Rawls, Antigone and the tragic irony of norms

11/16/201911/18/2019 Aris Trantidis Culture, Liberty, Philosophy ancient Greek thought, Antigone, civil disobedience, democracy, ethos, Greek drama, John Rawls, justice, logos, norms, pathos, rule of law, Sophocles

Is civil disobedience justified when it invokes a moral objection to target a law that has been enacted through a legitimate process? The reason societies seek to establish a legitimate process in law making is because they want to set up common rules and norms which people who disagree with them will still have to abide by. However, history shows us many instances in which, even in a democratic system, civil disobedience both triggered and animated a debate on legitimately enacted rules and, often, led to their revision as well as the reform of the procedural rules that allowed their enactment in the first place.

Rawls’ position on civil disobedience struggles with this question. His position is that, once society has set up principles of justice in an institutional setting, acts of civil disobedience are just insofar as they appeal to the sense of justice of the majority and should be willing to bear the consequences of their actions. We may read the Rawlsian perspective as follows: these acts are still of value because they re-launch a process of public reasoning regarding the law itself.

However, the implications from this statement are broader and baffling. First, we don’t know how far this revision can go. Will it be allowed to cast doubt on the basic principles of justice which society previously agreed to observe? Can it challenge the procedural source of legitimacy for the contested norms?

Second, civic disobedience cannot be reduced to appeals to a sense of justice demanding the revision of law through the same process. Instead, the rationale behind civil disobedience reminds us that there will always be competing conceptions of justice that go as far as challenging the source of legitimacy – what some have come to accept as the just process may no longer seen as just by others. A society’s prior decision at a single historical moment that this is a just process for law making does not end the debate over different perceptions of justice concerning both norms and processes.

Moreover, acts of civil disobedience appear in moments in which different moral norms clash and judgment should be passed regarding which one takes precedence over the other. Episodes in the US history, particularly regarding the civil rights of African Americans, epitomize the important role of acts of disobedience in invoking a higher moral ground against norms approved by the majority through the institutions of a democratic system. We have learnt from history that these moments spawned animosities and brought about new episodes of conflict. They were emotionally disturbing episodes.

This implies that social contract theories tend to adopt an a-historical approach to norm-building and a, strangely- a-social view of public reasoning. Norm-building is seen as cleansed of emotions and often dismissive of the idea that there will be unintended and unforeseen consequences. A reduced historical and social conception of justice is what acts of civil disobedience reminds us of. The process of defining justice as norms and as process remains an open turf for never-ending, reflective social interactions that no constitutional moment can capture, crystallise and entrench indefinitely.

These three elements – the historicity and sociability of norms, normative contradiction, and the emotional dimension in the conflict over norms – is manifested in Sophocles’ masterpiece, Antigone. Sophocles’ theatrical play on civil disobedience was written around 441 BC, about 2,400 years before Rawls’s work. It conveys a nuanced message on norms, normative debates, public deliberation and reasoning, and sees the social nature of all as a human tragedy.

The play is set in the aftermath of a civil war in Thebes and the final battle which Thebes survives the attack of seven exiled Theban generals. One of the generals, Polynices, son of King Oedipus, fights his own brother, Eteocles, a defender of the city. In that fight, the two brothers kill each other.

Creon, the legitimate King of Thebes and uncle of the two brothers, issues a public order for Eteocles to be buried with honours and for Polynices to be left outside the walls to rot unburied as punishment for his betrayal. Creon also orders that whoever tries to bury Polynices’s body shall be arrested and executed.

Polynices’s sister, Antigone, defies Creon’s order and secretly buries her brother in accordance with the religious tradition that demands that the dead must be buried. Soon after, Antigone gets arrested and is brought by guards before Creon and the city. She chooses not to apologize for her actions or claim ignorance of law. Instead, she confronts Creon by invoking that the law of the gods is superior to the law of men.

Creon sentences her to death, publicly stating that everyone should be treated equally before the law. He would make no exception for her niece. Creon presents himself as a just leader who firmly adheres to ‘equality before the law’ even if that means he would sentence to death one of closest family members. The law, he stresses, is above everyone.

Antigone’s public act with an emotional appeal to the law of gods initially fails to trigger sympathy from the people of Thebes and Creon insists on his sentence. Antigone is taken off stage to be buried alive in a cave.

Creon’s own son and Antigone’s fiancé, Haemon, rushes to defend Antigone but he too fails to convince his father to change his decision. Even against his son, Creon reiterates his conviction that the law takes precedence over personal relations. But gradually the people of Thebes, the chorus of the play, changes its stance and starts showing more sympathy to Antigone’s drama.

In the next scene, a respected prophet named Tiresias makes a public interference. He tells Creon and the city that their neglect of the moral law will displease the gods and will bring more sorrow and pain to Creon’s family and the city of Thebes. The leader of the chorus changes his mind and asks Creon to reconsider his decision and set Antigone free. We are witnessing here that public is changing its views following a morally charged debate triggered by an act of civil disobedience. Antigone disobeyed the law guided by her love for her brother, but she was also honouring the law of the gods. Creon decides to spare Antigone. Emotions and fears have a drastic effect on public perceptions political decision making.

But Creon’s decision came too late. Antigone committed suicide. So did Haemon and, following the news of his death, her mother and Creon’s wife, Eurydice. The play ends with Creon devastated, isolated, discredited and vulnerable, and the city of Thebes descending back into chaos.

Rather than a clear clash between a hero and a villain, the two protagonists are tragic figures and so is the city itself. Creon wants to demonstrate that he is a prudent ruler who obeys the law that he rightfully sets. But he has to listen to the people he commands. His confrontation with Antigone is his own public act in which he defends his decision. The chorus, representing the people, initially sides with Creon but turns against him after observing a human drama unfolding and after hearing the menacing words of a prophet about the incoming doom. Perceptions of justice are drastically reshaped through an interplay of feelings, reasons and fears. Deliberation is emotionally charged.

Unlike Rawls, Sophocles’ theatrical play presents us with a richer blend of public reasoning, emotions, emotive responses, and unforeseen and unintended consequences in a debate over clashing norms and perceptions of justice. Creon – the personification of equal rules for everyone including his own relatives – is the legitimate political authority but his decision creates a personal and civic catastrophe. Thebes descends into a spiral of death and civil unrest. A just act of disobedience triggers a spiral of turmoil and tragedy. Emotions and personal affections guide decisions that produce unforeseen dramatic developments for the protagonists and the city as a whole.

The Greek drama is purposefully presented as a morally inconclusive story. Antigone had no initial intentions to make her actions a public statement and did not wish to bring down the entire political system. But after her arrest she did make a dramatic public defence of her stance invoking the moral law. Creon was surprised and angered, torn between his adherence to the rule of law and his duty towards his family. The Theban public watches all this astounded, emotional and anxious. This is far from a society that can be equilibrated into an orderly state. It cannot even rest secure about its own convictions.

Sophocles grasped much of what political theory tends to shy away from: the complexity and ambiguity surrounding normative thinking in human societies that tends to bring about tragic or fatal results for every system of norms shaken by its own contradictions. In short, Sophocles lyrically presents us the tragic irony of norms creation. Rather than taking a nomothetic stance, his play helps us reflect on the tragedy of human interactions from a nearly anthropological viewpoint.

Sophocles allows the audience to pass their own judgment through both logical and emotional engagement. The audience is baffled by the merits of each of the opposing viewpoints – Creon’s defence of formal equality before the law and Antigone’s defence of a higher moral ground. But it is also touched and distraught by how tragic the protagonists are, trapped in the consequences of their own moral standing and reasoning. In Sophocles’ play, society is watching and reflecting on behaviors and norms through pathos, ethos and logos. After each performance, the verdict is a flow of tears rather than a canonical judgment.

You’re Not Worth My Time

11/16/201904/15/2020 Joakim Book Books, Comments, Culture, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics conspiracy theories, Culture, environment, intellectuals, intolerance, knowledge, learning, Opportunity Cost, truth

In our polarized and politically intolerant times, intellectuals worry about the divisions in our societies. You might call it inequality or absence of social mobility, racism or rigid social structures but all pundits seem to agree that despite our apparent cosmopolitanism, many people’s opinions on lifestyles, politics, or economics are diverging. More so, their opinions about others’ opinions is less accepting. We disapprove of people that believe the wrong things, and we shun them in favor of like-minded people.

Economists like Paul Collier (The Future of Capitalism), Raghuram Rajan (The Third Pillar), and Branko Milanovic (Capitalism, Alone) are producing well-publicized books about how the social world of our current societies are collapsing – “coming apart at the seams”, as Collier phrases it. A recent book on technology and the environment by MIT researcher Andrew McAfee, states the following:

more and more people are choosing to have fewer ties to people with dissimilar values and beliefs, opting instead to spend more time among the like-minded. The journalist Bill Bishop calls this phenomenon ‘the big sort’. (2019:227)

The observation could have come straight out Jonathan Haidt, a scholar I greatly admire. Why do we do this Bishop-style sorting? A common assessment is that having people challenging my beliefs hurts my identity and I don’t like it. We rather go for echo chambers.

Let me be contrarian and obnoxious for a minute and defend this Big Sort: is it really that bad to distance oneself from those with different views and opt for like-minded people?

The Irrelevance of Political Opinion

It’s long been recognized by social scientists that politics drive people apart (together with ‘Economics’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Abortion’, forming the acronym R.A.P.E, the avoidance of which is key to successful social conversations). From being friendly customers in a decentralized marketplace, politics urges us to become enemies and opponents, demands that we confiscate one another’s stuff rather than cooperate in creating value for each other. Bringing up your position on some labor market reform or the taxation of the rich (of which your familiarity is probably quite limited) is likely to deteriorate a relation rather than improve it.

