ITT We pretend it’s a leftyjak.party thread

General Niggnin

General Niggnin

2024 oldGOD
2E5BA190-B0D4-40CF-8BC5-0C32D7686C76.png

why do bourgeois always use the same arguments marx proved wrong 100 years ago, are they stupid?
 
Dethroning God: The Anglo-theological roots of Austrian Economics

>All things are done according to God's plan and decision; and God chose us to be his own people in union with Christ because of his own purpose, based on what he had decided from the very beginning.
>Ephesians 1:11 GNT

It is interesting to note, why Austrian economists have gained such purchase in America and the broader anglo-sphere, despite being virtually unknown in their homeland of Austria, let alone continental Europe. It is no accident that the countries it has been more accepted in are highly Christian, protestant, nations. This is because the real objections Austrians have to central planning are theological and not economic. The economic arguments are just projections of their deeper, theological objections to the very idea of a planned economy. When you look into the backgrounds of many “modern” anglo-american economists, you will discover they are usually christian. One example is Robert P. Murphy:

>Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He has been affiliated with Laffer Associates, the Pacific Research Institute, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Independent Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Fraser Institute.
Murphy is a Christian, and has stated in his writings that "my ethical beliefs are informed by my Christian faith, and I am a firm believer in natural law".

The absurdity of a christian objecting to central planning should be obvious. After all, don’t they already believe in a divine central planner? In their heart of hearts, they know they are full of shit. They know socialism is possible. Despite their protestations, what they really fear isn’t socialism isn’t being impossible: it’s socialism being POSSIBLE, and the implications this would have on theology.

What Austrians really think

We can think of the calculation “argument” as a long laundry list of objections that Austrians have for why socialism MIGHT not be possible. For Mises, the achilles hill of socialism was it’s supposed inability to rationally cost capital goods. For Hayek, the ability of a market economy to communicate information through price signals was key. Now, Austrians have begun using the arguments of Philosophers like Searle and his “Chinese room argument” which holds that a computer program cannot have “mind” or “consciousness”.

What you realize after a while is that the so called “calculation argument” is as much a product of the Austrian school’s radically subjectivist stance than any mathematical arguments about the technical feasibility of calculation. Indeed, given their aversion to mathematics, one wonders why the Austrians even bother to throw out the technical arguments against calculation, which are self refuting. If a decentralized network of actors (the market) can rationally calculate the costs of all goods and services, there is no reason that a single central planner can’t.

If the computational theory of mind is correct, then a human mind is equivalent in computing power to a Turing machine, the same as a digital computer. The only way to sustain the belief that a network of decentralized minds can exceed the computational power of a single mind, or the complexity class of problems, is to entertain a kind of cartesian dualism, to imbue human minds with a “hypercomputational” consciousness unavailable to machines. However hypercomputationalism is largely considered pseudoscience by the vast majority of scientists.

Instead of looking at the content of the calculation argument(s), it is more useful to look at their form. A socialist says “planning is possible”, and an Austrian comes up with 1 or more “requirements” that a planner must have, starting from the relatively reasonable (knowledge of labor inputs) and building more and more up to an absurd level until you have Austrians insisting that a socialist central planner must have knowledge of the internal state of mind of every human being, precognitive predictive power, the ability to calculate utility scales for every individual human being in real time, etc. “Requirements” which not even a market economy could possibly reach or really needs, given that a market economy reaches a sort of statistical equilibrium without access to such knowledge. On one hand you can see this as an ideologically motivated attempt to reinforce a refuted argument by reinventing it over and over. On the other hand one could note, that only a divine or universal consciousness could achieve the level of knowledge needed, according to the Austrians at least.

