Follow-Up On The Follow-Up On Fake Deter-Minism

Ok -  WHY do I think that Classical Thermodynamics alone without the help of quantum indeterminism is sufficient to destroy the unfounded belief in a deterministic universe?

You will need to know a little bit of Physics to become fully persuaded by this line of reasoning.  No - I lie.  You will need to know a LOT of Physics.

But I will endeavour to make it understandable to the lay person who wants to understand at least what this line of reasoning consists of.

Could the Universe go backwards?

Classical Newtonian interactions - nay even Relativistic Newtonian interactions - are time-reversible.  Newtonian Mechanics consists essentially of conservation of all momentums for either elastic or inelastic collisions, which includes the famous F=Ma law that expands momentum conservation to account for forces and fields.  Running the video backwards of any experiment in which particles interact using Newtonian Mechanics does not produce any violations of Newtonian physics, or specifically the three Laws of Motion that are the foundation of classical physics.

Interactions of individual particles in a thermodynamic body, whether solid, liquid, gas, or plasma, are individually Newtonian and hence time-reversible.  Individually, you can run each collision backwards without violating any physics.  From strictly a Newtonian point of view, all processes in the universe should be totally reversible.  This is the very reason, when you think about it, why many people are wedded to the idea of Determinism and feel that all future states of the universe are pre-determined by the initial state.

However, Entropy destroys information.  This makes Thermodynamic processes basically irreversible.  A large collection of particles, each interacting in strictly Newtonian fashion, can only proceed in the forward direction of time without violating basic Thermodynamic physics.  Why is this?

The reason for this is fundamentally statistical: higher-entropy states are vastly, ridiculously more probable than lower-entropy states simply because there are so vastly many more of them.  (Entropy is essentially a statistic which measures the degree to which energy in a system is evenly distributed throughout the system.) The probability is overwhelmingly that in any given transition from one state to another through the cumulative effect of countless Newtonian interactions of countless particles, that transition will be from a relatively rare lower entropy state to a relatively more abundant higher entropy state.  Note also that many higher-entropy states are physically indistinguishable from one another.  Going backwards even one step is just so ridiculously improbable such that it literally could never happen in the entire lifetime of a universe.

So, putting these two concepts of physics together, if we start from some initial state and roll time forward, each collision, each trajectory, each vibration of each particle perfectly obeying reversible Newtonian physics, following the laws of Thermodynamics we inevitably reach states of higher and higher entropy.  At some point let us decide to stop the video and run time backwards, supposing we were able to magically do this - say perhaps in a simulation.

From that higher entropy state, if we attempt to run the clock backwards and get back to the initial state of the system, we find that the information about that state has been lost - destroyed actually - by Entropy, and we will not be able to find that initial state again.  Even if artificially forcing the system into impossibly lower and lower entropy states, what we find is that although we manage to wrangle the system back into some minimum-entropy state, it is not the SAME minimum-entropy state that we started out in.  We do not get the initial conditions back again - the initial conditions that were supposedly deterministic of all future states of the system.

If you can get to the same or an indistinguishable higher entropy state from any number of initial states, and if the individual interactions are time-reversible, and by reversing time we do not get back to the one initial state because the information about that state has been erased by entropy, then that means that either initial states of thermodynamic systems are NOT deterministic of all future states, or that Thermodynamics is wrong.

And Thermodynamics is demonstrably not wrong.

To summarize the case against Determinism by Physics:

• The N-Body System is ultimately chaotic and any given future state is in no way inevitable whether by initial-state ambiguity or by non-inevitable system perturbations. By what means?  Perhaps ultimately by the stochastic Gravitational Wave noise from the Big Bang itself that permeates the universe.  Any infinitesimal perturbation of a chaotic system is all it takes to tip it into a wildly divergent state trajectory over time. 
• Thermodynamic systems are never Deterministic on a microscopic scale because initial-state information is erased by Entropy and is thereafter irrelevant and non-determining of subsequent states.
• Finally, at the Quantum level Determinism doesn't stand a chance; even Causality has issues and must be regarded as at best an emergent property of more complex, large-scale physics.   The initial state of the universe at the Big Bang cannot be understood without Quantum Physics plus some other stuff we don't even know about yet, meaning that the initial state itself must have been ambiguous and undetermined, and subsequent states were random rather than causal consequences of that state.

In the end, Determinism from Physics is a purely speculative nonsense concept and is not a real feature of this universe.  Do Not base anything you think, including any conclusions about Free Will, on the nonexistent error known as Determinism.  Nothing is inevitable here except perhaps Entropy.

Free Will Versus Determinism

Certain scientists who seem to have only recently discovered philosophy on wikipedia have announced that finally, at long last, they and they alone have solved the question of Free Will for good and all.  Popular thing-sayers such as Sam Harris have informed us that because of a thing they read about called Determinism, there can be no free will.  Meanwhile professional philosophers such as Daniel Dennett who have spent just a wee bit more time on the subject say "Bollocks! Determinism is entirely compatible with Free Will; although Free Will might not be quite what you thought it was."

A simple mechanism which, when assembled, produces the emergent competence of performing arithmetic calculations even though no one of its parts has this ability!  Curiously, if used to compute x = r*x*(1-x) repeatedly with r chosen to be around 3.6, this simple mechanical device cannot even be said to be deterministic.

I would like to point out at this juncture that the title of this post is an unadulterated lie.  It is a lying, lying lie in every possible way.  It is lying about Free Will, it is lying about Determinism, and it is lying about the Versus part, too.  Hopefully the remainder of this post will make up for these despicable lies by acquainting you with some small part of the truth.

We start with Determinism.  This is the idea that the universe proceeds like a clockwork, obeying physical laws such that given the initial conditions, all future states of the universe can at least in principle be predicted in advance or calculated in retrospect.  The very idea came to prominence in response to Newton's physics in the late 17th C when philosophers, impressed by slightly improved (but by no means perfect) predictions of planetary orbits, began asking, "What if someday the planet's positions really COULD be predicted accurately forever?  And what if everything in the universe also worked just like that? Would that not mean that everything, every future state of the universe including human behaviour, would be predictable and thus predetermined by the initial state of the universe?"

Well, yes, it might mean that IF the universe worked that way.  People forget that key word, "if," and make the mistake of assuming that rigid-body Newtonian physics applied to a handful of structureless bodies is all the physics that the universe has or needs.  But "Deterministic" Newtonian physics could not even predict the planets' positions very accurately over a few hundred years; and in the case of Mercury, hardly at all.  Determinism as we shall see is a complete lie and a fiction.  It never existed, even in Newton's day, and doesn't exist now.

First of all, there are WAAAAAY more than seven bodies in the universe.  With more and more interacting parts, even perfectly classical Newtonian systems become chaotic over shorter and shorter periods of time.  Even with as few as N=3 single rigid bodies interacting in a system, you need to have infinitely precise information  - 12^N measurements out to infinity decimal places each - on the initial state of the system in order to make accurate predictions of the system's state out to large timescales, still more for an infinite timescale.  The Universe itself is not large enough to contain that infinite amount of information nor does it have enough matter in which to encode that infinity of information.

But whether or not the information of the initial conditions is encoded in anything other than the initial universe itself, the precision required for long-term determination of a chaotic system cannot itself even exist given the known limitations of matter, space, energy or, well, universes themselves.

Therefore I assert that the existence of sufficient information to make a chaotic system predictable and therefore determined at all time is not a thing that can exist in the universe; or in other words, it's not a real thing even in this simplest case of a universe with an unreasonably small and boring number of rigid bodies obeying Newton's boring version of physics.  Even in that simplified universe, there is no such thing as Determinism.

It gets worse though.  With any more reasonable number of bodies in the universe (say, a few million) Newtonian physics is no longer a suitable representation of physics.  Mind, it still can be used to describe individual short-term interactions between particles and energy; but the cumulative state of the universe is now a statistical, stochastic thing which any one of countless initial conditions could equally well produce.  That universe has an average kinetic energy represented by Temperature, an average potential energy represented by Pressure, and average quantities for particle sizes and masses represented by density and an equation of state.  Trajectories of individual particles and the momentary interactions between individual particles are meaningless, unknowable, and at best short-term phenomena with no long-term influence on the future states of the universe; only cumulatively do they have any influence.  In this realm of Thermodynamics, there is no Determinism.