Here’s the thing: Life is much more important than politics. Life is the experiences we’ve had, the sunrises we’ve seen, the friends and relationships we’ve had and lost and the stories that came with them. Not to mention the food we ate and the things we did. What your stance is on the environment or what you think the long-term consequences of QE is going to be are all very secondary issues. They might be much more interesting to those of us who care about such things, but for the majority of people, they remain pretty immaterial.

What happens when you trumpet these R.A.P.E. topics in your indecent search for like-minded people – or even an experience-widening tolerant search for opponents? Consider the typically loud liberty-minded American: within five minutes in his (yes, his) presence, you know what his views are and he throws them in people’s faces whether they like it or not. Your group of acquaintances, likely consisting of people who couldn’t care less, gets annoyed. While some people may engage in serious conversations about politics or economics (or religion or abortion) once in a while, their lives are generally concerned with more worthwhile topics. Having some loud-mouthed libertarian invade their everyday life with provocative statements and logical argument is not just annoying, it is bad manners.

I can lecture anyone and everyone I meet on the brilliancy or markets or how Scottish banks operated in the 18th century, with the sole outcome that I will have no friends or even acquaintances. Sharing your political and economic views rarely endear you to other people; it merely makes you a nuisance.

In short: Don’t be an arse. Stop ruining our great time with mindless, hurtful, harmful politics.

What about the perspectives and knowledge of others?

If you must invade others’ lives with your pesky politics, speaking to people with diverging opinions and different background might be interesting and fruitful. Key words “might be”. More accurate words: “is rarely”.

It is true that you might learn some exciting things from random strangers, but it’s unlikely. Most people are less informed about the world than I am (if you doubt that, ask your conversation partners to take Rosling’s Gapminder test) – what are they going to “teach” me but inaccuracies and misinformation…?

Sure, my car-loving friends can teach me something *fascinating* about some new car, a topic a could care less about. My baseball-crazy friends could recount the latest Sox game or why Tom Brady is the greatest – oh, ye, that’s a different sport. Soz. But is an environmentalist really going to teach me anything worth knowing about the impacts of climate change? (No, how could they – they don’t understand markets or even capitalism). Is an Occupy Wall Streeter going to lecture me about how financial markets work and what banks really do? How is my mother contributing to my perspectives on monetary policy when the sheer extent of her monetary wisdom comes from a novel where the ostensibly private Federal Reserve was purchased and controlled by some millionaire?

Don’t get me wrong: these are all amazing people that I highly cherish. I enjoy spending time with them and sharing stories about life. Point is: I’m under no illusion that they offer intellectually valuable perspectives that I could benefit from.

If I wanted to get such perspectives, I’d much rather spend time around two kinds of people: smart or curious. The majority of people you meet are neither:

Smart People are those who actually know things about the world, and I don’t meant boring things like why Israel celebrates this or that holiday, why the sky is blue (OK, that could be cool) or how one assembles a roof out of palm leaves. I mean a fair and favorable view of markets and a data-driven optimism. I mean a basic grasp of statistics. I mean a big picture understanding of what matters and the intellectual capabilities to explore them.

Curious people are those of whatever political persuasion that have thick enough skin to have their positions questioned and willing to reason to reach mutual understanding. One does not have to be smart or well-informed to be interesting – it’s enough to be sceptical and hungry for knowledge.

They rarely make ’em like that no more. So I take my probability-informed chances and avoid politically-minded people.

Elitist and Snobby?

Probably. But consider this: I have 24 hours a day, of which I sleep maybe 8. For maybe another 8 a day, I need to produce value, and so can’t be interrupted by loud and obnoxious libertarians (or environmentalists, or anthropologists or whoever). The last third of my days contain a lot of tasks: washing, workout, food, reading, wonders of the world. At best, it leaves a couple of hours a day for curious intellectual disputes. Let’s say 3. Statistically, I have another 56 years to live, for little over 60,000 hours worth of intellectual endeavors. There is an almost an endless supply of materials from interesting people out there – actually smart people: authors of books and journal articles, podcast interviews, lectures etc, all on topics that interest me. And more is produced every day. For every hour you take away from me with your “enriching perspectives” and uninformed opinions, I lose an hour of engaging with the treasure trove of actually smart people. Besides, the depth of their knowledge, the clarity of their formulation, the well-researched (and sourced!) material and examples they bring are almost certainly better than whatever you’re about to bring me. Consider the opportunity cost for me of having to listen to you “bumble-f**k your way through it“, as my beloved Samantha (Lily Collins) says in Stuck in Love. Even if you only take 10 minutes of my time, is whatever you’re about to say better than 1/360,000 of the sum of humanity’s current (and future) literary, statistic and economic treasure?

I don’t think so either. It’s simply not worth it.

This is a good reason to stick to people of similar mindset – people who are curious and open to having every argument re-examined, every proposition questioned. People with thick enough skin and sharp enough intellect not to mistake your objection for insult. People who might jump that 1/360,000 bar.

It’s not really the content of someone’s ideas that we’re shunning; it’s the intolerance and ignorance that we’re avoiding, carefully taking the opportunity cost into account. Talking to people who don’t share those views – the meta-views of intellectual discourse if you wish – is mostly a waste of time. The book on my desk is almost certainly more valuable.

With all due respect, you’re simply not worth my time.

Sunday Poetry: Stefan Zweig’s “Royal Game”

11/03/201911/03/2019 Alexander Albrecht Culture, Liberty, Philosophy Art, chess, literature, poetry, Stefan Zweig, Sunday, Zweig

A Sunday is perfect for me to cure hangovers, slurp coffee in bed, and most vital, for a couple rounds of chess. The miraculous yet material nature of chess could not have been better described than by Stefan Zweig in his “Royal Game“:

“I was well aware from my own experience of the mysterious attraction of the royal game, which among all games contrived by man rises superior to the tyranny of chance and bestows its palm only on mental attainment, or rather on a definite form of mental endowment. But is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet’s coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval yet ever new; mechanical in operation yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing; mathematics that produce no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless, as proved by evidence, more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all peoples and all ages; of which none knows the divinity that bestowed it on the world, to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit?”

I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.

Wiener Moderne and Austrian Economics – A product of times of turmoil

10/10/201910/10/2019 Alexander Albrecht Culture, Economics, Liberty, Philosophy Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian Economics, civilization, Culture, Erwin Dekker, liberty, literature, Vienna, Wiener Moderne

There are some certain incredibly rare constellations of time and space which result in one of a kind decades. The peak of Greek civilization from 5^th to 4^th century BC, the Californian Gold Rush from 1848–1855 and the Fin de Siecle from 1890-1920. The latter one is of specific interest to me for a long time. Some of the most worlds most famous painters (Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka), philosophers (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Edmund Husserl) or authors (Georg Trakl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler) coined the decade. Even more intriguing for me is that the Viennese intellectual live happened in very close circles. All intellectuals being witnesses of the downfall of one of the greatest empires of the 19^th century, each discipline coped with this fate in their very own way. Especially if one compares the movements of that time in literature and economics, it becomes clear that the self-imposed demands of the authors and scientists on their science differ considerably.

The Wiener Moderne: Flight into the irrational

Driven by the predictable crumbling of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the anticipated increasing tensions in the multi-ethnic empire and the threating of financial recession, the civil society was teetering on an abyssal edge. Furthermore, the Halleyscher comet was predicted to “destroy” the world in 1910, the titanic sunk in 1912, a European war was lingering just around the corner. Concerning the breakdown of stable order, people sought a way out of ruins of what once has been a stable authoritarian order. When existential threats become more and more realistic, one would expect cultural life to totally drain or at least decrease sufficiently. However, the complete opposite was the case.

At first, art merely revolted against the prevailing naturalism. Why would anybody need a detailed, accurate depiction of reality if reality itself is flawed with incomprehension, irrationality and impenetrability? Missing a stable external framework, many writers turned the back against their environment and focused on the Ego. To express the inner tensions of most contemporary people, many authors sought to dive deep into the human consciousness. Inspired by the psychoanalytical insights provided by Sigmund Freund, who had vivid relationships with many important authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, human behaviour and especially human decision making became a topic of increasing interest. Therefore, news ways of narrating such as interior monologue were founded.

Many writers such as Albert Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Georg Trakl found in transcendence a necessary counterbalance to supra-rational society. Reality and dream blurred into a foggy haze; rational preferences gave way to impulsive needs; time horizons shortened, emotions overcame facts. The individual was portrayed without any responsibility towards society, their family or other institutions. In the Dream Story (By far my favourite book) by Arthur Schnitzler, the successful doctor Ferdinand risks his marriage and his family to pursue subconscious, mysterious sexual needs. If you have the time, check out the movie based on the novel “Eyes Wide Shut” by Stanley Kubrick, truly a cinematic masterpiece.

Karl Kraus, on the other hand, founded the satirical newspaper “The Torch” in 1899 and offered often frequented point of contact for aspiring young talented writers. The content was mostly dominated by craggy, harsh satirical observations of the everyday life which sought to convince the public of the predictable mayhem caused by currents politics. Franz Wedekind, Adolf Loos and Else Lasker-Schüler could use the torch as a stepping stone for their further careers.

