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by
Free
Market Duck
America's Intellectual Hierarchy
What Age do we
live in: the Age of Reason? The Age of Enlightenment? The Age of Envy?
The Age of Altruism? Or maybe it’s the Age of Stupidity?
The Age we live in
is characterized by our culture. Our culture is characterized by what we
think, by our intellect. Our predominant cultural thoughts are determined
by the so-called intellectuals at our Universities. Judging by that
criterion, one could argue that in 2004 we are slowly backsliding from our
forefathers’ Age of Enlightenment to an Age of Intellectual Stupidity.
How can that be
happening? Is it possible for intellectualism to go backwards from smart to
stupid? Yes. Let’s review what passes for intellectualism in our society
today.
First, one notes
that there are diverse areas of intellect and various levels within those
areas. On a hierarchical scale of difficulty of understanding, the physical
sciences of physics, math, chemistry, and biology are relatively easy areas
of intellect compared to the qualitative area of economics. (Ironically,
economists have tried to justify the difficulty of their “dismal science” by
emulating the methods of the physical sciences because they do not
understand the epistemological differences, but to no avail as our current
economic anomalies refute their assertions.) Quantitative Economics –
called Econometrics – has itself been a dismal failure since one cannot
model a qualitative science of human action after Einstein’s E=mc2
or F=ma or why cells undergo meiosis. There exist fundamental intellectual
differences between these two areas of science.
Skipping physics,
math, and biotechnology, let’s jump into the levels of intellect that
comprise human action, commonly called economics. Economics encompasses all
socio-political-economic activity, qualitative decisions and actions by
individuals who commonly disagree with each other; hence we have divergent
political parties based upon the constituents’ intellect in each party.
What are the
hierarchical levels of intellect in each of the major political parties in
America?
In the area of
socio-political-economics, we define “intellect” as whether or not somebody
understands the set of scientific laws that govern such thoughts as
individual rights and freedoms, free market price formation, supply and
demand, competition, and the proper role of government, to name a few.
While some of these intellectual ideas may seem obvious – and some are –
they pose great intellectual conflicts between individuals who fall into
simplistic economic sophisms (untruths) and thus run off on tangents of
economic intellectual stupidity. For example, supply and demand price
formations and thus true economic calculations can only be accomplished in a
free market in which the participants are allowed to freely exercise their
priorities or wish lists – whether their priorities are deemed frivolous or
even objectively contradictory to their own well being or not. Economics is
color blind except for the color of fiduciary media: money.
At the bottom of
the intellectual scale in human action (economics) are those who gravitate
toward socialism and its various corollaries such as fascism, communism, a
mixed economy, and dictatorships. These types of individuals are usually at
the intellectual level of a rock and have fallen for all the absurd economic
sophisms long since disproved hundreds of years ago by free market
economists.
The next
intellectual level up from socialism – and it’s not a clean break between
the two -- are the left liberal Democrats. The left liberals are like
little school children that have only learned to read by sight-reading
rather than phonetics. Sight-reading, if not quickly changed to phonetics,
trains young minds that every word is a new mystery in pronunciation. They
get lost in the millions of words in the English language. Phonetics, on
the other hand, trains young minds that there are only about 26 or less
sounds to learn, that all words can be categorized into those sounds, and
thus the pronunciation of millions of new words becomes easily integrated
into one’s intellect.
The problem with
sight-reading is that it leads to sight thinking, or what I call
disconnected thought globs. Left liberals act like emotionally disturbed
little children who can’t think logically in a straight line. Like
sight-reading, they have never been taught to “phoneticize” their thought
processes into logical, step-by-step categories and thus be able to think
clearly and draw logical conclusions. Instead, left liberals tend to think
in child-like terms of touchy-feely, of emotionalism, of kids throwing a
temper tantrum at the mall because they want a cookie and don’t understand
why mommy and daddy can’t always just give them a cookie. If liberals see
cookies, they think – like children – that the cookies belong to everybody
and that society owes them a free cookie or that the cookies should be all
divided up equally.
Because left
liberals tend to think in “disconnected thought globs” – like little
children who have yet to integrate their thoughts and have learned to
survive by mumbling what looks like the best “thought glob” to throw out at
any given moment -- they gravitate toward the Democratic Party which is
about two notches above the intellect of stupid socialists. This
touchy-feely group tends to feel empathy for social issues such as a woman’s
right to abortion, gay rights, and freedom of speech – and rightly so -- but
one notes that none of them can put forth the correct philosophical premises
for these basic rights – premises which do exist but are beyond the
intellect of the liberals. If they did understand, they would be able to
extrapolate those same premises to free market economics, voluntary
exchanges of ideas, commodities, and services and thus graduate to a higher
level of intellect than stupid left liberalism.
A couple of notches
above the left liberals in economic intellect are the GOP Christian
Socialists. Individuals who gravitate to this group are both economic
“sight readers” and “phoneticists.” While they superficially understand
many of the principles of free market economics, they are incapable of
reconciling their altruistic ideas of Theism with free market principles.
Steeped in theocracy and never having understood the difference between
Theism and Deism, that man has free will and God does not intervene, the GOP
Christian Socialists attempt to drag everybody back to a pre-Articles of
Confederation and Divine Right of Kings intellectual level. This is quite
ironic since our American Revolutionary forefathers were Deists who made fun
of the Theists as they dumped King George during the Age of Enlightenment,
the predominant feature of which was that man obtained his freedoms from
Nature, not the government and certainly not from the church (which always
turns out to be the government anyway.)
A higher level
of socio-political-economic intellect describes those rare individuals –
intellectuals – who gravitate toward Libertarianism. The individuals in
this group clearly understand and can elaborate at length – often too
lengthy, snore z-z-z – about all phases of human action, from individual
rights to how prices are formed in an evenly rotating free market economy.
They are way beyond the left liberals and GOP Christian Socialists in their
intellectual development.
The highest level
of economic intellect, however, can best be described as those individuals
who understand Randian Objectivist philosophy and Libertarian free market
economics and their relationship. Many Libertarians cannot make the leap to
an understanding of the metaphysical, epistemological, or moral step by step
reasons concerning why individuals in a rational society ought to be free,
not just for freedom of economic trade, but for the sake of the individual
qua him and herself. Objectivist Libertarians correctly reason that free
market economics is a natural consequence of their a priori Objectivist
philosophy.
In conclusion, what
Age do we live in? I would guess that the five levels of intellect just
described from lowest to highest is probably comprised of the following
percentages of society and can thus be rated as:
Idiots – Socialists,
5%
Stupid – Left Liberals, 45%
Smart – Republicans, 45%
Intellectuals – Libertarians, 4%
Humorous Intellectuals – Objectivist Libertarians, 1%
Therefore, my guess
is that history will record the years surrounding 2004 as The Age of
Altruistic Stupidity, The Age of Oxymoronic Rights to Receive, or, put
simply, The Age of Economic Suicide. I predict we will thus reap the
rewards accordingly unless more individuals learn how to think more
clearly. What we really need is a Renaissance of Free Market Thinking and a
big dose of Objectivist Individual Rights Philosophy.
And where will that
come from? Certainly not from the stupid left liberals who currently
dominate our universities and colleges.
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