Dawn Of The Dead Playing in Athens28 Jun 2011, 03 Jul 2011Greek politicians are now deciding whether or not they will accept the austerity package. On the eve of the vote here are two contrasting newspaper articles: What an amazing world it is, some Greek politicians say rejecting austerity is suicide, others say it is freedom! The last time a European state debated suicide vs freedom was back in WW2. Are you alive enough to see how amazing this moment of history is? Don't the Chinese Sages sum it up when they say "May you live in interesting times". Even my pet budgie is looking agitated and depressed these days, somehow even he seems to know something crazy is afoot. I am scared to let him out, in case he tries to do something inexplicable like flying away and never coming home. Can you believe the Greeks can't come to a consensus on such an important question? Do you really think it's so hard to see over the cliff edge? I mean is it really so unclear to you whether or not voting against austerity is Greek suicide or salvation? Perhaps you think the answer is unknowable? You think, as the relativists do, that there is no such thing as objective truth? Or if there is truth, it is so fuzzy that it can not be argued, and must instead be decomposed into parallel augments, and then felt emotionally by a jury of average men, and then voted upon. People who study science at university tend to develop a strong instinctive belief in objective truth, but to really believe in objective truth you should try working in financial markets as a proprietary trader. Note, a proprietary trader is not the same thing as a broker or a salesman, instead of trying to talk up the values of things, he tries to look past the marketing smoke and identify the true value of things. So proprietary traders spend their lives analysing other people's opinion, and betting on where or not they are right, they are seekers of objective truth. I started my career as a trainee on the bond arbitrage proprietary trading desk. I remember my first day, the head of the desk said to me: "I am going to tell you an idea that's so silly even children instantly know intuitively it's completely absurd, but which almost all the academics of the world swear blind is the god's honest truth, and then I am going to disprove it in five different ways, all of which the academics turn a blind eye too". What was the idea? Rational expectations, the idea that market prices perfectly reflect value, if it were true proprietary trading wouldn't exit. I was thrilled by his proofs and left in no doubt as to the philosophical essence of proprietary trading: to seek out and destroy the irrationality of the herd using intuition combined with objective analysis. He capped it all off with another amazing speech. "Remember", he said, "a top trader is a Master Of The Universe. If your training succeeds you will join us, the Gods, in the heavens and the skies, and there you will live in enlightened paradise, dropping down to the sordid earth only long to enough to eat the crawling worms that make up human life for breakfast." The old man was deeper than Gordon Gekko, for him it wasn't "Greed is Good", it was more like a game of Chess with human pieces played between Ancient Greek Gods, and the money was just a way of keeping score. Over the years I learnt, of course, that proprietary traders aren't really Gods. A lot of them just focus on a tiny very technical piece of the world and profit by that silly little bit of insanity. Trust me, devoting ones life to EURJPY anomalies makes one a Geek not a God. But even being a more "psychological" trader is not enough. Many proprietary traders give up on the idea of soaring above the marketplace, instead they try to enter into the herd, connecting with it, becoming at one with it, driving the lows lower, and the highs higher. The momentum types ignore the contrarian advice of Pericles, who, according to Thucydides said: government is the art of terrifying the herd when they are complacent, and placating them when they are terrified, keeping them ever under pressure, headed always to higher ground. But it takes more than a contrarian trading style to be a God, divinity requires a sort of infinitely long term outlook which is philosophically aloof. Ordinary traders, for example, enjoy the 'love' the money they earn brings rather than just its 'power'. Wearing crocodile shoes or going out with a model is like being a pop star, or a beautiful woman at a party. The herd trader's heart fills up when he gets attention from the masses, he calls this recognition 'fulfilling'. The divine trader moves beyond all that humanity. Socrates said the world starts to go downhill when the King starts to care about his reputation, enlightened aristocracy is the art of detaching from the need for the people's love. Isn't that an extraordinary thought? The temples we build to honour the Gods are sort of smoke signals that denote our progress and piety, the Gods don't need our praise, what they want from us is simply growth. That's why God's love seems so merciless to the ordinary people who care about 'what is' instead of 'what will be', all that really matters to the Gods is growth, and the people's suffering is one of the mechanisms of their evolution. In the language of mathematics, Gods think about derivatives, and earthlings think about underlying levels! But, at least in theory, top traders live in a different world from ordinary people. They come to see ordinary people as like sheep who stupidly vote for what they feel will make them better off, and traders learn to predict what the sheep will choose, and how their choice will actually effect their economy, and then buy and sell assets as appropriate. We watch nations convulsed in insanity, and as they march themselves like lemmings off a cliff, we profit. As a young trader it's fun watching the madness of the world, it's your lifeblood, but as you get older, and loose