In the end Petersen working on self help – or self correction (direct) at one end of the spectrum and I’m working on systemic help – or systemic correction (indirect) at the other end of the spectrum. He’s teaching and I’m governing. Via positiva, via negativa.
I made this similar argument about Mises vs Hayek, and I could easily make the argument about Spencer vs Nietzsche.
I could make the same argument between Marx and Keynes.
Hayek spent his whole life coming to the same conclusion I have, by almost exactly the same sequence.
individual training is extremely expensive but collective (systemic) training is cheap and most effective. And the single most effective means of training is the continuous evolution of the single law of reciprocity that we call the law.
People will self justify anything and everything at all times.
People cannot self-justify their way out of law. Legislation, and morality yes, but law no. They must act in accordance with it.
The brain gives us reward for the number of free associations generated by any given set of relations. It literally feels good for the neural economy to prune and grow – identifying more possibilities…. more IMAGINATION, and therefore more opportunity. And it is opportunity-generation that is the value of memory.
This is one of the reasons we able to empathize, extend trust, suspend disbelief, and accept new information from storytelling uncritically via suggestion the by the same process we imitate others through observation and imitation. (if you can connect those processes it will help you understand.)
But we are suggestible by observation and by storytelling just as we are suggestible by acting in the environment – hence metaphysical value judgements that we intuit but do not know we know.
Observation and storytelling are much cheaper than action. Literature/experience and philosophy/argument are cheaper than science/engineering, because emotions, thought, and action describe a sequence of costs.
As it must be for any creature that decides action using memory.