QUORA: Is spirituality for losers?

Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3] Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.

A recent QUORA submission asked, Is spirituality for losers?

I left this answer:

Is spirituality for losers? Only for those who want to deny their own humanity.

The human spirit is the non-material part of a person. It is your consciousness; your capacity to observe and understand the world, direct your actions through choice of values and rational thought, experience emotions, develop moral character, form evaluations of others (admiration, disappointment, etc.), store and retrieve memories, and so on. Spirituality is the act of using one’s non-material capacities in service to one’s life.

The problem is that religion has hijacked the concept of spirituality, redefining it as some kind of alien body-snatcher that descends from another allegedly supernatural dimension to take over an otherwise soulless body—to return to that other world after death. Consequently, religionists have convinced us of the myth that spirituality equates to religiosity, and is somehow separate from the real world. I think this concept of spirituality is what the questioner has in mind.

I reject that otherworldly concept of spirituality. Your spirit is not an alien invader. Spirituality is an integral part of your humanity—as indispensable and real to your life as your body. You may use your spirit to its fullest, or not. But to live, you must use it—be spiritual—to some extent. Though non-material in nature, spirituality is as real as your bodily organs, including the physical senses that transmit perceptual material to your brain, which then through logic and reason integrates the data into knowledge. Human life is an integration of body and spirit—of the material and the spiritual. There is no dichotomy there. Transforming an idea into an invention is an integration of the spiritual and the material. Applying your knowledge and skills into a paying job is that. Transforming the desire for companionship into a romantic relationship or friendship is that. Transforming an answer to this question into the written word is that. Adopting a philosophy—religious or secular, supernaturalist or real world-based—and applying its principles to the governance of one's life, is that. Both spirit and body come into existence together; develop together, largely according to our own choices; and go out of existence together at death.

Spirituality, properly understood as the full use of one’s mind in service to one’s life, is not for losers. It is essential to making one’s life—as far as we know, the only life any of us will ever have—the best and most flourishing it can be.

Related Reading:

Is Religion Responsible for ‘Fulfilling Family Lives’?

Reclaiming Spirituality for Lovers of Life—Craig Biddle

Consciousness—Ayn Rand Lexicon

Finally, Some Positive Recognition for the Statists' Favorite Whipping Boy, Wall Street

Donald Trump has been telling us for weeks that he will repeal (or revise or whatever) the Dodd-Frank regulatory regime put in place after the financial crisis and Great Recession. Who knows how that will work out.

But related to the current debate over changes to Dodd-Frank regulations is the kind of piece we don’t often see these days—one that praises Wall Street. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Your way of life would not be remotely possible without Wall Street, William Cohan starts out:

At $500 million in box office revenue and counting, we sure love Disney’s new movie “Beauty and the Beast.” With more than 1 billion sold, we sure love Apple’s iPhone. The same goes for Netflix, Chevy pickups, wide-screen televisions and grocery store aisles stocked high with fresh fruit and vegetables.

But for some reason, we hate the one entity that brought all these things within reach of most Americans: Wall Street.

Our way of life would not be remotely possible without the interstitial role played by Wall Street. It’s the left ventricle of capitalism. Yet Wall Street has become shorthand for everything that is wrong with the American economic system.

Cohan doesn’t give Wall Street a complete pass. Nor should he. He believes that Wall Street “exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis and was not held accountable.” Hence, politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump have villainized Wall Street, “[O]ne politician after another,” Cohan observes, “has lambasted Wall Street for every imaginable evil.”

But he then returns to his main point:

With so much sanctimony on the national stage, it’s easy to hate bankers. But if we want to actually fix what’s wrong with Wall Street, we will need to stop mindlessly villainizing it.

In the most basic terms: Wall Street provides capital at a fair price to people who want it, by borrowing it from people who have it and want to invest it. It’s a simple service, and without it, we might as well go back to the Middle Ages, when people never ventured far from their tiny villages and spent their days worrying about their next meal.

Wall Street put the Internet at our collective fingertips. It’s the reason more than 160 million Americans have credit cards and access to an unsecured line of credit anytime they may want to use it. It democratized jet travel, which now allows average people to get halfway around the world in the time it used to take a fisherman to get his cod to market. Few people who have these things would be willing to give them up.

It’s refreshing to see some honesty and objectivity brought into the debate over financial regulations. But it’s not enough. Cohan is right that some on Wall Street were a contributing cause of the financial crisis. But was Wall Street the primary cause? I think Cohan falls short in not emphasizing the government's primary role in fomenting the housing bubble and bust and its role in spreading the contagion of bad mortgages throughout the investment community and ultimately the “main street” economy. Aside from pointing to the government’s “too-big-to-fail” policy, he ignores the Washington politicians’ “affordable housing crusade” and the related perfect storm of regulatory interference in the mortgage and housing markets to back up their crusade.