What they have in common is their understanding of their craftmanship: It is not of the concern of art to save civilization or to convince us to be better humans, but to describe, document and in a way aestheticize human behaviour. This does by no way means that the Viennese authors of the early 20^th century were not politically or socially involved: Antisemitism (Karl Kraus & Arthur Schnitzler), Free Press (Karl Kraus), Sexuality (Franz Wedekind and Arthur Schnitzler) were, for example, reoccurring themes. However, in most works, the protagonist struggles with these problems on an individual level, without addressing the problem as a social problem. Also, the authors seemed to lack the entire puzzle picture: Although many individual pieces were criticized, the obvious final picture was rarely recognized (Especially Schnitzler).

Economics – Role of the scientist in society

Meanwhile in economics another exciting clash of ideas took place: The second wave of the Historical School economist, mainly Gustav Schmoller, Karl Büchner and Adolph Wagner, were waging a war against Austrian School of Economics, mainly Carl Menger. The Historical School sought to identify the patterns in history through which one could deduce certain principles of economics. Individual preferences are not the result of personal desires, but rather the sum of social forces acting on the individual depending on space and time, they asserted. Thus, instead of methodological individualism, methodological collectivism must be used to conduct economic research. To determine the historical-temporal circumstances, one must first collect an enormous amount of empirical material, based on which one could formulate a theory. Austrian Economists, in turn, claim that individual preferences stem from personal desires. Although the Austrian emphasize the constraints emerging from interpersonal interactions, they rejected the idea, that free individuals are confined in their will through culture and norms. Thus, economics is a science of aggregated individual preferences and must be studied through the lens of methodological individualism.

As Erwin Dekker (Dekker 2016) has argued, the works of Austrian Economists must be seen as an endeavour to understand society and civilization in the first place. One must carefully study human interaction and acknowledge the ridiculously small amount of knowledge we actually possess about the mechanism of a complex society before one can “cure” the many ills of humankind. With the socialist calculation debate, Austrian Economist tried to convince other academics of the impossibility of economic calculation in the absence of prices.

Apart from their academic debates, they were very much concerned with the development of common society: Authoritarian proposal, the constant erosion of norms as a foundation for civil society, the increasing overall hostility lead them to the decision to leave the ivory tower of economics and argue for their ideas in public discourse. “The road to serfdom” is THE peak of this development. Hayek impressively explains to the general public the fragility of liberal democratic order and how far-reaching even well-intended governmental interferences can eventually be. Joined by Karl Popper’s masterpiece “The open society and its enemies”, Austrian Economist were now defending the achievements of liberal democracy more vigorously than ever.

Conclusion

It would be exaggerated to claim that the literary-historical “flight into the irrational” had excessive influence on the economic debate between the historical school and the Austrian school. Nevertheless, it has already been proven that intellectual Viennese life took place in a few closely networked interdisciplinary circles. There is no direct connection between the Viennese literary circles and famous contemporary economic circles such as the Mises-Kreis. However, the intellectual breadth of contributions and the interwoven relationships of many contributors became an important point of study in recent years (See: Dekker 2014). Especially Sigmund Freud could have been a “middle man” between Austrians (especially Hayek) and the authors of the Wiener Moderne (especially Schnitzler).

What definitely is remarkable is how different the various scientists and artist reacted to the existential threats of the early 20^th century.
Resignation? Internal Exile? Counterattack? There were many options on the table.

The “flight into the irrational” pursued by many, by far not all, authors of Wiener Moderne was a return to surreality, irrationality and individualism. Austrian Economist, however, went from individualism to social responsibility. According to them, scientists had an obligation to preserve that kind of liberal democratic system, which fosters peaceful human cooperation. To achieve this shared goal, many Austrian Economists left the ivory tower of academic debates, where they also fought for the same purpose, and temporarily became public intellectuals; starting a much more active defence of liberal democracy.

Thoughts on Time from a College Library

10/03/201910/03/2019 Kevin Kallmes Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Philosophy ancient Rome, mortality, On Time, Opportunity Cost, Seneca, social media

Note: This was written by my brother Keith, and he did not originally post it online but sent it to our family members. For being a younger brother, he brings a hell of a lot of wisdom to the table, and I think this thought-provoking epistle deserves to be shared more widely. I am publishing it here, with permission:

From Keith:

I learn a great deal from my family. The facts, figures, and articles that commonly result from discussing and arguing with each other are a reward in and of themselves. As might be expected, many of these experiences and facts are soon forgotten, making way for new debates. Once in a while, however, when discussing a topic, we–or I–stumble upon an insight which radically changes, clarifies, or re-enforces my understanding.

In recent months, I had two routine, incidental, and unrelated conversations, one with my brother, and the other with my sister. The conversation with my sister did not start during some contentious economic debate, but when we were eating dinner together. Offhand, my sister said to me: “Keith, I have really come to appreciate the ideas from your econ classes you told me about, like opportunity cost, especially the opportunity cost of time spent on one task being a loss of all other possible actions. When I applied those ideas to my everyday life, I saw a marked improvement, because I had become more efficient, simply from valuing my time appropriately.” We often complain that few people these days recognize how econ is not a theory of how society works but of how math can represent human reality at any level. This is one case where there are real, personal benefits from understanding the math of limited lifespan.

My second recent conversation of note did not concern this day and age, in fact, it concerned the ideas of a wealthy 2000-year-old Roman by the name of Seneca. My brother had recently been translating his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (literally “Moral letters to Lucilius” in Latin, courtesy of Wikipedia), and had stumbled upon Roman intellectual gold. Any attempt of mine to summarize the ideas in the letter would be less than adequate, so I shall copy it here. I know that it is long, and rather Latin-ish, but I would encourage anyone to take the time to read it, if only because reading it will pay your time back, with interest:

Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.

Continue to act in the way you described, my dear Lucilius: set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or stolen away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem of lost time, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed, Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.

Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity: time! And yet time is the one loan that even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

You may desire to know how I, who preach to you so freely, am practising. I confess frankly: my time account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man. My situation, however, is the same as that of many who are reduced to slender means through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, but no one comes to their rescue.

What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.

Farewell

After listening to my brother dictate the whole of this letter, I felt genuine chills. The truth it contains is so blatant, a simple calculation could yield the same result: life is made up of a limited number of hours, therefore life is time. Whenever you work, you are giving up your time for money (hence the old adage that time is money). This means that whenever you waste time, or money, you are wasting your life, and wasted life is death. This single fact horrifies me every day, because like most every other human, I waste an obscene amount of time. Time watching a movie I have already seen, trolling through Facebook without really reading any of the posts, or having the same argument all over again: rarely, when I am doing these things do I think about what else I could be doing.

Therein lies the link, which most will have already seen, between my two conversations. Our time is not free. Every moment we spend sleeping, eating, studying, etc., has a cost–an opportunity cost–and once it has been spent, if it was not truly the best way to spend it, then some small part of your life has been lost without reward.

I see this nearly everywhere: students doze off in class or idly check their email or texts, they, when “studying” in the library, will spend a majority of the time effectively idle. Writing this, I am in a college library, and with sample size n=11, I may, without prying too much, say that ~7/11ths of my fellow computer users are not doing what they came intending to do. They are wasting time they will not get back.

And so I say to you, whoever you may be reading this (perhaps idly), much the same as what Seneca might say to you, only I will say it less eloquently, and more directly: value your time. Do not waste it. Work on being efficient not for the sake of productivity, but for the sake of leisure, for we all have our jobs to do, and if we get them done faster then there is more time for enjoyment. If you spent less time complaining, you might spend that time actively addressing your problems, solving them rationally and thus eliminating your cause for complaint.

Vale.

There is no such thing as a sunk cost fallacy

09/23/201909/23/2019 Federico Sosa Valle Economics, Philosophy Barry Weingast, catallaxy, constitutionalism, costs, Douglass North, F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, John Joseph Wallis, Jon Elster, sunk costs fallacy, Vernon Smith

The advocates of the sunk cost fallacy state that, since an agent ponders in his decisions marginal costs against marginal incomes, any consideration upon sunk costs would be irrational. Notwithstanding, as soon as we accept the arguments of the said sunk cost fallacy and try to put its recommendations into practice, we discover that we have just become an easy prey of a more severe kind of irrationality: the one that concerns with intransitive preferences.

Jon Elster exemplifies the sunk cost fallacy with the case of a huge snowfall that pours onto the city the very same day we were planning to attend a theatre play whose tickets we had bought the previous days and are not refundable. Elster points out that, since our attendance to the play will not bring the money we had paid for the tickets back, there is no reason to make the decision on whether or not to attend the play on the basis of the sunk costs of the tickets. The correct reasoning should take into account only the cost of enduring the heavy snowfall in order to reach to the theatre where the play would be performed. Nevertheless, the same Jon Elster makes the disclaimer that a zealous observance of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy could lead to make choices following non transitive preferences.

If we change our mind every day, discarding previous decisions and assuming a new direction just because a new opportunity has arisen, we risk to end up in the ruin. Transitive preferences tend to assure the agent of a certain profit and non transitive ones exposes him to losses. In evolutionary games simulations, agents who act according to transitive preferences outshine agents who do not. It seems, then, that the rational agents walks on the edge of the razor, between sunk cost fallacies and non transitive preferences.

That is why there is not such a thing as a sunk cost fallacy. The rational agent, to be such, must ponder a whole plan against an alternative plan in a whole as well, which in some cases, both of them last several periods of time. It is true that in the “very short term” all past costs are sunk and that it only matters the opportunity costs, but most decisions are made in the short term, which lasts more than just a moment. Otherwise, the very concept of transitive preferences would lack any meaning.

