Thoughts on Economics, Kings, Religion, Culture and Intelligence

I think that one of the reasons I like the Austrian vision of human cooperation is that it does not require that a majority of people agree to believe in anything that is common to all or share any vision of the world – whether it be personal activity in daily life or the general purpose of man in the distant future. Since all men have different abilities, and with different abilities we see the past, present, and future just as differently, we must all have slightly different strategies for pursuing our happiness and welfare.

This universal possession of a single idea of human behavior is one of the problems with monotheism and the Zoroastrian religions in general: the benefit of religions of this nature is that they help large populations coordinate their activities. (Even if it constrains them to simple ones.) And, in particular, it allows the development of trust that will permit an increase in cooperative activity, namely trade. And this is accomplished partly through the universal respect for life, and partly through the sharing of visions of what we all should be doing in our daily lives. But on the opposite side of the spectrum, by “walking in the footsteps of the prophet” it goes too far and asks all men to be the same. And this is the bad part: we are not equal in our abilities and circumstances, and therefore by pursuing similar outcomes we tend to pursue minimalist and static futures, with masculine zeal. This limited view of man is a destructive process.

Christendom was not an innovation in cooperative technology. It was not the progress that we commonly think it was. It was a regression. It was a comforting yet economically destructive idea like socialism that the west took a millennium to shake off. While men of the Enlightenment attributed the success of Europe to Christianity, the truth is that Christianity, while making us adopt strategies that benefited Christendom, which was a very large population equal to essentially “everyone”, they missed the fact that the underlying beliefs that created their economic success were not Christian but pagan, Aryan individualism. And the truth is that Aryans (from the Kurgans forward) were committed to a universal population in the first place.

My opinion, and it becomes more certain with each passing day, is that military conquest that imposes individualism is more honest than religious conquest that imposes collectivism, is better for the economic prosperity of the population, and more tolerant of a diverse population.

Even more so, in an expanding division of knowledge and labor, it inhibits the rate at which technology spreads in a population.

In this way, despite what we attribute our past to Christianity. And the fact that the church and the Catholic philosophers added significant value, largely defending us against the eastern philosophy. The fundamental truth is that humans will prosper better under individualist polytheism.

Kings have often been a problem. But you can kill a bad king. It happened time and time again. It was often done by the king’s family, whose interest was in protecting their assets. But the travesties in human history are not from kings and princes. They are from emperors and priests. The combination of a powerful king who claimed divine revelation is the worst combination of all.

In the west, our kings were not divine. They were men. They eventually adopted the mantle of divine right, but never divine revelation.

If one looks at history, the natural state of man is to have kings and princes. These are just fanciful titles for tribal chieftains. If one looks at history, and applies a bit of reasoning, the optimum philosophy for men is one that is polytheistic. Because men themselves are polytheistic. Because men are different.

The real problems facing man are those that provide visions of leadership that are epistemologically impossible: governments and religions. Our first problem is to shake off the error of divine revelation as the means to enforce economic and social coordination, and to use education and knowledge of economics instead. Our second is to shake off the mantle of government, the increase of which, beyond having kings, places people in slavery and poverty.

This can only be done though kings and polytheism. In this way, we can provide a better certainty to a diverse population who wishes mythical allegorical advisers to help them cope with the universe. It also prevents the rest of the alternative. The stifling, stagnating human social order that makes slaves in poverty of men who would sacrifice their freedoms for temporary security.

There are those that say that Zoroastrianism was developed to counter Aryanism (military expansion, technology, hierarchical division of labor, bending nature to man’s will, limited births, excess production of food stuffs, rational realism). But the door swings both ways. Aryanism has been reacting to Zoroastrianism as well. And the competition between the two ideas goes onward. (Of course, the fact that one has led to widespread prosperity, and the other to ongoing poverty is enough of a determinant in the only test of any such philosophy.)

Very few people have made the world rise into prosperity. We are still the very few. And when there is enough prosperity that the peasantry can use economic and political force to unseat the aristocracy, the civilization – all of them in history – falls. The only question is whether, with such an integrated and mobile world, the economic individualism that has raised the world kicking and screaming out of ignorance and poverty can continue. I suspect not.

Not unless the differences between people’s economic strategies is actually biological in nature. And if (and when) this is found to be true, then the world will be a very different place.

Now, I will add that there are multiple dimensions to intelligence, and that this division will not work the way most people think it will. For example, some people may be better with verbal skills. Some with abstract reasoning, some with physical movement. But the thing that is most interesting is whether some people are better at suppression of impulsive emotion, or better at, most importantly, network cooperation. I have begun to suspect over the past year that this is not just an aesthetic or learned value, but that given the way the mind works with spatial and temporal memory, that some people are just better geared to cooperation than others. I am probably the first person to explore this avenue. But the reason that I have an interest is that I am fairly certain that I understand how the chemistry and physical properties of the brain will allow memory and memory-prediction to provide different levels of temporal skills to people. While exposure to similar ideas does alter the brain, and may account for some of it, simple observation of babies and toddlers in my family and that of others has shown me that this is not due to education, but to genetic predisposition.

And being placed in circumstances that do not allow that coordination makes someone look less intelligent, and frankly it’s much more frustrating for them as well.

In this way, if we are all slightly different in this spatial-temporal ability, we will choose economic models (social organizations) that are slightly different. It may be that this ability rests in a distribution in all races and populations, and that as the ability of people to move about, especially among economic strata, increases, each population will develop this ability equally. However, it appears to me that just as I cannot seem to fathom “objects” and “sounds” the same way as a Mandarin Chinese, that outside of a very narrow band of European descendants, it appears that I cannot find from any other culture anyone, even those raised here in the States, who can handle spatial-temporal coordination in the same way.