The problem isn’t that they think this isn’t possible, but they fear that it is, that socialist planning in practice would create a Marxist universal consciousness, an all-powerful socio-technical intelligent system, which would supplant their God with a “collective mind”. As we know from Hofstadter, right wing thought in America is the product of the “secularized fundamentalist mind” a.k.a. a secularized version of extremist protestantism, complete with pseudo-calvinist morality. Remember, the original sin of Christianity was knowledge, the fact that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gained the knowledge that properly belonged only to God. By creating a planned economy, the Communist threatens to “dethrone” God, by replacing the planning of God with the conscious self-planning of fallen, sinful humanity. This God can be literal God, or it’s secularized analogue in the capitalist market, which for right-libertarians occupies the position of a sort of lovecraftian demiurge, which must be appeased. Therefore the communist goal of creating a planned economy is the secular equivalent to erecting a false god, an “idol”, a pagan arrogance which insists on the capacity of human beings to know and control the world, as opposed to the christian reactionary’s conception of providence.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a german atheist and left-hegelian philosopher who’s idea of God was that the idea God was really a projection of human’s inner nature. That God was merely the ideal to which human beings strived towards:

>Thus God is nothing else than human: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of a human's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimera by Feuerbach, that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach states that, "a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God", and continues to say that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God divine, indicating that humans are capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion makes a human divine. The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout humans in all forms. God "is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature." It appeals to humankind to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God.

Marx takes this and expands it further, seeing Feuerbach’s conception as partially correct but also idealist and divorced from historical context, and that the nature of man “could only be understood in the context of his economic and social relations”. Marxism retains the critical stance of German critical idealism, but it transposes that criticism into practical, material, political terms. The critical Feuerbachian stance on religion is therefore retained, but transformed, so in a sense the right’s absurd complaint that the left seeks to “dethrone God” is actually true, for to dethrone God is to realize that God is merely the projection of man’s inner highest aspirations, and for the subject to realize that the collective of man is the only God that exists. Therefore this God should recognize itself and conduct it’s affairs accordingly, through the conscious planning of it’s own activity.

In the economic realm this means dethroning the secularized God of the market economy. To the Austrian, this is blasphemy. The proper stance is to humble oneself before God/the market, to engage in a paranoid supplication, as it is arrogant for mortals to assume they know God’s plan, as Hayek would say, “the pretense of knowledge”. The divorce of political economy from the natural sciences is a sort of cartesian special pleading, which places economics beyond the reach of even the brightest humans.

It’s funny to think that these supposedly “rational, atheist” libertarians are really just LARPing a repackaged pseudo-protestant ontology.

The job of the Communist is to storm the gates of heaven and slay their market-God, and place mankind on his rightful throne.
 
DonutHole said:
Dethroning God: The Anglo-theological roots of Austrian Economics

>All things are done according to God's plan and decision; and God chose us to be his own people in union with Christ because of his own purpose, based on what he had decided from the very beginning.
>Ephesians 1:11 GNT

It is interesting to note, why Austrian economists have gained such purchase in America and the broader anglo-sphere, despite being virtually unknown in their homeland of Austria, let alone continental Europe. It is no accident that the countries it has been more accepted in are highly Christian, protestant, nations. This is because the real objections Austrians have to central planning are theological and not economic. The economic arguments are just projections of their deeper, theological objections to the very idea of a planned economy. When you look into the backgrounds of many “modern” anglo-american economists, you will discover they are usually christian. One example is Robert P. Murphy:

>Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He has been affiliated with Laffer Associates, the Pacific Research Institute, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Independent Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Fraser Institute.
Murphy is a Christian, and has stated in his writings that "my ethical beliefs are informed by my Christian faith, and I am a firm believer in natural law".

The absurdity of a christian objecting to central planning should be obvious. After all, don’t they already believe in a divine central planner? In their heart of hearts, they know they are full of shit. They know socialism is possible. Despite their protestations, what they really fear isn’t socialism isn’t being impossible: it’s socialism being POSSIBLE, and the implications this would have on theology.

What Austrians really think

We can think of the calculation “argument” as a long laundry list of objections that Austrians have for why socialism MIGHT not be possible. For Mises, the achilles hill of socialism was it’s supposed inability to rationally cost capital goods. For Hayek, the ability of a market economy to communicate information through price signals was key. Now, Austrians have begun using the arguments of Philosophers like Searle and his “Chinese room argument” which holds that a computer program cannot have “mind” or “consciousness”.

What you realize after a while is that the so called “calculation argument” is as much a product of the Austrian school’s radically subjectivist stance than any mathematical arguments about the technical feasibility of calculation. Indeed, given their aversion to mathematics, one wonders why the Austrians even bother to throw out the technical arguments against calculation, which are self refuting. If a decentralized network of actors (the market) can rationally calculate the costs of all goods and services, there is no reason that a single central planner can’t.