Through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the Federal Reserve, to the FDIC, to the Community Reinvestment Act, to mark-to-market accounting rules, and on and on, the government pushed and prodded and coerced and incentivized borrowers into homeownership-at-any-cost and lenders into destroyed lending standards, all amid inflationary monetary policies. The results were as basic economics has always taught. The 2008 financial crisis was a long time in the making—well over a decade. The truth, though pretty much ignored by the Washington Establishment, has been deeply documented in books by experts like Thomas Sowell, John A. Allison, and Peter J. Wallison. A good encapsulation of the government’s primary role in causing the economic catastrophe is presented by Don Watkins in his essay FREE MARKETS DIDN’T CREATE THE GREAT RECESSION.

Cohan believes that “The problem with Wall Street is its incentive and compensation system, which encourages bankers, traders and executives to take big risks with other people’s money. It rewards greed and recklessness without imposing accountability.”

What he doesn’t emphasize is that government regulation and interference is what skews the incentives (though, as noted earlier, he does name the “too-big-to-fail” policies, which he rightly argues should be thrown “into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.”) But he opposes proposals to “gut the financial regulations implemented after the financial crisis.” Instead, he proposes taking “a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” to Dodd-Frank—and proposes a few significant changes.

Cohan is on the right track. But I think he misses the big picture.

We need a new incentive system on Wall Street, one that encourages risk-taking, innovation and creativity, while also holding the people who work there accountable where it hurts — in their wallets — when things go wrong, as they inevitably will again.

He’s right. And what he doesn’t acknowledge is that these are exactly the kinds of incentives that are seamlessly built into a free, unregulated financial market. (By “unregulated,” I do not mean government has no role. Laws against fraud, laws that protect the sanctity of contracts, and the like are proper government roles.) It was precisely the government’s regulatory interference that destroyed those natural free market incentives, rigging the system toward a “heads I profit, tails the taxpayer loses” mentality.

These caveats aside, I love that Cohan unabashedly defends the massively vital practical contributions made by profit seeking Wall Street to our well-being and standard of living. I would add that the work of Wall Street is extraordinarily humanitarian and richly moral—no pun intended. Isn’t making the world a better place for humans to flourish the essence of humanitarianism? Isn't that integral to the morality of self-interest that lies at the heart of free market capitalism? Yes and yes. Cohan’s is a good start in making the case for deregulation.

Related Reading:

Notes on the Sub-Prime Credit Crisis

The Nature and the Origin of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis—San José State University

Department of Economics

The subprime mortgage crisis had its origin in the program the directors of Fannie Mae initiated in the late 1990's to pursue social welfare goals rather than maintain financial viability.

Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis—Richard M. Salsman for The Objective Standard, Vol. 4. No. 1.

The Morality of Moneylending: A Short History—Yaron Brook for The Objective Standard, Vol. 2, No. 3.

Sterba’s ‘Liberty’ to Steal: Marxian Evil by Any Other Name . . .

Karl Marx secularized religious ethics by advocating an egalitarian social system based on the principle that each person must work according to his ability, but consume just enough to satisfy his needs. Despite the horrendous humanitarian disasters that this principle has wrought, it keeps resurfacing.

The latest incarnation of Marx’s principle that I have seen comes from University of Notre Dame Philosophy Professor James P. Sterba under the guise of libertarianism. (Yes, libertarianism!) In an article for Philosophy Now magazine, titled Liberty Requires Equality, with the subtitle “libertarianism implies a right to welfare.” As we'll see, the term "welfare" way understates Sterba's argument. The article appears in the October/November 2015 issue of the magazine. The cover subject is “Liberty and Equality” and includes several articles besides Sterba’s on that subject.

Sterba contends that “the ideal of negative liberty”—understood as “the absence of interference by other people from doing what one wants or is just able to do”—inevitably leads to “conflicting liberties,” and thus must be rejected. Sterba’s example of conflicting liberties should tell you all you need to know about his argument: The example goes as follows, which I condensed to its essentials:

Now, in order to see why libertarians are mistaken about what their ideal requires, consider a conflict situation between the rich and the poor.

[Conventional Libertarian view, as Sterba sees it]:

[T]he rich . . . have more than enough resources to satisfy their basic needs. In contrast, imagine that the poor lack the resources to meet their basic needs even though they have tried all the means available to them [i.e., political and economic freedom] that libertarians regard as legitimate for acquiring such resources.

