Libertarian class theory means that those who benefit, in t…

Libetrarian class theory was first described by Rothbard, inspired by Oppenheimer, a Marxist. Oppenheimer's theory was a historical one, which proposed that modern states developed out of two ethnically different classes of people: agriculturalists that became the lower class, and pastoralists who invaded and applied their herding skills to became the upper class. Historical examples can be seen in the Norman (vikings who lived in Brittany) conquest of Great Britain and in the ancient Greek civilization, which resulted from the descendants of the raiders of Troy invading and enslaving the descendants of the people who created the Minoan civilization.

Oppenheimer believed that the modern state would, over time, lose its original purpose as an instrument of exploitation as the master and slave classes mixed with one another. However, Rothbard's economic analysis led him to conclude that the state would always be used to exploit the tax payers by somebody, even if it was not an ethnically separate group or descended from the original invaders, because those who benefit from the tax system have the collective incentive to increase taxation and to agree with each other on any pretexts they can come up with to do so, whereas the lower class has the opposite incentive. In the long term, the state will fail to serve the people because the people have to take time off from their jobs and family in order to argue that taxes should be lowered, whereas the upper class does not have to take time off to say that taxes should be raised--that is their job.

I have been thinking on libertarian class theory and on how we got to where we are today after the conquest of the agriculturalists by the pastorals. There has been a gradual shift in favor of the lower class as a result of the development of capitalism. In the past, there was downward mobility. The upper class had more children than the lower and relatively few of them could stay in the upper class. With the development of capitalism, the situation gradually reversed. The upper class became more like something that was drawn out of the upper class. Today, the right has bigger families than the left, so it appears that leftism is at odds with nature. In the past, things would have looked quite different. Agriculturalists suffered from poor nutrition relative to pastorals due to the pastorals' reliance on meat and milk. They were shorter and less powerful, and less adept at war. Thus, they would have been easy targets for raiders who would eventually move in among them. The pastorals would have increased their numbers by living as predators to such weak and easily exploited people.

The advantage that the right has over the left is that of long-term thinking, which was required in order to be willing to work long hours producing food for the dry season when there was already plenty of food available to eat right now. The agricultural revolution did not happen by choice. It happened because of population pressure that forced people to move on to lands that could not support them as hunter-gatherers. Nobody wants to work by the sweat of their brow when they could live in the garden of Eden. The pastorals who became the upper class, on the other hand, were short-term thinkers. Their superior strength and intelligence was not enough to overcome the gradual accumulation of benefit that accrues to long-term thinkers. They created something that, at long last, they could not control. Now they live in a world too complex for them to grasp that tends to break free of control faster than systems of control can be implemented.

how does this work with for example net worth... is class correlated with net worth?

The important book Biohistory by Jim Penman describes a biological theory of animals that he applies to human societies which can be used to characterize the original agriculturals and pastorals. Penmann has two types which he calls baboons and gibbons. The baboons are a population that is limited by predation, whereas the gibbons are limited by food supply. The baboons are incentivized to "live fast and die young" since they can't do much to increase their own lifespan. They need to have children quickly so that they don't miss out. The gibbons, by contrast, are incentivized to amass the resources for children before having any. Thus, they tend to have children later and males must establish a territory before they can attract mates. An interesting thing about humans is that humans are their own apex predator. Thus, when we talk about human societies that are limited by predation rather than food supply, we are talking about war, and we are talking about a people who would rather go to war than till a field.

The theory of Austrian economics provides further insight into the difference between long term and short term people. In Austrian economics, long or short term thinking is understood in terms of time preference, which has to do with how willing people are to deprive themselves in the present in order to have a better future. In Austrian economics, the lower the time preference (in other words, the more willing people are able to defer gratification in the present) the larger the limit of the eventual growth in the economy is. People with a low time preference are more willing to deprive themselves to build bigger and more efficient machines today so that they can have a greater production tomorrow. Thus, their economy grows for longer and reaches a more advanced state in terms of the productivity of labor, than an economy of people with high time preference people.

In particular, there is a relationship between time preference and morality. A willingness to defer gratification today for a better tomorrow is a key factor in the preference for good relationships over exploitation. Every day you defer gratification that you could achieve by exploiting your friends--because you know you would lose them eventually. There is a great benefit to being part of society because of the potential for specialization and strength in numbers. In order to obtain that benefit, one must not behave as an exploiter or else society will want to banish you. Thus, I see morality as abstraction of the principles that lead to good relationships with friends. It is like a friendship with society as a whole. If you are a short-term thinker, you won't worry about being banished so you will be willing to act against society. People with a low time preference will act like they want to increase the friendship of society--in other words, make everybody more valuable to each other. Exploiters will not like that idea, not only because they don't like long-term thinking but also because it will result in better identification of exploiters, which would increase their chances of being banished.

In intellectual history, there is a traditional distinction between ancient and modern virtues. The ancient virtues can be understood in terms of the traditional cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Later came the seven heavenly virtues, which were the four cardinal virtues plus faith, hope, and love. This transition can be understood in terms of a lowering of time preference in which society changed to be less dependent on war and more on trade and diplomacy. Yet, the modern virtues were not absent in ancient times. Instead, they were the virtues of the lower class which didn't write. The ancient virtues were the virtues of the upper class. We can see evidence of modern virtues in ancient times in works like Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's fables, and Hesiod.

