Tag: Veriphysics

Veriphysics: The Treatise 016

VII. The Counterfeit and the Real

The deepest irony of the Enlightenment’s triumph is that its self-proclaimed weapons of reason, mathematics, and empirical evidence were all counterfeits, while the tradition possessed the genuine articles but failed to deploy them effectively.

The Enlightenment claimed reason but practiced rhetoric. Its arguments were not demonstrations but performances, designed to persuade rather than prove. When the arguments were examined carefully, as Hume examined causation, as Kant examined pure reason, and as the positivists examined verification, they dissolved under it. The Enlightenment’s elevation of human reason was a promise that could never be fulfilled.

The Enlightenment claimed to be mathematically sound but refrained from actually doing the calculations. When the calculations were finally done, whether it be Gorman on demand curves, the Wistar mathematicians on mutation rates, or the various genomic analyses of the twenty-first century, they uniformly refuted the Enlightenment’s claims. The mathematics was available all along but the Enlightenment simply never submitted to its discipline despite the public posturing of the empiricists.

The Enlightenment claimed empirical evidence while immunizing its core axioms from empirical testing. The social contract is not an empirical claim; it is a philosophical posture. The invisible hand is not a testable hypothesis, it is a literary metaphor. The perfectibility of man is not an objective subject to falsification, it is a groundless faith. Whenever empirical evidence contradicted Enlightenment expectations, as it has, repeatedly, across every domain, the evidence was either reinterpreted or ignored. Enlightenment empiricism was selective, avoided, and ultimately proved to be fraudulent.

The tradition, by contrast, had the real currency. Its logical tools were genuine; its openness to evidence was principled; its capacity for mathematical reasoning had been demonstrated over centuries. But the tradition did not mint this currency for public circulation. It kept its intellectual gold in the vault while the Enlightenment flooded the market with counterfeits. By the time the fakes were exposed, the Enlightenment had already bought up everything that mattered.

However, the situation today is not the situation in which the eighteenth-century intellectuals found themselves facing. The Enlightenment’s institutional monopoly, while formidable, is observably cracking. The prestige of its credentials is declining with every passing year. The failures documented in Part One are increasingly visible to ordinary observers as well as to specialists. The rhetoric of “science says” and “experts agree” and “studies show” no longer commands belief because far too many lies have been told in the name of science.

More importantly, the empirical data now exists to anchor the critical arguments that were previously abstract. The human and chimpanzee genomes have been mapped; the calculations can be done; the impossibility of Neo-Darwinism can be demonstrated and mathematically proved, not merely asserted. The economic data of three decades of free trade is available, the predictions can be checked and the failures can be confirmed. The democratic outcomes of two centuries of representative government can be examined; the gap between promise and performance can be measured.

The tradition’s arguments were always sound. What was lacking was the empirical anchor that would make them irrefutable and the rhetorical strategy that would make them heard. The empirical anchor now exists. The rhetorical landscape has shifted. The opportunity is real and the time is now.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 015

VI. The Usury Connection: How Capture Was Funded

The rhetorical victory required material support. Ideas do not propagate themselves; they require patrons, publishers, institutions, and time. The Enlightenment had all of these in abundance, and the abundance was made possible by the financial revolution that Part One described.

The traditional prohibition on usury had constrained the accumulation and deployment of capital. Lending at interest was limited, regulated, morally suspect. Wealth accumulated slowly, through production and trade, and was dissipated across generations through inheritance, charity, and the sheer friction of economic life. No one could amass the resources to reshape civilization according to a plan.

The legitimization of usury changed this calculus. Central banking created money ex nihilo. Fractional reserve lending multiplied it. National debt allowed governments to spend beyond their revenues. Patient capital could now be accumulated and deployed over decades, over generations, with compound interest working in its favor. Those who controlled credit creation could fund projects of civilizational transformation that would have been inconceivable under the old dispensation.

