Category Archives: Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson. Courtesy | GoogleCommons.

The senior class should invite Jordan Peterson to deliver the colleges commencement address inMay.

For a school that studies the classic tradition while fighting for freedom in modern politics, Peterson is an excellentfit.

A public intellectual and clinical psychologist, he speaks on eternal truths and classic texts, and applies their lessons to todays controversies. A New Yorker article called Peterson the most influentialand polarizingpublic intellectuals in the English-speaking world.

Peterson came to public attention in 2016 when he opposed an amendment to Canadas criminal code that added gender identity as a protected category. Peterson argued that the change would criminalize a persons refusal to use they/them pronouns and ultimately push Canada toward tyrannya concept he has studied foryears.

Ive studied authoritarianism for a very long timefor 40 yearsand theyre started by peoples attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory, he told the BBC in2016.

He stands strongly against cultural insanity while not becoming an ordinary talking head on a nightly shout show. He has spoken out against the sexual revolution and transgender radicalism while defending family values andtradition.

Since entering the spotlight, Peterson has captivated audiences everywhere. He has written two best-selling books on life improvement and traveled across the world speaking to thousands of people on ideas like responsibility anddiscipline.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, Peterson said in a video. Try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth thats the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty oflife.

Self-responsibility is a core theme of Petersons messagepractically identical to the principle of self-government this college holdsclosely.

Almost all the meaning that you will need to get you through the hard times of your life is going to be a consequence of adopting responsibility, he said in onelecture.

But theres another reason to invite Peterson to campus. We have the unique opportunity to teach one of the worlds leading intellectuals alesson.

Peterson has spoken out about the decline of the university countless times. The crackdowns on free speech, the decreased diversity of thought, and increased reliance on feelings and identity are among hiscomplaints.

At a 2019 Heritage Foundation event, Peterson said what universities fundamentally manage to achieve is leaving studentsdefeated.

What people are being taught, Peterson said referring to the modern university, is of no utility as a guiding light to anyone. And its a catastrophe to take young people in their formative yearsand to tear the substructure out from underneaththem.

Peterson spends hours on podcasts lamenting the failure of modern education. On his Aug. 2 podcast he talks to seven guests about their experiences on American campuses, including a North Korean defector who said her time at Columbia University made her very pessimistic about the Westernworld.

Hillsdale College should show him an example of a successful collegeone that pursues truth, encourages diversity of thought, and stands firmly against the race-obsessed and emotionally-charged curriculums ruining most institutions.

He will see, in Hillsdale, an example of education done right. He will finally have an example to point to of an intellectually serious and open-minded college.

What he says matters and when he talks, millionslisten.

In a time of disillusionment and turmoil, Peterson speaks to the sanity and truth we crave. We should invite him to send us off into theworld.

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Jordan Peterson should be the 2022 commencement speaker - Hillsdale Collegian

Russell Brand published this video item, entitled Candace Owens debates Russell Brand below is their description.

Candace Owens and I go head to head here in this excerpt from my Under the Skin Episode (Will It Go Left Or Right? Candace Owens & Russell Brand). In this Candace Owens Interview, we debate the pros & cons of The Left and The Right and an attempt to negotiate when utopia might look like.

If you want to watch the full Candace Owens podcast then click the link below I highly suggest you watch the full interview:

This is a short excerpt from my podcast Under the Skin. Click below to listen to my luminary original podcast and hear from guests including Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Haidt, Naomi Klein, Kehinde Andrews, Adam Curtis and Vandana Shiva.

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Candace Owens debates Russell Brand - The Global Herald - The Global Herald

A liberal wants happy endings. A conservative wants satisfactory endings. Liberal happiness usually involves great unhappiness. Conservative satisfaction usually means things that work.

In the Covid-19 crisis the West has sought a vaccine-powered happy ending where everyone goes to heaven but no one dies. As we see now, a more realistic end game that conceded some death and hardship was needed for a satisfactory ending. What produced the former and actively suppressed the latter was China.

As we wrote in April of 2020, only the Chinese knew what was happening on Covid-19: Repeat. No one but the Chinese knew anything till at least March (2020). (U.S. President Donald) Trump only knew what he was told by his crack science team of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Karen Birkx, Dr. Anthony Redfield and the armies of CDC and Health Department apparatchiks. Who said in March that masks were ineffective. But now science proves theyre boffo. (In D.C. opinions are like belly buttons. Everybodys got one.)

