March 1, 2011

The trivium as the critical thinking meme


Peace Revolution Podcast lopo

Peace Revolution Podcast # twelve – Origins of Money

A Virtual Round-Table Discussion by Brett Veinotte, Jan Irvin, Paul Verge, and Richard Grove

GM # 41 Stephen Zarlenga pt 1) Money's Dirty Little Secret
GM # 57 Stephen Zarlenga pt 2) Why Gold and Silver are not the Answer
GM # 67 Stephen Zarlenga pt 3) A Response to the Austrian School
GM # 88 Stephen Zarlenga pt 4) Silver and Gold


@ 9 min – Jan) He is one of the world's only economic historians: Whereas most economics is based on theory rather than looking also at the history and seeing how these things have played out historically when the evidence is looked at, he is one of the only economists ever actually who do that.
And so what he does is he looks up the material of guys like Adam Smith and many from the Austrian school and other schools of economis and shows not only where their theories originated from but the history behind them and if there is any solid foundation to support those theories. Like let's say Adam Smith's invisible hand that they rely on to control the economy. It basically is magic, it's wishful thinking and nothing more.
They don't know how it works.
So what they do is, when they no longer have an explanation and their philosophy fails, they throw things out like the "invisible hand", it's there to guide the free market economy in the sort of a magical sense, but as has been shown it just simply doesn't work that way.


@ 12 min – Brett) Economics is, in my opinion, not a science of money but it's a science of human action.
And von Mises's theories were backed up by an entire scientific field of study called Praxeology which looked at human action. And there are a few problems with this, because most of what he was requiring for his theories to be valid was logical thought.
So before we actually jumped into this, I said that the free market is something that emerges out of an enlightened society, which is why at this point is purely theoretical. Von Mises's ideas are based on individuals acting in their own rational self-interest towards some kind of logical end.
Obviously, if we look at the massive success of religion and, you know, government propaganda and state education throughout history, it's safe to say that reason and rational self-interest are not the motivators for most people's actions today. So there is science behind the Austrian school for sure.


@ 26 min – Richard) None of us think that the free market exists right now, none of us were that naive, which is why we're all coming together trying to understand what is money, what is the history of money and how it does effect the current situation, so we can see through the myriad of different pieces of propaganda that were put there to take advantage of our ignorance.

The definition of money


@ 26 min – Jan) What he's presenting has admittedly never been tried before, but what he can show is a review of history detailed with historical facts. He can show how all of the other methods that have been tried, where they completely fail, and then using those as a map. What he's doing is he's presenting the American Monetary Act as a guide to try something for and by the people themselves that hasn't been snug into power by a bunch of greedy bastards at Jekyll Island. Woodrow Wilson being bought out to sign the Federal Reserve Act into place so that they could use the Federal Reserve system to suck money out of the U.S. so that England could launch its war on Germany. That's the real history as Eustace Mullins has pointed out in his work. A monetary system that's actually for and by the people, regulated by the people with no usery attached to it, that literally is completely freed up.
If there is no usery attached to the money, if you're not having to pay a tax for the use of your own money, then the entire way, the entire landscape, the entire definition of money completely changes and suddenly works to serve our freedom instead of as a tool to suppress us by a bunch of greedy people that are working behind the curtains. And [...] there is no doubt that the bankers and others that are in power today would do everything possible to keep something like that from going into power, because it would create a totally open system that everyone could see exactly how it works.

"Eustace Mullins was the first author who has exposed the true nature of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. He is also the last living protegee of Ezra Pound and was a good friend of the great author Anthony Sutton.
Even thought he would have deserved a nobel prize in literature for his writings, he is unfortunately mostly unknown to the public, because his books concern the hottest topics you can write about."


A jesuitized historical outlook


@ 31 min – Paul) Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University SJ wrote a book called "The Evolution of Civilizations" and what it really does is takes a look at the history of these different civilizations and how they functioned. With special focus to their economic systems because a lot of the success and () of societies really hinges on that. [...]
Money basically was meant as a convenience, but just like everything that's presented to us as a convenience it's a double-edged sword. [...] just like the government is supposed to be our servant and it's become our master because it's become so conveniently.


@ 42 min – Brett) The history of money has to parallel the history of states: Governments do not exist for the welfare, or the well-being, or the protection of people.
Jan) And this is what we're talking about though!
As Zarlenga shows in his book, it's never been tried the other way where the money has been put into full control of the people. It's always been the elitists using the government as a force to protect their money, and their systems of controlling the society. So this, in effect, would flip it in its antithesis which has never been done before. And he is showing via history why all of these other things have already been done, here's basically what's left that hasn't been done, and here are the exact steps on how it should be done.