The Enlightenment’s patrons understood this. The salons were funded. The journals were subsidized. The academies were endowed. The chairs were established. The process was gradual, as it had to be, to avoid provoking too violent a reaction, but it was relentless. Each generation formed by Enlightenment institutions produced the teachers, publishers, and patrons of the next generation. The compound interest was intellectual as well as financial.

The tradition, operating on honest money, could not compete. Its patrons were the old aristocracy and the Church, both increasingly constrained by the new financial order. Its institutions were ancient foundations that could be infiltrated and captured. Its defenders were individual scholars, working without coordination, without resources, without a long-term strategy. They brought arguments to a financial war.

This is not to reduce the intellectual contest to mere economics. The ideas mattered; the arguments mattered; the truth mattered. But ideas need vectors, arguments need platforms, and truth needs defenders who can sustain the fight for decades across generations. The usury revolution gave the Enlightenment the resources to wage a multigenerational campaign. The tradition had no comparable resources and no strategy for acquiring them, and in both England and in France, the Church had been deprived of a significant portion of its historical property.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 014

V. The Stolen Universities

The full measure of the Enlightenment’s fraud becomes clear only when one recognizes what the tradition had actually built.

The universities, those great medieval institutions the Enlightenment captured and claimed as engines of secular reason, were uniformly creations of the Church. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge wer founded under Church auspices, governed by Church authority, staffed by clerics, dedicated to the pursuit of truth understood as ultimately unified in God. The very idea of a university, a community of scholars devoted to preserving, transmitting, and extending knowledge, was a medieval Christian innovation. The Enlightenment did not create these institutions; it invaded them, subverted them, and eventually seized them.

The scientific method itself emerged from Scholastic soil. The insistence on systematic observation, the commitment to logical rigor, the belief that nature is intelligible because it is the product of a rational Creator—these were not Enlightenment innovations but medieval inheritances. Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme: the list of medieval contributors to what would become natural science is long and distinguished. The Enlightenment’s claim to have invented scientific inquiry is not merely exaggerated; it is a lie.

The logical tools that make rigorous argument possible were Scholastic achievements. The Enlightenment produced no logic comparable to the medieval summulae, no analysis of inference and fallacy as sophisticated as that developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Leibniz, the one Enlightenment thinker who made genuine contributions to logic, was saturated in Scholastic learning and knew what he owed to it. The rest simply used the tools they had inherited, often badly, while denigrating the tradition that had forged them.

The hospitals, the charitable institutions, the schools for the poor, the entire infrastructure of social welfare that the Enlightenment would later claim as the fruit of secular humanitarianism, these too were Church creations. The Enlightenment did not build anything, first it appropriated from those who came before, and then it erased the memory of the appropriation.

What occurred was not a legitimate transfer of responsibility but a theft. The thief dressed in the victim’s clothes and claimed to have tailored them himself. And the victim, bewildered by the audacity of the crime, failed to cry out or even complain.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 013

IV. The Tradition’s Failure to Fight

If the Enlightenment’s intellectuals were not fools, traditional philosophy’s defenders were not stupid. Many of them recognized the threat and attempted to respond. But they responded as dialecticians, imagining that good arguments would prevail because they were correct. They did not understand that they were in a rhetorical contest, not a dialectical debate, that the audience was not a seminar but a civilization, and that winning did not require being right, but being heard and believed.

The first failure was accepting the hostile framing. When the Enlightenment declared itself the party of reason and cast the tradition as the party of faith, the tradition was too often inclined to accept the terms. Some retreated into fideism, declaring that faith needed no rational support and conceding, in effect, that the Enlightenment was correct about its claim to reason and that the tradition must seek refuge elsewhere. Others attempted to beat the Enlightenment at its own game, adopting Enlightenment premises and trying to derive traditional conclusions from them, a project inevitably doomed to failure, since the premises were specifically designed to preclude those conclusions.