The most interesting evidence that the difference between right and left can be understood in terms of time preference, and more particularly to do with the theory of baboons and gibbons, are their stances on abortion. I don't think there is another theory that explains why the left is so rabidly pro-abortion and the right so adamantly anti-abortion. If you are anti-abortion, that is like saying that you should not use a stop-loss when you make a trade. Clearly, this is a long-term position because it does not allow you to say that you made a mistake and go back on your earlier position. If you are some kind of gibbon who must establish territory before you have children, then you would say that it is wrong to have children when you are not ready for them. On the other hand, if you are a baboon who has to be ready to take advantage of every opportunity then abortion is an important part of your strategy. The abortion debate today mirrors the early Christian conflict with pagans over exposure of infants--an acceptable practice among pagans that Christians refused to practice themselves and eventually abolished.

Thus, ancient societies such as Greece were a class of long-term thinkers that were enslaved by short-term thinkers. The slave class would have had a mindset that would have seemed in some ways more modern than the upper class, because of a greater reliance on empathy and kindness. The upper class would have expended a lot of resources to keep the slave class under control, and lived in fear of rebellion. In this light, their mindset may be seen to me more like that of modern criminal organizations than like the average person today.

As the lower class gradually began to win out over the upper, I see in the upper class (which I trace down to modern leftism) a transition from overt narcissism to covert narcissism. What began as a people who saw themselves as so obviously superior that there was no need to question or justify it, who reveled in domination turned into a group of people whose sense of superiority is at odds with reality and who try to invade and control things by appearing innocuous and by saying the exact opposite of what they truly mean. In them we see the same contempt and fear of the lower class as the ancient upper class had for their slaves yet today it comes in the form of projection onto the right of everything that they themselves are. In the right I see a false consciousness, or what we would today call an identification with the abuser. In the right I see an admiration for ancient conquerors and kings who I see as more properly associated with the left (and of course the left agrees that these people are "right-wing") and I see in the right an attempt to gain control of the power of the state and make it work for them, which isn't really what that power is good for.

As I have written above, the explanation for goodness is economic and it has to do with the benefit of long-term thinking. The explanation for evil is psychological because it must be some kind of short-term motivation that overcomes a person's long-term interest. Thus, evil can be understood as a kind of addiction. Psychologists have understood that there is more than one motivation for evil. The best theory currently available theory of evil, in my opinion, is the "dark triad" theory, which includes three character types called the psychopath, the narcissist, and the macciavellian. The narcissist is the most important one to understand what is going on in the modern world, but I am putting him in context here just to point out that he is not a complete explanation for evil. The macciavellian seems to be someone who is characterized by long-term thinking. Thus, he might be like either of the other types, only with better impulse control. Just because evil is disadvantageous for long-term thinkers does not mean that it doesn't exist. However, the macciavellian would have to be seen as a rare supervillian type who is especially at odds with himself. The psychopath is more like a violent criminal and is so destructive that he has a lot of trouble getting into power. He is motivated by sex, power, and money. Psychopathy seems to be inborn brain anomaly whereas narcissism is a response to early childhood abuse.

Since we cannot evaluate historical figures for narcissistic personality disorder, I distinguish between narcissism and NPD. Narcissism is a sliding scale with NPD at the extreme end, and we can say that a historical figure is likely to be narcissistic without evaluating him by a licensed therapist. Narcissism is important to understand from the standpoint of defense. Narcissists are abusive and ordinary people are very vulnerable to them because of a relatively poor understanding of love which makes it easy for narcissists to simulate it in order to get close to victims. Like psychopaths, narcissists are motivated by lower passions, but a narcissist desires admiration and approbation whereas psychopaths are much more interested in material things. A narcissist may be a criminal who ends up in prison, but if so he is more associated with white color crime than violent crime. He may also be someone who knows how to hurt people without flaunting the law. He may, indeed, be someone who knows how to take control of the legal system itself and subvert it to his own ends, or invent a cult and entice many people to join of their own free will. Thus, the fact that narcissists are more social than psychopaths makes them potentially more dangerous because they are more likely to succeed in achieving important positions where they can do a lot of damage. The paradox of narcissism is the degree to which their destruction of the people around them corresponds to their own self-destruction. Narcissist behavior is irrational. They destroy things that are very good for them. This is part of the reason people get lured into positions of vulnerability with them. You offer them a square deal and they stab you in the back--even if they get nothing good out of doing so.

The paradox is resolved by understanding narcissism as an addiction to an idea--to the idea of ones own superiority. This addiction is so strong that no therapy has been developed which enables people with NPD to recover. The term narcissism was coined by Freud and it is apt because it refers to a man who is obsessed with his own reflection (as opposed to his true self). So obsessed is he, that he fails to notice Echo's love for him before she wastes away, becoming nothing more than a voice that repeats anything he says. What could be a better depiction of a relationship with a narcissist? Something that might have given him real happiness is destroyed and becomes a mere extension of himself, merely because he cannot turn his face away from his image. A narcissist's greatest fear may be of dying alone, yet his actions virtually guarantee that he will do so. Such a sad character, yet at the same time any sympathy you have for him is wasted so you might as well not worry about it.