your hunger, and think about higher things, the lunacy of this world becomes simply appalling. Indeed, this Greek vote on austerity, this sheep like suicide / salvation debate, is the one of the most appalling spectacles I have ever seen. The truth is that whether or not one treats this crisis as one of simple economics or common sense, it is in fact blindingly obvious that a vote against austerity really would both suicidal and immoral. So If you're like me, you have probably come to realize that the world is completely and utterly stark raving mad. So who do you blame, the journalists or the politicians? Surely it has to be the fault of the press? The press control which politicians we hear and which we don't, they are primarily responsible for pandering to masses instead of educating them. But in the long arc of human history who killed the Western world? Cultural capitalism is a new phenomena, who opened the magic box that let the evil journalists fly into the world? Was it the academics? At one time famous academics had more power than newspaper owners and editors. But the gap between modern academics and the masses has long since vanished, how did society turn so populist? Surely it has to be the Christians, because they taught faith instead of philosophy. Isn't faith the essence of relativism? Faith, of course, in one's own righteousness. Faith in the impossibility of solving ethical and political questions using reasoned philosophy, faith in the virtue of non expert decision making. But perhaps it's not just faith, it's also love? The old Christian love pipe works very well for the ordinary man, but if you let the King smoke it he will soon start thinking about what the people think, and his ermine robe will turn into a woolly fleece, and his sword into a shepherds staff, and sooner or later he will give up the lonely life and start sleeping with his sheep. Look at the UK Times today, even the great Anatole Kaletsky has failed today. He simply says, as if it were obvious, that "the euro would surely break apart after a Greek default". Why Kaletsky? Is that obvious because it's what you feel emotionally, or because it's what you have concluded with reasoning? Surely the sight of 11 million Greeks committing suicide would have a rather sobering effect on the rest of Europe, and might bring around precisely the sort of advanced technocracy you dream of. Your article today is called "To save the euro, the crisis must get worse", isn't 11 million committing suicide the worse we need? Yes God help us, even Kaletsky, the best Britain has, has gotten himself tied up in knots because he builds arguments on top of things he simply feels instead of drilling down into what's possible. From afar I can tell you all out there one terrible thing: I have not detected a convincing trace of intelligence anywhere in the Western World (except this blog of course). This crisis isn't about the Euro, nor even democracy, it's really about insanity. Is it the insanity of the mob or the elite? Both, but especially the latter, the insanity of journalism, politics and academia. People who study Ancient Greek Philosophy usually begin with Plato's Apology. In the Apology Socrates is named by the oracle at Delphi as the wisest man in Greece. Try and imagine it today - imagine one guy out there who is wiser than everyone else in the world, it's a really shocking idea. We are just not talking about specialist knowledge, rather the most important knowledge of all, the knowledge of human nature, so it's like imagining a Buddha not an Albert Einstein. Socrates spent his life running around Ancient Athens exposing the so called wise as idiots, he even proved the elite more idiotic than the masses. So he tore apart the elite like Tea Party, but unlike Sarah Palin he didn't try to woe the masses, instead he tried to build a new elite. But it gets even more shocking, Socrates didn't claim to be a God, what he really said is that everyone is just completely and utterly stupid and corrupt, what I am going to call in this article a 'zombie'. Can you imagine that? It's not that one guy is wiser than the rest, it that the rest are zombies, the entire world is brain dead. People read Plato's apology and the words just wash over them, but that's because the world is brain dead, it's actually written to blow you mind to smithereens and start you on a philosophical journey. So Socrates is screaming - "You're all Zombies, wake up this world is dying!", but the zombies read it and say "philosophy is impossible, nobody knows anything, rely on your instincts, we are all a truth unto our selves." Let's dig a little deeper, how did the zombie plague start, and what is the nature of zombie thought processes? Really it's two critical ideas. First, it's about the difference between philosophers and religious people. Look, mathematicians know that 2 + 2 =4, and vets know what Dogs need to eat, but as you dig down into human decision making it becomes increasingly abstract, aesthetic and ethical. So forget the science of the iPad, and think about a question that transcends science, for example, whether justice is merciful or vengeful. That's not a pointless question, it's one of those deep questions that underlies human decision making. So how can you answer these really deep abstract questions? Although Christianity says things like "turn the other cheek", Jesus was not a philosopher and turn the other cheek can not be used to solve real world problems in jurisprudence, so instead people look for ideas from Christianity at a less philosophical level. So religious people work on inspiration, they don't drill down, they don't cut decisions apart until they reach these abstract philosophical questions, they deal with the problem at a much higher level by relying on inspired feelings. Maybe they have an image of Jesus and they try to imagine what Jesus would do in similar circumstances, or they believe in the bible and they