For example, relying upon freedom of religion to defend Christianity from government is foolish when the entire point of the freedom of religion is to permit the return of pagan license, and eventually, the destruction of Christianity. A more effective response would have been to reject the framing entirely: to point out that the tradition had always been the party of reason, that the Enlightenment was a regression to sophistry, that the methods of scientific inquiry were Scholastic achievements that the Enlightenment had inherited and degraded. This response was rarely, if ever, made.

The second failure was speaking over the heads of the public. The tradition’s arguments were technically sophisticated and expressed in an academic vocabulary developed over centuries for precision and nuance. This vocabulary was inaccessible to the educated layman, who heard it as meaningless jargon, impressive perhaps, but entirely opaque. The Enlightenment, by contrast, wrote for the public: clear prose, memorable phrases, accessible arguments. Voltaire’s quips reached a larger audience than could any Summa. The tradition had truth at its disposal; the Enlightenment had publicity.

The third failure was striking a defensive posture instead of attacking the Enlightenment’s obvious fragilities. The tradition’s posture was consistently reactive. Its defenders respondedto Enlightenment challenges, defended traditional positions, and attempted to shore up what was being undermined. This ceded the initiative entirely. The Enlightenment set the agenda and the tradition dutifully responded to it. But the Enlightenment’s premises were far more vulnerable than the tradition’s. The social contract was a complete fiction. The invisible hand was a metaphor mistaken for a mechanism. Autonomous reason was observably self-refuting. The tradition could have attacked. The Scholastics could have put the Enlightenment on the defensive, demanded justification for its premises, and exposed the gaps between its rhetoric and its substance. This approach was seldom pursued.

The fourth and the most consequential failure was never calling the Enlightenment’s bluff. The Enlightenment claimed the authority of reason, mathematics, and empirical science, but these claims were fraudulent. The Enlightenment’s publicists did not do the math, did not follow the logic, and did not submit any evidence. The tradition could have demanded accountability. But the demand was seldom made, and was never pressed with sufficient force. The philosophers’ bluff was never exposed, and before long, their fraudulent claims became accepted truths and settled science.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 012

III. The Enlightenment’s Rhetorical Strategy

The Enlightenment’s thinkers were not, for the most part, fools. Many were genuinely intelligent, some were mathematically gifted, and a few made genuine contributions to human knowledge. But they were charlatans, and the movement as a whole succeeded through the effectiveness of its propaganda instead of the quality of the arguments it presented.

The first and most consequential rhetorical move was the appropriation of “reason” and “science” as assumed identities. This false appropriation had a precedent. The groundwork was laid four centuries earlier by Petrarch, who invented the ahistorical concept of the Dark Ages by inverting the Christian understanding of history. The traditional view held throughout Christendom was that Jesus Christ is the light of the world, and that His coming had illuminated the darkness of paganism. The Roman world, for all its many achievements, was deemed to have been shrouded in spiritual blindness until the Gospel dispelled the shadows of sin. Petrarch reversed this imagery. For him, the classical Roman world was the light and the civilization of Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca represented the pinnacle of human achievement. The centuries following Rome’s fall were the darkness, not because paganism had not yet been entirely displaced, but because classical learning had been disrupted.

This disruption was real enough; the invasions that ended the Western Empire shattered the infrastructure of civilization and scattered the literary culture that Petrarch idolized. But Petrarch’s framing targeted the wrong culprit. The barbarians who destroyed Roman learning were pagans, for the most part, not Christians, while the monks who preserved what knowledge survived were almost uniformly servants of the Church. Yet in Petrarch’s telling, it was the Christian centuries that were portrayed as the problem, being an interruption and a falling away from the historical standard of human excellence as exemplified by the glory that was Rome.