[S]ince . . . the liberty of the poor is not at stake . . .,

the rich should not be required to sacrifice their liberty so that the basic needs of the poor may be met.

[Sterba’s Libertarian View]:

In fact, however, the liberty of the poor is at stake in such conflict situations. What is at stake is the liberty of the poor not to be interfered with in taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs.

There are basically only two ways for human beings to interact; by physical force or by voluntary agreement. I would say that’s the basic alternative faced by all political theorists. Anyone who advocates any manifestation of a “right” to material goods that others must supply necessarily obliterates any distinction between the two alternatives. That’s exactly what Sterba does, by asserting that the ideal of liberty must be “viewed as a conflict of liberties.”

To justify his “conflict of liberties” premise, Sterba must obliterate any moral distinction between force and voluntarism. And that’s exactly what he does.

To Sterba, liberty means doing whatever the hell you feel like, no matter the consequences or effects on others. Doing an honest day’s work, volunteering time to Habitat for Humanity, and grabbing a gun and going out and robbing what you believe to be your neighbor’s “surplus” wealth are morally equal. (As regards the armed robbery, it makes no difference if the government is your hired gun. Electing politicians to be do the crime of forced redistribution of wealth is still a crime. The only difference is, when government does it, the crime is organized and the victims are stripped of governmental protection of their property rights; the government having become the criminal rather than remaining within the moral and constitutional bounds in its proper function of rights-protector.)

What facts of reality support Sterba’s view? None. The observable facts of human nature provide only evidence of the “negative” view of liberty. Material goods, whether basic or surplus, don’t pre-exist in nature, like rocks, poison ivy, or contaminated streams. Only raw materials exist. Human life and flourishing requires turning those raw materials into resources, and those resources into material goods. The creation of goods requires someone’s work. Productive work—reason-guided physical labor—requires a long-term effort. Long-term effort and planning requires peaceful coexistence, including being safe from human predators. If people are “free” to take by force what they please when they please, how can anyone engage in the productive work his life depends on? The facts of reality support only a moral code that incorporates the non-initiation of force principle. The non-initiation of force principle necessarily invalidates any notion of the “liberty” of the poor, or anyone else, to take from others by force; i.e., to steal.

But Sterba advocates the right to take only “surplus” wealth, you might ask?  But what does surplus mean? A Yacht or a 20,000 square foot mansion or a 3-karat diamond ring might be one poor man’s conception of surplus wealth, while a second car or a 2000 square foot house might be another poor man’s idea of surplus. Besides, most of the surplus wealth of the rich is tied up in the production of material goods, including basic goods of necessity. Once the production stops for lack of investment capital, which has been seized by poor people as surplus wealth of the rich, how will anyone’s needs be satisfied?

Lest anyone misunderstand where Sterba is going with this, consider what he advocates as “A Peaceful Road to Justice.”

Clearly, the political and social changes required by my argument are both massive and wide-ranging. Just imagine a world where each person has just enough resources she needs to meet her basic needs, for a decent life, but no more, and think about the many changes that we would have to undergo to get from here to there.

The emphasis is mine. There can be no misunderstanding. He is not an advocate of, nor is he trying to justify, the modern welfare state, which features a government-imposed “safety net” but otherwise leaves people more of less free to earn and keep as much surplus wealth as she can, after taxes. Sterba forbids “surplus wealth” altogether; i.e., he forbids human flourishing. Haven’t we seen this movie before? We’ve seen Sterba’s ideal in action in every socialist country ever created, from Soviet Russia to Venezuela, but especially in Soviet Russia, which featured the socialist ideal of a single world-encompassing communist state as the goal. (The communists’ cousins, the fascists, advocate national socialism; the tailoring of socialism to individual societies’ unique cultures. It’s a distinction without a fundamental difference.)

Of course, Sterba doesn’t advocate leaving to each person the liberty to determine what constitutes surplus wealth, what constitutes basic needs, and the “right” to take matters into his own hands the job of “taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs.” Even Sterba would probably acknowledge that every man for himself in this way would be chaos. So who, in the end, would be in charge of deciding such issues? Why, the state, of course, through the only method possible; totalitarian democratic powers over our economic lives on a world scale. Universal acceptance of Sterba’s “should lead us to take steps to transfer our present and future surplus [to] appropriate institutions to guarantee that everyone has the resources for a decent life. . .”

Sterba pays lip service to voluntarism, as he fantasizes over a scenario in which “the entire adult population of the world came to accept my argument and began to act in accord with it.” But it’s clear that his “massive and wide-ranging” changes require that the state must have the final say, and the unfettered power to enforce the ideal. Why? Because all it will take to blow up Sterba’s ideal, if it is rooted only in voluntarism, is one or more people of self-esteem to say “no,” and assert their legitimate, “negative” rights to be free from forcible interference.