Trump is not an epidemiologist. Hes a businessman, a salesman whose focus was on preventing a total collapse of the economy. So when the initial calming sounds from his advisors proved fatally wrong, Trump played for time. He mobilized supply chains, supplied states with ventilators, PPE and beds. Even his bitter enemy Cuomo, governor of New York, was forced to concede that Orange Man Bad had done alright by the people of the Empire State. His policies did flatten the curve, preventing an early meltdown of U.S. hospitals and their health system.

Likewise, Trudeau is not an epidemiologist. The PM got his talking points, largely,from his virus expert Dr. Theresa Tam (via the WHO). Reading from the Chinese script she scorned masks and the closing of borders. While Trump closed Americas borders and sanctioned China, Trudeau, Health Minster Patty Hajdu and senior public health officials insisted that the risk of transmission was low in Canada right up until early March.

When the risk level suddenly jumped to high on March 15, the government scrambled to impose an economic lockdown to curb the spread of the virus reports CBC.ca.

Which is where we have been since the fabled 15 days in 2020 to flatten the curve the first of many Orwellian bromides to deflect from the tragedy of executive overreach.Now we have an extensive article saying just that.

In the Wests abject panic over the virus, says Tablet magazine in The Masked Ball of Cowardice, the assembled political and health elites of the West took their marching orders from Chinas carefully manicured script on how they beat a virus that most everyone now concedes they launched themselves. The script was a lie that launched an estimated 4.5 million deaths worldwide.

At the heart of the lockdown madness was the collective fantasy of controlling a common respiratory pathogena feat the epidemiology profession had agreed was impossible and self-destructive just months prior.

In The Masked Ball of Cowardice Michael P. Senger documents how the pandemic can be explained by initial gullibility on alleged Chinese treatment of the virus and the subsequent attempts by the West to cover their ass for being suckered. since 15 days to slow the spreadfrom fear propaganda to masks to school closures and vaccine passeshas been a cover-up of catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real.

A few samples from Sengers blistering of the Wests elites. Starting with our favourite: the blunderbuss PCR tests.Based on WHOs guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives.

The WHOs PCR guidance was quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to coding guidance, if the decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to death, then death should be classified as COVID-19 death.

Senger points out that in swallowing the Chinese prescription the West ignored the far-greater catastrophe of social costs. In March 2020, the Dutch commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be 6 times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming society would not accept optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed.

Figures from Trudeau to (now former) NY state governor Andrew Cuomo hopped on board the Zero Covid train early. As we wrote in April 2020: Justin Trudeau, has suggested that losing even one Canadian to the virus is not worth any economic benefit. In the U.S., the key health advisors to president Donald Trump talk about not being able to re-start society till the virus is stopped and no lives are in danger. This humanist position enjoys the approval of the mainstream media which has turned the Covid-19 death toll into a telethon of tragedy, bereft of context and precedent.

That implausible goal of crushing the virus at all costs has now resulted in a choked health-care system, untold millions dying or suffering from the isolation and desolation of lockdowns and, despite the buoyant stock market, the destruction of supply chains. To give just one example, August production of Toyota vehicles is to be slashed by 60,000 to 90,000 vehicles. Why? Microchips are impossible to source and petrified labour is staying home, not working.

We foresaw the supply-chain monster in March of 2020. One revelation that will not pass, however, is just how vulnerable North Americas indulged society is to events in China. The virus, which originated in Wuhan, has become the unwanted party guest who wont leave till hes soiled the carpets and broken the furniture as he plays air guitar.

But its also informed Americans and Canadians that almost all their prescription drugs and a host of other products come exclusively from China. Or near enough. So those high-blood-pressure pills we gobble especially the generic brands are 95 percent dependent on Chinese labs after successive governments in North America allowed the business to migrate eastward. And supplies are dwindling.

This dependence has been around for some time now, waiting to emerge. It just took the Covid-19 emergency to make citizens aware. You certainly didnt hear it it discussed in media circles when the new North American trade deal was being discussed We can see why now. Canadas PM Justin Trudeau is too busy currying favour with the geopolitical swells to watch out for his nations vulnerability. Like ceding our sovereignty on energy to the Saudis or Americans, it was getting in the way of him winning a seat on the UN Security Council in his priorities.

