"Wittgenstein's Vienna:" When a Ruling Class is Losing It

Do we care about Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, which is all about putting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work in the context of the fin de siècle Vienna in which he grew up?

Well, I do, for several reasons. First, I am interested in the decline and fall of a ruling class, and what it looks like. Second, I am interested in better understanding the context of Wittgenstein's philosophy and thought. Third, I am interested in the cultural clash between the feudal-era Hapsburgs, the 19th century Viennese bourgeoisie, and the creative class chappies from Karl Kraus the journalist, Adolf Loos the architect, Arnold Schönberg the composer and, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein the rich-kid philosopher and dropout. Fourth, I want to believe that our current ruling class is as clueless and myopic as the ruling clique in Hapsburg Vienna.

Decline and Fall of a Ruling Class: The Habsburgs were perhaps the most successful ruling class in history. Habsburg Castle was built in 1020, and Habsburgs were heads of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to 1740 and produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Galicia-Lodomeria. At the end of the 19th century the emperor Franz Joseph I ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Vienna. You can imagine that all the lefty rich kids chattering in the cafés of Vienna absolutely hated this tottering remnant of feudalism into the modern era.

The Habsburgs ruled on the basis of Hausmacht which translates as house-power, and I interpret as governing to preserve and protect the power of the House of Habsburg. That is to say, everything that Franz Joseph did was an act to keep the Habsburg thing going. And so it did, until the defeat in 1918. Hey, it worked, keeping the ancient family in power until World War I swept the old order away.

Philosophical Context: Philosophically, I am a Kantian: I believe that we humans cannot know "things-in-themselves," only "appearances." Put crudely, I think that we cannot know the real reality, whatever it is -- if it is. Between things-in-themselves and appearances are all the theories and assumptions and science and philosophy that flesh is heir to and that we have such a grand old time arguing about.

Now Wittgenstein grew up in the era when all the science that we now take for granted was being proposed and argued about. For instance, Heinrich Hertz  was developing a "model" theory of science and Ludwig Boltzmann was developing the idea of statistical mechanics that is now the core of quantum mechanics.

Then there was Ernst Mach who proposed to reduce "all knowledge to sensation;" so "the world is that sum total of what appears to the senses." 

Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics proposed a "model" theory of science, that tests of "a representation of mechanical phenomena are logical consistency, correspondence with empirical data, and simplicity or elegance of presentation." Wittgenstein used Principles in his university studies.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics is too complicated to discuss here, except to note that Max Planck picked up on it.

In this way, one could eliminate finally all subjective references, to "sensations of warmth" and the like, which lingered on in Machian accounts of heat theory and replace them with rigorous mathematical descriptions.

Needless to say, Wittgenstein was a Hertzian and a Boltzmannian, not a Machian.

Cultural Clash: Let us propose the following clashing cultures: the feudal Habsburg monarchy, the various nationalities in the Habsburg empire, the rising bourgeoisie, the rising industrial workers, the Jews, the rising intelligentsia. The Habsburgs were trying to manage all this to stay in power; the nationalities were each agitating to advance their separate national interest; the bourgeoisie was creating wealth and prosperity in the new industrial era, and building ornate houses to reflect their satisfaction; the new working class was having problems because of a severe housing shortage in Vienna; the Jews were shooting into the stratosphere after centuries in the ghetto; the creative intelligentsia was fit to be tied by the insult of Habsburg power, the mindlessness of the rich bourgeoisie that thought that just copying the fashionable taste was the way to organize life, and the need to create the world anew.

Wittgenstein's family history is canonical. His father, Karl, rebelled against his father, wanting to get a technical education, which his father considered beneath his status as a "gentleman." So Karl want off to America, and went to technical school on his return.

Over the next twenty years the financial world of Vienna witnessed the meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. He had an extraordinary capacity for utilizing his technical knowledge to transform failing factories into booming and productive enterprises.