The narcissism's sense of superiority derives from a story that he told himself to help make childhood bearable, and it has become an addiction as an adult because it covers up for the fact that his real personality failed to develop. Behind his mask is an emptiness and to acknowledge this is an unbearable kind of nihilism for him. If a child is prevented from walking, his legs don't develop properly and when he grows up he cannot walk normally. The narcissist is like that. At around age 2, when a child starts to walk, he starts to take time independent of the parents and he uses that time to develop his own personality. In the childhood of a narcissist, this process was arrested. In some way, he was punished for attempting to develop his own personality. He responded by accepting his parents viewpoint and treating his budding personality as something bad that he should not indulge in. Instead, he adopted a persona that acted the way his parents wanted. This persona, coming from a child's imagination was like something that appealed to a child, like a superhero. Young children are not expected to engage with reality, as they are protected by the parents. They have a need to fantasize as a way of developing their minds. Unable to develop naturally, the narcissist remains trapped in a stage of childhood in which fantasy is more important than reality.

Nietzsche describes an addiction to an idea as an Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy. To explain as briefly as possible, Apollonian dynamic is associated with the imagination and the Dionysian with the instinct. Animals are understood as lacking the Apollonian dynamic, and thus addiction to an idea is a special human thing. According to Nietzsche, use of the imagination leads to fear of the instinct because people can imagine all the bad things that might happen to them if they follow their instincts. For example, if they go out and hunt for food, they might get eaten by a predator. If they go and talk to a girl, they might get humiliated. The addictive idea shows them a false image which tells them that giving into their fear is a good idea. For example, if they never talk to a girl and starve themselves, they will go to heaven. People are loath to drop the addictive idea, even if they can apprehend with their rational mind the utter implausibility of it, because of a feeling of nihilism that creeps up when they contemplate such a thing. If their addictive idea is not real, then that means everything they have been doing is meaningless. That is tough to accept because of loss aversion. Furthermore, everything in real life is tainted in comparison to the purity of the false idea. How can food be pleasurable when so much risk is required to get it? Nietzsche's theory was originally applied to Christianity, but it has a general application--ideas can be very addictive. The narcissist is someone who is addicted to the idea that his childhood superman is real. Nietzsche also describes a process of recovery from an addictive idea. Over time, someone can become recalibrated to reality and come to enjoy the things that he formerly found fearful and come to accept that everything good is a trade-off, not perfection. This is the Nietzschian man (sometimes called the superman, or overman). The emptiness that the narcissist perceives when he starts to look past his fake personali…

Narcissism is demonic possession. The reason people are susceptible to narcissistic abuse is that they, themselves, are narcissistic. You begin as a narcissist. Empathy is an advanced style of thought--it takes a long time to get good at it, and it develops later than other cognitive functions. Healthy people may not get good at it until around age 40, even though the process begins at age 2. NPD is characterized by a fight against his own growth to push himself in the opposite direction from what is natural, but natural, healthy development is a long process of gradually getting over an inflated self-image. Thus, everyone, especially young people, is susceptible to the same addiction as the narcissist himself, though capable of recovery. The narcissist traps these people into relationships with him by being addictive to his partner in the same way that he is addicted. However, he is not able to make a person less lonely, only to flame desire. His perfect partner is an imaginary creation as well, and he gradually turns his real partner into her using rewards and punishments. Of course, there is no particular reason that the narcissist would be male and the partner female! That is simply rhetorical.

Covert narcissism superficially looks like the opposite of narcissism, but beneath the surface is virtually the same thing. Coverts try to position themselves beneath other people, and attempt to entrap people into relationships through their sympathy. They attempt to "dom from below", controlling the situation from an apparent position of inferiority. Narcissists become covert when their sense of superiority is so at odds with reality that they simply can't ignore it. A covert and overt narcissist may be the same person at different times, or it may be someone who just isn't very beautiful or talented, who just can't convince other people of their superiority. At the same time they feel entitled. They just now they can't show it so they project the opposite in order to hide it. They project the image of someone who is especially humble or selfless.

!quoted by CosmosStag

We now discuss contemporary political ideas in terms of the concept of covert narcissism. Egalitarianism readily admits a psychological explanation because it is so impractical that nobody can justify it. To proceed, we need to distinguish between types of egalitarianism. Equality before the law is not impractical; it is a necessary for any valid theory of ethics and in particular for a system of justice (see Kant). Equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, on the other hand, both destroy society by destroying the potential for specialization. Eliminating differences eliminates an important reason that people are valuable to one another. (see Ricardo and his argument on comparative advantage) Although equality of opportunity and equality of outcome appear to mean something very different, they are not different in practice. They both involve concepts of fairness that are enormously costly to implement (even if we could neglect the cost of destroying society) and which would require the government to make value judgments about all of its people. Not only would this be subjective, but it would require an army of bureaucrats to implement to apply these value judgments. I think this is obvious in the case of equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity means that we need to "level the playing field" as if life is some literal game that isn't fun unless everyone has the same starting position. Thus, like equality of outcome, equality of opportunity is a rebellion against real life.

Egalitarians cannot explain how equality is worth the cost and if you ask them to they act like you are some kind of extremely distasteful person for bringing it up. That's because costs exist in the real world which is exactly where the don't want to be. They want you to be in an imaginary garden of Eden with them. If that is not where you are, then you must be some kind of hateful degenerate. The only way to benefit from egalitarian is to be someone who is below average or being one of the bureaucrats who implements the policy. There is great opportunity to manipulate the process to try to be below average or to become part of the bureaucracy that implements the policy. Thus, egalitarianism is a lie that conceals the opposite of what it really is. It is good for expanding the tax base, which is what the upper class wants. Thus, egalitarian is useful to people who conceal a sense of superiority behind a mask of inferiority or innocuousness.