As conservative radio host Jesse Kelly writes: I dont understand. I was told repeatedly that you could just pause an economy as if it was Netflix. After all, someone got sick. Did pausing the economy and dumping trillions of unbacked currency into it cause widespread economic dislocation? Weird.

Weird indeed. And with Canadas GDP dropping, about to get weirder.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canadas top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

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Jordan Peterson and Rex Murphy on Woke Culture Wars - Todayville.com

Photo: Jordan Peterson, via YouTube.

Here at Evolution News, Ive written about the popular public intellectual Jordan Peterson, whose political controversies have unfortunately often overshadowed his fascinating contributions to the cultural discourse on religion, science, and psychology. Although Im unconvinced by his attempts to weave together an evolutionarily grounded unifying narrative of all these things, Ive always admired him and always learn something from his lectures.

When I interviewed Stephen Meyer for his new book Return of the God Hypothesis, we chatted a little about Peterson and various other public intellectuals who seem to stand on the shores of theism with one foot in and one foot out. Commenting here on Jonathan Van Marens recent survey of these New New Atheists (which also included figures like Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and Niall Ferguson), David Klinghoffer expressed his hope that this might be a new window of opportunity for intelligent design to gain a hearing in the public square.

That wish has now come true at least for the Canadian rock-star professor, who tweeted out his positive first impressions of Meyers Return of the God Hypothesis this weekend. Its a difficult book, Peterson wrote, well-written, densely informative. He claims (p. 211) without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed. (This is in reference to the groundbreaking experimental work conducted by Douglas Axe.) Peterson followed up that tweet by asking his followers Is this an accurate claim? He makes the case very carefully. Its not often that I encounter a book that contains so much that I did not know

Its refreshing to see such intellectual humility from a figure with Petersons status. But not all his followers were thrilled. The more colorful replies dismissed Petersons quote from the book as intelligent design nonsense, gobbledygook, absolute rubbish, etc. One thanked Peterson for making it clearer once again that you are nought but a Christian zealot. How are we still having this discussion in 2021? one follower sniffed.

Others were more polite but still took issue with the claim, repeating well-worn objections. Even rare events can happen, replied one follower. You just have to play for long enough or simultaneously. Someone else echoed this, saying the rare and improbable are happening all the time in the universe.due to its vastness. When a 1:1000000 event could happen any time and in a self propagating system you only need that one event to start the ball rolling.

Of course, its trivially true that rare events can happen, but probabilistically speaking, when weighing likelihoods this is very thin gruel indeed, and thats precisely Meyers point. Someone else objected, Its not a scientific hypothesis, unless we can test it. To which someone else correctly replied, Then you just got rid of history and the scientific method itself!

Some tried a slightly more clever tack, one follower suggesting the quote is double-edged, since he could flip it to say without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically the best option for success. He followed up that if you assume things like the many universes theory, or cyclic time, then random variation becomes probabilistically sound.

But as Meyer discusses in the book, those sorts of things are not insignificant ifs, to say the least! Indeed, they have the classic look of ad hoc assumptions, like Ptolemys epicycles of old. Peterson agrees, retweeting with the reply, But those assumptions add immense complexity to what was once a theory typified by its elegance. If you have to posit whole universes to maintain the credibility of your assumptions is that not a problem?

Hmm!

Not all reactions were negative. One follower said that he had just seen a video about the immune system from Kurzgesagt and found it difficult to believe the complexity of this system is the result of random processes. While materialists insist science will find answers in time, he suggests maybe science will lean towards the creationist argument.

A European follower agreed that straight forward evolution as developed from Charles Darwinis mathematically impossible, pointing other followers to the roundtable discussion on combinatorial explosion with Meyer, David Berlinski, and David Gelernter.

Peterson himself mentioned the combinatorial problem in a later followup tweet: Which neo-Darwinists effectively address critiques of neo-Darwinisms putative inability to deal with the problem of combinatorial explosion with regard to protein folding (to say nothing of DNA mutation) @StephenCMeyer?