The Enlightenment inherited and amplified this Italian inversion. What Petrarch had expressed as one man’s literary and aesthetic preference became, in Enlightenment hands, a comprehensive historical narrative. The Dark Ages was expanded to encompass the entire medieval period; the light that had supposedly been extinguished was identified not only with classical style, but with reason itself. The Church, which had preserved classical learning through the monasteries, which had founded the universities, which had developed logic and natural philosophy to heights the Romans never approached, was recast as the agent of darkness, the enemy of inquiry, and the suppressor of knowledge. The narrative was false in almost every particular, as medieval Europe was one of the most intellectually dynamic civilizations in human history, but it served its rhetorical purpose. It made the Enlightenment appear not as one philosophical movement among others, but as the recovery of light after a millennium of darkness, the restoration of reason following an age of superstition.

This rhetorical inversion became a tribal marker. To be for reason and light was to be for the Enlightenment; to oppose the Enlightenment was to be outdated and against reason. These identifications were asserted rather than demonstrated, repeated until they appeared to be self-evident, and relentlessly enforced through social pressure and institutional control.

The inversion was fraudulent. The classical tradition had always employed reason. Indeed, it had developed formal logic to a degree of sophistication never matched by any Enlightenment thinker. The Christian tradition had founded the universities, supported the investigation of nature, produced mathematicians and astronomers and physicians. But fraud, confidently asserted and widely repeated, can override the truth for generations, and sometimes even centuries. The Enlightenment did not earn the mantle of reason; it simply claimed it, and its claim was not effectively contested by its rivals.

The problem was that Aristotelian dialectic was designed to operate within a community of honest inquirers who shared its basic assumptions: that truth exists, that reason can apprehend it, that logical argument is the proper means of resolving disagreement. The Enlightenment rhetoricians shared none of these assumptions in practice, whatever they may have claimed in theory. They understood, as the Sophists had understood two thousand years earlier, that the mass of men are not moved by syllogisms but by appeals to their passions, their vanity, and their self-interest. Voltaire never refuted Aquinas. He mocked him, and that mockery proved far more effective than refutation because it operated on the rhetorical plane where most human persuasion actually occurs.

The second rhetorical move was the strategic use of “evidence” and “empiricism” as gestures rather than disciplines. The Enlightenment talked constantly of evidence, of observation, of testing ideas against experience. But this talk was largely decorative. The core Enlightenment commitments—the social contract, the invisible hand, the perfectibility of man, the inevitability of progress—were not derived from evidence and were not surrendered when evidence contradicted them. They were philosophical postures, immune to empirical refutation, defended by the same appeals to authority and tradition that the Enlightenment officially despised.

The Scholastic method had no defense against an opponent who refused to engage on Scholastic terms, who bypassed the dialectical arena entirely and went straight to the unlettered masses. By the time the tradition recognized what was happening, its institutional foundations in the universities and the Church had already been hollowed out, and the abstract Platonic idealism it had once held in check had returned in secular dress, more powerful and more destructive than ever.

When mathematicians at the Wistar Institute demonstrated that the Modern Synthesis could not account for observed genetic variation, the biologists did not revise their theory; they ignored the mathematicians. When economists proved that market demand curves do not behave as Smith assumed, the economics profession did not abandon supply and demand; they continued teaching it. The pattern is consistent: “evidence” and “reason” are invoked as legitimating rhetoric, but the actual conclusions are determined by other factors—institutional inertia, career incentives, ideological commitment—and the evidence is interpreted, or ignored, accordingly.

The third rhetorical move was the reframing of the debate as “faith versus reason” or “religion versus science.” This framing was tactically brilliant and substantively false. The Christian tradition had never opposed faith to reason; it had always understood faith as complementing and completing reason, by providing access to truths that reason alone could not reach but that reason could one day hope to subsequently explore and articulate. The great Scholastics were not enemies of rational inquiry; they were its most rigorous practitioners. But this false dichotomy served the Enlightenment’s purposes as it forced the tradition onto defensive ground, portrayed every defense of revealed truth as an attack on reason, and obscured the fact that the Enlightenment’s own premises were matters of unsubstantiated faith and groundless assumptions that would inevitably prove to be false over time.