Victim narratives provide opportunity for both victims and allies to establish their superiority through displays of false humility and empathy. I imagine that the reader is familiar enough with this BS that I don't need to elaborate.

We now list narcissistic writers who are good to study in order to understand narcissism. The first is Sam Vaknin, a psychologist who is largely responsible for producing the modern understanding of narcissism, author of Narcissism Revisited, has NPD himself so he understands it from outside and in. He is also a youtuber who has posted many helpful and entertaining videos.

Next we discuss Jean Jacques Rousseau. An examination of his life reveals him as a particularly disgusting degenerate even for the relatively cruel times in which he lived. Father of five children who were all given up for adoption never to be heard from again, his political and social writings show a similar lack of care, both for the people of society that he is writing about and for the more basic issues of clarity and logic. In particular, his writings show an astonishing antipathy towards human flourishing even though he himself was successful in more than one field. His essay, On the Origin of Inequality, is generally credited with founding the myth of the noble savage. His idealization of pre-civilized, pre-conscious man as a state of tranquility and goodness, written without any experience or scientific interest in real tribal people of his day, makes sense if we understand him as someone who is not strongly motivated to distinguish fantasy from reality, who prefers fantasy to reality, who is projecting his own infancy, before his troubles truly began as a toddler, onto human history. His book Emile, a treatise on the education of children (as if he would know something about that), is characterized by frank callousness and the absolute unquestioned belief that children are blank slates who will become whatever the teacher wants them to be through the application of behaviorism. It is a perfect description of narcissist parenting. Rousseau's supposed greatness among political philosophers I can only explain by theorizing that many political philosophers are similarly disturbed. The negative qualities which I read into his work can all be used to serve the function of self-aggrandizement and parasitism.

Victor Hugo's entertaining novel Les Miserables is just like being inside a narcissist's brain and is so similar to modern leftist thought that it could almost have been written today, except that Hugo's way of thinking is all fitted within a Christian outlook, whereas modern leftists hate Christianity. The first thing that needs to be said about the book is that the characters are all one-dimensional and over about 1500 pages, no realistic characterization is ever attempted. Instead, the characters represent abstract concepts such as justice. In fact, the idea of the book seems to imply that people do not really have character because it suggests that people can make a 180 change after a single experience. The book begins with the application of blank slate theory to a middle-aged convict named Jean Valjean who, after a selfless act of mercy from a Bishop from whom he had stolen, is inspired to become the perfect exemplar of Hugo's interpretation of Christian morality for the rest of the novel. Narcissists do not feel like they are consistent characters themselves and they do not feel responsible for their previous crimes and they believe that they deserve mercy and forgiveness (like any addict). For comparison, a short work from Hugo called The Last Day of a Condemned Man, is designed to provoke sympathy for a condemned criminal without explaining what his crime was (he gets executed before he could write that part). Jean Valjean's counterpart, Javier, is an inspector from the government who trails Valjean across time and space to put him back in jail no matter how much he proves his goodness. Javier represents justice as unthinking rules and absolute tenacity. If you were to combine Javier and Valjean, you might have more of a complete character. This can be interpreted as an example of splitting, which is an infantile way of thinking in which the good and bad aspects of a person are separated, as if they are different people rather than a consistent whole. The …

Ayn Rand shows marked similarities to Victor Hugo, who was a favorite novelist of hers, only more extreme, though on the right rather than left. Rand not only deserves credit as an early founder of libertarianism but as an early writer on narcissism. In The Fountainhead, the villain Elsworth Toohey is described in very similar terms to the way we think about narcissism today, as a kind of empty man with no self who is driven to project that emptiness onto everything around him, who invades organizations and controls them from an inferior position. The thing that Rand got wrong about him is his frank self-awareness. Narcissists are not naturally self-aware but rather are deeply confused by their own fantasies. The Fountainhead makes more sense if you interpret all the characters as narcissistic. Although Howard Roark is portrayed as a man of integrity who does not cheat, in contrast with Elsworth, he is, himself, like a machine with no soul who, when he has no business, simply sits at his desk staring ahead waiting for the phone to ring. His willing to let his girlfriend Dominique Francon (who could easily be interpreted as having borderline personality disorder) humiliate him by marrying other men for seven years before he finally gets together with her. Not all narcissists are equally dangerous but Howard Roark is truly self-destructive like a typical narcissist; the novel simply covers up for him. The scene near the end where a jury exonerates him for blowing up a government housing project because the government deprived him of his right to design the building is fantastical and would never really happen. Rand was a great exposer of covert narcissism but the vagueness of the concept of "virtue of selfishness" enabled her to promote overt narcissism over true morality, although I agree with her that morality is ultimately about self interest.

John Steinbeck is an author you may have read in school and you can go back and re-read him with an understanding of the concepts presented here and you will see the same sort of thing. Many important novelists are narcissist. Once you become aware to narcissism, you can see it everywhere. There is a narcissist bias among famous people because narcissists are much more motivated than the average person to become famous. An understanding of narcissism is probably the best way to improve the world because it is so common in people with important positions. If people could be more aware of it, a huge number of important people would be out of their positions.