@ 47 min – Richard) I'm not here to defend Zarlenga's work in any way, shape or form, I'm just saying that he is the only person I've ever found in a book to give you 23 case studies of what money has done and what is has been to different civilizations and how those civilizations came to fall. Because it all had to do with money, as you will follow the pattern through it, it repeats.
History repeats until we think for ourselves and start to learn from it. That's the essence of what I like to represent from reading this book, because I found it useful.
You know, it is an expansive book and it is a tough read but it's intrinsically interesting, because he's going to () and bringing together all these different historians who before ... like if you an economist you do not get this education, and then you have to ask yourself, no wonder the rule is so easy to perpetrate in our financial markets, because even the people on TV reading the teleprompters have no idea what they're talking about.
And that's the brilliance of how they keep it secret.


The black gloved fist


@ 52 min – Brett) I mean, this is the end-product, this is what he's presenting to other people.
I believe that he should be able to deliver responses to important and valid counter-arguments in a way that is not dismissive.
And just an example what I'm talking about is Adam Smith's freeze 'invisible hand' comes up. He says, this is something that they can't explain, there is no good reason, and then he ad-hominems it by calling it a cop-out. Now, we can all see the hand in today's economy: It's a black gloved fist that reaches into the pockets of taxpayers, and takes out 700 billion dollars, and gives it to Goldman Sachs and AIG.
We know what the hand looks like, right? We can see the hand, right?
When we are talking about an invisible hand we're talking about what I would call as either market signals or a feedback loop. Now, this is something that's very very easy to define and there's been definitions available and explanations of the freeze invisible hand for over a hundred years. What we are talking about is when I say people can vote, people can participate in desicion making with their feed and their wealth – that's the signals.
Like the government has no market signals because they take money by force. In a truly/thoroughly voluntarily free market system people have a hundred percent choice about where they go and how they spend. That's a continuous feedback loop that is essentially the invisible hand of the free market, theoretically.


They love the Fed


@ 56 min – Brett) The Fed can be nationalized ... As long as the US government exists, the US Federal Reserve System will be there, because all those people who are decision makers in the government benefit from the existence of the Fed. When the Fed prints money, it goes to the lobbying interest, it goes to the military-industrial complex, it buys them votes, it gets them re-elected: They love the Fed, right?

12/24'10 A "motivated youth":

"Yawn ... bunch of nonsense. Until all citizenry can justly participate in an economy, there will be educated (elite) snakes and rats robbing and cheating.
Simplify it, downsize it, recognize it. I don't recognize the 'economy' because there are inventions like derivative trading markets, credit, and digidigits (zeros on a screen) ...
I don't blame the snakes and rats from exploiting the economachine (mechanics of the economy).
It's a tool, they manipulate it to serve them, that's simple.

But, simply put, they (snakes and rats) don't see those they ruin. The economunnity (people subjected to the economachine) is too large and too obscured for their to be justice.
How can I give a shit about someone I've never met? Should there be PSAs on TV with Sarah McLachlan singing about the poor disenfranchised resources (humans) in Vietnam, and Senegal, and Mauritania, and Mexico, and Jamaica, and Bangladesh, and Camden, NY, and Indonesia, and Haiti? I doubt it would matter.
If everything is out on the table, so to speak, and everyone (except the retarded) plays an integral role in the health and well-being of a community, than no one will 'lose'.
Simplify it, downsize it, recognize it."

cca) Most excellent comment, "motivated youth"! Very refreshing.
Way too fatalistic for my liking, to be sure, but right on target, in my opinion. Bull's eye! You know, during this supremely enjoyable two-hour talk, the most fascinating thing for me to watch was how all four of our gladiators in the monetary arena repeatedly touched the battlefield, which I prefer to classify as the "piety theoretical" field of study, without really stepping into it, despite a considerable number of first-class statements.
Then you came along and simply did it, finally, in your juvenile cockiness ... :)
You waged the crucial step seemingly effortless – congrats!
You're saying "simplify it, downsize it, recognize it."
Are you aware of how complicated it is to fulfill your demand in the right way, so that you can get an easily understandable picture in which extremely complex phenomena are coherently contained?
It's very complicated, but not impossible, I hope. Any further ideas of you would be very welcome ...


The little bell and the big swoosh


@ 59 min – Paul) What's funny is that we are basically talking about theoretical things, neither which can really put into place unless we have a responsible citizenry that can actually hold the government accountable.

Richard) Or could receive the ideas to be able to hold the government accountable.
From my perspective, I have been trying to communicate certain truths to the public, and what I discovered was that even when I got my words right, they can't hear my words – it's noise to them. So I have to give them a translator so they can turn the signal that I'm sending into a signal that they are actually receiving.
They don't have the codec to systemize critical thinking so that they can actually discern fact from fiction. And without that they left not knowing what they believe, right?
But if they can use this system to identify: Hey, what I have here is definitely fiction, so let me go find some fact. And then you have this little bell that goes off – it's like this is identified as fact, here it is: no contradictions, all the grammar, logic, and rhetoric is not bending anything out of place, there is no fallacies being used to try to deceive you. It's just straight forward, here it is: facts that are verifiable connected and presented in a verifiable way and an honest manner. [...] If I can you adore and I said, I'd like you to outsource your decision making to this group of people or the corporation – which is psychopathic 'cause that's how those things work – like we would never do that, but that's what we've all ended up being conditioned to do since we were kids was outsource our critical thinking to the "experts", the people who hold corporate jobs and are paid to lie to us.