The fourth rhetorical move was institutional capture. The philosophes understood that ideas propagate through institutions: universities, academies, salons, journals, publishing houses. Control the institutions, and you control the formation of the next generation. The Enlightenment pursued this strategy with patience and persistence. Chairs were endowed, curricula were shaped, journals were founded, academies were captured or created. By the nineteenth century, the infrastructure of intellectual respectability was almost entirely in Enlightenment hands. To dissent was to be excluded—not refuted, simply excluded, denied publication, denied respectability, and denied an audience.

As noted in the previous section, this capture was enabled by the usury revolution. Ideas require patrons; patrons require capital; capital, after the legitimization of usury and the creation of central banking, could be generated almost without limit by those who controlled the mechanisms of credit. The tradition operated on real savings, actual production, and honest money. Its opponents had discovered leverage, deficit spending, and the long game that patient capital makes possible. The rhetorical victory was underwritten by a financial revolution that gave the Enlightenment vast resources that the traditionalists could not hope to match.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 011

II. Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Ancient Distinction

The distinction between dialectic and rhetoric is as old as philosophy itself. Plato, in his dialogues, repeatedly warned of the danger posed by rhetoric unmoored from truth. The Sophists of fifth-century Athens claimed to teach virtue but in fact taught persuasion, the art of making the weaker argument appear the stronger, of winning debates regardless of where truth lay. Socrates opposed them, not because persuasion is inherently wrong but because persuasion divorced from truth is manipulation, and manipulation degrades both the manipulator and the manipulated.

Aristotle, more systematic than his teacher, distinguished the two arts precisely. Dialectic is the method of reasoned inquiry, proceeding through premises to conclusions, testing propositions against logic and evidence, aiming at truth. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, analyzing audiences and occasions, selecting appeals that will move hearers, aiming at assent through emotional manipulation. Aristotle did not condemn rhetoric, indeed, he literally defined and categorized it, but he understood that rhetoric without dialectical grounding becomes sophistry that is effective, morally empty, and ultimately destructive.

It is worth noting that the Enlightenment did not arise in opposition to Plato and his warnings about rhetoric. It arose, in a very real sense, from Plato’s philosophy. The theory of Forms, with its insistence that ultimate reality is abstract and immaterial, that the visible world is mere shadow, planted a seed that bore strange fruit once Christian Aristotelianism lost its grip on Western intellectual life. The Enlightenment philosophers, from Descartes onward, retained Plato’s conviction that pure reason operating on abstract principles could arrive at truth independent of experience and tradition. They simply replaced his Forms with their own abstractions: natural rights, the social contract, the general will, the invisible hand. These concepts functioned exactly as Platonic Forms had functioned, as idealized entities that were held to be more real than the messy particulars of actual human life, and against which existing institutions could be measured and found wanting.

The Aristotelian tradition, grounded in observation, experience, and the careful accumulation of particular knowledge, should have been the natural bulwark against this rationalist overreach. That it failed to serve as one is the great intellectual catastrophe of the modern era. The Scholastic method was intensely dialectical: proposing questions, marshaling objections, articulating responses, proceeding through careful distinctions toward conclusions that could withstand scrutiny. The great Summae were not works of persuasion but of demonstration. They assumed an audience committed to truth, willing to follow the arguments wherever they led, and prepared to abandon positions that could not survive logical examination.

This assumption was the tradition’s great strength and its fatal weakness. It was a strength because it produced genuine philosophical progress through the refinement of ideas, the resolution of difficulties, and the accumulation of insight across centuries. It was a weakness because it left those responsible for passing on the tradition entirely unprepared for opponents who were not committed to truth, who understood that most men are moved by passion instead of reason, and who were willing to ruthlessly exploit that understanding for the benefit of their false philosophy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 010

PART TWO: THE DEFEAT OF THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION

I. Introduction: The Nature of the Defeat

The Enlightenment did not defeat traditional Christian philosophy. It displaced it.