We now look into the logic of economics and the psychology of famous economists. In the history of economics, we see arguments that are good, honest, straightforward, and logical which explain why independence and the institution of private property are necessary conditions for the wealth of a modern economy, and we see opposing arguments which are characterized by obscurity, evasion, and emotional reasoning that are used to promote centralized control. Sometimes both types of argument are seen in the same person. I have said above that goodness is economic and evil is psychological and thus in the history of economic thought I see a clash of good and evil along these lines. Unfortunately, among those who I find to be honest and straightforward, I find a severe lack of understanding of the psychology of the other side, to the extent that F. A. Hayek was so easily manipulated that Keynes made him believe, up to the end of his life, that he (Keynes) was continuously on the verge of coming around to Hayek's side. These economists will autistically document every fallacy in Marx or Keynes and will not understand that they will still be ignored. Among economists, one of the best psychologists was Thomas Sowell. If you read Thomas Sowell, his books are full of snarky comments about the psychology of his opponents. Unfortunately, I think it was a missed opportunity for Sowell not to go more deeply into psychology, which he could see was the biggest reason that his ideas were not more adopted. If he had changed fields to psychology part way through his career, he could have accomplished a lot more for the advancement of economics. There is a great need to combine economics and psychology in order to win arguments in the future.

If I am right in my interpretation of Nietzsche that the Nietzschian man is one who embraces the fact that achieving the best things in life entails risk, then it appears that people can be Nietzschian without going through a process of nihilism and overcoming nihilism. These people have a phlegmatic temperament and they avoid getting addicted to ideas in the first place by taking a scientific approach. Thomas Sowell is one of these people. His fundamental dictum, "there are no solutions—there are only tradeoffs", which he has repeated many times in different ways, is the very thing that people wish to lie to themselves about. Sowell understands that people resist this idea out of a sense of entitlement but I think that he fails to appreciate the emotional turmoil that people may go through in accepting this idea, particularly when it touches on something especially dear to their heart. Sowell was a Marxist early in his career but the economic data coming out of the Soviet Union was enough to change his mind about it, and he does not seem to have gone through a dark night of the soul. We see a similar style in other free market economists. They have a kind of strength--an ability to avoid addictions that other people find so enticing but at the same time, an inability to deal with their opponents on anything other than an intellectual level.

To get an idea of the degree to which people can be emotionally triggered by economic reasoning, check out the Red Pill community. The red pill analysis is founded on evolutionary psychology, which is really a kind of economics. The optimal evolutionary strategies of both sexes are intimidating to the other because each sex puts the other into a stiff competition. Men, especially young men, tend to have an idealized version of woman that they cannot marry in real life because they do not exist. Men tend to specialize in either short-term (alpha) or long-term (beta) mating because it is too costly to be both at the same time. Women, on the other hand, are attracted to both alphas and betas. Blue-pill men may believe they can have a woman who is not attracted to the alpha, aka chad. When they find out that a woman actually is attracted to him, then she's not a good woman anymore. This is called the Madonna/whore complex and could be seen as an example of splitting. The truth, that all women are capable of being whores, is a tough pill for many men to swallow, yet it is all explained logically by the economics of female reproduction. Men want a solution for their loneliness, but what they get is a trade-off. No woman is perfect from a man's perspective. A phlegmatic economist like Thomas Sowell might say "we cannot blame woman for being the way she is since she is merely maximizing her own self-interest and to ask her to do anything else would be unstable over the long term." Other people go through the whole Nietzschian journey through nihilism.

Economics has been called the "dismal science", which is surely the designation of an addict who doesn't want to be cured. Is it really so dismal to say that socialism doesn't work? To the contrary, economics seems to imply that with capitalism we can eliminate poverty over a long enough time, whereas with socialism we cannot. In fact, with socialism we create poverty instead of ending it. But surely, ending poverty is the whole point of being a socialist isn't it? No, for those who think economics is dismal, that cannot be the only reason. Economics is dismal to the upper class because capitalism comes at the expense of the upper class. Economics is also dismal to people who have been addicted to the ideas produced by the upper class because it threatens them with nihilism.

Psychologists distinguish between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand another person's emotion, whereas emotional empathy is to feel that emotion along with them. Autists and narcissists both have trouble with empathy and may superficially appear to be similar to one another because of that. However, autists are usually said to be bad at cognitive empathy whereas narcissists lack emotional empathy. The autistic stereotype is someone who you have to spend some time explaining what he did that hurt your feelings but when he follows you, he will feel sorry about it. However, autists can become good at cognitive empathy if they can find a good theory to explain people. On the other hand, a narcissist develops his skills in cognitive empathy in order to manipulate people, and hence will always look at people in a simplified way, as if everyone is stupid and weak. Narcissists are likely to get the authentic and incorruptible aspects of a person completely wrong. Furthermore, narcissists also misread people because they themselves are so heavily self-deceptive and reliant on psychological defense mechanisms. This is the dynamic I see playing out in the history of economic thought. True economics is a kind of cognitive empathy, founded in theoretical rules which are broad enough to include the whole range of human sentiment. Necessarily, these rules are not very specific but they are also not limiting and thus can be applied to every real situation. False economics imagines people in a way that is simplified and inaccurate. This always results in a vision of people as fools who need management because for any simplified model you can always come up with scenarios in which people will not behave appropriately.