Of course certain costs are sunk: if the flux of earnings that a good of capital produces just covers the variable costs of putting it to work (for example, a truck whose earnings just pay for the gas and the salary of the driver), the more rational choice is to use it until it becomes full obsolete and do not replace it with a brand new unit.

But the sunk cost fallacy does not provide a criterion to distinguish sunk costs from just mere costs of a single plan. What a rational agent with transitive preferences discards in his considerations will be named sunk costs, and what he does not, will not. A pure tautology.

Even the snowfall case does not explain satisfactorily the said fallacy: when the agent bought the tickets, their cost were inferior to the income of watching the play, but a heavy snowfall adds not a marginal cost but increases the marginal cost of the plan composed by the cost of the tickets plus the cost of enduring the snowfall.

Notwithstanding, the sunk cost fallacy derives into a philosophical puzzle: what is the subject? How are relations between time and being and between being and becoming. It seems that our permanence as rational agents depends mostly upon not to put into practice the opportunistic approach of the sunk cost fallacy ad libidum.

Moreover, the matter has a political strand: constitutional constraints demand from the authorities to take into account the weight of certain principles in their decisions and those principles could be disregarded if the decisions are purely made on the basis of expediency. If it is the same authority the one who decides whether certain constitutional principle should be followed or not, then all the citizens would be left exposed to arbitrariness.

The considerations about the length of the period a plan should last, the responsibility upon the consequences of our past choices, and the weight of the constitutional principles on the legitimacy of political decisions, become rational if they are not pondered by an isolated agent but in the framework of the interplay among several agents.

This framework of human interaction upon which the agent’s choices take place had been characterised by Friedrich A.Hayek as a spontaneous, or abstract or extended order. He proposed to leave the term “economics” to the explanation of the choices made by an isolated agent and to establish the science of “catallaxy” as the study of the complex phenomena involved in the said structure of interactions. In the same line, James M.Buchanan labelled the interplay of individual agents as “symbiosis” and proposed to redefine the task of the political economy to its study. More recently, in 2009, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast, in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, coined the term “open access orders” to analyse the same set of events. To this stream of thought, it also belongs Vernon L. Smith’s own account of the concept of ecological rationality.

Catallaxy, Symbiosis, Complex Phenomena, and Open Access Order or Ecological Rationality are some of the aspects of what Karl Popper once called “critical rationalism” and supersedes old problems such as those of the instrumental or subjective reason. An authentic “toolbox,” ready to be used.

Atomistic? Moi?

09/09/2019 Nick Cowen Liberty, Links, Philosophy David Hume, F.A. Hayek, liberalism, postmodernism, rationality

I have written a brief paper entitled ‘Hayek: Postatomic Liberal’ intended for a collection on anti-rationalist thinkers. For the time being, the draft is available from SSRN and academia.edu. Here are a couple of snippets:

Hayek offers a way of fighting the monster of Rationalism while avoiding becoming an inscrutable monster oneself. The crucial move, and in this he follows Hume, is to recognize the non-rational origins of most social institutions, but treating this neither as grounds for dismissal of those institutions as unsound, nor an excuse to retreat from reason altogether. Indeed, reason itself has non-rational, emergent origins but is nevertheless a marvelous feature of humanity. Anti-rationalist themes that appear throughout Hayek’s work include: an emphasis on learning by processes of discovery, trial and error, feedback and adaptation rather than knowing by abstract theorizing; and the notion that the internal processes by which we come to a particular belief or decision is more complex than either a scientific experimenter or our own selves in introspection can know. We are always, on some level, a mystery even to ourselves…

Departing from Cartesian assumptions of atomistic individualism, this account can seem solipsistic. When we are in the mode of thinking of ourselves essentially as separate minds that relate to others through interactions in a material world, then it feels important that we share that world and are capable of clear communication about it and ourselves in order to share a genuine connection with others. Otherwise, we are each in our separate worlds of illusion. From a Hayekian skeptical standpoint, the mind’s eye can seem to be a narrow slit through which shadows of an external world make shallow, distorted impressions on a remote psyche. Fortunately, this is not the implication once we dispose of the supposedly foundational subject/object distinction. We can recognize subjecthood as an abstract category, a product of a philosophy laden with abstruse theological baggage… During most of our everyday experience, when we are not primed to be so self-conscious and self-centered, the phenomenal experience of ourselves and the environment is more continuous, flowing and irreducibly social in the sense that the categories that we use for interacting with the world are constituted and remade through interactions with many other minds.

“Return to the Bronze Age… national nudism”

08/31/2019 Bill Rein Books, Culture, Philosophy Alt-Right, Trump, twitter

It seems that the alt-right (have we normalized it past the point of quotation marks?) is seriously studied almost exclusively by the political left, and demsoc journalists of the Vice variety, who will study anything edgy. This is a shame, because the alt-right was a point on the political axes chart that has grown to a blob, with its own online mythos, layered culture, and, recently, mass shooters.

The alt-right is an interesting group to study. I’m as interested in them as the Posadists, and agree with them about as much. They are no friends of liberty, so, given the 2016-and-on talk of toxic forces latching onto libertarian institutions, it seems appropriate that the libertarian mind analyze more thoroughly just what the deal is – rather than having the left stoke a pipeline theory ad infinitum.

I’m reading a recent work that is very popular among the alt-right (and other groups), and, in fairness, I do not know whether or not it is “deplorably” alt-right yet. Bronze Age Mindset came out last year and caught mainstream media attention this year, written by an irreverent anonymous author who, like any modern philosopher, has highly public blue thumbs. It’s about some sort of modern scourge, a return to greatness (a familiar theme by this point), and sex politics, I think.

It feels peculiar pausing my ongoing reading – Feyerabend, Land and Krafft-Ebing – for a piece that seems like a 200-page version of Real Social Dynamics, but the alt-right is here, it is, I still think, growing, and I don’t yet think we’ve seen the worst it will do, unfortunately.

If Bronze Age Pervert is one of the in-house philosophers of the alternative right, we should treat his work with the same critical stewardship. I’ll post a review when I’m finished with it.

Thoughts on ‘For Method’

08/22/2019 Rick Weber Books, Liberty, Philosophy epistemic humility, epistemology, for and against method, Imre Lakatos, Philosophy of Science

Our project hasn’t seen much public-facing action, but it’s still happening. For my part, I have (so far) read Lakatos’s lectures that were meant to form the basis for his joint project with Feyerabend.

Before I jump into it, let me start with my favorite quote:

The social sciences are on a par with astrology, it is no use beating about the bush. (Funny that I should be teaching at the London School of Economics!)
Imre Lakatos, p. 107 For and Against Method

These lectures were an entertaining evisceration of some old (and still prevalent) superstitions about the functioning of science, plus Lakatos’s own view on how science actually works. I think his picture (which I’ll describe below) is a pretty good one, but doesn’t actually solve the demarcation problem.

The Big Question (TBQ) is this: how do we separate good science from bad? Lakatos presents three main schools of thought (besides his own):

Demarcationism — a set of schools of thought that share a belief in something like an objective answer to TBQ.
Authoritarianism — the belief that there are some people who can identify good science, but can’t necessarily enunciate their positions.
Anarchism — which argues (according to Lakatos) that there is no good or bad science.

He quickly rejects the various flavors of Demarcationism. These schools of thought are either logically impossible (e.g. inductivism), inconsistent with the history of science, and/or too subjective. They’re popular caricatures of science–cartoons with heroic scientists battling ignorance, limited only by funding. But they aren’t true.

For example, Falsificationism (which is alive and well, half a century later, in the minds of many practicing scientists) tells us that scientists are only swayed by disconfirmatory evidence. But in practice scientists tend to ignore anamolies (i.e. disconfirmatory evidence) with the hope that they’ll be explained away later–and they tend to be swayed by confirmatory evidence in spite of Falsificationist priors.

All told, Demarcationists run into the problem of not being able to come up with a theory that doesn’t make significant errors such as classifying Newton as bad science.

On the far side of the spectrum are anarchists. Far from believing in any formula, criteria, or line in the sand, they say TBQ misses the point entirely. There isn’t such thing as “good” science or “bad” except from the perspective of whatever the current orthodoxy says. For the objective-truth-seeking philosopher, science ultimately boils down to “anything goes!”

For Lakatos, the anarchists have basically surrendered in the face of the demarcation problem. But it’s not clear to me that Lakatos hasn’t joined them. He’s got his progression criterion (more on that later), but can we really pin that down in any objective way? Motterlini seems to think Feyerabend thought Lakatos was really an anarchist after all, and I’m inclined to agree based on what (little) I’ve seen. Lakatos offers heuristics, but makes no guarantees that any formula will work reliably.

Let me come back to Authoritarianism after describing Lakatos’s theory of research programs.

A research program is (if I’m understanding this correctly) basically a mix of scientific framework and community. Austrian Economics is a research program comprised of a common theoretical view (with some disagreements), a network of citations, and a social network across space and backwards through time. Austrian Econ contains smaller programs within it: entrepreneurship, political economy, history of thought, capital theory, etc.

Any given research program (RP) may look relatively “good”(ish) or “bad” at any given time, but the future is always uncertain. I wouldn’t bet money on it, but how am I to prove that astrology won’t turn out to be true at some point? It’s the Grue problem writ large.

What we can evaluate is whether an RP is “progressing” or “degenerating.” In the former case it’s gaining predictive power. In the latter case it’s turning into an ad hoc mess in the face of evidence.

It’s up to individual scientists to make the entrepreneurial [my word, not his] decision to invest some effort in whichever program they think is promising. The natural move would be to join a progressing RP. But there might be an opportunity to save a degenerating RP.

