by
Steve Hagen
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You are the final authority. Not me. Not the Buddha. Not the Bible. Not the government. Not the president. Not Mom or Dad. You. No community of philosophers, scientists, priests, academicians, politicians, or generals--no school, legislature, or parliament, or court--can bear responsibility for your life, or your words, or your actions. That authority is yours and yours alone. You can neither get rid of it nor escape from it.
Of course, you can pretend to give up this ultimate authority, or ignore it and act as if you haven't got it, or try to give it to someone else. But you haven't really gotten rid of it. You gave your authority to someone else. You chose to deny or ignore that authority. You made the decision to lie to yourself, to pretend that you lack this authority.
Right speech doesn't rely on judgment or discriminative thinking. In judging we weigh everything out. We base our speech on some conceptual frame that we've arranged to accommodate ourselves and process ideas--like, for example, that the Gestapo are inherently bad, and the people upstairs are inherently good. This is precisely the thinking that got us into trouble in the first place. Indeed, it's the very thinking that produces both the Gestapo and the fugitives.
Instead, we have to simply see the situation in all its pain, conflict, difficulty, and contradiction, and see how it is we become so confused. Then, and only then, can we speak and act in a way that's conducive to awakening.
ties into the way I think about redpilling - sometimes it's more complicated than "you are in the matrix and machines are bad"
being able to reconcile complicated and perhaps contradictory ideas
In many ways, we create a bigger problem when we put people on a pedestal in our speech than when we cut them down. Whenever we make anyone--a minister, a teacher, an athlete, a genius, our ancestors, the Buddha--bigger than life, it's easy for both you and your listener to forget that the person you're discussing is a human being. And with the passing of time, the person will only become larger until, like Paul Bunyan, they're sixty ax-handles high.
We tend to bunyanize the people we admire. But this is very dangerous--particularly if your hero is a teacher of the buddha-dharma. You'll forget that you're made of the very same stuff they are. You'll forget that, like them, you're completely equipped to see Truth right here, right now.
If you keep putting an enlightened person (or, more accurately, your concept of "an enlightened person") on a pedestal, you'll miss this critical point, and get lost in confusion. As long as you think enlightenment is something special, you won't wake up.
the obverse of the kill-your-heroes idea and just as dangerous as expecting perfection
I remember hearing a fellow talking about the Nazi doctors on the radio. He described these people as monsters, subhuman. It's true, of course, that we human beings have done monstrous things. But none of is anything other than human. Indeed, it's because we're human that we are capable of such monstrous actions. If we don't realize this--that every sadistic murderer is human, like us--then we overlook the fact that we have the capacity to act as they do.
We have to realise what we are. That range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.
this ties into my thoughts on the role of the system in determining human behaviour
In Buying Time, I treat the global financial and fiscal crisis of 2008 not as a freestanding individual event, but as a part of, and tentatively also a stage in, a historical sequence. I distinguish three phases: the inflation of the 1970s, the beginning of public indebtedness in the following decade, and the increasing debt of both private households and businesses, in both the financial and the industrial sector, since the mid-1990s. Common to these three phases is that each of them ended in a crisis whose solution was at the same time the starting point of a new crisis. In the early 1980s, when the central bank of the United States ended inflation worldwide by a sharp rise in interest rates, public debt rose, more or less as a balance to this; and when this was redressed in a first wave of consolidation in the mid-1990s, private household debt rose, like a system of communicating vessels, and the financial sector expanded with unprecedented dynamism, until it had to be rescued by states in 2008 at the expense of their citizens.
[...] three processes running in parallel and mutually interlocked (a ‘triple helix’, if you like): the sequence of economic crises of inflation, public debt and private debt (today followed by dramatically expanding balance sheets of central banks, and a corresponding expansion of the money supply); the political-fiscal development from tax state to debt state to consolidation state; and a progressive shifting of the arenas of class conflict ‘upwards’, from labour market to welfare state to capital markets (and from here to the arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organizations).
footnote 7
shifting the arena of class conflict upward is a good description of tech? specifically, upwards to a battleground where capital is already the incumbent, has technological +legal advantages
[...] Buying Time treats state debt as a phenomenon of political economy: not merely one of democracy but also one of capitalism. Capitalism is about the expansion of expandable capital in the form of private property; this entails the danger of a withdrawal of cooperation by those who are needed for accumulation but will not own what is accumulated. Since capitalism is not a state of nature, it can only exist on the basis of reciprocity in some form or other; if this is not present, the question then unavoidably arises as to why one kind of people should work forty and more hours a week for the enrichment of the other kind. This implies that problems of justice and distributional fairness in capitalism are not the discovery of irresponsible political troublemakers, but lie in the nature of a capitalist social order itself. They are mastered to some extent as long as high growth makes it easier for the owners of capital to cede a part of the collectively produced increase to the non-owners. When growth declines, as after the end of the reconstruction phase in the 1970s, distributional conflict sharpens, and it becomes correspondingly more difficult for governments to secure social peace. [...]
[...] Until now, of course, longer-term growth rates have been falling together with peak tax rates, and so has the average tax take of rich democracies. Worse still, in parallel with the declining taxability of firms, their claims for national and regional infrastructure have become more demanding; firms ask for tax reductions and tax concessions, but also and at the same time for better roads, airports, schools, universities, research funding, etc. The result is a tendency for taxation of small and medium incomes to rise, for example by way of higher consumption taxes and social security contributions, resulting in an ever more regressive tax system.
the inherent instability of basing tax policy on the Laffer curve (states lower tax rates to attract large corporations)
feels like a fairly simplistic analysis tbh but maybe worth making note of as a larger general trend in light of all the tax avoidance going on?
[...] not even the greatest optimists claim that enough has been done to make the financial industry safe for society, while there are quite a few voices, both insiders and outsiders, that insist that whatever change there may have been is not sufficient to protect the global economy from another financial crisis of the 2008 sort. Calls for more radical reform are widely heard, even from the likes of Christine Lagarde and Wolfgang Schäuble. For example, speaking at the meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank presidents in Shanghai in February 2016, Schäuble, according to newspaper reports, ‘warned against a delay in financial market reform. “This would be a terrible mistake”, he said. “We must continue reforming the financial markets.”’ The article mentioned that ‘demands for easing up on reform had been heard after bank stock prices had come under pressure globally'.
[...] the notion of a ‘savings glut’, put forward in 2004 by Ben Bernanke when he was still chair of the Federal Reserve. In a savings glut, desired saving exceeds desired investment, making for an overabundance of capital for which there is no use. Why something like this should have come about remains in dispute. An interesting theory claims that excess capital is due to both technological and demographic causes taking effect simultaneously: technological, as today’s advanced methods of production require less and less lumpy physical capital, and demographic, as people live longer and therefore must save more for their old age. While technological change lowers the demand for capital, demographic change increases its supply. Low or even negative interest rates are therefore primarily reflections of market conditions, not the result of central bank monetary policies – the latter essentially just follow and mirror the former. The practical implication is that in order to revive growth, governments should rely on fiscal rather than monetary stimulus, absorbing the surplus capital by borrowing – which is so cheap in a ‘savings glut’ that borrowing practically pays for itself. Growth and employment are then brought back by substituting public for private demand.
he goes on to talk about the problems with this theory, esp the inter-state differences