!quoted by CosmosStag

According to Nietzsche, the instinct (Dionysian dynamic) does not know about the future, whereas the imagination (Apollonian dynamic) does. Man, the unique animal with both imagination and instinct, is in conflict due to this difference in the way that his higher and lower functions interact because the imagination is showing him the risks that come with doing what is instinct is telling him to do. Thus, other animals do with gusto and a love of life that man does with trepidation. This idea makes sense from a Darwinian perspective because the instinct is kind of ancestral memory that recalls only successes and forgets all failures. Ancestors all hunted food and secured territory and mates and managed to reproduce before any of these activities cut his life short. Thus, the instinct tells us that to pursue our function as animals is a pure good that has no risk, whereas our imagination produces images of failure, humiliation, and death as possible consequences and makes us aware of risk. According to Nietzsche, people deeply wish to believe that their instincts are telling them the truth even though really they are deeply biased. This, according to Nietzsche, is the reason that people are drawn to spiritual quests like the alchemist's quest for the philosopher's stone. These spiritual quests have a similar emotional character for humans as the ordinary quests of animals, acting without imagination, have for them.

Many diversions that have been pursued by humans over the millennia could fit the general formula described above: spiritual quest, the pursuit of utopia, the construction of an AGI that will solve all problems. When Thomas Sowell says "there are no solutions, only trade-offs" (a good summary of the result of marginal utility theory, thus common to all modern economists), he directly challenges the basis for all such quests. The bias of our instincts seems to be saying that really there are pure solutions, and that the existence of a trade-off negates all transcendent value. On the one hand, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" is a truism that few would disagree with, but on the other, people seem to believe that the only lunch that makes life worth living is free. This theory of human motivations explains why economics is considered to be "the dismal science" rather than the most valuable science insofar as it explains to us how to maximize the wealth of our society. I liken socialists (who can be found on both the left and the right) to people who want to build perpetual motion machines who become angry when I tell them that they can't actually build one. Surely ones time better spent to try to invent something that is actually physically possible? Not necessarily, according to the theory that transcendent value, that which makes life meaningful, is inherently a quest for the impossible, and real things that involve trade-offs are not good enough.

According to Nietzsche, when a man's transcendent values are threatened, which is what happens when you tell him that "there are no solutions, only trade-offs" he is threatened with nihilism and he will avoid agreeing with you even if what you say is completely obvious. The Nietzschian man is like Paul Atreides, who can hold his hand in the box of pain in order to avid the Gom Jabar. In this way, he satisfies his instincts with real things by accounting for the bias of his instinct. The quest for the impossible is an addiction. Someone who is trying to create the philosopher's stone is not a threat but someone who wants to create utopia is someone who is putting their addiction over other people's lives. Arguing is not enough. They must feel the pain of the consequences of their actions. This is the only way that ideas which destroy society can be held back.

At this point, I hope to have convinced the reader that libertarian class theory + covert narcissism = our society. I will now go back in history to trace the transition from the overt narcissism of the old pastoral slave masters to the covert narcissism of today. I will also trace the autistic free market intellectual trend and attempt to comment helpfully on its (relative) failure to defeat the covert narcissists or to connect with the lower class. At this point, I hope to have convinced the reader that libertarian class theory + covert narcissism = our society. I will now go back in history to trace the transition from the overt narcissism of the old pastoral slave masters to the covert narcissism of today. I will also trace the autistic free market intellectual trend and attempt to comment helpfully on its (relative) failure to defeat the covert narcissists or to connect with the lower class.

The point at which the upper class transitioned from overt to covert narcissism I locate at the work of Plato. To provide some background, Plato was not the first philosopher, but is the earliest one from whom complete works survive. An early event in Plato's intellectual development was the execution of his teacher Socrates by the Athenian democracy, and Socrates was not the first philosopher to be politically persecuted. According to Plato, philosophers were persecuted for questioning the existence of the gods and in particular the divine sanction of their society's institutions. Thus, philosophers were seen as anti-nomos, which was an ancient greek word which could be translated as tradition or convention, which was seen as essential to the freedom enjoyed by the Athenian upper class. Philosophers we seen as promoting tyranny, which meant rule by one man unconstrained by convention or tradition. Nowadays, in large part because of Plato, tyranny is a very bad word but at the time it was not universally abhorred because tyrants had also sometimes been seen as pursuing the interests of some formerly oppressed class. The short Platonic dialog Euthyphro dramatizes the conflict of philosophy and tradition as one man who asks simple questions and another who cannot answer them. Thus, according to this view, a philosopher was not simply a "friend of wisdom" but a forerunner of the modern atheist. Knowing how closely Euthyphro resembles a real episode of The Atheist Experience, one of my favorite shows, I do not think that this version of events is altogether implausible. However, an interesting book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy by Costin Alamariu, proposes that the early philosophers actually did advocate for tyranny and in particular said that they should be the tyrant, being smarter than everyone else. Plato's political philosophy is the earliest political philosophy known, but Alamariu's theory that there was an earlier doctrine makes a lot of sense…

Whether or not there was an earlier political philosophy to Plato's, the conflict between nomos and philosophy continues today, with nomos as the clear loser. The success of philosophy over nomos is not necessarily a good thing. Philosophers are capable of producing an endless amount of books to attack us with. The power of the upper class today is the ability to read many books and adopt those which promote their agenda, knowing that the lower class won't have as much time to go through and understand it. For example, ancient governments were said to have a constitution, but they were not written out and designed like the USA constitution. Instead they arose naturally out of the interactions of political coalitions. Such a system could not survive an assault of philosophy, which is why we need to have written constitutions today. Although it may well be true that nomos is superior to philosophy, I have no sympathy for people who want to go back to it. With philosophy we have a situation very reminiscent of Pandora's Box: once it is opened it cannot be closed. We are required to use the methods of philosophy to withstand the attacks from philosophy because we cannot win by looking like a man who cannot justify the system that he represents, as in Euthyphro.