This distinction is essential. A defeat implies that the arguments were met, weighed, and found wanting, that the tradition’s premises were examined and refuted, its conclusions tested and falsified, its framework tried and discarded on the merits. None of this ever took place. The great questions that the Scholastics had labored over for centuries were not answered by the Enlightenment; they were simply dismissed as relics of a benighted age, unworthy of serious engagement, and set aside.

The transition from the medieval to the modern via the Renaissance was not a philosophical victory but a rhetorical one. The Enlightenment captured the vocabulary of reason, science, and progress, and used that vocabulary to frame the debate in terms favorable to itself. The tradition was cast as “faith” opposing “reason,” as “superstition” opposing “science,” as “authority” opposing “freedom.” These dichotomies were observably false, as the tradition had always employed reason, had built the very institutions of scientific inquiry, and had developed logical tools more sophisticated than anything the Enlightenment produced, but the rhetorical framing proved to be more convincing than the relevant facts.

Understanding how dialectic lost to rhetoric is not merely an exercise in intellectual history, however. It is a necessary condition for reversing the defeat and replacing the failed ideas of the Enlightenment. The tradition’s ideas were not refuted; they were outmaneuvered. What was lost through rhetorical failure can be regained through rhetorical success, provided the rhetoric is grounded firmly in the dialectical substance that the Enlightenment always lacked.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 009

X. Transition: The Present Void

The Enlightenment is dead. Its premises have been tested and found wanting. Its political philosophy produced tyranny in the name of freedom, oligarchy in the name of democracy, censorship in the name of liberty. Its economics produced models that do not describe reality and policies that impoverish those they claimed to enrich. Its science produced institutions incapable of correcting their own errors and a theory of life that cannot survive contact with basic arithmetic. Its epistemology consumed itself, beginning with the enthronement of reason and ending with reason’s abdication.

And yet nothing has taken its place.

The modern educated person, the heir of the Enlightenment, the product of its institutions, and speaker of its language, now finds himself in an uncomfortable position. He cannot return to the pre-Enlightenment world; too much has changed, too much has been learned, too many of the old certainties have been genuinely superseded. But he cannot remain in the Enlightenment world either, for that world has been exposed as built on sand. He is suspended between a past he cannot recover and a present he cannot believe.

This suspension is not sustainable. Human beings require coherent frameworks for understanding reality, grounding morality, and orienting action. The borrowed capital of Christendom, upon which the Enlightenment drew even as it denied the debt, has been spent. The contradictions can no longer be papered over. Something must replace what has failed.

But what will replace it. What can replace it.?

The pre-Enlightenment philosophical tradition was Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Christian, avoided the pathologies that have undone modernity. It understood reason as participatory rather than autonomous, as a faculty for apprehending truth rather than constructing it. It grounded rights in the nature of things rather than in social contracts that no one signed. It integrated fact and value, knowledge and goodness, in a unified vision of reality ordered toward transcendent ends. It did not make the errors that the Enlightenment made, and therefore it did not create the series of self-inflicted catastrophes that the Enlightenment has inevitably caused the men of the West to suffer.

But the classical tradition, as it existed before the Enlightenment, is not sufficient for the present need. It was formulated to address questions that were live in the thirteenth century; since then it has ossified and has not been adequately developed to address the questions that challenge Man today. It failed to seriously resist the rise of the Enlightenment, in part due to the false promises of the Enlightenment, in part because it had grown rigid, defensive, and backward-looking, more concerned with preserving past formulations than with pursuing present truth. A tradition that neglects to evolve to meet present and future challenges is a tradition that is unlikely to endure.

What is needed is neither a return to the pre-modern tradition or modern philosophies, but something new: a philosophical framework that recovers the structure and coherence of traditional thought while incorporating what has been genuinely learned in recent centuries, an intellectual structure that avoids the errors of the Enlightenment without ignoring the challenges it raised, a conceptual architecture that not only offers a critique of what has failed but provides a positive vision for what actually works to build successful societies and a healthy, thriving civilization.

The outline of this framework begins to take shape in what follows in Part Two: The Defeat of the Western Philosophical Tradition.

