and randomness, and how both appear different from order. Again, it's a tricky concept, but important to understand.

Gilder gives the example of a normal heartbeat on a monitor, which is ordered but carries little information; it is a low-entropy carrier, basically telling you that the person is alive.

Conversely, a hi-entropy message contains so much information -- i.e., so much surprise -- "that it will actually appear as random noise to any recipient unequipped with the proper decoding device."

The first thing I thought of was jazz -- in particular, its more abstract variants -- which has been called "the sound of surprise." And how could 15 modern jazz fans be wrong?

Yet, to most people -- to the uninitiated or unpretentious -- it will just be the sound of... random noise. This is in contrast to, say, a marching band, which conveys no surprise but lots of order.

But real noise is truly "defined by its randomness. Each sound or signal, independent of previous signals, is utterly unpredictable; each bit is unexpected."

That being the case, it is "impossible to differentiate such random noise from a series of unrelated creative surprises," because "both are gauged by their entropy or surprisal." Thus, constant surprise looks a lot like complete randomness -- that is, unless you know how to decode the message.

Finnegans Wake: creative surprise or just random noise? Most people will take one look at it and conclude the latter. Others will say it is the most dense with information -- or novelty -- of any "novel" ever written. But it's impossible to unlock the information without a Skeleton Key.

Obama's foreign policy: full of creative surprisal, or just random squawking?

His economic policies are certainly flooding the world with noise. Gilder: "When government either neglects its role as guardian or, worse, tries to help by becoming a transmitter and turning up the power on certain favored signals, the noise can be deafening.... governmental interventions in the economy are distractions -- 'noise on the line' -- that nearly always retard expansion."

For example, the current artificially low interest rates are destroying information, because interest rates are supposed to convey information about real-world conditions.

As such, "if the government manipulates them, they will issue false signals," resulting in a serious misallocation of resources.

The housing collapse of 2008 was a direct consequence of such government-based noise, what with the combustible mix of artificially suppressed interest rates and state-mandated loans to unqualified borrowers. What resulted was not a "surprise" but an inevitability. You can drive out economic reality with a pitchfork, but she always comes roaring back, usually pissed off.

In his terrific The End is Near, Williamson talks about the extraordinary distortions caused by the Fed's monetary polices, and how these naturally redound to the benefit of the state -- specifically, a state that simply cannot stop spending.

This hides the true impact of the debt, for if -- okay, when -- "the cost of financing the federal debt" reverts "to its historical average," it will result in interest payments the size of the Pentagon budget. (And this is leaving aside future commitments to the tune of 222 trillion, on top of the "official" -- i.e. admitted -- debt of 16 trillion. That's more money than there is in the world.)

Should interest rates go higher than the historical average -- and who's to say they won't? -- "then interest on the debt would be the single largest item in the federal budget by a long ways, equal to about twice all current discretionary spending." Yeah, you might say the End is Near.

Imagine a compulsive shopper who has the power to command the interest rate of his credit card to be zero. That's the federal government.

Worse yet, the compulsive spender with the magical credit card knows the interest rate is eventually going to rise. He's just hoping it won't happen until the next generation is on the hook for the bill.

To which I say: no taxation without incarnation.

Or, maybe we can ban abortion on grounds of pre-emptive tax evasion.

Bottom line: the state cannot force creativity or plan for upside surprisal. It can only be a parasite on, or beneficiary of, those. But what it's really good at is being an economic, educational, and environmental noise machine.

And that's just the e's.

Oh, and don't be *surprised* that the most enthusiastic supporters of the noise machine are themselves characterized by *low information*.

(Great piece by Ace on why liberal minds are so devoid of surprisal.)

The Left Talks About Evolution. Why Not Put it into Practice?

I mentioned yesterday that Gilder -- although he doesn't describe it as such -- implicitly presents what amounts to scientific basis for modern conservative liberalism.

