(Profound)
We can learn from history that allegorical mythology was converted to factual description by taking advantage of the desire for certainty, and inventing the scriptural religions – despite the obervable and logical contradiction of mystical statements with reality of experience.
We can observe the continuing human desire for marxism, communism, socialism and redistributive social democracy despite its irrefutable logical impossibility, despite its universal failure, and despite our scientific knowledge of human behavior.
We can observe that humans desire to believe the many contradictory falsehoods in Postmodern thought that form the current progressive ideology, and which is taught in our schools as the civic religion of the state.
None if this should give us confidence that reason and fact will prevail, or that people desire reason and fact. Evidence is to the contrary.
Progressivism, freudianism, postmodernism, and marxism are – as Hayek warned us – a new mysticism ushered in by Marx (1848) and Freud (1902AD), just as Zoroaster (~1800BC), Abraham (~1800BC), Jesus, Peter and Paul (<~50BC) ushered in ages of mysticism for political purposes.
And we are, thanks to them, and thanks to human desires, despite our progress in the physical sciences, living in an age of regressive, pervasive, social mysticism.
That is the evidence.
Hayek suggested that future generations would see this as an age of mysticism. But there is little evidence of that in history. Instead, generations are perfectly happy to persist the social narrative and the scientific and economic narrative as if they were independent frames of reference for describing human history.
Property, truth, and reason are aristocratic values and virtues, and their dominance in any culture the result of the organized application of violence by aristocrats to protect themselves from the ignorance, mysticism, and desires of the many.
That humans benefit from aristocratic virtues and values is evidentiary. That they will voluntarily adopt aristocratic virtues and values is contrary to all evidence.
And membership in aristocratic rationalism REQUIRES that we observe and respect that evidence.
If you persist in the illusion that either the enlightenment vision of equality of ability limited only by will, or the postmodern vision of equality limited only by environment, then you are, in fact, non-rational, unscientific.
Reason, property rights, and aristocratic virtues and values will exist only where a minority is willing to use violence to impose them on an unwilling population more desirous of mysticism and mental comfort than objective truth.
Violence is the highest virtue, and the greatest asset one can possess. Everything else is just rhetorical justification to obtain property rights at a discount. And that is not aristocratic: it is fraud.
Curt Doolittle
Kiev