DISCUSS ON SG

Veriphysics: The Treatise 008

IX. The Inevitable Self-Corruption

The deepest failure of the Enlightenment was not in politics or economics or science. It was in the very premise from which all else followed: the autonomy of reason.

Reason was to be self-grounding, answerable to no external authority. But reason cannot ground itself. Every attempt to provide a rational foundation for reason either assumes what it seeks to prove or regresses infinitely. The Enlightenment’s greatest minds recognized this problem and attempted to solve it, but their solutions have not survived either scrutiny or the experience borne of the passage of time.

Descartes sought certainty in the thinking self, but the existence of the self is precisely what requires demonstration; the cogito is an assumption, not a proof. Hume, being slightly more honest, admitted that reason could establish nothing beyond immediate impressions and the custom of conjunction; causation itself was a habit of mind, not a feature of reality. Kant attempted to rescue reason by distinguishing the phenomenal from the noumenal and confining knowledge to the realm of appearances, but this concession was fatal, because it amounted to an admission that reason could never directly touch reality itself.

The subsequent centuries have traced the consequences of this admission. If reason cannot reach reality, then reason is not discovering truth, it is constructing a variant of it. The positivists of the early twentieth century attempted to restrict knowledge to empirically verifiable propositions, but their criterion of verifiability was itself unverifiable. They constructed a self-refuting standard. The postmodernists of the late twentieth century finally admitted the inevitable result of Enlightenment philosophy: truth is a construction, a social product, an artifact defined by those with the power to enforce it. What counts as knowledge is what the powerful have decided to call knowledge. Reality is what those in authority define it to be. Reason is not a tool for discovering reality; it is merely a weapon in the struggle for dominance.

This is why the scientific authorities can declare that evolution by natural selection is a scientific fact. This is why the government authorities can declare that a married couple is divorced and that a man is truly a woman. In the postmodern world, there is no objective truth or objective reality, literally everything is subjective and capable of being redefined at any moment. War is Peace, Love is Hate, Free Association is Racism, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

This Orwellian world is not a corruption of the Enlightenment; it is its idealistic completion. If reason is autonomous and answerable to nothing beyond itself, then reason is also groundless. And groundless reason is not reason at all, but sheer will dressed in rational costume. Nietzsche saw this more clearly than anyone: he understood that in Enlightened terms, the will to truth was only a form of the will to power, and those who claimed to serve truth were only serving themselves while wearing a more flattering mask.

The Enlightenment began by enthroning reason and ended by destroying it. The progression from Descartes to Derrida is not a decline or a betrayal, but the logical and inevitable path. Each generation discovered that the previous generation’s stopping point was arbitrary, that the foundations assumed were not foundations at all, that the certainties proclaimed were merely conventions. The Enlightenment’s acid dissolved not only tradition and revelation but eventually reason itself.

The modern West now lives among the ruins. The vocabulary of the Enlightenment persists, and men pay homage to its rights, progress, science, reason, freedom, but the very meanings of those words have been hollowed out entirely. No one can say what a human right is grounded in, or why progress is desirable, or how science differs from ideology, or what reason can legitimately claim, or where freedom ends and license begins. These concepts are invoked ritually, habitually, but they no longer make sense nor command belief. They are just antique furniture sitting in a ruined house whose foundations have collapsed.

DISCUSS ON SG

Ricardo’s Deliberate Deception

I recently had the privilege of assisting one of the world’s greatest economists in his detective work that comprehensively completes the great work of demolishing the conceptual foundation of the free trade cancer that, far from enriching them, has destroyed the economies of the West. The subsequent paper, The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage, was published today by the lead author, Steve Keen. And while it’s a pure coincidence that he happened to notice Ricardo’s textual amphiboly at about the same time that I noticed Kimura’s algebraic amphiboly, I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that two intellectual fixtures of modernity should prove to be constructed on such fundamentally flawed foundations.