Needless to say, hell have a long wait for the answer to that question! In reply, Meyer explained:

Neo-Darwinists largely ignored the combinatorial search problem associated w/ novel protein folds. As evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr admitted this problem was almost entirely ignored for two decades by molecular evolutionists. But protein scientists like the late Dan Tawfik (Weizmann Institute) called protein fold origination close to a miracle. He showed protein folds loose thermodynamic stability after a few mutations & long before they can evolve new folds.

Of course, Peterson was trained with the same assumptions of naturalism and materialism shared by other evolutionary thinkers. This has tended to make him reach for naturalistic explanations of everything by default. He has shown respect for theists, but like Carl Jung before him, he generally frames their belief in psychological terms, where God is a product of our own collective unconscious rather than a distinct, personal, creative entity. Its not that he closes the door on traditional theism. He just hasnt yet felt comfortable opening it beyond a crack, at least not publicly.

Now that hes giving Meyers work a hearing, he may have invited a new barrage of flak. But the good doctor has already proven himself capable of taking more than a bit of heat. In my post analyzing his podcast with Lawrence Krauss, I said that it seemed Krauss was content to stop searching, while Petersons search didnt seem to be over. Im happy to have been proven right.

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Jordan Peterson Discovers the God Hypothesis - Discovery Institute

According to market research, U.S. self-help book sales have nearly doubled over the last five years. There are books offering advice on any aspect of our daily life, but the highest grossing tend to make bold claims like improving your sexual desirability in the eyes of others or helping you lose weight on a diet of soaked nuts. Self-help books are often criticized for exaggerating their own effectiveness, and while we often pick them up with some reserve, we keep reading because we are in need of assistance.

Before self-help books became a separate, mass-marketable literary genre, readers turned to philosophers for answers to life's most burning questions. Though philosophical texts are typically constructed with greater scrutiny than your average assertiveness training guidebook, not all are equally reliable. In many cases, philosophers have also cherry-picked evidence or employed elevated language to get a certain point across more efficiently, usually at the cost of their followers.

While ideas evolve with each subsequent generation and differ from culture to culture, human emotions stay more or less the same across space and time. As such, it should come as no surprise that the practice of shuffling words around is as old as language is itself. In Ancient Greece, practitioners of this powerful but dangerous artform were called sophists. Sophists were rhetoricians who sold their service to politicians, helping them to persuade or deceive their colleagues and constituents.

Developing alongside the art of word shuffling was the science of detecting false premises in everyday discourse. This can be easy and straightforward if you are dealing with a short speech but difficult when analyzing academic writing, which often features long, complex arguments that offer more opportunities for the author to cloak their incorrect propositions. In today's age of fake news, recognizing sophistry is more important than ever and these thinkers show you exactly how to do it.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates manages to score a one-on-one with the titular sophist. Getting it was not easy; Gorgias is one of the most eloquent and, as a result, popular speakers in all of Athens. But while most of his countrymen readily accept whatever proposition comes out of Gorgias' mouth, Plato believes he has more in common with a magician or a snake oil salesman than he does with a thinker. Consequently, Socrates uses his own philosophical tactics to see through Gorgias' elaborate act.

For starters, Socrates asks Gorgias to conduct their discussion in the form of a dialogue. Initially, Gorgias refuses. As an orator, he is used to delivering long and uninterrupted monologues to large crowds of anonymous onlookers. Up on his stage, Gorgias relies on charisma, pathos, and fancy world play to reinforce the weaker sections of his arguments. In dialogue, Socrates can pause Gorgias whenever he wants, forcing the orator to rely only on logic.

Consequently, Plato is able to plant several red flags regarding Gorgias' credibility. Judging by his character alone, Gorgias hates to be proven wrong and never forfeits a debate until he achieves victory. The orator cannot be blamed for his insistence on winning; it is drilled into every sophist's skull in school. Still, it stands in contrast to Socrates, who tells Gorgias that he would love nothing more than for his interlocutors to prove him wrong, thus bringing him closer to his ultimate objective: the truth.