But it gets even worse than that.  Bodies in the universe are not, as assumed up to this point, individual rigid particles.  They are thermodynamic globs of particles - solids, liquids, gasses, plasmas.  They have practically infinite numbers of possible internal states that can have at best only statistical representations such as pressure, temperature, and average density.  These thermodynamic systems are the bodies that interact in approximately Newtonian ways.  Each of these bodies contains not merely a few thousands or millions of identical particles, but unimaginable numbers of great varieties of particles.  Practically a universe within itself, a single grain of sand contains more individual particles than the number of grains of sand on the beach from which it is plucked.  Even the external parameters (e.g. the mass and shape of a grain of sand) have an unknowable infinity of possibilities, not to mention internal configurations.  The universe is a thermodynamic universe of innumerable thermodynamic universes, thus increasing the indeterminism of the universe exponentially.  It is Random raised to the power of Random.  Determinism disintegrates in a single grain of sand, and still more so on the greater beach of existence which is an ever-shifting system of forces, matter and energy obeying mainly Newtonian laws.

But we're not done destroying Determinism yet.  This absurd idea needs to be obliterated right down to the level of the fundamental nature of matter, energy, and existence itself.  You've probably heard of Quantum Mechanics; and some small part of what you've heard might even be correct.  While Quantum Mechanics predicts and requires that bodies consisting of more than a few thousand individual particles must always obey Newtonian Mechanics to an absurdly high degree of precision, those individual particles themselves have entirely different rules of engagement.  In fact, at that scale the notion of a particle as a tiny pellet of matter is something of a convenient fiction - merely an efficient way of maintaining an accounting of quantum numbers for charge, mass, energy, spin, and other quantities which must obey certain strict rules in order to interact and transform.

Let us take an atomic nucleus as an example.  A nucleus is a particle which itself is an arrangement of protons and neutrons that are all stuck together.  Let's pick as an instructive example one having 55 protons and 75 neutrons, which by convention we know as a Caesium 130 nucleus.  Protons have a unit of positive electric charge each, and are thus in a continual state of repelling each other with tremendous force owing to how close together they are.  This repulsive force would ordinarily overwhelm the inherent contact stickiness that these particles have for each other, causing them to fly off in opposite directions at high velocity; but the additional 75 neutrons surrounding and embracing those protons provide almost enough extra adhesion to keep this nucleus together.  Just three more neutrons are all that would be needed to render this nucleus perfectly stable forever.  But as it stands the poor hapless Cs130 nucleus is always just on the verge of breaking apart.

When will it do so?  At what time?  In what fragments and in what directions?  These questions have fundamentally no answers within the universe, even in principle.  Even the "when" question for an individual Cs130 nucleus can only be answered with the evasive, "any moment now, or possibly never."  A large assemblage of Cs130 nuclei can at best be treated statistically: on average, half of those nuclei will blow up within the next 29.21 minutes, and the remaining half anywhere from then until the end of time.  There is not even any underlying mechanism at work which could in principle be used to predict and determine the time of decay.  Physicists have searched for such an internal mechanism for a century and have found instead only the opposite: more indeterminism at every level.

By using the word "Determinism" in the title of this post, I was lying to you by allowing you to think Determinism was even a real thing in physics.  It is not in any sense a real thing, as we have seen.  At best, simple machines of only a few moving parts isolated from the messy, noisy universe can be treated as deterministic for specific periods of time.   But liquids, gases, complex systems of solid objects, very large objects, very small objects, thermodynamic systems, chemical systems, and, most importantly, biological systems cannot even theoretically be regarded as deterministic for any length of time, much less from the beginning of time throughout eternity.

While in a sense physics determines chemistry, and chemistry determines biology, and biology determines you, this line of reasoning uses a subtly different definition of the word and is not what is meant by Determinism with a capital D.  The kind of Determinism that could potentially have any impact on Free Will is the kind that states that all future states of the universe are able to be perfectly predicted by and are thus determined by the initial conditions of the universe.  In other words, the present state of the universe was absolutely inevitable and pre-determined, as are all futures that ever will be observed. And that, says physics, is Bollocks.

However, it may not even matter that Determinism from Physics is a silly fiction, because I was also lying about the "Versus" part.  Free Will and Determinism, as Prof. Dennett, pointed out, really have nothing to do with one another.  So what if your actions are Determined by something?  You'd better hope they are, actually.  Where would we be if all our actions were the result of random coin-flips, dice-rolls, card shuffles, or noise-based stochastic random number generators?  I mean, other than in the midst of a D&D game.  Hard-core believers in the fiction of Determinism may still complain that such processes are (as they believe) the determined results of make-believe physics and initial conditions in their make-believe universe.  But even allowing for that, would a coin-flip make you feel any better about your self-determination than having your actions locked in by something like reason, reflex, habit, or animal instinct?

The point is that whether your actions are determined by physics (no way), by chemistry (hmm...), by biology (quite possibly), by reason (sometimes), or are merely random noise, you are still accountable as a morally competent agent, even if (or particularly since) that agent is not some supernatural entity.  Even if a moral agent is really just a complex process and not an entity as such, that agent could well meet the requirements of  Moral Competence:

1. The agent must have something of significance to gain or lose - livelihood, freedom, security, any of the fundamental needs or problems of a perishable organism.
2. The agent must have the in-principle ability to select among any of several actions and privacy of mind for concealing its intentions until advantageous to reveal them.
3. The agent must have at least the competence to make a judgement in its own best interest, regardless of whether or not it chooses to do so.  

Just as chaos emerges from complexity as a system acquires more and more moving parts, and just as temperature and pressure emerge as a system acquires more and more particles and becomes a thermodynamic gas, and just as Design emerges from a large number of natural selections with evolutionary pressure, and as Competence emerges from assemblages of large number of individually incompetent parts, and just as what we might call "intelligence" emerges from a large number of dumb little neurons in a brain, why then is it so difficult to accept that "Free Will" emerges from a sufficiently large number of stimuli, needs, impulses, influences, memories, desires, fears, information, rationale, instincts, and yes, even the occasional coin flip?

This leads to the final lie I need to correct: Free Will.  By referring to it, I have dishonestly mislead you into thinking that both you and I knew what Free Will even was.  Well, what is it?  This question remains unexamined by the people who rush to condemn it as impossible on the basis of something else that is even less possible (i.e. Determinism).  In struggling through the largely incoherent Sam Harris thesis, I find myself wondering whether he thinks Free Will is by definition a supernatural force of some kind.  A form of magic consisting of a disembodied Mind-Without-Brain, a sort of Ghost With A Plan that makes choices and steers its Meat Machine through life in order to fulfill the plan.  

At any rate, that is explicitly what theists think Free Will is.  And gods have the most of it, presumably.  As an aside, one notes with mild disinterest that the numerous gods promulgated by the various abrahamic mythologies cannot be regarded as having any Free Will when taken as presented. These gods have nothing to gain or lose because they are "perfect" and "eternal." They lack nothing and thus can neither be rewarded for their rare good acts nor punished for their frequent evil. The gods have no choice nor privacy of mind if we listen to their backers who insist they know exactly what the gods like, dislike, want, or ever will do. We are often told for example that the gods "cannot lie" or must unavoidably reward or punish us, etc, effectively limiting their possible actions and freedom. Failing the first two criteria for Moral Competence, gods cannot be regarded as morally competent and thus cannot be regarded even as free agents, or possibly even as agents at all. But that is no surprise to those who already realized that gods are nothing more than fictional characters in a bronze-age comic book.  

At any rate, the debate about Free Will has become a proxy battleground, in my personal experience, for the war between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.  I have been accused of defending Supernaturalism for little more than explaining that Determinism does not actually follow from Physics!

To be clear, by explaining how Determinism fails, I have not left open the door to Supernaturalism.  Instead, all I have pointed out is that Physics does not produce Determinism, not even in Newton's time.  Very little in the universe is inevitable, particularly on the scale of the short lives of Meat Machines From Planet Earth (which by the way would be an excellent name for a rock band).  It was not inevitable that smart monkeys evolved to look like we do.  Neither was it inevitable that the continents and coastlines of Earth appear the way they do, nor that the craters on the moon are precisely in those positions.  Perhaps only black holes and heat death are inevitable in this universe and are thus pre-determined.  But none of the details, particularly the humans, monkeys, dogs, spiders, and even bacteria, are necessary, unavoidable, inevitable consequences of this universe, even in principle.  Aside from even existing, each can and does make choices.  Simple organisms make simple choices: Left or right? Up or down?  Eat or avoid?  How they produce or arrive at that competence is not relevant to the fact that they do posses that competence.  Complex organisms make complex, abstract choices:  Rook or Knight? Red tie or blue?  Spend or save?  Mac or Windows?