To begin with Plato, let me describe my own experience with him. My impression of Plato before I read him was of perhaps the top philosopher ever. As Whitehead said, "Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato". However, upon reading him, although I certainly enjoyed the experience, I found myself underwhelmed by the depth of his thought. As I stand now, the philosophers I judge as most important were not strongly influenced by Plato. To summarize, one could say that I was most influenced by the founders of modern science, the Austrian economists, and by Kant and other Kantians following Schopenhauer. Antecedents to these sorts of people can be found in the scholastics and Aristotle. Philosophers who are called idealists to put them in the same camp with Plato, such as the essentialists or the rationalist, I still find to be much closer to Aristotle in their overall way of thinking. In political philosophy, Plato is regressive and is very much opposed to the enlightenment and to the ideas of the American founding fathers. Thus, where is Plato's greatness? How can he be as big as people say?

Plato's influence is more apparent in religion. Not only in Christianity but more directly in other groups from late antiquity, such as the gnostics and the hermeticists, who lift their creation myths from Plato's Timeus. However, Plato does not claim to know anything about the creation of the world. His mythologizing is explicitly made-up. In the case of the Timeus, it may be that Plato's creator god called the demiurge is intended to support Plato's politics. The demiurge is like a philosopher god, who creates order out of his mind, similar to the way that the Plato's philosopher kings would order society on rational principles.

Plato's politics seems to be quite different from that advocated by later philosophers. The bulk of Plato's political writings are in the Republic and the Laws. The Republic describes an idealized reconstruction of early society, which was presumed to have perfect virtue, whereas the Laws is a more practical idea that could be implemented by a current administration. However, both of these systems are overtly hostile to free thought, foreign intercourse, and independent sources of value (for example, family) other than that of a person's role in the government's plan. Thus, we could certainly see Plato's influence in modern totalitarian movements, but later philosophers do not generally support totalitarianism and to the extent that they do, they generally appear to mistakenly believe they are supporting freedom with something that is actually good for totalitarianism (for example, Marx).

The Republic describes a three-class system of artisans on the bottom, a military class in the middle, and a council of philosopher kings on top. This system resembles the two-class system that I have used to describe the real ancient Greek civilization, except that there is a third class on top. So it is as if, first, pastorals invaded agriculturalists and became human herders that ruled by force; and then a group of philosophers invaded next and ruled both classes by way of their power over ideas. This, indeed, is what I interpret Plato as proposing in the Republic. Plato was the descendant of a raider and grew up in a society of human herders, but was not, himself, a great military man. He saw weakness in his fellow men in their reliance on nomos and he saw in weakness the opportunity to exploit both the upper and lower class of his society using the power of myth. The well-known myth of the cave depicts ordinary people as imprisoned underground and unable to escape because of being entranced by shadows. To modernize this myth, an ordinary person is like someone who has been watching a movie and who doesn't know that he can get up and leave the movie theater. These are the people who follow nomos, like Euthyphro and prisoners in the cave are what Plato is imagining when he sees people believe the myth that social institutions were consecrated by the gods. Plato says that a philosopher can escape the cave of illusion and can also show other people out of the cave of illusion. However, Plato also observed that not everyone wants out of the cave of illusion. In fact, people may become violent when they are pointed towards the exit, as he saw with Socrates. Plato described these people as lacking an independent sense of justice and proposed that philosophers can rule these people by creating their own illusions. Plato called this the noble lie. Thus, the result is a society not based on nomos, but on illusion. In fact, it would appear that in Plato's version of even…

I see no true parallel to Plato in later philosophy. His idea of politics as a conspiracy is not echoed by later writers. He had no influence on me... or did he? Yes, I confess, I lied. I was influenced by Plato! My videos are easily compared with the works of Plato in the way that they turn an idea into an adventure and in the way they use irony and misdirection to incept an idea that may not be evident on the surface. It seems that Plato may have incepted his own method into me without my full awareness, for I had not thought much about Plato in years when I made those videos but watching them again, I cannot help seeing them as imitations of Plato. Looking at Plato as a master of double talk who could publish his esoteric writings out in the open without fearing that they would be understood, as a hypnotist who inducts his students without their awareness, his influence becomes much more apparent. Though none truly echo his way of thinking, his influence rings down to us in disconnected pieces. Above all, we see his influence in people's actions rather than in their writings. Later philosophers have not advocated for a conspiracy that governs from an apparent position of authority, but we see organizations which function that way, like the Federal bureaucracy. Later philosophers may not agree with Plato but many still act like covert narcissists that are drawn to power but preferring to advise rather than rule. We see scams, cults, and utopian movements that exploit people through the use of illusion--but rarely do we see any of these cult leaders explain quite clearly in writing that everything he says may be a lie that is used to manipulate people who are too dumb to see through it! Perhaps the closest comparison to Plato might L. Ron Hubbard, a part of whose appeal was his ability to make people feel like he was teaching them power over others, all the while exerting his power over them.