But this immensely creative man -- he took his violin everywhere and just about everyone in the family was a talented musician -- would not allow his children to go their own way, Elder brother Hans wanted to be a musician; dad said no, and eventually Hans committed suicide. "His second son, Rudi, committed suicide in similar circumstances[.]"

Karl Wittgenstein had all his kids educated at home by tutors. But this meant that Ludwig could not go to a Gymnasium, because he didn't know Greek. So he went to Realschule and then engineering school (like Einstein) where he read, learned, and inwardly digested The Principles of Mechanics of Heinrich Hertz.

And of course, there was the intellectual culture of chaps like Kraus, Loos, and Schönberg.

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Notice the compulsion to épater la bourgeoisie. And note how the young sprouts of Vienna represent an emerging creative class desperate to break out of their embarrassing bourgeois origins and streak across the sky as creative gods of creation.

Myopia of Our Ruling Class: Steve Sailer has a piece on "The Future of Floydism" where he ponders what on earth our ruling class thinks it is doing with the "the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren." Hey, writes, Sailer, gun murders are up by 34.4% in the year After Floyd. And we don't know what proportion of the murderers were blacks. Not yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

But is it all a conspiracy to screw us all over, a Macchiavellian plot by the Ruling Class? Sailer thinks not.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.” 

Maybe that's a good thing; maybe our ruling class doesn't have enough of a culture of Hausmacht to guide it in maintaining its power. Maybe its determination to get rid of Trump at all costs was not such a good idea. Maybe making liberal urbanist urban dwellers less safe will not end well for the rulers.

Of course, I would rather not have our ruling class exit stage left like the Habsburgs after losing a World War. That might not be too much fun. 

I have in mind that one day soon some Trump or DeSantis will get up and, like Cromwell tell our ruling class: 

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

And, like the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls they are, our ruling class will do just that. 

"Equality Never Hurt Anyone"

When COVID shut down the gym last year I had to figure out: how does a 74-year-old keep exercising and stay healthy? The answer was to take a 45-minute walk up to the top of Phinney Ridge here in north Seattle, go down the other side and then climb the hill again. And let me tell you, after the second hill I am really panting and breathing to the depths of my ageing lungs.

Part of the walk involves walking north along the street with the best views -- and the most expensive houses -- at the top of Phinney Ridge. I won't say that the houses along the street have more than their share of Black Lives Matter and #AWeBelieve and Be the One yard signs, but they certainly display their share.

But one house in particular seems to have gone the extra mile. As well as BLM signs in the window, it has a hand-painted "Black Lives Matter If Not Now When" sign and a "Equality Never Hurt Anyone" sign that sports a BLM clenched-fist logo. On top of that the house sports a RV trailer parked partially on the sidewalk planting strip.

Last Saturday was "Garage Sale Day" and as I came up to the BLM house I noticed an older man putting out stuff to sell on a table in the middle of the sidewalk (since the planting strip was already blocked with the RV trailer).

And sitting on a bench was a thirtyish man with the usual wokey beard. I asked the young man if he was the author of the racist signs, and he retorted that there was nothing racist about "equality."

I then spewed my fancy-pants argument from Hegel that "the thing is the same as its opposite." Thus, racism, anti-racism: both indicate an obsession with race. I ended by recommending that he get out and read his Hegel.

Well, maybe, in l'esprit d'escalier I should have suggested that in the interests of equality he should sell the fancy-pants house at the top of the hill and buy an equivalent one at the bottom of the hill and give the difference to Black Lives that Matter.

And I could have mentioned that it is really curious that right alongside his innocent slogan is a clenched fist, suggesting ever so innocently that unless we get Equality real soon a little fisticuffs might be in order.

But really, the point is that, as Jordan B. Peterson pointed out in his lobster story, all animals, even primitive animals like lobsters, do hierarchy. And the point of hierarchy is to reduce violence, reduce the number of occasions when hierarchy is established or re-established by force. Why? Because violence is expensive and costs lives.