In other words, Lakatos wants to describe what science is doing, but he wants to avoid making value judgements about unknown futures. Rather than draw a demarcation line he instead offers a way to ask if a RP is going in the right direction (right now or retrospectively).

Let’s digress a minute and consider objective reality. Putting aside Cartesian skepticism, it seems reasonable to take the existence of an objective universe as a basic axiom. But just as surely, that objective universe has far more complications than humanity will ever be able to fully account for. The universe has more dimensions than us; what did you expect? In considering science’s ability to grasp objective reality, we have to understand that there’s always going to be some degree of (radical) uncertainty, even at the best of times.

“Good” science is that science that gets us closer to capital-T Truth. But we’ll never be in the omniscient position necessary to conclusively judge a bit of science as actually being good or not.

I think Lakatos and I share a sense that there is this objective reality that we can move towards. I think we also share an understanding that this objective reality is fundamentally inaccessible. I also share his position that the demarcationists are wrong. But I’m not ready to give up on the anarchists or the authoritarians.

Authoritarians basically argue that although there is good and bad science and that they can identify them even if they can’t explain how. Lakatos deals mostly with the uglier side of this school of thought, but misses a nicer side. That nicer version, ironically, includes him telling us things like astronomy is more valid than astronomy. To be fair, he hedges by acknowledging that the future is always uncertain… maybe in 1000 years astrology switches from a degenerating body of knowledge to a progressive one.

Hayek’s notion of tacit knowledge applies to scientific knowledge. The tacit knowledge of scientists allows them to tell future scientists things like “don’t even bother with alchemy.”

Still, just because you know something, doesn’t mean it’s right. We all “know” that Roman soldiers spoke with English accents because that’s how they’ve always been portrayed in movies. Try imagining Gladiator with Italian accents; it doesn’t work!

Sometimes authorities give us useful advice like distinguishing between astronomy and astrology. But sometimes they turn out to be wrong (after encouraging us to pursue eugenics in the meantime).

Authority is a useful guidepost, and represents the (current) structure of knowledge. I am not willing to give up my own authority because when it comes to economics, I know it’s not a matter of “anything goes!”

Reading Lakatos, I can’t quite settle on a camp between the anarchists and authoritarians. The anarchists are literally correct, but the authoritarians are able to actually make bets on a reality I think exists.

We’re all in the position of the blind men and the elephant. When someone tells me an elephant is like a tree, I think it behooves me to a) accept that as evidence about what the world is like, and b) take it with a grain of salt. The bumper sticker version of my stance might be “the Truth is out there… and its bigger than you think.”

So what about Lakatos? It’s all a bit rusty at this point so please push back in the comments. But here’s my tl;dr:

Don’t trust anyone who tells you they’ve got the formula for “good science.”
The way science actually works (as opposed to the mythology we’re taught in high school science) is that RP’s build up complex bodies of knowledge around a few core postulates. Normal science is concerned with attacking the knowledge that isn’t in that core.
Scientific progress (e.g. the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics) isn’t an Occam process… we’re not eliminating anomalies, but changing the set of anomalies we deal with.
The mark of bad science is adding ad hoc theory that hand-waves away anomalies but doesn’t generalize to describing novel facts (if Nasim Taleb were in the audience, he’d be shouting via negativa! right now)

What Albert Camus taught us about freedom

08/18/201908/18/2019 Alexander Albrecht Liberty, Philosophy Albert Camus, existentialism, liberty, philosophy, political philosophy

The French-Algerian author and philosopher Albert Camus is unarguably one of the most read and thought-provoking intellectuals of the 20th century. Although he mainly gained attention through his philosophical theory of the absurd, which he carefully and subconsciously embedded in his novels, Camus also decisively contributed significant ideas and thoughts to the development of freedom in the post Second World War era. That is why I want to present you five little known things we still can learn from Albert Camus’ political legacy.

Oppose every form of totalitarianism

After the Second World War, socialism spread across Eastern Europe and was proclaimed the alternative draft to capitalism, which was regarded to be one of the reasons for the rise of fascism in Germany. On the other side, socialism was believed to bring about freedom for everybody in the end. Even though many intellectuals at first were attracted by the socialist ideology, Camus instantly saw the dangers of its predominant “the ends justify the means” narrative. He justifiably considered the vicious suppression of opposing views in order to obtain total freedom in the future as an early shibboleth for totalitarianism.

To achieve self-realization, an individual needs personal freedom, which is one of the first victims of totalitarian despotism. Thus, Camus vigorously fought against right or left authoritarian proposals – and for individual liberty, which lead to his conclusion: “None of the evils that totalitarianism claims to cure is worse than totalitarianism itself”.

A diverse Europe

If one thing is for sure, then it is Camus’ unbroken love for Europe. However, his conception of Europe does not portray the continent as a possible source for collectively controlled industry, military or thoughts. In contrast, he depicts Europe as an exciting intellectual battlefield of ideas, in which for 20 centuries people revolted “against the world, against the gods, and against themselves.” Thus, European people are unified through shared ideas and values rather than divided by borders.

That is why he forecasts the emergence of an unideological Europe populated by free people and based on unity and diversity already in 1957. Although he felt a strong love for his homeland France, he notes that an expansion of the realm he defines as “home” does not necessarily affects his love in a negative way. That is why he later on even argued for the “United States of the world.”

Nihilism is not a solution

In “A letter to a German friend” Camus remarks certain similarities between him and the Nazis regarding their philosophical starting point. They both reject any intrinsic, predetermined meaning in this world. However, the Nazis derive an arbitrariness of defining moral categories such as “good” and “evil” as well as a human subjugation to their animal instincts from this perception. Thus, it is allowed to murder on behalf of an inhuman ideology.

Contrary, Camus insisted that this nihilism leads to self-abandonment of humanity. In turn, he argues that we must fight against the unfairness of the world by creating our own meaning of life in order to achieve happiness. If there is no deeper meaning in our existence, every person has to seek happiness in his or her own way. When we accept our destiny, even if it devastating at first glance as he describes it in “The myth of Sisyphus”, we can pursue our own goals and therefore fulfil our personal meaning of life.

Total artistic freedom

Considering his artistic background, Camus’ conception of the value of freedom is quite interesting. Classical liberalist such as Locke and Mill regard freedom as the state of nature: The man is born free and thus freedom is the natural state of any person. Liberty for Camus instead is a necessary condition to fulfil every personal perception of the meaning of life. That is why he particularly emphasizes the invaluable worth of liberty for humanity: When people are not free, they cannot pursue their own meaning of life and thus achieve happiness in an unfair world.

Considering the immense value art personally has for Camus, it certainly reflects a major component in his personal equation towards fulfilment, alongside other interests such as sports and love. Hence, it is not surprising that he was a lifelong supporter of total artistic freedom, which prevents nobody from obtaining happiness through individual perceptions of art. That is why he famously concludes “Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself and dies of all others.”

Abrogate the death penalty

In the chilling essay “reflections on the Guillotine” Camus insists on the abolishment of the death penalty. Apart from different scientific arguments such as low efficiency and a non-existing deterrence-effect, Camus also points out the general moral fragility of the death penalty: He is deeply worried by the state privilege of deciding over life and death. This privilege is exploited through the death penalty, which solely is a form of revenge. On the contrary, it is only triggering an unbearable spiral of violence instead of preventing it. Alternatively, he argues for being set at labour for life as maximal punishment.

Albert Camus was not an Anarcho-capitalist nor was he a libertarian. Nevertheless, he regarded individual freedom as an essential element of society and examined the inseparable relation between freedom and art. Every true work of art increased the inner freedom of its admirer and thus free art gives scope for individual happiness. One can never solely serve the other – they presuppose each other. Because of his artistic and philosophical roots, Camus provides an unusual moral argument for individual liberty, which makes him worth reading even today.

The Case for Constructivism in IR Pt. 2

08/12/201908/12/2019 Alexander Albrecht Liberty, Philosophy, Politics balance of power, Constructivism, coordination problem, Friedrich Krachtowil, Hans Morgenthau, institutions, international relations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, power

After a not so short break I took from blogging in which I submitted my Bachelor Thesis and took some much-needed vacations, I finally got my hands back on writing again. Before opening up something new, I first need to finish my Case for Constructivism in IR.

In my first post, I described how constructivism emerged as a school of thought and how the key concept of anarchy is portrayed. In this part, I want to discuss power and the differences between moderate constructivism, radical constructivism and poststructuralism.

The social construction of… everything? Where to draw the line.

The connection between moderate constructivism and radical constructivism is more of a flowing transition than a sharp distinction. Scholars have further developed the idea of social constructivism and expanded it beyond the realms of the international system. Not only the international system but also states, tribes and nations are socially constructed entities. Thus taking “states” as given entities (as moderate constructivist do) in the international system neglects how national identities are constructed. Why do nations act so differently although they are subjugated to the same international system? The implications of these findings have been the subject of many influential works, notably Francis Fukuyama’s latest book “Identity” or Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization”.

The most important component which radical constructivist brought into consideration was language. The linguistic turn induced by Ludwig Wittgenstein disrupted not only philosophy but all social sciences. For decades language has been portrayed as a neutral mean to communicate between the human species which evolved from spontaneous order. Wittgenstein dismantled this image and explained why we so often suffer from linguistic confusion. Friedrich Krachtowil further applied Wittgenstein’s findings to social sciences by dividing information into three categories: Observational (“brute”), mental and institutional facts. All these three dimensions need to be taken into account in order to understand a message. The institutional setting of spoken words directly builds a bridge between speaking and acting (speech act theory). If I say, let’s nuke North Korea, I might get a weird look on the streets, but nothing significant will happen. On the other hand, if the president of the USA says the same, the institutional setting has changed, and we might have a problem with the real-world implications of this statement. The social construction of the institutional setting is highlighted by paying special interest to language as a mean of human interaction. However, how far one can go with analyzing the results of a socially constructed language without losing the bigger picture out of sight remains a difficult task.