In the case of the intractable problem of defining "intelligence" we get much further by instead talking about Competencies.  Similarly, Free Will is best defined as just one more layer of competence that organisms have to one degree or another.  Free Will is not some magic Ghost With a Plan.  Free Will is merely the competence to engage with and navigate a complex world.  

However, there is another thing that could be meant by Free Will that is neither the opposite of physical predetermination nor demonic possession.  It rests on the idea that the Self makes choices according to some set of values.  We know that this isn't actually how decisions are made most of the time: usually the brain makes a decision calculated to stave off emotional discomfort and satisfy some need; and then the rational human uses the cognitive parts of the brain to make up a clever post-hoc excuse for doing whatever that is.  Some people say that is not Free Will, but just the organism making "you" do stuff, (as though "you" and the organism are different actors), and if choices are in any way influenced by society or psychology, then it ain't no free will.  Well, no, I say that is still the organism's Free Will at work; just that actions are once again not mere random noise undetermined by anything at all.

But if you want a "higher" level of free will such that your actions are not predetermined by your brain's conditioning or your automatic emotional responses to stimuli, then that's another thing entirely.  In that sense, most of us filthy monkey-men never develop a free will and are entirely at the mercy of our condition and conditioning.  By engaging in intentional manipulation of the cognition of the brain by tactics involving impulse control, momentary suspension of cognition, intentional management of emotional states, or other forms of "mindful" reflection as some describe it, individuals can and do develop the ability to exert higher degrees of rational determination of their actions and thus can better control the trajectories of their lives.  If this is what is meant by free will - determination exclusively by rational reflection -  then again we see it has nothing to do with either Determinism from physics or choice-determination by external stimuli, nor is it in any way a supernatural phenomenon. 

That augmented form of free will is yet another emergent property or competence of the brain, which in the case of a self-reflective, mindful individual, has been turned in to a sort of GPU that runs the individual's selected apps in place of the evolutionary default operating processes that even monkeys use to navigate the world in the execution of their Free Will. It is still not evidence of ghosts with plans, and it is even further removed from Determinism from Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or Ecology.  This kind of free will advances even to the level of non-determination from human society, and even ultimately from psychology. 

"Wah! But Determinism!  A computer executing code is Determinism!  Wah!"

Nope!  Even if the hardware is entirely Deterministic within the timeframe of the experiment (one hopes that it is), a software program running on a hardware platform does not absolutely inherit the property of Determinism from the hardware.   Of course software algorithms are a long way from being complex enough to exhibit emergent properties of "higher" competencies.  There is also the problem that a mere algorithm abstracted from any particular hardware will struggle to qualify as Morally Competent because it will always lack the problems or needs of a perishable organism.  But the whole point is that as a system becomes more complex, new (higher level) properties emerge and old (lower level) ones dissolve.  

You may be able to pre-determine the behaviour of a watch that is wound up and running perfectly; but you will never be able to predict the exact way in which that watch corrodes and decomposes if left unattended in a riverbed for a few decades.  And as any system becomes more complex than that watch (a very simple mechanism, really), then less and less can be pre-determined about it.  If a system becomes sufficiently complex to exhibit emerging competencies of choice, then predicting its behaviour using physics becomes wholly impossible, and new more complex models are required.  These must include models of biology, sociology, and psychology, but will never have the accuracy or precision of physics or even chemistry.  

Therefore what ever the definition of Free Will, and whatever kinds of Determinism you want to talk about, there simply is no vital connection between the two ideas, and one certainly does not preclude the other.  Also, while certain meanings of Determinism demonstrably do not exist as realities, in no way can it be said that Free Will does not exist, for most of the definitions applied to it, with one exception: 

There are no Magic Ghosts with Plans; we Meat Machines are free to do as we please.

Evidence versus Arguments: A Guide to Knowing with Greater Certainty

We've all heard of logical fallacies - those errors of reasoning that can lead to unreliable conclusions but which seem convincing to someone motivated to believe.  There is a complete taxonomy of fallacies, and some people rejoice in observing them in the wild, like bird watching.

But there are just three particular fallacies I want to discuss here.  One is a subset of  Red Herring fallacies, called the Fallacy of Relative Privation.  Red Herrings generally are a response to a position that instead of addressing the evidence for the position or the arguments that connect the evidence to the position's conclusion, simply changes the subject. For example:

"How about cancer, huh?  Pretty bad stuff, am I right?" 

"How DARE you minimize the suffering of people with heart disease!"

We've all seen exchanges like this in internet comments sections, and we can all recognize that the respondent is an irrational person.  The first person has evidence which leads him to conclude that cancer is a bad thing, and the second person disagrees on the basis that something else exists which they perceive as being just as bad or worse.  This Fallacy of Relative Privation leads the respondent to the unreliable conclusion that the first statement is somehow incorrect.

Another of my favourite fallacies is the Fallacy of Four Terms Via an Equivocation Error.  Cool name, huh?  The Four Terms refers to the fact that a classical syllogism has exactly three terms, not four; and slipping in a fourth (or fifth or sixth) term invalidates it.  Basically, it states:

If A = B, and if B = C, then A = C.  

But if we introduce a fourth term, we get:

If A = B, and C = D, then A = D.  Or A = E.  Or G = H.

This reasoning is clearly flawed.

What makes a Four Terms fallacy hard to spot is the addition of an Equivocation Error, i.e. you disguise the fact that B and C are not actually the same thing.   While almost impossible to do using mathematical notation, it's pretty easy using the good ol' English Language.  A great example is attributed to Lewis Carroll:

If we accept that nothing is better than Eternal Bliss, 
and that a Ham Sandwich is better than nothing, 
then a Ham Sandwich is better than Eternal Bliss. 

Clearly.  Fun Fact:  This syllogism was not found in an early draft of the Koran.

The equivocation error is that nothing is not the same thing as nothing.  Get it?  No?

Then let us rewrite the syllogism as follows:

Given: the set of things greater in value than Eternal Bliss is empty.
Given: a Ham Sandwich is greater in value than any Empty Set. 
Therefore, a Ham Sandwich is greater in value than the set of things that are greater than Eternal Bliss.  

This exposes the fallacy, since it is not Eternal Bliss that a Ham Sandwich is greater than, rather the set of things greater than Eternal Bliss, which happens to be an empty set, since we have accepted (without evidence as it turns out) that Eternal Bliss is the greatest possible thing.

Therefore, if someone offers you the choice of a Ham Sandwich, or Everything that is Greater than Eternal Bliss, you take the ham sandwich, without question.  Because the other thing is an empty set; in other words, nothing.

But if given the choice of a ham sandwich or Eternal Bliss, then you have to start asking for evidence of the existence of both Eternal Bliss AND this alleged ham sandwich.

This leads us to the relationship between arguments and evidence.  An argument is just a way of drawing a continuous line between the evidence and some conclusion.  A fallacious argument is like a broken line: the conclusion is not necessarily connected to that evidence.

But it should be recognized that there can be any number of lines (arguments) connecting the evidence to a conclusion.  If one line is broken, that does not exclude the possibility of some other solidly connected line

This leads me to the third fallacy I wished to discuss: the Fallacy Fallacy.  Just because an argument is fallacious doesn't mean that the conclusion is automatically wrong.  It just means that the argument is wrong.  In other words, the line is broken and the evidence and conclusion are not connected in that particular way.  Perhaps by some other way, but not that one.  The conclusion could still be right by some other unknown argument or on the back of some different evidence.

However, without at least some kind of evidence, all the greatest arguments in the world are meaningless.  The lines leading to a conclusion have to lead back to something.  They have to originate somewhere, from some kind of evidence.

I have seen a lot of different arguments for the existence of gods or goddesses.  Hell, I invented some of them myself.  The fact that I now find all of them in some way fallacious isn't even the most relevant point.