In other words, if you have Equality then the next thing that happens is that the males will start a fight to reestablish a hierarchy.

And whatabout elections? An election is all about which politician and which political party shall be first and have power to tax people and spend money on people. How does Equality fit in with that? Where do the losers go to get their Equality back?

And so on.

Sometimes I think that the left is driving us all into a cruel and merciless one-party state. But then I also think that their current hysteria is really an unconscious realization that their whole project has gone wrong and is heading into the ditch.

Which is it? I dunno. Probably a bit of both.

The Juilliard Raciss Meltdown

The Juilliard School is, obviously, part of the ruling class. When you get a school, founded in 1905, devoted to academizing and bureaucratizing the performing arts -- music, dance, and drama -- to inject a steady stream of highly-trained professionals into the non-profit performing arts, well, it has to be part of the ruling class, holding up a mirror for the ruling class to admire itself.

And now the Juilliard School has got itself tangled, hook, line, and sinker, in the race wars.

See, according to the incomparable Heather Mac Donald at City Journal in "The Revolution Comes to Juilliard School," the Drama[!] Division is convulsed in race activism. See, the Drama Division is 50 percent black, and it looks like they are all "trained Marxists" from Black Lives Matter.

Now, according to Data USA, the Juilliard School in 2019 was 34.5% white, 11.9% Asian, and 6.25% black. So, if the Drama Division is 50% black...

See, back in June 2020, right after George Floyd Day, the students got up a petition, a Call To Action.

The Call to Action charged Juilliard with “systemic injustice.” It demanded an end to the school’s “almost completely Eurocentric” faculty, curriculum, and performances and a “complete in-person season featuring the works of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] artists.” It called on Juilliard to create #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd scholarships in music, drama, and dance.

But get this. In the Drama Division things are much worse.

Its “racist environment is hazardous to BIPOC students’ bodies,” the letter charged. “Some students are silenced, broken, and limited by racism within the Drama Division . . . [They] have to endure harm and violence [and] sacrifice their physical and mental health every day in this institution.”

I suppose you could say that liberals had this coming. It is like the story of the submarine firing a homing torpedo that circles back and blows up the submarine that launched it.

Here are the things that, to me, are tragically comical about all this. If there is such a thing.

"Silenced, broken... mental health" Hello, honey! The whole point of the performing arts is that it is a brutal animalistic survival of the fittest and the best and brightest. Many are called, but few are chosen. Most likely, very few of the students in the Drama Division will go on to get a professional career after graduation. If you don't have the steel balls or intestinal fortitude to rise above your fears and hesitations, if you don't have the courage to confront your weaknesses, if you don't have the single-minded determination to succeed at all costs, if you aren't bat-shit crazy, then this performing arts world is not for you. Honey.

"Almost completely Eurocentric" Well, yeah! The whole point of the "arts" is that it is an expression of the highest and most exotic and most fancy-pants stuff imaginable. That means that the "arts" is going to be almost completely European high art, Hindu high art, Mughal high art, and Chinese high art. Everyone else need not apply. At least, not yet. My primary interest in the arts is with Drama and Music. I'm really interested in Shakespeare, and I'll watch an August Wilson play out of his "Pittsburgh Cycle." I really like Tom Stoppard, but frankly you can take your average lefty drivel and put it where the sun don't shine. Why? Because lefty playwrights and lefty directors are recycling dead-as-a-doornail memes from the last 200 years that have nothing to do with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Only 11.9 percent Asian? I would expect the Music Division to be 75% Asian, because Tiger Moms. Unless, of course, there is racial discrimination going on. And I expect that the 50% blacks in the Drama Division are deeply conscious that they are mere flotsam and jetsam compared to the Tiger-Mommed kids in the Music Division.

See, back in the day, half a century ago and more, when I was a teenager, I understood that I was not going to go to Oxford or Cambridge for university. Because I wasn't brilliant, I wasn't a top-tier student, I wasn't driven, I just didn't care that much about dominating the world.