examine the moral precedents that seem to underlie the ethical choices Jesus made in the bible. So this is religion, it involves faith in inspiration, and then imagination or legal opinion. Philosophers on the other hand, I mean proper philosophers not modern relativists who say objectivity is impossible and we must rely on instinct, believe that everything can be known, verbalised, and deduced objectively. It's not that they despise the imagination or belief of religion, but they dig down into the abstract / aesthetic / ethical layer which resolves into paradoxes not absolutes like the imagination-belief layer. That's why the Chinese sages are always talking about yin and yang, not moral absolutes. Even these dualities are not the end of Ancient Greek Philosophy, solving ethical dilemmas, explains Socrates, requires another still deeper layer of very abstract "itself-by-itself" Forms. Although Socrates comes to an idealism which looks like the idealism of religious people, it's much more advanced, it's not dogmatic, it's not faith based etc. Of course, that doesn't mean everything can be debated with everyone, philosophy takes skill, but it does mean that in theory two guys like Socrates can sit around together and figure out anything. In fact Socrates says two people should work on problems together, an expert in inspiration and an expert in analysis, bouncing ideas back and forth in their objective examination (Socrates was the analytic "midwife", the greatest sensitive in Ancient Greece was the priestess Diotima). Of course, when I say 'anything' I don't mean how to build an iPad, I mean these abstract aesthetic questions which transcend science. So philosophy is the sort of proper guiding light from which religion should be constructed for the less sophisticated masses. OK, so if you have been following this discussion, you now have some idea of the difference between philosophy and religion. But a religious mindset doesn't make a zombie on its own, there is another dimension to the collapse of the Western World, just as there was to Ancient Athens. The zombie is created when a religious person looses his religion; in both the modern world and the Ancient Greek world it started when people started thinking about evolution and survival of the fittest; ie the "problem of evil" killed prevailing religion. So the second critical idea is that the zombie plague starts when the religiously minded human with no philosophical skill gives up on inspiration and faith etc, and just follows his own lower instinct instead of his higher divine instinct. In other words, instead of listening to his "spiritual inner voice", he listens to his "selfish inner voice", and his whole personality starts to go down hill. So it's at this second stage of human development that the zombie plague properly develops. The Ancient Greeks called the zombies Cyclopes. The Cyclopes is not a spiritually developed creature, the huge eye is the fusion of his old eyes, it is not spiritual, the creature is frighteningly ugly, has no nose, and avoids light. Greek philosophers described it as a horrifically stupid tyrannical beast of primitive urges and abrupt emotion. In it's final form it stops living in social groups and lives alone in dark caves because it can not tolerate even it's own kind. At the elite level the Cyclopes is what Socrates called the "sophist", which subdivides in two types, one represented by the character Protagoras, and one by Thrasymachus, today the post-modernist liberal and the anarcho-capitalist libertarian respectively. (Note: The Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published a book called "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" in 1976. He controversially argued that the Mycenaean Greeks degenerated into unconscious zombies before the destruction of their civilization. The contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says detailed analysis of modern American political decision making, even at the elite level, proves that it is essentially emotive not rational. But feeling not thinking is the default mode of much of humanity, the critical factor that creates the Zombie / Cyclopes is the giving up of the conscious pursuit of external inspirational guidance.) So the zombie plague starts when the religious type looses his religion and starts believing in nothing but himself. Now how do you spot a zombie? One way is that they can't evolve and they eventually fail, when they are failing we describe their decisions as "wooden", "ideological", "naive" etc. But this focuses only on the first critical idea, the rigidity of religion with it's fixed viewpoints that don't evolve alongside the challenges of life. The second idea involves the move away from the external spiritual vision of the prevailing religion to the selfish inner voice. So decision making becomes both more selfish and more chaotic. This second stage is exemplified by the herd mentality, it's no longer "wooden", it's "flightily". Not only do we get the abandonment of morality and the rise of materialism, nimbyism, and hedonism, we also get the chaos of the paranoid hysterical behaviour of the selfish sheep herd. Ironically, individualism brings the herd together in vapid individual instinct, like the cheering monstrous masses at a football pitch. Eventually it degenerates into looting, then pure survivalism, and then the zombie becomes the solitary Cyclopses. To test the second critical idea examine morality, test whether or not a person has lost both intelligence and idealism. You can think about the Greek mob in terms of it's blindness to future consequences, and it's lack of morality. Eg the liberal mob has no morality, it stops talking about sovereign default in moral terms, and just talks about personal choice. Theoretically it's calculation is simply "which course of action will make me better off", not "what would my image of Jesus do, or what legal precedents did Jesus set in the