Gorgias calls Socrates' incessant questioning of society's most basic and widely accepted concepts childlike and disruptive. The orator does not see his interest in the abstract as being in service to his community; truth and logic neither sway elections nor destroy invading armies. Socrates, for his part, serves the truth in the way that other men might serve the woman that they are in love with hence, his famous statement, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Socrates also points out flaws in Gorgias' reasoning. Instead of using logic to build up propositions, orators reinforce their arguments with anecdotes. When discussing the importance of virtue, a follower of Gorgias recounts the life of a slave who, by immoral means, became a ruler. As moving as the stories of individual people can be, Socrates reminds us that they can never be perfect distillations of universal human experience, making them essentially worthless to the honest philosopher.

Credit: Markus Spiske via Unsplash

Unfortunately, recognizing a sophist is not as easy as it was in Ancient Greece. Across history, the term has not only become irrelevant to the general public, but within academic circles, it has actually acquired a negative connotation comparable to words like "populist" and "demagogue." In other words, no self-respecting thinker (or self-help book writer) would ever call themselves a sophist. To make that link, we have to look even closer at their preferred rhetorical strategies.

Sophists are fond of strawmanning, which is when someone formulates a weak or imaginary version of their opponent's argument to make their own appear stronger. In 2019, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson took on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek in a heavily televised debate titled Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism. The pro-capitalist Peterson, rather than tackle a substantial portion of the diverse literature on Marxism that is out there, limited himself to one short text: The Communist Manifesto.

Despite reinvigorating socialist movements around the globe, The Communist Manifesto cannot be considered representative of the communist nations that arose during the last century. Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, it was conceived as a political pamphlet, making it incomparable to true academic works such as Marx's magnum opus, Capital. By refusing to acknowledge any text other than the manifesto, Peterson hinted at his inability to debate iek head-on. This is not to label Peterson a "sophist," but to indicate that he was debating a strawman.

Sophists frequently use high-brow language to distract from any discrepancies in their logic and appear more authoritative than they are. Within academia, this practice got so out of hand that the British writer George Orwell decided to write an essay about it. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," he wrote in Politics and the English Language. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns to long words and exhausted idioms, like cuttlefish spurting out ink."

That, however, is not to say that simplicity is always better. Inspired by the same sentiment that moved Orwell, a number of public intellectuals have built entire careers out of simplifying complex social, cultural, and economic phenomena. Like the aforementioned cuttlefish, these individuals are ostracized by the academic communities in which they were trained for leaving out crucial but contradictory details in their efforts to construct big pictures.

Even with all these methods in mind, recognizing a sophist remains challenging because of the way certain ideas grow and take root. For an easy-to-understand explanation, look no further than Denis Diderot's 1805 novella Rameau's Nephew. Set in Paris during the dawn of the French Enlightenment, it describes the conversation between an unnamed philosopher and the embittered, cynical, hedonistic nephew of a famous composer named Jean-Franois Rameau.

The French Enlightenment revived European interest in ancient Greek culture and ideas. Democracy, metaphysics, and the belief that reason leads to happiness and progress were all back in swing, but the nephew refused to join the party. "People praise virtue," he tells the narrator. "But they hate it. They run away from it, because it makes them freezing cold, and in this world one has to have warm feet. Why else do we so often see devout people so hard, so angry, so unsociable?"

While favoring the easy way over the hard one has always been a telling characteristic of demagogues, Diderot implies that there is more to the nephew than meets the eye. "Talent hits a target no one can reach," Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his book The World as Will and Representation, "but genius hits a target no one can see." Academic and artistic breakthroughs are rarely appreciated in their own time; neither Socrates nor Schopenhauer became well-known until after their deaths.

Applying this parable to Rameau's Nephew, we find a quintessential man of talent in the form of Rameau himself, a composer who according to his own family members found quick success catering to contemporary tastes but whose music would surely be forgotten in the future. Though the nephew will not refer to himself as the genius of this story, he has a few things going for him. Like Socrates, he has repeatedly clashed against the established order over his unpopular, anachronistic values.

Given how familiar the nephew's cynicism and existential dread are to us today after they were further developed by the likes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, this is likely no coincidence. Rameau's Nephew teaches us that, while we should always be skeptical of people claiming to have knowledge that could change our lives for the better, we should not ignore them just because they are being criticized by the academic community. Years from now, their ideas may well become commonplace.