The real point is that there is no evidence that does not support some other, more concordant conclusion, or that does not require further baseless assumptions, e.g. invoking the supernatural.  In many cases, the arguments for theism lead back to nothing - no originating evidence whatsoever.

In spite of the Fallacy of Four Terms via Equivocation, if someone offers you the choice of a ham sandwich or eternal bliss, take the ham sandwich. Lewis Carroll's argument may be dodgy, but the conclusion was still sound: a (real) Ham Sandwich is infinitely better than (nonexistent) Eternal Bliss.

A Brief History Of Marriage

In recent times good people everywhere are being urged to step forward and protect Marriage.  But what exactly would we be protecting?   The 1950's definition of marriage?  The 1920's definition?  The 1360's definition?  The paleolithic definition? One reason why the public debate over marriage sounds nonsensical with neither side able to understand the other is because everyone talking about marriage is talking about a different thing.

Therefore in the public interest I herewith undertake to present to you a brief history of Marriage.

Modern humans have been around for somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 years.  So this problem with marriage isn't exactly a new thing.  Humans have these genes that have one goal and one purpose: to reproduce; to perpetuate themselves; to carry on.  Those genes are not by nature monogamous, but they are by nature highly jealous.  "MY genes are being perpetuated here, not YOURS.  So get your paleolithic paws off my woman!  That one, too.  And that one."

This tended to lead to a lot more clubbing and stoning than was strictly necessary, and so in the best interests of our reproducing genes humans formed societies.  These societies solved the problem of jealousy-related manslaughter and other reproductive misunderstandings by pairing off and marking spouses in some way as off-limits to others.  Not that that ever really stopped any mischief from happening; it merely set down the ground rules, indicating where extra discretion was needed, and providing a framework for dispute-resolution.

So we have the earliest definition of marriage, consisting of socially-recognized reproductive partners as a way of heading off potentially deadly disputes among your basic cave-man types.

Much later as societies became incredibly complex, it became increasingly difficult for an individual to determine one's actual place in society.  In European cultures and others it became usual for people to belong to classes or categories, and for certain categories to exist under the protection of more powerful ones which they served.  Marriage paralleled this arrangement by placing women socially under protection of men whose status offered them a position in society.  Marriage in this type of feudal society became then a contract between a man and his father-in-law in which property was exchanged; namely a woman.  In every legal sense she was considered property, first that of her father, and then that of her husband.   A woman simply had no status without being legally deeded to some man or another, and the definition of marriage in such societies was the arrangement by which a man extended some of his legal, social status to a woman in exchange for subservience and offspring. This is the origin of the legal definition of marriage that people defend so vociferously today.

Much, much later we witness shifts in society leading to more enlightened concepts such as human rights, freedom and democracy.  Just for men, initially, but eventually for women as well.  In most countries this has only happened within the last 100 years or so; in some countries it has not even happened yet. With that change, marriage quietly changes as well.

Since women no longer need a man's legal status in order to own property, to be recognized under the law, to have rights etc., what is marriage now for?  Well, the law conveniently provided another reason for marriage by outlawing fornication and adultery.  By inserting itself into the bedroom, government held onto its medieval authority over the family, and marriage became basically a license to have legal sex.

In the last 50 years or so in most jurisdictions, "blue laws" have been struck down as impractical, unnecessary, backwards, unenforceable, inhumane, and generally stupid.  So where does that leave marriage?  Unwilling to surrender power in any domain, the law gradually and sneakily found a way to keep the marital handcuffs on:  Insurance.  Taxation.  Property.  Identity.  Each of these areas in our complex lives are affected by one's marital status.  When a relationship breaks down, it leaves a path of legal destruction a mile wide which supports a thriving industry all its own.

Not only that, the law as it stands discriminates and disadvantages people who for any number of reasons cannot or will not participate in traditional marriage.  The law in regard to marriage is increasingly being recognized as deeply unjust, outdated, destructive, and pointless.  Children?  There have long been adequate laws on the books which protect the rights and enforce the responsibilities of biological mothers and fathers.  Laws regarding marriage are more often an obstacle and a distraction to paternity/maternity laws being fairly and evenly enforced.

What should the future of legal marriage hold?  None.  Nothing whatsoever.  It is far past time to dissolve any and all legal definitions of marriage, whether it be:

• Ownership of women;
• Legalized sex;
• Eligibility for citizenship, insurance, education, or any other specific benefit;
• Inheritance and property;
• "Next of kin" recognition.

If two (or more) people choose to say they are married, then they are the only people eligible to define what exactly that means.  The Law, to be fair and just, must restrict itself to recognizing individuals only, and must accept that individuals will at times be in relationships with each other.  And when those relationships dissolve, the Law does not need to become involved.

Will this be better or worse for children and families?   I assert that it will be better.  My reasoning is as follows:

A marriage is often regarded as an extant thing apart from the individuals, as some gold-plated unassailable fortress of permanence.  If that illusion were not reinforced with legalistic documents, elaborate state-issued certificates and the like, then perhaps more attention would be given to the fragile, ever-changing and ethereal thing called a relationship.

Without the legal fiction of Marriage to muddy the waters and distract everyone, substantive legal concepts such as property and paternity could be dealt with rationally and in the best interests of all involved including and particularly children.

Without a legal definition to consider, individuals would be free to consider their decision to marry entirely within the context of their particular religious faith should they have one, or entirely in the context of their relationship.  This would seem to present a clearer, more focused idea of just what it is they are choosing for themselves, and in my opinion would lead to stronger families less likely to be torn apart by financial, employment, religious, social or legal considerations, well-meaning though they may be.

Therefore the question of gay marriage is the wrong question entirely.  We should not be asking whether gay marriage is legal, but why the Law has anything at all to say about our most intimate, personal relationships in the first place.

The government is neither our parent nor our priest.  We are not feudal serfs, nor cave-men.  It is time to establish the preeminence of human rights and freedom, and to eliminate any reference to marriage in the Law.

Economics Explained

(so that even a moron can understand it)

When an inventor comes to me for help with a totally new idea for an internal combustion engine that he promises will save the planet while producing emissions no more harmful than ice cream sundaes, I immediately know for a fact that this individual knows less about internal combustion engines than my belly-button lint does.

The same is true when some naive intellectual comes up with a new economic system that he claims is more "fair," meaning that people like him with absolutely no useful skills will not have to work for a living.  The arrogance of ignorance knows no bounds.

Taking economics lessons from someone who has no money and no clue about what it is, where it comes from or what it's for is like asking my grandma to fix the internet.  It can only lead to one place:  the emergency room.

So, if you're one of those smug hippies who think they know better how to organize everybody's lives for them, then put down your goddamned bongos for half a goddamned minute and learn how economics really works.

Economics is all based on Human Rights.  Yes, you read that right.  It is all about the most basic, fundamental and universal human right there is:  the right of the individual to self-determination.  In other words, it is the individuals' right to chose his own actions rather than being compelled in his actions by force.  In the most basic terms, this means that people have the right not to be the slaves or the property of other people, even of the State.

This further means that the most fundamental human right is the right to ownership over one's own labor, and by extension, the results of one's labor.  If you go out and gather, kill, make or grow some food, then you and you alone have the right to eat that food or to decide who besides you eats that food.

Whether to feed yourself, your spouse, your offspring, your parents, your neighbor's kids or the guy who in exchange gives you some of his nice dry firewood is entirely 100% your own personal individual right to determine.   Your labor and the products of your labor (which I call stored labor) belong to you and to no one else - not your parents, not the community, not the State, not even the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other mythological being.  

Does this mean that all taxation is theft and slavery?  No, silly.  Only that all excessive taxation without democratic consent and without a return to the taxpayer of goods or services of commensurate value is theft and slavery.  There is a legitimate role for the state, but politicians seem never content to limit their power to the small handful of legitimate areas of government involvement.

Equality does not mean that people have equal assets.  There is no requirement for or benefit from that kind of fairy tale.  Equality means every person has the equal right to ownership over his or her own labor and stored labor (property).  Besides, everybody has assets whether they understand them or not.

Your time is your most basic asset and property, and it is your human right to decide what to do with that asset.  Many people will choose to apply that asset to their best interests by utilizing it for the urgent matter of survival - food, shelter, clothing and security.  But if people chose to do otherwise, you can't suddenly revoke their human rights just because it's not exactly what you would have done.

