Enlightenment (part 0)

The walls may hold you
But the prison's in your mind
Freedom is your choice.

The American's Prayer:

"Heaven save me from my fantasies. Amen."

Forgive Me a Parable:

Enlightenment is a rich man who would give you his entire fortune, under the conditions that you name him in your will as the sole beneficiary, and upon receiving your reward you will be immediately killed.

Doh!

The Zahir II: With a Vengeance

Or: A fable Where Capitalism is Supplied as the Founding Myth of Despotism and then Capitalism (the Sui Generis of Capitalism.)

Imagine the following events: first, a single currency becomes the world standard. Second, a law is enacted by the world government stating that any form of bartering--the exchange of goods for goods--without money exchanged equal to the respective value of the goods or services in question is outlawed. This relies on some sort of internet clearing house for goods and services that would establish a uniform price based on all the transactions in the world, which would have to be registered on a server. Naturally, with such conditions money would become fully computerized and would have no physical basis. This eliminates the reliance on the physical coinage entirely, and allows the currency to be exchanged in fractions of the original unit (i.e. one could spend, for example, .000576$ on a particular item. This, of course, already occurs all the time in trading, and a few folks even make millions of dollars trading fractions of a penny per share of stock.)

Now imagine that a massive computer failure wiped out all of the money in the world except one dollar, owned by one man. And imagine, as well, that the central government controlling the currency for some reason decided not to simply print more money. The one dollar is it--its everything. What happens to prices? They become not infinitely but rather arbitrarily low. The one man would be able to name his price for anything, because the value of whatever arbitrarily low number he chose would have and infinite number of decimal places between it and zero. There would also be no other demand to compare to, except his. The use-value of the thing is not reflected in the exchange value, and the exchange value is determined not by initial cost, but by supply and demand. The supply would remain, but the demand would be reduce to a single monopoly. Of course the man could be more of a king than any king ever was. He could buy up all the businesses and have everything he ever wanted. and then he could render the money that he just spent totally worthless simply by spending an amount of money that is still ridiculously low, but worth much more than the previous arbitrary number.

But lets say that he decides not to do this. He spends his money at arbitrarily small increments. lets say, he starts shelling cash out in increments of 10^-47 . He decides, like any good American, that spending is patriotic, and that he needs to get out there and stimulate the economy. First he buys goods and doles them out to the newly poor, so they can at least survive. Then he gets data on the previous month's sales of all the goods for sale in the world, and proceeds to buy up a cross section of finished retail goods and services from the whole economy. Every good out there, he buys in sufficient quantity to match all the old demand. But lets say he decides only to buy stuff at retail. he doesn't need to buy steel; only, of automobiles. He doesn't need to buy wheat, only bread. He could if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to.

So something magical happens: the retail shops get money and they use it to pay for more finished goods from the manufacturers. then the manufacturers pay the suppliers of raw materials. This assumes that the manufacturing firms wouldn't be taken over the retailers. but lets say the owner of the almighty dollar gives them a cash advance to temporarily recapitalize their business. Anyway, now they all also have the money to pay their workers. Now everyone's got money, and this money is basically in proportion to their monthly earnings before. everything hasn't returned to normal, of course, since all of their savings are gone. but their assets, for instance, retain a certain value that can now be traded in the new world where the 10^-47 dollar is king. Surprisingly even banks and the whole system of debt start working again. Thank God! What would we ever do without them? This is because the banks aren't in the business of keeping and holding money--they have a small reserves of currency, but most of their money is lent out. Losing their actual cash reserves would probably not be as fatal to the banks as this latest crisis, where the wholesale collapse of the multinational banks was averted only by the government pulling about a trillion dollars out of thin air.

Now lets pretend that the banks were required to store all the information keeping track of who had money in thier institutions on the central computer, and couldn't maintain their own records. The computer system was fried, so all the people who had savings in banks were out of luck and couldn't go asking the banks for money. The banks aren't in the business of holding money as we have said--they are in the business of lending money, and of investing it. and, of course, things like mortgages and the like are still just fine--they didn't get erased; however, lots of people and businesses would then owe sums of money that were ridiculously expensive at that point--many, many times the total amount of money in existence in the economy! So lets pretend the banks get together and say: Ok! all the debts you had are now divided by 10^-47 . Everything's cool. This is realistic because, although the banks could get lots of cool property on the cheap, they wouldn't have any money to pay all of their own debts and obligations, of which they have many! These debts would also be denominated in dollars, not 10^-47 dollars. So its at least conceivably in the interests of the banks to come to this kind of agreement, so that they can be recapitalized by workers in the economy, and not send the value of real estate plummeting.

Now, finally, The Man decides to pretend he's the central bank. He does this by either lending money to the big banks at certain rates; or, he goes into debt to them (though, of course, he has the money to pay at any time) and pays back the loans at his leisure. Meanwhile tax time comes, everyone's earnings gown do to the level of 10^-47 dollars, and they're taxed accordingly (minus the sticky issue of capital gains and the like.) Everything is back to normal.

I find this fable illustrative on many levels. About the nature of money. About the transition from despotism to capitalism. About how centrals banks work.

Enlightenment (part 1)

Foreword

I an hesitant to say anything about enlightenment, as ever word feels like a lie, or at best a sloppy half truth. But I have faith in you, my reader, to look beyond the mere meaning of these words, so please if you read on, do so with an open heart. "What do you mean by 'read with an open heart'?" you ask. I respond, it would be a good sigh if you are not worried by that question.