While the radical constructivists first established a connection between language and physical action, the poststructuralists sought to discover the immanent power structures within social constructs. Michel Foucault (one of the most prolific sociologists of the 20^th century with some neoliberal influence) brought the discourse and moreover discursive action into perspective, whilst Derrida or Deleuze focused more on the deconstruction of written texts. Contrary to many poststructuralists, moderate constructivists avoid being constantly fooled by Maslow’s Hammer: While it is irrefutable that power relations play a vital role in analyzing social structures, an exceedingly rigid focus on them conceals other driving forces such as peaceful, non-hierarchical cooperation for example.

Why Constructivism at all?

Moderate Constructivism puts special emphasis on the institutional setting in which certain behaviour is incentivized. This setting, however, is subject to permanent changes and perceived differently by every subjective actor in the international system. Thus, the driving problem of IR remains a coordination problem: Instead of simple state interest directed to maximize their share of the Balance of Power (as Hans Morgenthau, the father of modern IR theory, proclaimed), we must now coordinate different institutional settings in the international system resulting in a different understanding of key power resources. None of the traditional IR schools of thought hypothesizes that ontology may be subjective. Moderate constructivism manages to integrate a post-positivist research agenda without getting lost in the details of language games (like radical constructivist) or power analytics (like poststructuralists).

Against Ideology

07/15/2019 Rick Weber Culture, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics epistemic humility, ideology, normative views, philosophy, policy, policy goals, political philosophy, utility function

Since first dipping my feet (brain?) into philosophical waters I’ve realized that the world has more dimensions than my mind. Many more. Which means insisting on a consistent philosophy is, in all likelihood, a recipe for disaster.

This isn’t to say I’ve got an inconsistent philosophy, or that I’m ready to throw up my hands and say “anything goes!“. But like a good bridge, my philosophy is full of tensions.

I can’t derive everything back to the Harm Principle (a principle I like), recognition of subjective values (which I’m on board with), or some notion of a social utility function (which I do like as a rhetorical crutch or skyhook, but am unwilling to take with me more than arm’s length from the whiteboard).

Instead, I’ve got a smorgasbord of mental tools–ethical notions (“don’t kill people!”), social science models (prisoners’ dilemma, comparative advantage)–that I try to match appropriately to the situation.

This puts me in the unfortunate position of requiring a great deal of humility. But as it will say on my tombstone: worse things have happened to better people…

I approach the world with libertarian priors. At the end of the day, I’m a left-libertarian anarchist. But Jonathan Haidt’s work has convinced me that my priors say more about me than the world. To be sure, libertarianism brings something important to the table, but so do other views.

Recognizing the importance of ideological pluralism lets me use my ideology like a lever instead of a bat–a tool instead of a weapon. And hey, what’s more libertarian than pluralism?!

As a centuries-long-run prospect for a meta-utopia I’m still staunchly libertarian. Go back in time 500 years and you’ll be told democracy is a pipe dream. I think we’re in a similar moment for the ideas of radical freedom, self-determination, and decentralization of power I’d really like to see put into practice. But imagine going back in 500 years, convincing everyone you’re a powerful wizard, then implementing democracy all at once. I don’t think it’d work out very well. Hell, I’m not even sure about going back in time 3 years to run that experiment! Similarly, flipping the An-Cap switch tomorrow would probably be 100 steps forward, 1000 steps back. Without the appropriate culture in place, good ideas are likely to backfire.

Still, I’m a libertarian anarchist by default and want to see the world move in that direction. But in the short-medium run I refuse to be dogmatic.

I get a lot out of my ideological priors, but I get more by refusing to slavishly follow them at all costs. Yes, the greatest good will be served in an anarcho-capitalist world (I think). But it’s a long trip from here to there. Sustaining that equilibrium will require a cultural shift that hasn’t happened yet–and ignoring those informal institutions is likely to lead to something more like feudalism than utopia. In the mean time, I say move towards greater freedom and avoid getting bogged down in partisanship.

So I’ve got a long-run goal: radical federalism and maximal freedom. But how do we get there? What are the short- and medium-run goals?

Simply to make things better while encouraging people to engage in voluntary interactions that create value, especially by building up social capital networks.

My Austrian-subjectivist priors are in tension with my rationalist-utilitarian instinct. But I think we find a way out by considering policy effects on future generations. Tyler Cowen suggests pursuing policy that promotes long run economic growth.

The big caveat is that although GDP is the best available metric to pursue, GDP is an imperfect measure. Figuring out “GDP, properly understood” adds a layer of complexity that makes policy evaluation all the more difficult. Which is part of the controversy with my recent posts on pollution taxes.

For example, after the end of slavery, total leisure time increased which would decrease measured GDP. But clearly a proper accounting of productivity would discount the initially higher GDP by the cost of forced labor. Similarly, we have to refine our notion of measured* economic well-being to account for things left out of the old methods–like household consumption, leisure, black markets (side note: the war on drugs is a waste!), human capital**, and ecological assets that fall outside the private property system.

Addendum for the left: what’s best for the world’s poorest people is a worthy addition to Cowen’s policy. And it’s an addition that also tends to push us towards libertarian arguments (like liberalization of immigration policy).

Unfortunately, I’m a rationalist by default which means I have to work at my epistemic humility. I’m constantly tempted to see the world as more legible than it really is. I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t know could fill a library. But the world is much more complex than any functional team of smart people could handle, let alone a lone economist–even if he happens to be one of few who really do get it.

One of my favorite arguments is the Austrian-libertarian point that “if we knew what people would do with their freedom, we wouldn’t need it.” For example, the reason to allow someone to start new businesses isn’t because we know that it’s going to make things better. Instead, it’s because market innovation depends on decentralized, crowd-sourced experimentation. We don’t say “oh, this Steve Jobs guy is about to improve our lives,” because if we could do that (we can’t) then we could instead find a less costly way to get the same outcome (we can’t do that either).

This line of reasoning also applies to policy. There are some easy cases–there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit in occupational licensing. But society is a complex system, so you can’t do just one thing. Any one policy change ripples through the system and creates unintended consequences.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should do nothing. But my conservative friends are right that we shouldn’t go too fast. In any case, we’ve got more tensions that require me to listen to a wider range of ideological voices due to my cognitive limits.

A particularly interesting policy question is to what extent we should (not) take account of the impacts of American (Canadian, European, Chinese, etc., etc.) policy on non-Americans.

Here we find another tension. On the one hand, surely being accidentally born into a particular geography doesn’t give you greater moral weight than others. On the other, even if we want American policy to help Haitians, there’s a knowledge problem exacerbated by distance.

I think the appropriate response is a friendly and open federalism. Local issues should be handled locally. We should be neighborly. We should resist the temptation to centralize power.

But we should also take advantage of large-scale governance structures (private or public) to deal with large-scale issues. Match the scale of governance to the scale of the relevant externalities.

The downside of this approach is that some locales will do terrible things. “States’ rights” is a bad argument for slavery (or for anything else). But stepping in to make things better isn’t an unambiguous improvement. If there’s one thing to learn from America’s adventures in statecraft*** it’s that you can’t just force a country to be free.

Given that, we should be more open to accept the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Historically, our record is far from spotless. But there have also been humanitarian successes in moving people away from tyranny.

We have a moral obligation to at least consider the well-being of everyone around the globe. And the lowest hanging fruit for actually making a positive difference is opening up our borders. Not to say there’s a simple answer, but the answer lies in the direction of freedom of movement.

How should we (according to me) go about deciding questions of public policy? We should opt to encourage the creation of value and reduction of costs (i.e. economic growth). But we should do so carefully and with open minds.

GDP growth is a worthy goal, but not for it’s own sake. John Stuart Mill wrote:

“How many of the so-called luxuries, conveniences, refinements, and ornaments of life, are worth the labour which must be undergone as the condition of producing them?… In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour.”

Mindless insistence on measurable output overlooks important things like going to your kid’s little league game, grabbing a beer with friends, or quiet contemplation. And even if the people arguing for protecting the environment seem a bit silly, we’re wrong to ignore the importance of environmental externalities in affecting our standard of living. All of which is to say, Cowen is right that we need to carefully consider the shortfalls of how we measure economic growth, all while encouraging it.

Perhaps most importantly, we should relish a tension between consequentialism and principles. There are plenty of low-hanging fruits for libertarianism, but if we want to get the most out of this metaphorical tree we need to let a fear of bad outcomes encourage us to invest in civil society, informal institutions, and rich social networks so that freedom can expand without costing us inhumanity. I want to see the welfare state ended, but I’m willing to wait while we start by reducing barriers to entrepreneurship. I want to see taxes go away, but I’m willing to see a less-bad tax replace an egregious one.

We should reject the dogmatism that too often leads us to over-prioritize ideological purity. First, such purity can trap us in local optima (metaphor: a self-driving car programmed to never go east sounds like a good way to get from NYC to LA… till it gets stuck in a cul de sac somewhere). Second, that purity is an illusion. God’s true ethical system simply isn’t available to us–it’s more complex than our brains are–so why worry?