Other assets that people own for themselves include innate talents, learned skills, tools, and property that meets a person's basic needs (apparel, housing, personal care implements, weapons for self-defense,  implements for communication, tokens of identity or status.)  To in any way deprive a person of his personal property is a violation of his human rights.

But what if someone appears to own far more than they actually need?

Oh?  Who gets to decide that?  You just worry about yourself and let other people worry about what they need.  To do otherwise is the height of arrogance - thinking that you know better what someone else's needs are.

Whether it is a hovel on half an acre or an estate on a thousand square miles, a person's property is a person's stored labor and therefore his life, and no one besides her has any right or claim over it.  That is even true if it was her great-great-grandfather's stored labor and not hers personally.  If you grow food (store labor) and bestow it upon your children, then it becomes their life and their right to do with as they determine.  If they exchange it for something else, then that article takes the place of stored labor and remains their right.  Because your time, tools or acreage makes it possible for you produce food, then that property is as much your human right as the sustenance you produce therewith, and bestows on you the right and duty to determine how that sustenance is disposed of.

Why is that in any way "fair" to people who don't have the same assets?  A) because "fair" is a subjective and imaginary concept that is pointless to bring up, since it involves making invalid comparisons between nonequivalent entities, and B) the basic human right to control one's labor and stored labor, if denied to anybody, is very soon denied to everybody.  If it is the poor (people suffering deprivation) you are so concerned about, then know that it is the poor who are always the first to suffer and suffer the hardest whenever this has been tried.  Equality does not mean that everyone has the same assets.  It means that everyone, without exception, has the same basic human rights - the right to ownership over one's own labor and stored labor.

With the sanctity of property explained, let's talk about wealth and where it comes from.  But let's not be confused by the concept of money, because money is not wealth.  Cash currency is at best a temporary storage container for wealth that facilitates exchange of value; nothing more.  Wealth is the ability to create things that meet one's own ongoing needs and the needs of one's dependents.  Thus, money is not wealth, and giving money to the poor does not make them un-poor.  By "needs" I refer to both the physiological needs of any human (food, water, shelter, energy, security) as well as the often paradoxical psychological needs (uniqueness and conformity, novelty and sameness).

Wealth consists of the assets I mentioned previously and occurs in the following four categories in the following order:

0.  Time and labor, which may be exchanged by agreement for basic needs;
1.  Talents and acquired marketable skills, which may be exchanged by agreement for basic needs and/or other assets;
2.  Tools which may be used to produce valuable articles for exchange;
3.  Productive property that enables the creation of desirable goods and sustenance.  Farmland,  factories, dwellings, businesses, or shares thereof.

Everybody has the zeroth asset category from birth, but not all in equal measure. Some people are stronger, some people live longer.  Get used to it.

Most people acquire some assets of the first and second categories by the time they reach adulthood. Anybody can eventually acquire the third asset category these days, since previous illegal restrictions on ownership (affecting women and minorities mainly) have been mostly abolished as a gross violation of human rights.

Wealth is created in two steps.  First, when an individual gets busy and uses any of the above assets to produce something of value, wealth appears as if out of thin air.  Assets are valueless unless they are used to provide for ones needs; but when they are used, that's called wealth.  Second, every time a willing informed exchange takes place, wealth increases.  How does that work?

If two people have dissimilar articles and willingly agree to an exchange, it is because each of them would rather have the other article.  In other words each person values the other article more than they value their own item.  Therefore the exchange of articles makes sense and actually increases the total value of the two articles.

If a seller has an article and a buyer agrees to purchase the article in exchange for an agreed amount of currency, then it is because the buyer values the article more than that amount of currency, and the seller values that amount of currency more than they do the article.  Again, value increases and wealth grows.

But, for this to work the exchange must be without compulsion, and the exchange must be informed, i.e. each party knows exactly what they are giving and getting.  Those are two pretty big if's, admittedly, and both account for a large measure of how the poor often act against their own best interests.  They buy stuff that is of no value for too much money, and sell their time (usually their only asset) for too little.  They also fail to acquire assets, frequently out of ignorance or due to cultural conditioning.

The other problem often encountered by the poor is being in a skewed market, which also happens out of ignorance or irrational human behavior.  Remaining in a labor market that is too far skewed in favor of the employer is not rational and not informed.  Move somewhere else, for Frodo's sake.  Or get out of the labor market and get into something more suitable by acquiring some category 1 or 2 assets.

We are now prepared to speak intelligently about price.  It takes two people to set a price:  the seller and the buyer.  Together they set the price of things by simply agreeing to the exchange, and it is nobody's business but theirs.

It may seem stupidly obvious that the number of items bought is always equal to the number of items sold, but this is a very important fact to keep in mind.  In an open and informed market, a large number of transactions for the same item can establish an average price point that may fluctuate from time to time.  But at any given time, the price being offered and accepted for an item is the price at which an exactly equal number of buyers and sellers agree is the exactly correct price for the number of items transacted.  Think about it:  at higher prices, more sellers would agree, but fewer buyers.  At a lower price, more buyers but fewer sellers would be willing to transact.  Therefore any murmuring about the price of an item not being "fair" is nonsense.

Often, people who don't understand economics propose the artificial setting of prices by non-involved third parties whose business it is none of.  The government, for example.  Also trade unions, produce cartels, monopolies, criminal gangs and the like.  Good company, apparently.  Things that have been or are being artificially price controlled in various markets include rent, gasoline, medicine, wages, electricity, and potatoes. (I am NOT making this up!  Western Australia has an all-powerful potato cartel that fixes the price of spuds.  Or tries to.)

The effect of setting a maximum price for things like gasoline, rent or potatoes is that there are fewer sellers willing to exchange items at that artificially low price and too many buyers eager to buy at that price.  In other words, shortages.  Long lines.  Black markets.  Poverty, crime and deprivation ensue.

The effect of setting a minimum price for things like wages is the opposite:  too many sellers entering the market with too few buyers interested in paying an artificially high price for something that is in plentiful supply.  The result is unemployment, slow economic growth, and fewer goods and services being made available to the population. In either case, meddling with private transactions between two informed parties wrecks everything and infringes on people's basic human rights to deal with their own property, labor and lives as they see fit.

There is nothing to be gained by lamenting the prices of things, as though the power to set prices was some magic belonging only to the rich and powerful.  Or something that politicians do.  Such woolly-headed paucity of reason distracts from the real issues of availability and desirability.  Supply and demand.   It is not a man-made system or an arbitrary rule someone made up: it is just the natural way that things work.  When you try to meddle with it, things always go wrong.

-    -    -

Worrying about other people's problems is a popular pastime these days, and so there are many theories about what to do about those people who can't seem to provide for themselves - the poor.  why is that my problem?  Because the poor in desperation turn to crime, and crime ain't good for nobody.

Here too price becomes a pointless distraction and leads to more harm than good.  Some people propose to "solve" poverty by forcing prices to be low enough for poor people to buy what they need.  This results in supply shortages and nobody getting anything.  Except the resourceful rich, who always know how to get what they need.  This benefits only extra-resourceful people who know how to supply the rich with what they want, and the poor continue to be poorer still.

The other solution is to just give currency to poor people.  This has a number of interesting effects, none of which helps the poor in any way.  A) It devalues the currency.  B) It increases the demand on goods.  C) A + B = prices go up, so that the poor are no better off.  D) It creates dependency while punishing resourcefulness, leading to an entire culture of people who are incapable of providing for themselves. Most programs to help the poor accomplish only two things:  They assuage middle-class guilt while assuring the continuing existence of poverty and suffering.

If it's the relief of suffering you're actually interested in, there's nothing stopping you but lack of generosity.  If someone is hungry or sick, give them food or medicine, no questions asked.  No paperwork to make sure they qualify under federal regulations, no cash payments.  Just relief of suffering.  Doing it that way is much cheaper than paying an army of bureaucrats to work out who gets it and who doesn't.  "But someone might take advantage of our generosity!"  So?  A truly generous person doesn't give a shit about quibbles like that.