And one thing I would have understood perfectly would have been that, as a pretty desultory music student -- I had studied piano until my early teens -- I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting into a top-notch music school. By the way, I notice that all the music schools today are careful to notice how they are really into jazz and pop and electronic music.

But see, notice how the music schools are basically conservative. Jazz? None of the jazz greats went to music school. They learned it on the streets and from fellow musicians. Pop? The pop music greats didn't go to swank music schools. They figured it out on their own; that is the meaning of "garage band."

That's why they call music schools "conservatories." Because they are in the business of conserving the arts. Until some fool comes along and destroys the whole edifice, because "mental health" or "Eurocentric." And when some cool new art comes along, out of the street, then in the next generation the sons and daughters of the ruling class want in, because "coolness."

Roger Scruton on Life, the Universe, and Everything

Back in 2014 the recently departed Roger Scruton published The Soul of the World. The book is about God and the two basic facts of life: "the nature of reality" and "how we should live." The point is that you may know everything about the nature of reality but the knowledge tells you nothing about how you should live.

Our current atheist educated class teaches us that science tells us how we should live. But the Islamists have another approach, that "originates in a need for sacrifice and obedience." They

believe that they are called to sacrifice themselves on Allah's behalf, and that their lives will acquire a meaning when thrown away for Allah's sake.(p.1)

And not just Islamists.

The desire for sacrifice is rooted deep in all of us, and it is called upon not only by religious but also by secular communities, especially in times of emergency and war.

Scruton calls this "cognitive dualism," that the world can be understood in two ways, "the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding." The natural world and the "lifeworld," or Lebenswelt for us intellectual snobs.

But then Scruton divides the lifeworld into two. There is the Order of the Covenant, of which the best known is the covenant between God and the Jews,

a binding agreement, in which God commands obedience only by putting himself under obligations toward those whom he commands.(p.78)

But then there is the Order of Creation, "another world beyond our daily negotiations." This is

another order, where being and nothingness, creation and destruction, wrestle together with no fixed result.(p.177)

This, says Scruton, is the world of sacrifice, of giving and forgiveness. In the Order of the Covenant, nobody has a right to forgiveness, only "to honor his obligations and receive his rights." But in the Order of Creation,

Forgiveness comes, when it comes, as a gift... It is a moment of mutual recognition, when who people lay down their resentment in an exchange of gifts.(p.182)

(Is this why women have such a culture of "gifting?")

Now comes the heavy stuff.

The experience of the sacred is the revelation, in the midst of everyday things, of another order, in which creation and destruction are the ruling principles. the great junctures of life are precisely those in which this order shines through, so that deals lose their meaning and vows come in their place.(p.183)

And so to the junctures, each in turn:

New life is a gift from the place where things are created and destroyed for no merely human reason. Birth is therefore marked by rituals of acceptance and gratitude...

Sexual love is the moment in which two people make a gift of themselves, and also prepare themselves for the sacrifices required by family and the love of children.

Death is the moment when the gift of life is surrendered and the funeral is the recognition in retrospect of the gift[.](p.183)

Community and its web of deals, its Order of the Covenant, cannot long endure without people making the gift of the sacrifice of themselves, in renouncing resentment and vengeance, and even making the ultimate gift, the sacrifice of life. Thus the need for rituals that extol the sanctity of sacrifice.

And in the end, God, the eternal question: "why?"

It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the Order of Creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die... In the faithful frame of mind we are aware that being is not simply a fact but also a gift, and aware that gifts have reasons. And the response of faith is to recognize that we too must give.(p.191)

And so, Scruton argues, we create a "space at the edge of reason, where faith can take root and grow."

Faith looks beyond nature, asking itself what is required of me by way of thanks for this gift.. It is open to God, and actively involved in the process of making room for him.(p.192)

And what does that mean, you ask?

It's a good question. I'll think about it. 