Post script: don’t take this to be an argument against libertarianism. Or a call to prioritize “pragmatism” over ideology or any other political values. I’m not trying to make a definitive argument abolishing ideology, I’m just gently pushing back. The key word here is tension. We can’t have tension between A and B if we get rid of A.

*Here’s another tension: I don’t believe we can actually measure economic well-being. I think we can make educated guesses based on well-thought out studies of observable proxy variables, but I believe in the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparison.

**A major pet peeve of mine is the conflation of education and schooling. Education, properly understood, is simply not measurable. We might find some clever proxy variables (for example, the Economic Complexity Index is my current favorite metric for productive capability–which overlaps capital and human capital accumulation).

***That’d be a good title for a comic book! If you know the right historian and/or international relations scholar, put them in touch with Zach Weinersmith!

The Philosophy and Ethics behind Blockchain (smart talk)

06/30/201907/06/2019 Chhay Lin Lim Liberty, Philosophy crypto-anarchism, cryptocurrency, Cypherpunk, ethics, Ethics of Blockchain, philosophy, Philosophy of Blockchain

I have recently given a 7-minute smart talk on “the Philosophy and Ethics behind Blockchain” at the Saxion Smart Solutions Festival. The talk is intended for laymen who are interested in the intersection of Philosophy and Blockchain.

What follows is a video and transcript of the talk.

Purpose of my Smart Talk

The purpose of this smart talk is four-fold:

Firstly, I contend that philosophy matters if we would like to understand the practical and social implications of Blockchain;
I then give a brief description of Crypto-Anarchism, a philosophy that together with the Cypherpunk movement have deeply influenced the Blockchain space from its early beginnings;
This is then followed by a description of the essence of the Bitcoin Blockchain. I also make a comparative analysis between the Bitcoin Blockchain and Crypto-Anarchism;
Finally, I will conclude that the Blockchain space is moving towards the development of products that are very well in line with its initial philosophy. These products are Distributed Autonomous Organizations or DAOs in short.

Why Philosophy Matters

I believe that in order to understand something, and to understand where it’s going to we have to understand where it’s coming from. In other words, if we want to understand the practical and social implications of Blockchain, we cannot dismiss the philosophy that has given birth to it.

What is the Crypto-Anarchist and Cypherpunk philosophy?

The invention of Blockchain has a long and very intriguing history. Blockchain was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a mysterious person or group of people whose real identity until this day has always been concealed. Although Blockchain was invented in 2008, we also know that Satoshi was heavily influenced by crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks.

In 1992, a crypto-anarchist called Timothy May invited a group of cryptographers, mathematicians, engineers, and others concerned with our liberties for a meeting. Their goal was to think of ways to protect

their privacy,
their political freedom,
and their economic freedom through the use of cryptography.

Cryptography is the science or practice of making information unintelligible. It is a means to protect your communication. For example, if you make a purchase on a webshop you actually don’t send a message to the payment service provider that includes your name, your product Y, the amount X and the time Z. What you send is a message that is scrambled into something unintelligible so that whenever a person intercepts the message – for example a malicious hacker – will not be able to understand it.

Crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks are practical idealists so they developed real-life applications that supported their ideals. They developed such things as untraceable e-mail, untraceable payments. They discussed ideas of anonymous markets, self-enforcing smart contracts, secure messaging etc. Most of the technical elements that form the foundation of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Blockchain were already developed by this group of people.

This group of people that came together in 1992 are known as Cypherpunks. I am sure that most people know at least one person from that group. The Dutchman Robert Gonggrijp (founder of XS4ALL) was part of this group as well as Julian Assange (founder of Wikileaks).

An important question we have to raise here is:

“What are Crypto-anarchists and Cypherpunks and what do they want?”

In the words of Timothy May (1994),

“Crypto-anarchy is the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism (libertarian anarchism)… Digital cash, untraceable and anonymous (like real cash), is also coming, though various technical and practical hurdles remain… For libertarians, strong crypto provides the means by which government will be avoided.”

Working in the same philosophical tradition as John Locke. The crypto-anarchists are also strict contractarians. They believe that two parties should be allowed to engage in any social and economic activity as long as both parties agree on the said activity. In other words, they believe that every social interaction should be legitimate as long as it happens voluntarily and without coercion. They are very skeptical of centralized institutions, such as governments as – according to them – governments are monopolistic coercive institutions. They want governments to be limited, and preferably non-existent. Crypto-anarchists don’t equate anarchism with disorder. They believe that within an anarchist society – thus one without a government – rules and regulations will emerge naturally from the ground up.

“And what are cypherpunks?”

Cypherpunks are activists who are also very skeptical of centralized institutions like governments. They use cryptography as the means to preserve the freedoms they deem important.

Let’s sum up what they want.

Crypto-anarchists/Cypherpunks

Transparency: Transparency of governments

Voluntaryism: Voluntaryist social and economic interactions

Privacy: Privacy for everyone

Propertarian: Strict property rights

Free markets: No institutional monopoly of money production

Decentralization: Decentralization of power. Social order happens from the bottom-up

Overview of the workings of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Now, let’s take a look at what a Blockchain is and see how it’s related to Crypto-anarchism and Cypherpunk. The most basic explanation of Blockchain is that it is a database, distributed among a network of computers so that every computer has an exact copy of this database. Every computer on the network – also called a node – verifies every mutation of the database. When someone tries to insert malicious data into the Blockchain, the network will easily discover it. In order to hijack the database, you need to be able to hijack a majority of the nodes on the network.

This is in stark contrast with traditional, centralized networks that contain a central server. The relationship between the central server and the connected devices is called a client-server relationship. However, one could also refer to it as a master-slave relationship. The central server has an administrator. This administrator can determine who Is adding what content to the database, he stores your password, your username etc. In such a network, you have to trust the administrator that he acts properly. These type of networks are very prone for corruption, censorship and attacks. In order to attack this centralized network, all you have to do is attack this central server. Therefore, we also say that it has a single point of failure (SPOF).

This is the most basic explanation of what Blockchain is and how its contrasts with centralized networks – but it’s also a boring explanation. A question I’d like us to explore is:

“What is the essence of Blockchain?”

The essence of Blockchain, I beleive, is that it creates trust in a network of unknown participants. It is an elegant solution to the possible corruption of digital networks. In its essence, it is a technology against censorship and corruption of digital networks. There is no need to appeal to authority, because rules are set by consensus, reached through active discussions and persuasion instead of coercion.

In this sense, the Bitcoin Blockchain perfectly matches the philosophy of Crypto-anarchism and Cypherpunk.

Comparison between Crypto-Anarchism and the Bitcoin Blockchain

Crypto-anarchists/Cypherpunks	Bitcoin Blockchain
Transparency: Transparency of governments	Transparency: Blockchain is open source and transparent. Everyone can look into the source code and follow every transaction.
Voluntaryism: Voluntaryist social and economic interactions	Voluntaryism: Everyone is free to join and leave the network. Everyone is allowed to use Bitcoin, and not coerced into using it.
Privacy: Privacy for everyone	Privacy: Anyone, anywhere can create a Bitcoin wallet without having to provide private information. Bitcoin addresses are pseudonymous and its encouraged to use a different Bitcoin address for every transaction.
Propertarian: Strict property rights	Propertarian: When you own your private key of your wallet, no one can take it away from you.
Free markets: No institutional monopoly of money production	Free markets: Introduces competition in money production.
Decentralization: Decentralization of power. Social order happens from the bottom-up	Decentralization: Blockchain is copied and distributed over a large network of computers. There’s no need to appeal to authority to participate or to make transactions. In that sense, it is radically neutral. Everyone on the network, no matter whether you are a king or humble civil servant, is treated the same and according to pre-specified consensus rules.

What types of applications can we look forward to

Knowing where Blockchain came from. What can we say about the types of applications they would like to build? What types of applications can we look forward to in the future that hold true to this anti-censorship/anti-corruption philosophy of the Crypto-anarchists and Cypherpunks?

The ultimate types of application for them are Distributed Autonomous Organizations or DAOs for short. These are organizations, that don’t have a single point of decision-making. They have no board of directors, no select group of owners that have exclusive ownership rights, no one executive that directs the organization. These organizations, instead, are open and inclusive for anyone. They are ruled by machine consensus and not by the whims of a small group of people.

There are already DAOs. Bitcoin was the first DAO. There is no Bitcoin company, no Bitcoin executive. If you think about DAOs, imagine a Facebook without a Facebook CEO, a YouTube without a YouTube company, and an investment fund without a fund manager.

The case for Constructivism in IR

06/17/201906/18/2019 Alexander Albrecht Liberty, Philosophy Alexander Wendt, anarchy, Constructivism, Friedrich Krachtowil, international relations, liberalism, Marxism, political theory, Richard K. Ashely, Yosef Lapid

Part one: The fourth debate and the origins of Constructivism

Recently there has been a surge in blogpost dealing with International Relation (IR) theory on this blog. Dr. Rosi stated that he thinks the paradigm of Realism best explains world politics. On the other side, Dr. van de Haar has proven to be an expert in the liberal tradition of IR, putting forward nuanced explanations of different subcategories of liberalism and even making a distinction between liberal and libertarian IR theory (As an IR undergrad I can say, this is not a very common thing to do). Although it seems like kind of a mismatch in the first place, that an undergrad tries to argue against two scholars who have spend a significant time of their life doing research in this particular subject, I at least want to try making a convincing case for Constructivism in world politics. However, I do not want to boil down such a diverse and heterogeneous tradition of thought into a few hundred words, which why I try to do this as a series. After describing the historical circumstances of its emergence, I’d like to summarize the key point of constructivist philosophy and then conclude how this school of thought has developed since.