Abstract
Ricardo’s arithmetical example of the gains from trade considers only the transfer of labour between industries, and ignores the need to transfer physical capital as well. He discusses the transfer of capital in the subsequent paragraph in Principles, but uses a textual amphiboly: whereas exploiting comparative advantage involves transferring resources from one industry to another in the same country, Ricardo speaks instead of the transfer of resources “from one province to another”. The fact that this verbal deception has escaped attention for over two centuries is in itself notable. When considered in the light of subsequent discussions of capital immobility by Ricardo, this implies that the person whose model led to the allocation of existing resources becoming the foundation of economic analysis, was aware that this foundation was fallacious.

Introduction
The theory of comparative advantage is perhaps the most influential and celebrated result in economics. Challenged by a mathematician to nominate an economic concept that was both “logically true” and “non-obvious”, Samuelson nominated the theory of comparative advantage:

That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.(Samuelson 1969, pp. 1-11)

From Ricardo’s original demonstration in 1817, to modern trade theory, the conclusion has remained constant: even if one nation is more efficient at producing everything than all others, it and its trading partners will gain from specialization and trade.

However, there is an obvious flaw in the logic: while labor can hypothetically be moved between industries at will, fixed capital cannot. Ricardo’s own text contains evidence that he knew that this reality invalidated his theory, since his defense of comparative advantage relied on an amphiboly that conflates two categorically different forms of capital mobility. Remarkably, though this evidence was hiding in plain sight, it has not been noted until now.

The Amphiboly: Province Versus Industry

In Chapter VII of the Principles, Ricardo presents his famous example of England and Portugal trading cloth and wine. Portugal has an absolute advantage in both goods but a comparative advantage in wine; England has a comparative advantage in cloth. Gains to both countries result from specialization according to comparative advantage. Portugal ceases cloth production and England ceases wine production, both countries focus their resources on the industries where they have a comparative advantage, and total output of both cloth and wine rises:

England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth. To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England. Though she could make the cloth with the labour of 90 men, she would import it from a country where it required the labour of 100 men to produce it, because it would be advantageous to her rather to employ her capital in the production of wine, for which she would obtain more cloth from England, than she could produce by diverting a portion of her capital from the cultivation of vines to the manufacture of cloth. (Ricardo, Sraffa, and Dobb 1951, p. 135)

Ricardo next explains that international trade means that “England would give the produce of the labour of 100 men, for the produce of the labour of 80”, something which is not sensible with domestic trade. He then states that:

The difference in this respect, between a single country and many, is easily accounted for, by considering the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another, to seek a more profitable employment, and the activity with which it invariably passes from one province to another in the same country. (Ricardo, Sraffa, and Dobb 1951, p. 136. Emphasis added)

“Province”? Why does Ricardo give the example of moving capital between provinces here? His model involves something categorically different: to exploit comparative advantage, capital must move between industries—from cloth production to wine production.

This is not a minor distinction. Geographic mobility of financial capital means that financial resources can flow to wherever returns are highest—a bank in London can lend to a manufacturer in Yorkshire. Geographic mobility of physical capital means moving equipment by road or canal, rather than by sea and ship. But sectoral mobility of physical capital means that the physical means of production in one industry can become the physical means of production in another—that looms can become wine presses, and vice versa. These are entirely different forms of mobility—one feasible, the other impossible.

Ricardo elsewhere in the Principles demonstrates his awareness of the distinction between physical and financial capital, and the fallacy inherent in treating physical capital as if it has the fungible characteristics of financial capital. In Chapter IV, “On Natural and Market Price,” he explains how the profit rate equalizes across industries: “the clothier does not remove with his capital to the silk trade” (Ricardo, Sraffa, and Dobb 1951, p. 89). Adjustment happens through the financial system, not through physical transformation of productive equipment. Only money moves between industries, and only relative prices change; the looms and the wine presses stay where and as they are.

Read the whole thing on Steve Keen’s site.

DISCUSS ON SG