Sophists are not defined by any lack of skill or intellect so much as their motivations. Writing or speaking for personal gain rather than the gratification of philosophic inquiry alone, they sell their soul to the highest bidder, claiming one thing one day, only to advocate for its exact opposite the next. A reliable philosopher does not just make arguments that are consistent across their career, but they also tend to argue against things rather than for them.

Dissatisfied with the amount of personal bias that influenced studies in the academic community, Karl Popper set out to formulate a new code of ethics for his colleagues. Popper, a philosopher, claimed researchers were better off trying to reject their hypotheses rather than affirm them. Since many public figures have a personal stake in trying to convince others they are right, empirical falsification as Popper called it in The Logic of Scientific Discovery tended to produce more accurate results.

While writing his book, Popper developed an almost religious trust in this idea. "What characterizes the empirical method," he claimed, "is its manner of exposing to falsification, in every conceivable way, the system to be tested. Its aim is not to save the lives of untenable systems but to select the fittest one by exposing them all to the fiercest struggle of survival." The Logic of Scientific Discovery left a strong impact on academics, establishing the philosophy of science as an independent discipline.

Knowing what we do now, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Popper was greatly influenced by the character of Socrates, who in Plato's earliest dialogues never produced any ideas of his own but only occupied himself by questioning the beliefs of others. Not until later dialogues like Republic and Symposium did Plato begin to use his protagonist as a mouthpiece for his own all-encompassing worldview. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper called this act of Plato's a "betrayal."

"Not even to himself did he fully admit that he was combating the freedom of thought for which Socrates had died," Popper wrote of the Greek thinker, "and by making Socrates his champion he persuaded others he was fighting for it. Plato became, unconsciously, the pioneer of many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes."

By applying these lessons from great thinkers, we make life harder for modern sophists, often politicians and self-help gurus. That is a righteous thing to do.

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Modern sophistry: how to debunk politicians and self-help books - Big Think

Shortly before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Donald Trump Jr handed his father a memo entitled Potus & Political Warfare. The memo blamed the German Jews of the Frankfurt School for starting the culture wars that destroyed American values. [C]ultural Marxism, wrote the memos author, National Security Council official Rich Higgins, relates to programmes and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian socialism and most directly from the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory.

Higginss memo suggested that groups opposed to Donald Trump, including the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, academics, the media, Democrats, globalists, international bankers, late-night TV comedians and moderate Republicans, are all Frankfurt School puppets: attacks on President Trump operate in a battle-space prepared, informed and conditioned by cultural Marxist drivers.

Its a conspiracy theory and an anti- Semitic one suggesting that these German Marxist Jews who lived in exile in the US during the Third Reich had been an enemy within, corrupting the land that gave them shelter. Martin Jay, the great American historian of the Frankfurt School, revels in its absurdity in his book of essays. Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which the normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. In our post-truth era, even dead Marxists get charged with having political power beyond their wildest dreams.

The irony is that the Frankfurt School had negligible real-world impact. The Institute for Social Research, the schools headquarters, was founded in the early 1920s to account for the failure of revolution in Germany in 1919. The Marxist theorists conclusion was that an economic account of history was inadequate; what was needed was a cultural analysis of authoritarianism, racism and the role of mass entertainment in seducing the masses into desiring their own domination.

Accordingly, in Europe and during exile in the US, the Frankfurt School studied everything from astrology columns to Hollywood cinema and popular music, radio demagogues to consumerism. The masses had been diverted from overthrowing capitalism by what the schools leading thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called verblendungzussamenhang, a total system of delusion.

***

The Frankfurt conspiracy theory, which has captivated several alt-right figures including Trump, Jordan Peterson and the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous news service, turned this history on its head. Rather than impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads from the academy, the likes of Adorno, Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse were a crack cadre of subversives, who, during their American exile, performed a cultural takedown to which Make America Great Again is a belated riposte. (Walter Benjamin never reached the US fearing repatriation to Nazi Germany, he killed himself in Spain in 1940.)

But it is not just alt-right rubes who have been fooled into believing the Frankfurt School harboured masters of subversion. In 2010, Fidel Castro wrote that the exiled Marxist academics worked with the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to develop mind control, deploying rock music as the new opium of the masses hence, Castro suggested, the invasion of the US by the Beatles who, he claimed, were tasked by the Frankfurt School with weaponising Merseybeat to destroy liberation movements.