What kind of a life is it where basic needs, not justice, is the standard—and enforced at the point of a governmental gun? When government guarantees basic needs, and forbids surplus wealth—the ultimate ideal of economic equality—the result is universal grinding poverty; poverty as the ideal, the end to be achieved, with every person a slave to everyone’s else’s needs. Sterba’s moral code is just another version of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Who would wish such a hopeless existence on their fellow human beings?

I am not a philosopher. But one doesn’t need a philosophy degree to recognize the evil, and silliness, of Sterba’s perpetually unworkable economic ideal. Given its history, there is no excuse for Sterba’s peddling of this new version of Marx’s ideal. There is no place for freedom in Sterba’s egalitarian ant-colony world; and no place for rational human beings. What kind of person has the most to gain from such a system? The parasites and the seekers of unearned accolades, for sure. But the power-lusters will be the biggest winners in such a need-based system, and always have been. Just ask Ivy Starnes, heiress to the Twentieth Century  Motor Company fortune and that company’s “Director of Distribution.”

Related Reading:

Professor Nicholas Carnes's Warmed-Over Marxism is Not what We Need in Washington

Why Marxism—Evil Laid Bare—an article by C. Bradley Thompson for The Objective Standard

Related Viewing

"Why Marxism?" An Evening at FEE with C. Bradley Thompson

Related Listening:

Radical Capitalist Episode 13: Why Socialism Won't Die—Yaron Brook

To Demand an 'Impregnable Pipeline' is to End Pipelines

The following comment was left regarding New Jersey Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine’s Chris Christie should address the oily logic of pipeline opponents. Mulshine highlighted the hypocrisy of NJ’s NIMBY (not -in-my-back-yard) opponents of the proposed Pilgrim Pipeline, which would carry liquid petroleum products across Northern NJ.

Mr.Splunge posted:

“At some point, it will be economically unfeasible to construct an impregnable pipeline.”

My reply:

No industrial project can be truly “impregnable”; i.e., achieve perfect safety and zero risk. If perfection is the standard, we’d have no energy to run water purification and delivery systems.

There are currently about 185,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines, 320,000 miles of gas transmission pipelines, and two million miles of gas distribution pipelines in operation in America. Yet, there is no clean water problem in America.

Clearly, pipelines and clean water can and do coexist. More to the point, these pipelines deliver the vital energy that powers our water purification and delivery systems. Without this energy, our “water supplies” would remain just so much inaccessible ground water rather than turned into the clean water conveniently available at the twist of a knob in our homes.

While many older pipelines are vulnerable to breakdowns, new pipelines represent state-of-the-art technologies, making them safer than ever. But if it’s 100% safety guarantees you’re demanding, you’re demanding omniscience and infallibility, two attributes impossible to man. On that premise, man’s first advance from the cave—the harnessing of fire—would never have happened.

Related Reading:

Human Life would be Impossible Without Accepting Dangers that ‘Could’ Happen

The ‘Jihad on Pipelines,’ New Jersey Front

Lima Climate Convention Disappoints FOE—and That’s Great News for Rich and Poor People Alike

Reject the Green Agenda in 2015

Debunking Myths of American History—4

This is Part 4 of a 4-part series, in which I replied to comments made under the op-ed by Frayda Levin, an Americans for Prosperity board member, titled I'm A Proud Koch Brothers Insider. For a deep, integrated history of capitalism, I recommend The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein.

“Fact is, while individual humans are decent, as a group they're aggressive, exploitative, oppressive, violent, selfish, and dangerous.  The evidence is in our history.”—Get Real

My Reply:

This makes no sense. A group is made up of individuals. Some individuals are “aggressive, exploitative, oppressive, violent, selfish [in the conventional sense], and dangerous.” But most are industrious, respectful, benevolent, cooperative, and no threat to others; i.e., rationally selfish [at least to some extent]. Man is not predisposed either way. The evidence is that the freer a country is, the more people achieve and coexist peacefully. Only with the arrival of “big government” did America begin its descent into predatory balkinization, as “progressives” transformed our government from one limited to protecting individual rights to a rights-violating tool of pressure group factions. When government (the power of the gun) is given the power of aggressive force, the bad type of people organize to use that aggressive power. Then others follow, either in self-preservation or for their own predatory purposes. Special interest politics proliferates. When people are forced into tribal conflict, what does one expect? Blame belongs to the collectivist/statist system the progressives built, not human nature, which is only suited to individualism and limited government.

Related Reading:

For the New Intellectual—Ayn Rand