In the battle against poverty, wealth is the only thing that has ever prevaled.  By affirming individuals' right to their own labor and stored-labor, by providing education and opportunity as well as non-cash relief of immediate suffering, the poor (and everyone else) get to choose whether to be poor or resourceful.  On a practical level, we do this by ceasing to bog small businesses down in regulation and double-taxation.  This allows previously poor people (newly educated about how economics actually works) to create their own jobs and jobs for each other rather than waiting around for a corporation to move in and flood the labor market with low-wage jobs.


The Big Secret to money is this:

Always have plenty of it.  



If for any reason you don't have plenty of it, then do these three things:

1.  Realize what money is: just a temporary storage media of value that facilitates exchange of stored-labor for productive assets.  Money is never the problem, so stop blaming it for your situation.  (And if you wish to accumulate wealth, do not accumulate currency.  Accumulate assets instead.)
2.  Start creating more value every day.  If you live somewhere where this is not possible, THEN MOVE!
3.  Manage your resources better.  Stop buying worthless crap and start acquiring value-producing assets, starting with category 1 assets such as education and skills.

How Money Works II: Perpetual Motion Is Stupid

Cash is only one manifestation of Money.

Last time we discovered that money is merely a storage medium for value, and the concept of value encompasses the needs, wants and survival of all life.  In this post, we wish to elaborate on those natural laws that money (or "wealth" as some prefer) obeys.

But why do I say that Perpetual Motion is Stupid?  And what does that have to do with money?  I say Perpetual Motion is stupid because it is a lie.  It is in direct opposition to Nature's Laws, and therefore it has never worked, does not now work, and never will work in the future.  People who believe in, pursue and promote Perpetual Motion including so-called "free energy" devices and schemes are therefore Stupid.

Likewise, people who pursue and promote financial or economic schemes that attempt to violate the laws of money are also Stupid.  This includes certain well-known philosophers, politicians, ideologues  reformers, do-gooders and, basically most of your garden-variety hippies. But when we learn exactly how money works, we will no longer be stupid, will we.

How can I say that Money obeys natural laws when it is just an arbitrary human invention?  I can say it because money is NOT a human invention at all, nor is it arbitrary.  It is a natural phenomenon.   And as we learned last time, money is not the same as cash.  The ability to store, transport and exchange value arises naturally whenever life takes an opportunity to create more value than it requires in that moment.  Ants gather in the summer ahead of the coming cold and dark.  Bears feast on salmon brains at certain times, ignoring the tasty flesh entirely as the most efficient way to prepare for hibernation.  Humans exchange their time and products to each other and store that value to be exchanged later at the grocery store.  We may flatter ourselves by thinking we invented this system, but it is actually a natural extension of the fundamental biological economy of life.

Recall also from the previous post that the willing exchange of two dissimilar items always creates value.  This additional value is the driving force behind trade, commerce, and specialization.  The exchange itself is of value because in a willing trade, both parties gain.  The sum of value after the trade is more than the sum of value before.

An economy is nothing more than a vast number of single exchanges happening continually.  You exchange an hour's labor for an hour's pay, and an hour's pay for a tank of fuel for your car.  You exchange some of that fuel to locate a mate or gather your offspring, then drive to the store and exchange yet more of your stored labor for some food.

No matter how complex an economic system becomes, it must always reduce to increased value for value in every willing exchange.

To introduce the natural laws of value and money, consider the following somewhat silly tale of woe.

Imagine a refugee camp.  There are ten thousand refugees who for various boring, tedious reasons may never leave the camp.  They have no resources in the camp, and every day they are given a specific amount of food that must be consumed on the spot.  It cannot be stored, traded, or used in any other way.  It has no potential value.

Nothing can enter or leave the camp - no materials, resources, tools, goods of any kind.  The people sit and do nothing all day, because there is nothing to do.  One day a multi-billionaire suddenly gets religion and decides to help these unfortunate souls trapped in the refugee camp. He bestows upon each of them One Million Dollars in cash.

Now, that much cash is a problem in a refugee camp, where it is impossible to secure.  But since they are all thieves to a man, each stealing as fast as he can from all the rest, at any given moment they still each have on average one million dollars more or less.   Still, as no goods may enter the camp, there is nothing to actually buy, so pretty soon they get tired and stop stealing each other's money back and forth.

No matter how much they exchange the money with each other (and none are stupid enough to actually lose money by being swindled or cheated), nobody ever gains anything.  The total amount of money in this "closed system" remains constant, and it remains perfectly evenly distributed.  Nobody has anything to gain, and nobody has anything to lose.  Nobody has anything to buy or to sell.  Even though they are "rich" according to some people's stupid definition, there is no value, no economy, no exchange, and no real life in this camp.

You might propose that prostitution would inevitably spread through the camp like wildfire, and pretty soon only the hoes would have all the money. But if the hoes were to reflect that the so-called "money" does not actually have any value, then solicitations would be refused.

Unlikely, you say? Hoes with that level of insight?  Then we'll exclude that possibility by insisting for the sake of discussion that there remains nothing of value inside the camp to trade for.

What about gambling?  Even to just pass the time?  Fine - but we stipulate that their games are 100% chance, no cheating and no skill involved.  The average refugee will still have one million dollars more or less, and the distribution will be random yet fairly uniform around the camp.

Perpetual Motion is like this ridiculously rich refugee camp.  There is money all around, but none of it is useful for anything.  Perpetual Motion imagines it can create more money, more wealth, more value within this closed system simply by having the money pass from one person to another and back again.  In this closed system, the amount of money is constant and fixed, and the distribution is as uniform as it gets.  Like all closed thermodynamic systems, it obeys the First and Second Laws: energy is always constant and maximum entropy always reigns supreme, barring statistical fluctuations due to random events (e.g. gambling).

Money obeys these laws too.  If you have a closed system (like this refugee camp) then there can be no increase in money and the distribution is, if not initially then certainly before very long, more or less uniform.  The laws of money stipulate that for an increase in value to occur, the system must be open, and there must be resources from which the participants can create value.  As soon as that is the case, then value-producing exchanges can begin and wealth expands at a more or less predictable rate.

The $6 Million Dollar Chicken.

Now suppose some enterprising outsiders learn about this camp full of millionaires. Imagine they cut a hole in the fence, and offer to sell a breeding pair of chickens to some of the inmates.  How much would they be worth?  A million dollars?  Each?  A quorum of inmates might see the potential value and pool their money, outbidding the others, and buy the rooster and chicken for as much as, say, $12 Million.

This one small hole in the fence completely and fundamentally changes the dynamic inside the camp.  Eggs start to sell for $100,000 each.  Chicks sell for $1,000,000 each.  Businesses spring up, skills suddenly become valuable, and wealth begins to be created.

Let's imagine that one person pays $50 Million to another to build a chicken coop.  An interesting thing happens the moment it is finished.  The wealth of the camp jumps by $50M.  How?  Well, the builder now has $50M, and the owner has a $50M chicken coop.  That's a total wealth of $100M.  Where resources are available, wealth expands as fast as people can create value.

One thing we learn is that the total amount of money in open economies is never fixed.  For one person to get rich does not mean that another must get poor. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.  When one person gets rich, it is virtually always because he or she created a lot of value for a lot of people. All those people are actually ENRICHED by that one person's rise to riches.  Logically, we should be celebrating our successful rich people, not tearing them down or blaming them for problems that have nothing to do with them.  Those are the irrational superstitions I mentioned last time and false emotional associations people have about money that cause them to react in such an illogical, irrational way. They choose to focus on the few exceptions, like the occasional airplane that crashes. Those are the aberrations where people have taken money for which they did not create equivalent value.  In the long run, that type of activity is unsustainable and ultimately fails.

But like airplane crashes, those are the flights we hear about on TV while ignoring the millions of successful landings that happen every year.  There are over ten million millionaires in the world today, and over 1,200 billionaires.  The vast majority of them got rich by making YOU richer.  Think about that next time you ignorantly disparage the rich.

*   *   *   *   *

The improbable refugee camp of this parable demonstrates another essential point.  In the closed camp, how much was the one million dollars that each  inmate owned actually worth?  When there was nothing to buy and the distribution was uniform, the value of the money was zero.  That's right: one million dollars can sometimes be worth nothing at all.  That is an extreme example, but the same mechanism of currency devaluation applies elsewhere, even in open, productive systems.