Constructivism – The origins

While the origins of Liberalism and Realism can be traced back to the beginnings of the 20^th century, Constructivism is a quite new school of thought emerging after the end of the cold war in 1990. Looking back, this was one of the most interesting and turbulent times for IR scholars. The peaceful collapse of the soviet union left structural realists and neorealist puzzled: How could the security dilemma be solved peacefully? The end of the cold war caused the theoretical hegemony of neorealism to wane. Contrary, Liberalism as IR theory regained interest culminating in the liberal manifesto of Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed a bloomy future for liberal democracy by conflating Hegel’s historical dialectics with democratic peace theory.

Simultaneously, the inter-paradigm debate (or arguably the 3^rd big debate in IR) had gained momentum and showed that IR scholars saw a significant barrier in the neorealist – neoliberal distinction inhibiting actual research progress. Instead, it became clear, that scholars looked for a via media approach which would focus on predictions and results instead of a sharp theoretical distinction, leading to the so-called Neo-Neosynthesis. Keeping the end of the third big debate of International Relations in mind, it becomes more clear how the fourth big debate unfolded.

Since the 1980’s scholars began to question the positive research agenda as well as their limited methods to explain world politics. Yosef Lapid, Friedrich Krachtowil and Richard K. Ashely published excellent works which directly attacked the determinism of traditional IR Theory. During the next ten years, the criticism got harsher and harsher. Scholars feared a fallback into another sharp distinction of radical constructivist and traditional IR schools – the issue that once sparked the inter-paradigm debate.

In 1992 Alexander Wendt published his well-known paper “Anarchy Is What The States Make Of It”, which eventually became a (or maybe: the first?) catch-phrase in IR. If I would have to choose one essay in order to understand IR after 1990, It certainly would be this one. With this essay, Wendt effectively tries to build a bridge between the newly emerging tradition (radical constructivism) and the traditional schools of thought (namely: liberal institutionalist).

In Order to differentiate Constructivism from other IR schools of thought, it is useful to recall how they conceptualize anarchy. Although we firstly might associate anarchy with total chaos, it basically just describes the absence of a centralized authority, which basically all main schools agree on as state of the art in world politics. However, the conceptualization of anarchy is the key to the distinction of these schools of thought.

Power and the construction of anarchy

Contrary to the deterministic construction of anarchy in Realism, Liberalism and Marxism, Constructivism introduced anarchy as a dynamic variable in the international system. As stated in the title, “Anarchy is what the states make of it” refutes anarchy as an axiom from which we can derive theories. Instead, Alexander Wendt pronounces the vital moment of the “first contact” between states from which in a process of ego-alter construction an anarchic international system is constituted. The key is that the intersubjective perception of the “other” determines whether we are friendly, hostile or neutral towards another state. Hence, anarchy operates not every time in the same way. Wendt instead distinguishes at least three kinds of anarchy:

Hobbesian anarchy – States perceive each other as predator, no international cooperation
Lockesian anarchy – States perceive each other as neutral, constant adjustment of the balance of power operates as a regulatory principle
Kantian anarchy – States perceive each other as beneficial allies, international cooperation becomes possible and international organizations emerge.

In the real world, we can observe (at least in Europe) how the international system went through all of these stages: The pre-1648 Europe basically was a Hobbesian playground until the peace of Westphalia manifested a respected international system of sovereign nation-states from which we got into Lockesian anarchy. In the early 20^th century the globalization began to gain momentum and suddenly international organizations and institutions began to flourish, hence heralding Kantian anarchy. this development, of course, does not prevent states from states self-interested behaviour, but it puts effective constraints on such acts by complex interdependent relation. Although I do not share the optimism (?!) of scholars to whom this development indicates a future transcendence into a Kantian-like world state, it is nonetheless remarkable how humankind has “tamed” (or at least constrained) anarchy in the international system.

This development goes hand in hand with the conceptualization of power. In the eyes of realists, power is determined by brute factors revolving mostly around military force. It was not until Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane introduced the complex interdependence theory that soft factors such as culture, ideology and identity of states were considered to be influential to international politics. The wide concept of power was subject to constant changes due to a process of “complex learning”. State identities are not stable but rather fluently dependent on institutional changes. Thus, states are able to learn and adapt to their political environment. Early constructivist (or moderate constructivist) thought sought to build a bridge between liberals, who were convinced that state identities were not stable but could change due to institutional changes, and early radical constructivist thoughts, who clearly despised the positivist research agenda of traditional IR schools.

When we analyze power in the real world today, it becomes clear that a narrow focus on military force fails to capture real power politics. What is more dangerous for the US, 50 nuclear missiles in North Korea or 50 nuclear missiles in Canada? What is perceived to undermine western values in a more significant way: 50 Buddhist preachers or 50 imams? Power cannot only be measured in quantitative ways but one rather has to take soft factors into consideration and put the brute facts into a cultural context.

To conclude my first takes:
Traditional schools of thought in IR fail to recognize anarchy and power as heterogeneous and dynamic variables. Constructivism points out this blind spot and seeks to connect new concepts with a post-positivist ontology, epistemology and methodology.

In the next part of the series, I want to differentiate moderate Constructivism from Radical Constructivism, Postmodernism and Poststructuralism and demonstrate what new fields of research have opened up in the course of a constructivist approach.

“Foucault’s Pendulum”: Social Scholarship, Ideology, and Libertarian Temptations

06/17/201906/17/2019 Andrei Znamenski Culture, Philosophy Barry Stocker, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, James Miller, Michael Behrent, Michel Foucault, neoliberalism, New Left, Paul Feyerabend

I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there 
were once walls.
― Michel Foucault

Martin Luther, a German Augustinian monk, is credited with triggering a profound spiritual movement in the minds of early modern Europeans. Luther, who was an extremely pious Catholic, eventually became a reluctant rebel by channeling the frustrations of the faithful over their inability to reach out directly to God within the then existing church matrix. The Protestant Reformation, which he helped unleash, developed in opposition to the powerful institutions and guidelines of the Roman Catholic Church that acted as a gatekeeper to the sacred knowledge. The reformation movement decentered and fragmented the once powerful Catholic ideology and bureaucracy, eventually shifting the minds of people toward the individual interpretation of Scripture.

In its condemnation of Luther, the papal court compared his heresy with that of Jan Hus. One hundred years prior to Luther, this religious dissenter from Bohemia had been burned at the stake for essentially advocating the same things that were later ushered in by the Protestants. Puzzled by the comparison, Luther, who had never heard about Hus, went to a library to research what the Bohemian had been up to. Stunned by the obvious similarities between Hus’s and his own ideas, the rebellious German monk allegedly exclaimed, “Yes, I am a Hussite.”[1] This historical anecdote was on my mind while I was following a recent debate about how and why, at the end of his life, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) – a 20^th-century philosophical giant of a French-Jewish extraction and, simultaneously, one of the intellectual gurus of the modern left – became interested in “neoliberalism.”[2]

F_Wire

Foucault’s intention to explore the ideas of individual liberty and free enterprise – the process which led him to discovering for himself the writings of modern libertarian and libertarian-leaning thinkers, particularly F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966), Milton Freedman (1912-2006), and Gary Becker (1930-2014). As the intellectual historian James Miller has informed us, the outcome of those insights was that Foucault implicitly came to defend “the value of a libertarian kind of liberalism.”[3] Continue reading →

Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

Philosophy

Rawls, Antigone and the tragic irony of norms

You’re Not Worth My Time

The Irrelevance of Political Opinion

What about the perspectives and knowledge of others?

Elitist and Snobby?

Sunday Poetry: Stefan Zweig’s “Royal Game”

Wiener Moderne and Austrian Economics – A product of times of turmoil

The Wiener Moderne: Flight into the irrational

Economics – Role of the scientist in society

Conclusion

There is no such thing as a sunk cost fallacy

Atomistic? Moi?

“Return to the Bronze Age… national nudism”

Thoughts on ‘For Method’

What Albert Camus taught us about freedom

Oppose every form of totalitarianism

A diverse Europe

Nihilism is not a solution

Total artistic freedom

Abrogate the death penalty

The Case for Constructivism in IR Pt. 2

The social construction of… everything? Where to draw the line.

Why Constructivism at all?

Against Ideology

The Philosophy and Ethics behind Blockchain (smart talk)

Purpose of my Smart Talk

Why Philosophy Matters

What is the Crypto-Anarchist and Cypherpunk philosophy?

Overview of the workings of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Comparison between Crypto-Anarchism and the Bitcoin Blockchain

What types of applications can we look forward to

The case for Constructivism in IR

Part one: The fourth debate and the origins of Constructivism

Constructivism – The origins

Power and the construction of anarchy

“Foucault’s Pendulum”: Social Scholarship, Ideology, and Libertarian Temptations

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The Irrelevance of Political Opinion

What about the perspectives and knowledge of others?

Elitist and Snobby?

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The Wiener Moderne: Flight into the irrational

Economics – Role of the scientist in society

Conclusion

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Oppose every form of totalitarianism

A diverse Europe

Nihilism is not a solution

Total artistic freedom

Abrogate the death penalty

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The social construction of… everything? Where to draw the line.

Why Constructivism at all?

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Purpose of my Smart Talk

Why Philosophy Matters

What is the Crypto-Anarchist and Cypherpunk philosophy?

Overview of the workings of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Comparison between Crypto-Anarchism and the Bitcoin Blockchain

What types of applications can we look forward to

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Part one: The fourth debate and the origins of Constructivism

Constructivism – The origins

Power and the construction of anarchy

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