In information theory there is the message -- i.e., the information -- and the medium or channel through which the message is encoded, transmitted, and decoded at the other end.

In order for this sequence to happen, the channel must be ordered and regular; or in other words, it must be low entropy, not full of surprises. Thus, "A stream of uncoded chaotic noise conveys no information." But at the other end, "A stream of predictable bits contains no information" either.

The main point is that "the success of the transmission depends on the existence of a channel that does not change substantially during the course of the communication, either in space or time."

The implications are obvious for, say, biology, where evolution depends upon the underlying stability of the genome. If that weren't the case, then there would be no information about the past encoded in the species, and each animal would have to start from scratch.

Applied to the plane of economics, we see how "technology can radically change," even while "the characteristics of the basic channel for free entrepreneurial creativity cannot change substantially."

In short, the conservative understands that the low entropy economic channel is what needs to be conserved, in order to make change and progress possible. Tamper with that stable foundation, and information is deprived of its medium. Surprises will still happen, mostly nasty.

In the classical liberal (i.e., modern conservative) view, the purpose of government -- insofar as it touches on the economy -- is to be the guardian of the low-entropy channel, leaving it as free as possible of noise, manipulation, or destruction (or in a word, to render it as transparent as possible).

When government instead attempts to dominate the channel -- as in leftist economics -- the result is a decrease in information, as we see in Obamacare, where the state acts unpredictably, based upon the needs of power. Again, for the state, power is a substitute for knowledge, since it is impossible in principle for any actor or group of actors to gain a fraction of the information dispersed throughout the system. The leftist doesn't know that what he doesn't know dwarfs what he does know, thus provoking the omnipotent ignorance of an Obama.

So, what are the most important attributes of the channel that government must preserve? Property rights free from the reach of the state, obviously. To which Gilder adds "free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation." These apply to the hardware, so to speak, but there are also important conditions for the software -- i.e., the human capital -- such as trust, shared cultural values, and education.

Conservatives are very much interested in conserving all these things, on both the systemic and human levels. To cite one particularly glaring example, we know what causes the vast majority of poverty in the U.S. and it isn't due to the government failing to fill the channel with more noise, i.e., direct cash payments and other valuable prizes. That seriously distorts the market, as when welfare payments exceed the minimum wage, and creates a perverse incentive that ends up draining the system of information.

Rather, the nearly failsafe way to avoid poverty is to shore up the channel by not having children out of wedlock, getting married, staying in school, not taking drugs, etc. If one fails to create the stable channel, then no amount of cash poured into the system will change anything. That's why the War on Poverty, which was supposed to last about a decade, has no exit strategy in sight.

It turns out that what goes by the name of "family values" touches directly on this question of a stable information channel. I prefer the term "tradition," because "values" sounds too transient and relativistic. But tradition essentially embodies all that human beings have learned and internalized about real world conditions, over multiple generations.

And this all dovetails nicely with another recent book on the first conservative, Big Eddie Burke. His insights are quite amazing, especially considering that he arrived at them in the latter half of the 18th century. For the left, he was wrong then and wrong today. Which is about as ringing an endorsement as one could imagine.

One of Burke's most famous wisecracks is that "A state without the means of some change is without the means of conservation."

An implicit corollary is that a state with no means of conservation is without the means of meaningful change. Again, the conservation at one level leads to change at the other. Which means that -- and I suppose a fully indoctrinated leftist would consider this *ironic* -- nothing brings about more meaningful change than adherence to unchanging conservative principles.

Just consider the profound unleashing of entrepreneurial creativity brought about by the "Reagan Revolution" -- which wasn't actually a revolution at all, but rather, a reversion to first principles that pertain to the economic information channel, e.g., lower taxes, less regulation, and sound money -- while at the same time championing the private values that maintain the channel. This led to an unprecedented quarter century of economic growth.

Conversely, what are we getting by Obama filling the channel with noise? Through the magic of the famous Keynesian multiplier effect, we are getting less than zero.