When a government prints large amounts of currency, unless there is an equivalent amount of value being produced somewhere in the country, the currency becomes devalued.  In other words, you have inflation of prices since each dollar contains proportionally less actual value.  Cash has value only when it has been exchanged for value.

Devaluation of currency also occurs when you give away large amounts of cash.  There is no exchange of value, and therefore the cash has no value initially.  This lack of value diffuses thorough the economy, and the total circulating currency is devalued in proportion to the amount that was handed out.  Giving cash to the needy is therefore harmful to the needy as well as to everyone else. It is a gross unkindness to give them something of no value that they do not actually need.

If you want to relieve the needy, give food, clothing and shelter, and then only in emergencies.  To do otherwise creates a dependency that is an even worse unkindness to those you are attempting to help.  It's like giving away free morphine for everyone to take in case someone gets a headache.  Using it routinely creates addiction and diminishes humanity.  But use in an emergency does not result in dependency and can be extremely beneficial.

If you want to help the long term needy, do not give food and clothing, and do not under any circumstances give cash.  Instead, give education and opportunity in generous measure.  Give them the means to labor for their own support with human dignity.  Giving someone meaningful work even if it is hard, unpleasant labor is the greatest kindness you can give.  And before you call me a heartless scrooge, you should know that someone was once kind to me in exactly this way, giving me the chance to do some very hard, hot, dirty uncomfortable labor, for which I am extremely grateful.  It added tremendously to my humanity, whereas cash handouts would have dehumanized me.

We are creators - that is our nature.  Being human means being a creator of value, and to deny someone the opportunity to be human is inhuman.

How Money Works, Part I

Munnie! Monet!  Moolah! Dosh! Dineros! Scratch!
Cabbage! Loot! Wad!

For something that affects people's lives to such an extraordinary degree and is the central topic of both political debate and armed conflict all around the globe, Money is woefully misunderstood.  Many people I know hold deeply ignorant superstitions about money, highly conflicted emotional childhood associations with the subject, and strident noisy opinions on how it is supposed to work which are embarrassingly at variance to the way things actually are.


My belief is that in order to have any sort of thoughtful conversation about the issues facing this planet including the economy, poverty, hunger, disease, immigration, war, environment, energy, climate; in short, the very survival of the human species, we need to have a serious chat about How Money Works.

Yet some of you will say, "Money isn't everything!  There is much more to life, and money just isn't as important as you are making it out to be."  This is a prime example of those ignorant superstitions I mentioned before. Money is important.  It does matter.  The Preacher or Koheleth of Bible fame instructs, "A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things."  (Eccl. 10:19)  Money forms the central part of the answer to every practical question in this world.  We will shortly discover that every living thing on this earth uses money in some form and that it is inseparably intertwined with the very concept of Life itself.

And the place to start is as self-evident as anything could be.  We need to know what we're even talking about.  We need to define "money."  To help us get there, let's first consider the question of gold.

Why is gold "valuable?" By which I mean, why does it have value.  What is Value, even?  A value is something that is important to you.  When you are hungry, food occupies your attention and you "want" some.  It is essential to you.  It is a value.  It has value. Everything even remotely associated with food likewise assumes a value:  crop seeds, farming implements, land, labor, storage, cooking utensils, fuel, culinary skill, transport of food, and the list goes on indefinitely.

When you are cold, warmth becomes important to you.  It has value, and everything associated with warmth assumes some of that value as well, such as clothing, fuel, shelter, labor for the provision of both, the right to occupy shelter, the space and land occupied by shelter and fuel, the security of that space, and so in indefinitely.  In short, value means survival, which is the one universal interest of all life.

Everything of value fills a need for somebody, is something of importance to someone, holds somebody's undivided attention, and is in at least some degree of demand.  An object has value if some organism (e.g. a human) wants it and needs it.  Is that plain enough?  That's the meaning of value.

There are different kinds of value, too.  An item may have immediate, realized value or merely the possibility of future value.  I distinguish between potential value and realized value through this slightly whimsical example.  Suppose I have a fish and you have an egg.  (Notice how easily Ownership arises as a natural, organic law?  It is a fundamental concept like gravity that cannot be overturned by any blackguard decree.)  Now suppose that I, having a fish, do not like fish so much, and you, with your egg, are not really in the mood for eggs today.

While the fish and the egg have the possibility of value not just as food but as desirable food, that full value is not being achieved in these circumstances.  The potential value is not currently being realized.  But suppose you and I reach an agreement in which we trade your egg for my fish, because you happen to like fish more and I happen to like eggs more.  Now how much value exists?  After the trade, the full value of both items can be realized upon consumption, and value has been created or increased by the mere act of exchange.

The following day I might be tempted to look for another fish, not because I like fish, but because I expect to be able to exchange the fish for something I like even more, such as an egg.  Catching a fish only creates a part of the value for me.  Exchanging the fish creates the rest of it. Initially, it has potential value, while its full value only becomes a reality upon consumption.  (This illustrates why all economic theories that consider only the production of goods and not the value of commerce and trade are complete bollocks.)

If this exchange continues for some time, I might, because of the difficulty of catching a fish and the relative abundance of eggs, no longer be satisfied with one egg per fish.  I might be able to negotiate, say, a dozen eggs for my fish.  Thus the "price" of a fish is a dozen eggs, and the "price" of a dozen eggs is one fish.  Nevertheless, value is still increased every time a willing exchange takes place. Both parties want more what the other has to offer, and both parties therefore gain.

Here's another example.  A tree grows in a field, and expends a tremendous amount of energy, time, risk and resources into producing a crop of fruit.  There's a lot of potential value stored in the fruit, but they are of little value to the tree.  Why did it even bother?  Because of first importance to the species is its continuation.  Animals and birds will seek out the fruit, of immediate value to them as food, energy, social and breeding advantage, and in exchange they will provide the essential service of dispersing that tree's seeds far and wide. Both parties gain.

Some may point out that this exchange is not really an exchange of value because it is not made consciously or deliberately, but on an instinctive, evolutionary level.  This is an unacceptable quibble, since most credit card purchases are made on exactly the same basis.  The economies of nature are every bit as taut and efficient as the stock market.

Certain species of ants actually keep livestock: tiny animals that are kindly husbanded by the ants and produce food that the ants prefer to anything they can scrounge on the ground.  The exchange is a fair one: the insect animal gains food and protection; the ants gain food security.  If it wasn't value for value and a gain for both parties, the system would break down and a different one would evolved.  This is continually happening, in fact, since no exchange is ever absolutely perfect due to the ever-shifting value of everything.  Some pushing and shoving is a necessary part of life.

With this clearer understanding of value, we can finally talk about the value of gold.  Gold has potential value as a commodity.  In ancient times it was one of a very few metals that was easy to work, though hard to find, and would not normally oxidize for anything.  It lasted virtually forever and you never had to clean it, and so humans endowed it with a mystical, divine aura.  Literally.  The elemental symbol "Au" comes from its Latin name aurum, meaning "shining dawn" that is the origin of our word for the alleged supernatural glow about one's person.

Gold electrical connectors are awesome.

The realized value of gold originally came from its ability to transfer that aura to the possessor and bestow him or her with social status. (Being a soft metal, it is quite useless for making tools or weapons.)  Feeling significant and socially connected is one of a humans' basic instinctual needs as an organism. We still use the commodity today for exactly those purposes in various forms of jewelry, decoration, tokens of distinction, mating status, or hierarchical position.  We also use gold in technology for providing incorruptible and reliable mechanical and electrical components used in virtually every machine made today, the true value of which can in every case be traced back to our fundamental instinctual needs, all of which are ultimately reducible to survival of the organism.  In short, gold helps us survive.

So if gold has become more, not less, valuable to us, why then is the price of gold no higher now than at most times in history, in comparable terms?  I mean, compared to the price of food, clothing, shelter, and labor, why is gold as cheap now as it was fifty, one hundred, or even thousands of years ago?

The reason is that price and value relate to one another in reference to the relative abundance.  Value may increase or decrease, abundance may increase or decrease, and so price is not a fundamental quantity but entirely derivative. Gold is today relatively in abundance thanks to more and bigger mines and advanced mineral extraction technologies, while at the same time the former industrial uses of gold (for manufacturing currency in the form of coinage, much more about which in a future post) are now obsolete.  Gold is no longer required in such enormous volumes, and so its "real" price remains more or less where it has been for millennia.