Abolish Cops and Billionaires? Oh Please!

I was walking around Green Lake in super-liberal North Seattle, and noticed a "tag" on the path. It said: "ABOLISH COPS & Billionaires." Oh, and "Defund / SPD / ^^ / (100%)."

 

Aren't they special, those highly intelligent AntiFa types!

Because that slogan encapsulates exactly what we should not do.

COPS: Imagine no policemen / It isn't hard to do. But what would it mean?

Why does a society create a police force? The answer is that if you don't have a police force then people will enforce the peace with vigilante groups and gangs -- where the gangs could be criminal gangs or clan enforcers. Oh, and lynching. 

OMG! I can't even! Yes did you know that back in the day, whites were lynched as well as blacks. You didn't?  OMG! Like, Whatever! Sure, blacks were lynched more than 3 to 1 over whites. But still! OMG! Here are the numbers on lynchings from The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. If you want more details the original table breaks the numbers out by states.

US Lynchings: 1882-1968

White	Black	Total
1,297	3,446	4,743

To give you a flavor of what a world without cops means, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali in on "Tribalism has come to the West."

Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

See what I mean? To the pre-urban human, you only get protection from the people related to you by blood, your kindred. Or we would say, your clan, your tribe, your ethnic group. And the idea that there is any other way is laughable.

The whole point of a police force is to take the maintenance of the peace away from warring kindred groups -- or in US cities ethnic gangs -- and give the job to boring bureaucrats. Or Mr. Plod, as they say in Britland.

So, if you turn the clock back, and "ABOLISH COPS" then you are going to find that the maintenance of law and order will devolve upon the enforcement arms of other groups. Actually, we already know how this works, because in many US lower-class urban neighborhoods the police hardly dare police; the local ethnic gang is the de facto government and police force. This is clearly happening in so-called "no go" areas where Muslim immigrants live in cities like Paris and Stockholm. It also occurs in US cities where the citizens are afraid to testify in court -- because intimidation from gangbangers.

The point is simple. One way or another, somehow, someone will enforce the peace and go after peace-breakers. And one way or another those peace-breakers will be the kind of lawless young men that our liberal friends have recently canonized: the George Floyds of the world, the kind of guys that Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime's failed experiments." And you aren't going to like the rough justice of gangs and lynch mobs, you nice liberal ladies.

BILLIONAIRES: Imagine there's no billionaires / You can do it if you try. But what would it mean?

It would mean that nobody was creating businesses that made a really significant improvement over the status quo. You know the stand-out guys of the last 200 years. The chap that invented the steam engine used to pump out the mines in Cornwall. The chaps that invented steam railway locomotives. The guy that turned the Bessemer process for making steel into a mega-business, mining coal and iron ore and then transporting them to the smelters to make steel. The chap that invented the modern business of refining and distributing illuminating oil for lamps. The guys that systematized the manufacture of automobiles. The guys that invented and manufactured electric generating equipment and electric motors. The guy that paid $50,000 for an operating system that he modified and sold to IBM to power its IBM PCs. And so on.

These millionaires and then billionaires made staggering fortunes not because they "accumulated" wealth from the surplus labor of workers but because they created businesses that utterly changed the world for consumers. And the consumers flocked to buy their products and the workers flocked to work for the billionaires.

We know what happens when you ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES. You get the Soviet Union, in which millions died in a government-induced famine, and millions were sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. You get Mao's China, in which about 30 million died in a famine when Mao decided that the farmers were going to make steel out in mini-furnaces in the countryside.

And when you decide to allow billionaires again then your economy revives a bit, as in today's capitalist -- but KGB-ruled -- Russia. Or it takes off, like in capitalist -- but Communist-ruled -- China.

Now, the real question is: how do AntiFa twerps come to believe the twerpish things they believe? How can they believe five impossible things before breakfast, and imagine that there were no policemen. And no billionaires? And not know that that would be a really bad idea?

But that is a topic for another day.

The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.

Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.