Referring back to the software side of the equation, the fundamental error of illiberal leftism is the insane -- and deeply unscientific -- doctrine of liberal individualism whereby human beings are analogous to isolated atoms. But the truth of the matter is that we are intersubjective to the core, which is what Aristotle meant vis-a-vis being "political animals."

To say that we are political animals is another way of saying that we are members of one another, which goes back the question of the family which makes this possible. The left's devaluation of, and attack on, the traditional family is just a corollary of the self-centered and atomistic individualism at its foundation.

Well, at least we can be consoled by the fact that the people who most support Obama are the very people most harmed by his policies.

Since I am out of time, I think I'll just end by saying that the left loves to talk about their belief in evolution. Why then don't they practice it -- i.e., celebrate the principles that make it possible -- as do conservatives?

Our Low-Entropy President

I don't want to poison the well, but this cold has moved north from the throat to the head, which has compromised my usual powers of synthesis just when I need them most. So if any of the following is murky, I'm sure it will be clarified in subsequent posts.

In Knowledge and Power, Gilder lays out something like a scientific basis for contemporary conservative liberalism. It is rooted in the new science of information theory, which is "postmodern" in a non-pathological sense.

That is to say, literary postmodernism makes a mockery of what came before, whereas postmodern science builds upon but transcends (without negating) what preceded it -- e.g., as Einstein to Newton in physics, or Gödel to Aristotle in logic.

Classical science works at the elimination of surprise. In a closed and deterministic system -- say, the solar system -- we know in advance what it is going to do.

But even then, the solar system isn't really closed; rather, that's just an abstraction. If the solar system were literally closed, then it would be devoid of surprise -- you know, little surprises like life, mind, and spirit. Or, at the other end, just ask a dinosaur if our solar system is closed to surprise.

Now, this is not to say that determinism is somehow a bad thing. Rather, we rely upon determinism at a lower level in order to allow for the emergence of freedom -- which is another word for surprise -- at a higher level.

For example, the rigid laws of grammar allow us to say anything we want, even while adherence to the laws alone doesn't "say" anything, i.e., contains little to no information. Likewise, you cannot create a hit song out of the rules of music; well, maybe Miley Cyrus can. But if you want to make an aesthetic statement, you need the rules, obviously, but there is an x-factor, a vertical ingression that enlists the rules for a higher purpose.

Similarly, Gilder writes that "the miracles forbidden in deterministic physics are not only routine in economics" but "constitute the most important economic events." Very little of what we take for granted in life can be extrapolated from the laws of classical economics, because such laws necessarily ignore free will and human creativity.

In fact, Marx elevated this to a doctrine, converting economic history into a closed system of class warfare, thus eliminating freedom entirely. For the Marxist, freedom is just "noise," whereas for the conservative it is everything -- both the ground and goal.

Now, the modern illiberal leftist also vaunts a kind of freedom, but as we shall see, it is an entirely self-defeating one. Referring back to the examples given above, it is as if the leftist wants all the benefits of high-entropy musical freedom without the boundary conditions of low-entropy musical rules. The result is moral, or intellectual, or spiritual chaos, which can resemble freedom, since it is difficult to discern low- from high-entropy.

This is because a high-entropy message is so loaded with information that it appears random. For example, a sky in which each star is placed purposefully will be indistinguishable from one in which the stars are strewn randomly, and both will appear quite different from the one that is merely ordered. This can be a tricky concept to wrap your mind around, but you have to think of order -- which is another word for predictability -- as the opposite of information -- which is surprise.

This is why political power is at antipodes to knowledge and information. It "originates in top-down processes" that attempt "to quell human diversity and impose order."

Political correctness, for example, is a typical sort of low-entropy stupid power that imposes its toxic bromides from on high in order to suppress not just spontaneity, but even the perception of reality. You might say that it is a low-entropy mechanism for maintaining a low entropy intellectual environment, e.g., university life or the media matrix.