One of the most successful embodiments


Brett Veinotte) One of the things that seems to be absent from a lot of these conclusions is what I would describe as the psychology of power. (62 min)
Remember, my big concern is power in the existence of this legitimacy around, you know, government which is essentially the socially acceptable use of force. (64 min)
One of the things that I'm trying to put forward here is that the current Federal Reserve System is one of the most successful embodiments of what government is supposed to do. That's what it's for. You know, the state was set up to concentrate resources into the hands of very few people by taking them from a large group of people.
I mean, go back a thousand years, two thousand years, three thousand years, that's what governments do.
He mentioned the constitution, the fact that a bunch of slave owners and aristocrats wrote, you know, stuff down on four sheets of paper 230 years ago did not change the course of history, and that's not be being cynical, that's empirical. (69 min)


@ 70 min – Richard) Let's keep in mind that the Greeks also owned slaves. So all these people, who created the laws, and the rhetoric, and all the things that are used to formulate this control today, come from historical slave owners and the minds of those people. So what we were realizing for the first time is that we weren't free as Americans, we've never been free in the history of mankind from this money system as long as history goes back in time. That's what we have learned.


There will always be blindspots


@ 77 min – Jan) Slaves can only be slaves by lack of ability to be able to think. That's why creating a critical thinking meme, a trivium meme is so important.

Richard) Because we all practice cityisms all day – things that we parrot, that we've been conditioned to know but never really thought about – and critical thinking the systematic form forces you to question things. [...]
Like in single life, you go out, and you try to meet new people, and you try to talk about interesting things – and I bet 99 percent of the people listening were just like the rest of us – and we would parrot things that we heard from other experts, or people on TV, or the "Wall Street Journal", or whatever, never thinking about those things ourselves. [...] Finally you get the point that wow, I'm incompetent. [...]
And then you spend another six years trying to get over your incompetence. You figure out ah, I am consistently incompetent and all I can ever do is kind of willow that down and filling these blindspots. Because there will always be blindspots but what's important is having a process to deal with all of this, because it gives you serenity of mind. And it means you can take all that stuff off your plate because now, you just have an intake process, where you can validate these things and you're not gonna be plagued by all these illusions of history that we've been programmed with, which is how the status quo remains. It keeps us broken to this process of ignorance and pseudo-knowledge. And once we can recognize that, we take all the power away from the people who are really behind everything we've been trying to describe through this whole discussion. [...] They get us to volunteer for our slavery and to love our servitude, and once you can question it you won't love it so much.

cca) Did conspiracy theorist Quigley actually mention the Jesuit Order even once in his books?
Or the Maltese and other Roman knightly brotherhoods?
By the way, piety theory, you could say, is about the distribution of these blindspots throughout what conspiratorial terminology refers to as "the masses" ...


A corporation is essentially an invitation to behave like a state


@ 83 min – Richard) And once they got themselves in bed and created their own intelligence agency, called the CIA, all these other things start to come into focus: The Ford Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, Rockefeller Foundation – all these CIA funding groups. Conspired literally through the congressional report proven by Carroll Reece and Norman Dodd's testimony, showing that these people had a goal to subvert our education system and to blend our way of living with the Soviet style of living which these people also control.
They also control the Bolshevik revolution and communism as we've been taught it.

@ 99 min – Richard) If you take away the corporate psychopathic power you're left with dealing with them and they don't want to deal with this face to face, which is why they create proxies.

Brett) So I mean, a corporation is essentially an invitation to behave like a state: to shield actual individual actors, which incidentally is the only thing in the world that actually exists. Like societies are conceptual, states are conceptual, corporations are conceptual, they are just these aggregations that the inividual, the decision maker, the person who is actually responsible for their actions become shielded from responsibility, or accountability, or () in whatever they do, following the exact same model of the modern state.


@ 108 min – Richard) Hegel didn't discover ... like he didn't create anything new, he described a repeating pattern that has gone through history, he gave it a name, that's all.
He looked at what had been going on: 'Oh, I should name this thing that they keep doing to us.'
They create all this action and drama before an event, they carry out an event, then erase whatever led up to that event so you can never see what leads up to the triggering point, because they give us this pseudo-history.
Sure he's a participant. If you read that stuff, he is a twisted character, right? But what I'm saying is that like he is not original in his thinking, he just gave a name to a process that the ilk of which he wanted to be a part used. You know, his "Phenomenology of History" ...
Here is the key: Being able to study all these different characters and to keep myself separate. Because I don't have to believe in any of them to understand their perspectives, to understand and emphasize what they were trying to do. But unfortunately for them, I have access to a more comprehensive set of information.
So I don't have to buy in to their shortcuts of thinking.

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