If the computational theory of mind is correct, then a human mind is equivalent in computing power to a Turing machine, the same as a digital computer. The only way to sustain the belief that a network of decentralized minds can exceed the computational power of a single mind, or the complexity class of problems, is to entertain a kind of cartesian dualism, to imbue human minds with a “hypercomputational” consciousness unavailable to machines. However hypercomputationalism is largely considered pseudoscience by the vast majority of scientists.

Instead of looking at the content of the calculation argument(s), it is more useful to look at their form. A socialist says “planning is possible”, and an Austrian comes up with 1 or more “requirements” that a planner must have, starting from the relatively reasonable (knowledge of labor inputs) and building more and more up to an absurd level until you have Austrians insisting that a socialist central planner must have knowledge of the internal state of mind of every human being, precognitive predictive power, the ability to calculate utility scales for every individual human being in real time, etc. “Requirements” which not even a market economy could possibly reach or really needs, given that a market economy reaches a sort of statistical equilibrium without access to such knowledge. On one hand you can see this as an ideologically motivated attempt to reinforce a refuted argument by reinventing it over and over. On the other hand one could note, that only a divine or universal consciousness could achieve the level of knowledge needed, according to the Austrians at least.

The problem isn’t that they think this isn’t possible, but they fear that it is, that socialist planning in practice would create a Marxist universal consciousness, an all-powerful socio-technical intelligent system, which would supplant their God with a “collective mind”. As we know from Hofstadter, right wing thought in America is the product of the “secularized fundamentalist mind” a.k.a. a secularized version of extremist protestantism, complete with pseudo-calvinist morality. Remember, the original sin of Christianity was knowledge, the fact that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gained the knowledge that properly belonged only to God. By creating a planned economy, the Communist threatens to “dethrone” God, by replacing the planning of God with the conscious self-planning of fallen, sinful humanity. This God can be literal God, or it’s secularized analogue in the capitalist market, which for right-libertarians occupies the position of a sort of lovecraftian demiurge, which must be appeased. Therefore the communist goal of creating a planned economy is the secular equivalent to erecting a false god, an “idol”, a pagan arrogance which insists on the capacity of human beings to know and control the world, as opposed to the christian reactionary’s conception of providence.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a german atheist and left-hegelian philosopher who’s idea of God was that the idea God was really a projection of human’s inner nature. That God was merely the ideal to which human beings strived towards:

>Thus God is nothing else than human: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of a human's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimera by Feuerbach, that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach states that, "a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God", and continues to say that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God divine, indicating that humans are capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion makes a human divine. The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout humans in all forms. God "is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature." It appeals to humankind to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God.

Marx takes this and expands it further, seeing Feuerbach’s conception as partially correct but also idealist and divorced from historical context, and that the nature of man “could only be understood in the context of his economic and social relations”. Marxism retains the critical stance of German critical idealism, but it transposes that criticism into practical, material, political terms. The critical Feuerbachian stance on religion is therefore retained, but transformed, so in a sense the right’s absurd complaint that the left seeks to “dethrone God” is actually true, for to dethrone God is to realize that God is merely the projection of man’s inner highest aspirations, and for the subject to realize that the collective of man is the only God that exists. Therefore this God should recognize itself and conduct it’s affairs accordingly, through the conscious planning of it’s own activity.

In the economic realm this means dethroning the secularized God of the market economy. To the Austrian, this is blasphemy. The proper stance is to humble oneself before God/the market, to engage in a paranoid supplication, as it is arrogant for mortals to assume they know God’s plan, as Hayek would say, “the pretense of knowledge”. The divorce of political economy from the natural sciences is a sort of cartesian special pleading, which places economics beyond the reach of even the brightest humans.

It’s funny to think that these supposedly “rational, atheist” libertarians are really just LARPing a repackaged pseudo-protestant ontology.

The job of the Communist is to storm the gates of heaven and slay their market-God, and place mankind on his rightful throne.
Click to expand...
that’s alot of words
 

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