We now look at Plato's earlier work the Apology, which purports to be Socrates's speech delivered in his defense at his trial for the crime of impiety to a jury of Athenian democrats, and show how the theory of Plato as a covert narcissist helps to make all of Plato's work internally consistent with all the rest. An apparent contradiction in Plato is that his mentor Socrates who he seems to idolize and exonerate in the Apology, would be executed in the society of the Republic and Laws. In Popper's important work The Open Society and its Enemies, which correctly identifies Plato as an intellectual founder of modern totalitarianism, Popper proposes that Plato went through a development, starting out as someone more like a modern liberal who favored toleration and openness to new ideas over repressiveness and closed-minded traditionalism, as personified in the Athenian democrats in Apology. This, I would argue, is wishful thinking on the part of Popper, who has allowed himself to be manipulated by Plato even with his awareness of Plato's maliciousness. Instead, the Apology is another noble lie, one that further positions philosophers to dominate covertly. First off, it is unlikely that Plato's version was an honest attempt to depict Socrates's thought because we have another quite different version of the speech given by Xenophon which is much better suited to the real situation. In Xenophon's version of the speech, Socrates acts like a man in fear of his life who is trying to appear harmless to people who have his life in their hands, and to ingratiate himself with them and convince them of his virtue. In Plato's version, Socrates antagonizes his jury and frankly states that he deserves to rule over them, as if he is daring the Jury to kill him. He challenges them to prove that he is impius and makes them come off foolish, as in the Euthyphro. His demonstrations of contradictions in the accusations against him make the jury look unjust. He comes off as a brave hero w…

As a final note on Plato's political philosophy, we turn to the interpretation of Georgics given in Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. This work is often seen as anti-tyranny but is easily interpreted as anti-overt tyranny and pro-covert tyranny. Not to go into too much detail, a character called Callicles argues loudly that the weak deserve to be oppressed by the strong. Socrates treats Callicles as more interesting than other characters who seem to take more moderate positions. Socrates does not actually refute Callicles's position but seems to say that his position is imprudent rather than wrong. Thus, the real meaning of the dialog may be that Callicles is a potential candidate to be groomed into the nocturnal council and the others are not.

We turn to Plato's metaphysics. Here too, Plato's thought is regressive and has much more in common with older styles of thought than other philosophers. In particular, Plato's doctrine that the world of the forms is somehow a real place where abstractions and other contents of the mind exist on their own dissociated from any mind is best compared with a tribal belief in a dream world that we visit when we sleep. Except that Plato has intellectualized it, as if a mathematical chain of reasoning is also a journey through the dream world. Indeed, Plato's dialogs themselves are very much like dreams and can be compared with shamanistic journeys, guided meditation, acid trips, or other altered states of consciousness. This is what puts Plato in a class of his own. We call him a philosopher, but maybe he's better understood as a kind of shamen.

Plato bills his dream world of forms as superior and more real than the real world. Thus, his spiritual journeys are not supposed to be something that make you a better warrior when you come out. Instead, the ideal would be to remain in the world of the forms forever. Thus these spiritual journeys are not journeys of growth that make you into a better warrior when you come out. They are intellectual narcotics that leave you wanting more. Knowing that narcissists are addicts to their own imaginary grandiosity, it is quite natural that Plato conceive of an imaginary world that is more real and true than the real world. This is exactly how all narcissists think. Just as narcissists become addictive to others by tapping into their own narcissism, Plato's allures his followers with the idea of retreating from reality and living in a world of pure intellectualism. Isn't this fantasy just what so many intellectuals want? What is it to be a scholastic monk or a professor than to be lured away from reality, with all its war and uncertainty, into a world of pure ideas? Thus, although I do not see Platonism in the ideas of later philosophers, I see it in their action. They are idea addicts and Plato is their master for having described his addiction as a journey into a truer world and the ideal of a life well lived. Exploitation of the fools who don't know they are lost in a world of ideas is the method Plato recommends to achieve this good life. Isn't that what it is to be a professor or a bureaucrat and to live off taxes and government grants? Later Platonists conceal their addiction but Plato revels in it.

The ring of Gyges, an idea from the Republic, was the inspiration for the Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings. In the Republic, the Ring of Gyges is used by Glaucon to make the argument that justice is social, and he asks us to imagine what we would do with a perfect tool for concealing crimes if we had it. He expects everyone to say that we would all eventually become criminals. This, of course, is the view taken by Tolkien, as would anyone who adheres to the "tragic" view of man. It is also quite in accord with an economic view of man as someone who responds to incentives. However, Socrates says that justice has an internal component, and a man who acts unjust is destroying himself as well as hurting others. A true philosopher would not act unjust even if he would not be caught for his crimes. Of course the Ring of Gyges is really no different from the Noble Lie, which philosphers use to weave a web of illusion to conceal the true nature of their power. Thus, if we lived in Middle Earth, Plato would be like someone who would say, "the true philosopher can wear the ring of power without serving Sauron". How can generations of political science students be assigned this work to read by professors who keep telling them it's important? When I was younger I dismissed the Republic as idiotic, but now with my experience of evil I better credit the sinister nature of the work. Those professors probably really believe that they are incorruptible. In the Republic, Glaucon never thinks about what would happen if he posed his thought experiment to a true criminal. "Of course my conscience would prevent me from committing crimes," he might well say. The Republic is the most important book of political science because it really is a bunch of self-deluded people and outright criminals weaving a Matrix around us.