To bring the discussion down to street level, consider the results of Obama's "smart diplomacy." This is synonymous with "low-entropy diplomacy," since it is rooted in a simplistic, abstract ideology that ignores the complexity of the real world. The result, predictably, is global chaos.

Physics, in all its predictability, is a wonderful thing. But it cannot in principle account for life, let alone mind, for the same reason that the most complete knowledge of hydrogen and oxygen tells one nothing about this very surprising thing called water -- let alone of the beauty of this waterfall that now flows outside my slackatoreum window. Why should molecules be beautiful, either alone or in combination?

To quote a high-entropy aphorism or two from Don Colacho, The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face. And To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang.

To be extra stupid -- not to mention evil -- is to believe it laudible to impose the low-entropy tyranny Pete Seeger sang about.

Gilder: The "transcendence of the physical by the informational, of matter by idea, has powered all economic development through all of history, and before."

Stay tuned to find out how!

Progressives: Parasites on Progress

Insufficient time for a fully loaded post, but maybe enough to nibble at the margins of George Gilder's Knowledge and Power, which is again enthusiastically raccoomended to all.

Matters up here are further complicated by what turns out to be a fractured metacarpal. I declined the cast in favor of a brace, but still, I was a primitive hunt 'n pecker to begin with. This is ridiculous. My thoughts are running so far ahead of my available fingers that it's like typing under water.

So I'll just highlight and expand upon some peripheral points without getting into the main core of the argument. For example, Gilder writes of scouring the Harvard catalogue and concluding "that 80 percent of the courses stultified their students."

And they don't just stultify intellectually, which is bad enough, but spiritually; you might say they warp the person both existentially and ontologically, i.e., in both knowing and being.

Thus, a significant majority of courses at this quintessentially "elite" university are "either self-evident or wrong, ideological or tautological, twisted or trivial." No doubt Miley Cyrus will soon be a guest lecturer in their Womyn's Studies department.

Why is it our business if deluded parents want to shell out 200 large to have their children indoctrinated with the latest perverse nonsense?

I see two potential problems: first, some of the children will lack the skepticism, or self-awareness, or independence of mind, or grounding in higher truth, to resist the indoctrination. Second, one of these idiots might become president.

D'oh!

Or as Gilder says, "Now those stultified students are running the country."

Stultified, like how?

Well, if, say, a president has no allegiance to truth but only power, then we have no right to expect intellectual consistency, as truth will be in service to power rather than vice versa. To the extent that consistency is present, it will be in terms of adhering to the needs of power, which change from day to day.

Thus, the Constitutional Scholar assured us when running for president that "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat."

Your point being? That was then. The needs of power were different. Likewise, no one was more outraged than Obama about the IRS's political persecution of taxpayers. Now? Phony scandal.

An associated question is why do the tenured despise the very economic system that makes their frivolous lives possible? This strikes me as a plausible motive:

"Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who, by virtue of their superior intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals, believe themselves entitled to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without understanding, and to be exalted without humbling themselves to meet the unruly demands of others in an always perilous and unpredictable life."

The market, for example, can only offer health insurance, and compete with other companies for your patronage -- i.e., in pleasing the consumer. (I should add that this would be the case in a real market, uncontaminated by the abundance of low-entropy noise from the state.)

But Obama didn't even need to please a majority of skeevy politicians, let alone citizens. Rather, through outrageous lies, naked bribery and legislative trickery -- thuggery, humbuggery, and skulduggery -- he was able to force this beast upon 300 million other human beings, who are now significantly less free than they were the day before.

At any rate, "It is not surprising, therefore, that the chief source of misunderstanding of capitalism is the intelligentsia, who disdain bourgeois or 'middle class' values and deny the paramount role of individual enterprise in the progress of the race."

In the deluded minds of progressives, they believe they are the cause of progress rather than its parasites.