Bible". But because it rejects reason and embraces personal feelings in a religious way, it choices are as extraordinarily self-destructive as the untrammelled hedonist. To be fair the average person doesn't get involved in politics, he just combines the mood of the crowd with what the elite say in the news. This is why Ancient Athens destroyed itself after the death of Pericles, because the elite that followed didn't try to 'guide' the masses, they played up to it. So you can't really test an ordinary person for the zombie plague but asking him about politics, the development of political liberalism only demonstrates the degeneracy of the elite, it only testifies to the existence of elite zombyism. So, to test an average person it's like Blade Runner, you have to give them a personal psychology test. Remember how in the Blade Runner film they gave the potential androids "empathy tests". They wanted to see if they would feel bad when they imagined a tortoise on its back dying in the sun etc. But this kind of empathy test is pretty useless because the zombies are flightily, the thought of a turtle dying can terrify them. Excessive sentimentality is one of the early signs of the disease. Instead, what you have to do is place two scenarios in front in the candidate, one which brings positive individual benefits in the very short term, and one which brings communal benefits in the longer term. Imagine a flock of birds flying through the sky, and you are the lead bird in the V, and you are very tired, but the other birds are very tired too, and if you don't pull your weight and give your utmost the flock will eventually fall into the sea a few yards a few yards short of Africa. The perfect zombie has no sense of the future and lives entirely in the moment and for his own urges. He wouldn't pull his weight, he would go for the immediate pleasure of a rest. How do you bring out the zombie in an ordinary person? But showing him how corrupt he is. Tell him wonderful stories about how brave people in the past gave their life for King and Country, and then ask him what he would do in similar circumstances. When he says he wouldn't life a finger, you pretend to be very confused and simply say "Isn't the precise definition of human goodness the man who elevates the community over individualism? It's community vs individualism the definition of "love"? Cut the rest of it away, isn't evil just selfishness? What you are saying is that you're not just a coward, you're an evil person?". Play this game at the pub and people will go nuts, for anyone with a shred of humanity remaining within them the realization of personal selfishness is terrifying. Talking politics is useful is the individual is a member of the elite who fancies himself knowledgeable about politics. Then what you can do is start questioning them about politics, and pull out the assumptions behind their chatter, then drill down into these assumption and tear them to shreds. You repeat this process a few times, and then the person develops this sort of total politically correct banality, like a Sex in City character who prides herself on her shallowness, but talking liberalism. Then you really go for the jugular. You make them realise that their arguments are build on mindless woolly assumption, it's all a house of cards. So you show these so called intellectuals that they are like witch doctors, they don't even have the creative imagination of ordinary zombies, they are precisely what they most despise, muddle headed self contradictory ramblers. The psychological shock this inflicts on the elite individual turns him into a Dominique Strauss Kahn like individual, which is to say completely and utterly depraved and ruthless. In Plato's dialogues Socrates does this over and over again to members of the so called elite. He exposes them as people who have no mental discipline at all, behind their fine speeches is pure drivel, pure mindless assumption. They have less capacity for creative thought than average people because they have devoted their lives to suppressing their intuition and putting on a good show. When you analyse academia you realise that it is essentially the process of disguising instinct and pretending that decisions are not emotive. That creates a sort of unrealness, a forced suppression of the sense of smell, that's why the academics, journalists and politicians are the stupidest people of all. Rational pragmatism is their goal, but it's actually impossible for them because their foundations are emotive not rational. That's why Plato says young men should only study mathematics & science. Literature, poetry, history, law etc are totally corrupting, they just made people in muddle headed fools. When someone is older they can move on from mathematics to philosophy, and then they can learn to write poetry or history or laws for the masses if it's really needed. The Chinese have figured this out, all their politicians are technical experts, but they haven't had the courage to follow through and abolish all other undergraduate academic disciplines, nor to take philosophy seriously. Plato talks about people turning around, doing this is a combination of shocking people senseless and then reinstalling idealism. This is why so many of Plato's dialogues give proofs of the existence of God, because without proper belief in God the religiously minded masses of the Western World are doomed to the zombie plague. Silly Chinese, why don't they gather together their scientists, reason it out, and publish updated proofs? It's actually pretty easy to prove the existence of God in several totally compelling ways (eg here). The future of the world revolves around the importance of communicating this to the Western masses, it doesn't matter to the Chinese masses because they don't think the way the Western masses do, but it's absolutely vital for the Western world to have some kind of guidance or they follow themselves into zombyism. Alas