Did you see what we did there?  We slipped in the concept of money by talking about price, without defining either one.  Now that we have a suitably large reference frame that includes all of life and all of earth's entire history, we can finally do what we started out to do, which is to define money, a concept that far transcends mere human invention or arbitrary constructs or systems.  Once that is done we can (in following posts) begin to answer questions about price, currency, trade, scarcity, labor, charity, taxes, and all that jazz.

What is money?  Most people immediately respond that money is dollars.  Duh.  But what about euros, yen, pesos and pounds?  "Oh," they say, "I forgot about them foreigners. Ok, then, money is any kind of currency.  Cash, if you please."

And that person would be spectacularly incorrect.  Ever hear of a bank account?  They don't exactly keep stacks of dollar bills in a box with your name on it.  They only keep a running total of your deposits and withdrawals, and "your" cash is handed out to someone else to use until it ends up back at the bank again.  For you, they only store a number in a computer.  It's still money, but it sure ain't hard currency of any denomination.

Is money therefore defined as all currency in circulation plus all bank deposits?  Never mind defining just what exactly a "bank" is or isn't.  If you have $50 on an Amazon gift card, that's definitely money, no doubt about it.

Yet it's no more than a tautology to say that money is circulating currency plus deposits.  What makes money Money?  Why do dollars and euros, much less their virtual equivalents on deposit, have any value at all?  In my youth I was taught that dollars only have value as long as people think they do. That is a stinking, fetid load of codswallop.  And completely false, too.

Money is any means of storing, transferring and negotiating value.  Dollars and euros have value because someone has exchanged value for them and will generally only exchange them again for as much value as they can negotiate.  Coins are valuable not for the price of the metal in them, but for the face denomination that they represent as tokens of exchange.

Money is your way of keeping track of the value that you produce so that you get exactly what you've earned.  If you don't seem to have enough money, it isn't the money's fault.  You either haven't been keeping track very well of the value you create, or undervaluing it, or losing value in ill-considered exchanges, or you haven't been producing enough value to ensure your own survival.

I go even further than this in defining money.  Here it is possible to have honest disagreements with economists wearing bow-ties and herringbone jackets with elbow patches.  I define everything with potential value that is owned or controlled by an organism or groups of organisms (humans, perhaps) that can or potentially can be traded, negotiated, bartered or exchanged, as Money.  Some people disagree and call all that stuff  "Wealth."  But in the end, words aren't important, because wealth and money work the same way and follow the same fundamental rules.

Stay tuned for Part II of How Money Works in which we describe those natural laws which wealth (money) obeys.

How To Become Deeply Offended

Hostility does more than plastic
surgery could ever undo.

Being offended by anything and everything can be a lifelong, satisfying occupation providing an endless source of valuable outrage for neurotic people who cannot afford cable TV and do not know how to work the Internet.  And, it's incredibly easy to do.  But before I explain the easy steps that anyone can follow to achieve a total, permanent state of affronted hostile umbrage, you may be asking why anyone would want to do so.

Hell if I know!  But is seems a wildly popular thing to do these days, and who am I to not jump on any bandwagon that happens to be passing by.  Since everybody is doing this anyway, I figure why not provide an easier way for people to have exactly what they want?  Therefore, whatever your bizarre and disturbing personal reasons may be for needing to be offended at every hand, the following steps will help you get there.

Step 1.  Always be on the lookout for an insult.  Is anyone calling you a skin-wearing compost smeller?  How about a grass-combing cake-sniffing gormless poltroon?  Has anyone indirectly implied that you are a bag-waving chino-covered gaberlunzie or a zit-popping denim-feeler?  Or a toenail-touching chicken taster?   If not, then you should pay more attention.

Pro Tip:  If you cannot induce anyone to insult you to your face, then you can always IMAGINE that they have done so.  This is every bit as effective and saves a tremendous amount of time.

Step 2.  Try to make sense of the insult. If you do not currently know what a pillock-mincing spanner or a carbuncle-covered poxydoxy or a wombat-licking cheese-voting galah is, then you might have to borrow somebody's internet to look it up.  However, a precise definition is not absolutely necessary as long as you assume that whatever it means, it must be something very, very bad indeed.

Step 3.  Whatever the insult is, e.g. hat-wearing puppy-spanker or a sniveling waste of parents, the most important step of all is to secretly (or openly) believe in its accuracy.  Whether due to your susceptibility to other people's natural authority, your weak-minded suggestibility, or simply a deep-seated self-doubt: for the insult to have any effect whatsoever it must be believed.  Conversely, if an insult IS having an effect on you, you can be certain that it is something that you DO unconsciously believe.

Once you have achieved Step 3 - a belief in the aptness of the insult to your personal situation - then your own self-hatred will be directed outward onto the person that you are pretending has given you the insult.  This allows you to self-righteously justify your anger and accept no responsibility for your next actions, including loud and embarrassing public tantrums, weak and futile acts of revenge, or simply wasting the rest of your life sulking in obscurity.

Most people are still not aware that the insult required not only your permission but your active willing participation, and will feel unable to blame you for whatever comes afterwards.  While your life will remain a failure, at least few people will blame you for it.  Because that would be insulting.

For some lucky individuals, indignation, resentment and pique come as naturally as growing hair.  They are gifted in that way, and unconsciously perform these three steps with intuitive style and flair.  Most are not even aware that they are doing anything at all!  But rest assured that they are following all of these steps, as anyone must who wishes to experience the regurgitating bitterness of hating themselves and others.

Be warned, however. If you are not careful to observe these rules, some insults will not cause you to feel the slightest tinge of discomfort.  Without diligently following all three steps, even the grossest epithets might pass right through you without any effect whatsoever.

How Luck Works

Is luck real?  Does it exist, or is it only random chance and perception?

Do you know people who seem to get all the breaks in life, all the good things, all the luck?  Is it something they are doing, or does God just love them more than you?

In the book  The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles by Professor of Psychology Richard Wiseman, the phenomenon of luck is scientifically studied a) to see if the phenomenon is real and not just anecdotal; b) if it is real, to find out why it works, and c) to determine whether "lucky" people are doing something different that anyone can do.

After interviewing and observing thousands of people, some of whom consider themselves "lucky" and others "unlucky" or "average," it became clear that there really are "lucky" people out there who seem to get all the breaks.  Seemingly in defiance of the laws of probability, "lucky" people get great jobs after a chance meeting, meet their perfect life partners in the most improbable ways, and repeatedly get opportunities to realize lifelong dreams through the most random and unlikely chains of events.  How do they do it?

From the research, four clear factors that predict the "luck" of a person emerged:

1. "Lucky" people are open to new experiences, see and take advantage of opportunities, have large networks, and have a relaxed attitude towards life rather than a fearful one.
2. "Lucky" people make great decisions by listening to their intuition, and working on ways of specifically improving their intuition through absorbing relevant information.
3. "Lucky" people remember their past "luck," expect to be "lucky" in the future, expect to have "lucky" or favorable interactions with people, set and actively work towards goals, and persevere in the face of adversity because they are certain that "luck" will appear any any moment, as long as they keep trying.
4. "Lucky" people have bad luck too, but they see a positive side to such events and believe that "bad luck" will actually be for the best in the long run.  They do not dwell on past "bad luck," and they take positive steps towards PREVENTING "bad luck" again in the future.

Have you been "unlucky" in life, career, love, money, health or bowling?  The bad news is that it probably WAS all your fault after all.  The GREAT news is that it was only your fault, and you have the power to change all that.  You are not, as you once assumed, at the mercy of the random chances of life, because Luck is something you can make.  It is made by the way you perceive, think, prepare and act.

"Lucky" people (and you will now be joining that group, I hope) are not superstitious, do not gamble or take unjustified risks, do not sit and wait for "luck" to come their way, and do not blame their life on other people or on circumstances over which they have no control, e.g. "bad luck."

"Lucky" people, including you, use the power of their creative minds to visualize what they want, to set goals that they believe in, and to absolutely have a blast working towards those goals.

The harsh reality is that you are going to die someday, whether you have any fun in life or not.  You can die a miserable deluded Pessimist, or die a happy deluded Optimist.  Your choice!



Oh, and "Lucky" people live longer, too.  How 'bout that?