The price of forfeiting the soul

“God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.” Friedrich Nietzche 1882

In this post I try to connect three interrelated thoughts 

1. A debt based monetary system is becoming unsustainable, but why is it so hard to abandon?

2. The 19th century origins and ideas of a mind/soul/God denying school of psychology and education and how it leads to the evisceration of terms like freedom, independence, volition, justice, theft, and all other terms of morality, undercutting a population’s ability to “fight back”

3. How the obvious flaws in thinking in Fiat monetary systems are protected by ideas that demand an elite ruling class - and how to fight them. 

Hope you enjoy some somewhat unedited musings from me on this Monday afternoon

1. Our Debt System is Bonkers… So why is it so hard to get rid of?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/20/national-debt-spending-interest-wars-00127805

“If interest rates basically stay at their current levels, interest will be the second-largest government program in two years,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Only Social Security will be larger.”

Can you imagine living like this? Your second biggest monthly expense is servicing the cost of what you already consumed in the past… but not what you consumed, what others consumed in your “group”. Our debt based system is financial suicide so why is it so hard to abandon?

There are ideas that have been funded for over a hundred years in America whose origins are the cynical universities of 19th century “God is dead” Europe. They treat man like a soup to be seasoned, without a soul or a mind to be respected, only a brain and a nervous system to be conditioned. Freedom is an illusion and coercion is necessary. It’s these ideas that give government power and strip populations of any will to fight back. With these ideas, programs like fiat money and monopoly banking find fertile ground to sprout, like fungi growing off rot and death. 

When the system crashes, either under its own weight or from some violent overthrow, the decay will be exposed, like a tree that has been hallowed out from the inside. People won’t know what to do and there will be no one to take care of them. The farm and field will throw them off, a just verdict to those who rejected their mind and their responsibility to use it.

But the crash will also reveal those who love their lives, who know they have a soul, and who know that they are free, creative, and worthy regardless of physical circumstances. These people will rebuild and be a light on a hill, a bright contrast to a world which allowed debt to become money and who traded managerial slavery for their birthright of independence.

#2 The origins of these soul forfeiting ideas…

I am reading a little pamphlet that traces the roots of modern psychology to a German university in Leipzig and the work of Wilhelm Wundt. There was the epicenter of a view shift in the 19th century from man who has a soul and mind to be respected as independent to man who is a mere stimulus response mechanism, a brain and nervous system to be conditioned. 

I think it explains why so many educators and graduates who profess to be “students of the soul and mind” (ie psychologists) treat the spirit within with so little respect and leave their patients like helpless bowls of soup needing experts to discover the just right right cocktail of therapy and psychotropic drugs. It also explains why education throughout the West has fallen off a cliff in the last 100+ years…

The Leipzig Connection (Basics in Education) https://a.co/d/a6xPb0x (https://a.co/d/a6xPb0x)

#3 - No amount of pain can change an idea…

Finally, I saw a great quote today by Saifedean Ammous, author of the Fiat Standard. He noted how adding to the money supply does nothing to increase the capital goods available for purchase. A fine and good point but it needs to be said that in addition to this obvious fact, monetary debasement puts purchasing power into the hands of less productive people and institutions, actively reducing capital goods while doing harm to motive power the same way rampant theft demotivates wealth accumulation. This is obvious and cannot be denied but does little to change the monetary monopolies of the world. Why?

One might conclude that this is the unfortunate bi-product of a necessary good, the exercise of power of the managerial class to "condition" society according to expediency and politically desirous outcomes.  When people are viewed as merely stimulus response mechanisms and not individuals with free volition, coercion replaces independence and categories like theft, justice, and the rule of law rot from within, hallowed out by the persistent and institutional denial of the mind. 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/saifedean_what-matters-in-money-is-its-purchasing-power-activity-7131315062085947392-QhxW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Conclusion: 

It’s not that we don’t know how to replace the fiat monetary system. It’s not that we don’t have plenty of evidence suggesting it doesn’t work. We could replace the monetary system over night! The reason we don’t is because we don’t know how to believe in man as a spiritual being. We have little faith in independence and reason. We don’t know how to argue for freedom. We no longer know how to think and take responsibility for our thoughts and instead have collectively abandoned our only tool of survival, our independent mind, to natural determinism and collective conditioning. Until we see ourselves as free, creative, and capable souls, we will be doomed to be treated with the same contempt as the lab rats from which Experiment Psychology learned it’s methods and the myriad tools of control, like monetary debasement and government sponsored violence which threaten global extinction. 

How to Fight These Ideas

1. Don’t use “evidence” since these ideas presuppose any evidence Attack anti-rational ideas by exposing contradictions. For instance, the premises of experimental psychology and the corresponding education system postulates that any given person has a “fixed” intelligence. 

—- who determines this?

— On what basis could that premise be known or challenged?

— How would a person know it intelligence were not fixed?

— How would those who determine intelligence know if they encounter a superior intelligence? Would they be woefully blind to recognize it?

—- What gives a limited mind the ability to assess the nature of intelligence 

At the root of all these questions, is a primary question: 

— By what authority do you have to make that assessment?

If the authority is generally available to all people, then one can suppose that it’s valid and safe. If it’s a special authority conjured up and guarded by elitism, then it is illegitimate and fraudulent, no different than the divine right of kings, or the claim of a common thief.

2. Read to improve your rational capacity. I recommend books by Ayn Rand but there are so many others.