the Chinese have a lot to re-learn too, once they wrote eight legged philosophical essays, now they worship Hobbes. Another critical component is to replace the Western elite, as long as we are run by zombies the average man is headed toward disaster. Exposing the elite zombies to cross examination in the presence of ordinary zombies is a way to bring about rapid change. You see, when the ordinary zombies realise that everything they took for granted from the elite is a lot of nonsense they go absolutely wild. It's like the old snake oil salesman who is exposed and then tarred and feathered. Or the French Revolution of course. If the Chinese were sensible they would be criticising the stupidity of the Western elite and trying to bring out new leadership, because the sooner this lot are replaced the more chance the world has to evolve peacefully. The respectful humility of people of like Wen Jiabao is admirable, but it is not what the world needs right now. But the reality of life is that trying to cure the zombies is so difficult that the likely future is that nature to take its course. God will cure them, by bringing them to full blown crisis by physical world challenge forcing them to evolve. Yes, after reflecting in this way on the madness of the world, and the need for a cure, and the method of its cure; one comes to realise that there are going to be a hell of lot of dead zombies before the Western world wakes up, and the Greek vote for austerity just delays the crisis and will ultimately kill more in the long term. If the Greeks said 'no' life might speed up, but instead they will probably say yes now without really meaning it, and the Eurozone crisis is going to drag on and on. Yes life just goes on and on, but no one understands, and no one can be reached, so what are the living supposed to do with themselves? So it is that the fate of the last living men is to scream endlessly into lonely space, just in case anyone worthy is out there after all. The Omega Man had a room full of radios, but all he ever picked up was static, never human life. In the same way I am on my radio now broadcasting to the dead. These words will wash over your zombie minds, you can read what I say, but you can not grasp what it means. Like the zombies in the shopping mall, there is a small register of emotion, but the brain is basically dead and useless. Becuase my words move you only imperceptibly, nature must take it course on you. You have not suffered enough to see yourself for 'what you really are', you can not 'know yourself', because the truth is too terrible. No zombie ever awoke reading my words, no matter how hard I have tried, the disease just goes on and on. How do I know? Because when humans are cured of a deathly plague, they write to their doctors in thanks, but no occidental human has ever written to me. Or perhaps the fault is mine, it's my writing style or something like that, either way I say we have failed, let God do his worst. Update: The Austerity package has passed The IMF and EU demanded cross party support, but the conservatives ignored them and voted against. Why? Behind the smoke the conservatives knew it was suicide, but they were fairly sure they there would be no consequences, soon there will be a new election, and the conservatives hope to gain political advantage from their resistance. Technically the EU and IMF should refuse new loans, impose suicidal disorderly default on the Greeks, and kick them out of the Eurozone. In reality, of course, they will overlook this political failing and lend the money anyway. Soon we will be back on the cliff edge. Meanwhile the zombie people will explode into political revolution because of the failure of cross party support, they will consequently cripple the country in protest and strikes, and the zombie politicians will continue to drag their feet on reforms anyway. What would Socrates do? He would surly exploit the Conservative's intransigence by saying the EU had lost all faith in Greek politics and needs a public referendum. The Greek people would be offered two choices: (1) Disorderly default and ejection from not just the Eurozone but also the EU (2) Suspension of Greek democracy and imposition of a state of emergency in which Greece is run by a team of non-Greek bureaucrats for a period of say fifteen years. The Greek people would of course have to choose the latter option, and all the political blame would fall internally on the Conservatives. Then the technocrats would ban strikes, implement profound reforms, nationalize property, build a hundred nuclear power stations, transform education, half the cost of healthcare, and turn Greece into a country the Germans are jealous of. It would serve as a model of what might be possible under federalism, and usher the EU into the 21st Century. The Chinese would help out, and the world would be transformed at breakneck speed. Alas, this zombie world has much more pain in store for itself. In the unlikely event the people of Greece choose disorderedly default, which would never happen if politicians followed Pericles' advice and took it upon themselves to scare the people when they are complacent, Kaletsky is quite wrong, it need not be a disaster at all. The EU could guarantee all external Greek government and bank debt holders, and recover it's various losses by seizing the foreign banking assets of all Greek nationals around the world, and all Greek ships, and foreign assets etc. In the unlikely event that sum is still not enough, the EU could annex a few islands. The Portuguese etc would be utterly terrified, never again would austerity packages be refused and federalism would move a step closer. The Greeks would starve, soon they would be back knocking on the door looking for a deal. Their famous arrogance would be gone, and Greece would be transformed by its new found humility and lack of populism. Alas, this zombie world has much more pain in store for itself. |