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THE 20TH CENTURY AS AN AGE OF MYSTICISM

You know, sitting here, reading a Engels, written in 1884, it’s pretty clear that it has only been, perhaps, since maybe, what, 1990, or maybe 2000, or maybe the milestone was Pinker’s 2002 book The Blank Slate, that the era of progressive and postmodern mysticism has begun to fade.

The conservatives, the marxists, the postmodernists, all the political nonsense that was constructed in the 20th century as for the purpose of using mass media to persuade a large ignorant population to transfer power to the state. Hell, the nonsense we libertarians came up with for the same reason is just as frustrating. Or it would be if we weren’t the only people on the planet who actually contributed anything to the advancement of political theory since the enlightenment.

Terrifying.

Hayek was right. Looking back on it, the 20th century, or at least, starting with the works of freud, marx and cantor, and maturing into the 20th century, became an age of mysticism.

It took only from Darwin to Marx to create economic obscurantism (experiences rather than necessities), and to Freud to convert from mystical obscurantism to psychological obscurantism (experiences rather than causes), and to Cantor to create mathematical mysticism (sizes rather than frequencies). Of course, the culprit is Kant, who could not bear that economics and individuals could determine status, so he invented a new irrationalism. But Hegel and Heidegger gave academia license to create more obscurantism.

It’s terrifying.

And I just stumbled on Hoppe. Damn. Lucky for me.