When something enters an infant's vision he might reach out to it, but often there is nothing to grab, what is reached for may only be an illusion or is further away then his reach or maybe incorporeal like smoke, or a moonbeam. This behavior to me seems an instinct, and there is a like instinct when we perceive something and then attempt to understand it, or grasp it; we reach out to grasp it rationally to define its exact location in our scheme of thought. And as is often the case for infants trying to touch what can't be touched, as they don't yet know what can and can't be touched, sometimes we reach for a rational understanding of somethings only to have what we reached for fade away. The experience is there in Plato, the Greeks before Socrates didn't seem possessed of the instinct to rationally grasp something, at least not to the modern or academic degree. They had these ideas, uncategorized, freely moving through their conversations and their dealings with one another, that is until they meet the Socratic. Socrates, and those like him, was to the Greek world view and our own grasping rational mind is to our individual worlds. Some would respond to Socrates by saying that words they could speak of perfectly well (like virtue) suddenly went numb to them; what was once very real suddenly seemed an illusion like a shadow on a wall. Thinking rationally is perfectly fine in many, externally defined, domains mostly those with a mathematical or exact nature. But other things always seem constantly beyond our rational grasp. As I move on, let me note an unfortunate prejudice that comes from the privileging of rational thinking: much as we tend to think of that which we can (at least in principle) touch as more real then 'the apparent' which we can only see, we privilege what can be grasped rationally as being real and go on to conclude that whatever can't be grasped rationally is at best meaningless or even impossible.

Before I go on, let me be very clear about what I mean by grasping something in a rational way, I even recommend you reread the previous paragraph in the light of this one if you are at all unfamiliar with this particular usage. Rational thinking is categorical. I mean categorical in the Aristotelian sense of accusation, the object of rational thought is accused of having a certain property, and thereby divided from those objects which don't have that property. Once the object has been divided from all other thinkable objects it has been grasped. I have been set on the 'grasping' metaphor because of the definiteness with which we know, even control, the location of that which is in our grasp. Likewise, when we rationally grasp an object we have put it in its precise place within its proper limits that separate it from all other objects with which it could be confused. We have grasped 7 only once we can separate it from all non numbers, and then from all other numbers, and then we can know its exact relation to all other objects that we have grasped.

Somethings are quite problematic to rationally grasp. As a quick and dirty example, the self as consciousness. Every time I try to say exactly what I am like, it seems like I change, even by the act of defining myself, and there is a sneaking suspicion that when I claim something about myself I might be changing my self to be that way instead if describing the way I already was. With language, we often try to become exactly clear about what a word, or better yet a statement means. But to what extent are we discovering the meaning it already had and to what extent are we reshaping its meaning to something graspable. Like when we interpret a text, say that a work means one thing as opposed to another, to what degree are we uncovering underlying properties of the text, and to what extent are we shaving off details and connotations from the text. Again I like the metaphor of grasping, the concepts we grasp at are like a soft soft clay, when we touch clay to determine its exact shape, it deforms to the shape of the hand never giving us its true original shape, so to do objects fit tend to fit to the categories that we apply to them. It is ironic that we only consider something real if it can be grasped, yet when we rationally grasp an object
we only encounter our own sensations of the object, and not the 'thing in itself'.

Our relations to others reflect this. When grabbed, or felt (like a blind man feeling your face) the whole situation takes on an object quality. That which grasps your arm does not seem like another but like an object it the way of your motion, and when you grab is is not a person you hold, but and object with certain texture, firmness, temperature, and shape. Interesting that where the solid grip fails to find another and alienates us completely, the gentlest touch can bring one to an immediate sense of otherness and companionship.

If some objects of rational thought are like soft clay, disturbed by by the gentlest of handling then enlightenment would be like a smoke ring, even to approach it with the intention of grasping it seems enough to make it fade away completely. Is this why reaching for enlightenment frustrates us so, that in trying to grab it we lose sight of it? Even in rare moments where one feels like enlightenment displays herself to us, as soon as we reach to her she hides herself and flees into oblivion, leaving behind only a faint memory bound to evaporate away like the memory of a dream within moments of waking. So maybe we should start by calming our rational instinct, and wait patiently for enlightenment to come to us.

When we rationally grasp an object, we distinguish it from what it isn't. We might say "I know what the object is, so far as I know what is not the object." Rational grasping of concepts is based on this, it is meaningless to say an object has a quality if it is meaningless to say that it doesn't have a quality. Enlightenment is ineffable, but so called enlightenment we may be able to progress on.

Nietzsche the Dragon.

In mythology the significance of the dragon is many fold, but his origin is simple. The serpent, with wings. Something grave and bitting, and at the same time free and up lifting. In Nietzsche's own way of using the symbol it is on the dragon's 1000 scales that 'thou shalt' is written. No doubt that for me today Nietzsche is a dragon, it is his writing that is guiding my, that speaks 'thou shalt' to me, and it is he who I shall some day have to turn against. Truly a worth enemy, one fierce enough to make me, the camel, take on much weight, knowing that the lion's battle will be fierce, and that much preparation will be needed.

For now, his poetry has so much power over me, how can I imagine turning against him?