We approach the crux of the matter. We approach the ultimate test for verification of property rights wherein lies the ultimate test for liberty and all of its fruits. The fruits? Social harmony, health, civilization, cooperation, family, wealth, virtue. How can I be so sure and so offensively brief? Out of the following: all of …
Continue reading “6.7, Right of Disassociation as Test for Liberty”
From a letter from one of the great American poets to another. From Melville while he is still birthing Moby Dick to Hawthorne, his friend. “My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a …
The logical, the mathematical, the economic (praxeology) are, and must be, technical, precise and clear. And there is much in promises (contracts) that is improved by a an employment of the precise and clear in meaning. But, it would be wrong to take this sphere of meaning as the everything. It is literally everything. But …
Continue reading “9.1, On the Value of the Poetic and Literal”
The power of disassociation is hidden from view in our day. Forced association is prominent and gaining explicit visibility. “The enforcers of the land demand you hire me!”; “The enforcers of the land demand you produce a cake for me!”; “The enforcers of the land demand you accept this jab of toxins from me!”; “The …
I have loosely tied the right to be racist or sexist in attitudes (not in attack or aggression) with reflections on four maybe-sages (Laotzu, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus). This right to be racist or sexist (or any other -ist one wants to add) is a part of the right to associate and disassociate. Often the reaction …
Money, the status achieved by a commodity so tradeable and widely valued that it is universally tradeable and acceptable as payment for anything because it can be offered for payment of anything. Whether anything achieves this status in any measure of time and space (history) is a matter of the particularities of that time and …
Continue reading “On Money and Currency and Fear and Trembling”
(Pg. 96) “Applied to behavior, especially sexual behavior, the disease label combines a description with a covert value judgment…Psychiatrists diagnose the person who eats too much as suffering from ‘bulimia’ and the person who eats to little as suffering from ‘anorexia nervosa’. Similarly, the person who has too much sex suffers from ‘sex addiction,’ while …
Continue reading “7.2, Szaz, Values, Disorders and the Growth of the Therapeutic State”
From The Medicalization of Everyday Life (2007) “The leading cause of death is being alive. The therapeutic state swallows all life on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the ground that nothing falls outside the province …
Continue reading “7.1, Szaz, On resisting the therapeutic state”
Jesus chose to disassociate from much of the social (and so political) standards of his day. He repeatedly frustrated the Pharisees and Sadducees with the way in which he ignored the nuances of their rules and regulations. Jesus might engage in what counted as work on the sabbath. Jesus might spend time with the discriminated …
Continue reading “6.4, Jesus, Disassociation and Living Well”
Socrates, in his jail cell discoursing with Crito, dismisses as mere warm feelings Crito’s multi-pronged attempt at argumentation that Socrates should break the law and escape into exile. Socrates reminds Crito, as if Crito had forgotten (Crito had not forgotten since Crito himself judges at the beginning of the dialogue what Socrates reminds him of …