[see also:Living in Fernando Pessoas world]

Jay finds the notion risible, ironically suggesting that it explains John Lennons quiet lyrics in one of the bands hits: You say you want a revolution. You know you can count me out Dont you know its gonna be all right? In the late 1930s, Adorno took part in a Rockefeller Foundation-funded research project at Princeton on radio content not mind control and certainly understood the Beatles as instruments of a culture industry by which late capitalism thwarted revolution. Adorno, however, was not the minence grise behind mop-topped world domination.

The truth of the Frankfurt School is that it failed to grasp Marxs dictum: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Jrgen Habermas, the schools second-generation leader, called his predecessors retreat from political action a strategy of hibernation. The time was not right for taking to the streets, Adorno told students in the late 1960s; for their part, his students saw their professor as a tool of oppression. They had a point. When students occupied the Institute for Social Research in 1969 Adorno called the police to evict them. One lecture by Adorno was interrupted when a student wrote on the blackboard, If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.

That same year, Jay told a fellow grad student at Columbia he was writing a dissertation on the Frankfurt School. The result would be his still seminal history of critical theorys early years, The Dialectical Imagination (1973). His friend a member of the militant left-wing organisation the Weather Underground was dismissive. Didnt Jay realise those Frankfurt jokers were craven sell-outs and Adorno in particular was contemptible for changing his surname from the Jewish-sounding Wiesengrund during his American exile?

Jay was not dissuaded. Thirty years later, though, he made a terrible discovery. In a cache of Adornos correspondence, Jay found a character assassination of himself. Adorno accused Jay of being a sensation-seeking money-grubber and warned everybody off talking to him. Jay wrote an essay called The Ungrateful Dead about how it feels to spend your career promoting the intellectual legacy of someone who then stabs you in the back from beyond the grave.

***

In 2021, then, surely we would do well to ignore the Frankfurt School? Jays new book suggests otherwise. In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamins stamp collecting to the schools engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age. Their analyses of authoritarianism, for example, especially the parallels they drew between Americas mid-century culture industry and Joseph Goebbels totalitarian use of propaganda in enforcing conformity and silence, not only remain relevant but to some seem prescient: The Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming, read a fanciful New Yorker headline in 2016.

Their insights into consumerism and human sacrifice on the altar of shopping have if anything become more germane. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Since they wrote these words, such self-loathing consumerism has become ubiquitous. We all know that using Amazon Prime makes us complicit in the exploitation of workers, but we carry on regardless. We are virtuosos of consumerist disavowal. Their diagnosis of anti-Semitism retains its critical power too. And so people shout Stop thief! but point at the Jews, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer. They are the scapegoats not only for individual manoeuvres and machinations, but in a broader sense, inasmuch as the injustice of the whole class is attributed to them.

There is something else we need to learn from the Frankfurt School, though something they taught by negative example: the perils of that strategy of hibernation. Jay argues that at heart, his hero Adorno doggedly maintained a utopian hope, against the failure of all efforts to realise it, that the domination of the constitutive subject can be ended. But hope without action led to the aura of ivory-tower smugness that often hangs over the Frankfurt School. I established a theoretical system of thought, Adorno told an interviewer at the height of the student revolts. How could I have suspected that people would want to implement it with Molotov cocktails? Adorno was no doubt right to point out the shortcomings of student uprisings, but he was also exasperating for programmatically retreating from the fray and back into theory.

Bertolt Brecht nailed the Frankfurt School best. For him, the group started as revolutionaries who sought to overthrow capitalism but became disengaged intellectuals. Condemned to live in an idolatrous world with the outlook of Hegels beautiful soul, they spent their lives finessing waspish denunciations of society for like-minded readers rather than striving to transform it. They changed the world too little rather than, as National Security Council lackeys told Trump, too much.

Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations Martin JayVerso, 256pp, 19.99

[see also:Jeanette Wintersons vision of the future of AI is messianic but unconvincing]

See original here:

Why Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School failed to change the world - New Statesman

Have you seen the opening moments of Euphoria? Rue Bennett, played by Zendaya, is pushed violently from her mothers womb straight into the aftermath of 9/11, nursing in the dim glow of a television tuned into George W. Bushs bullhorn speech. Bennett narrates the early days of her own life.

And then, without warning, she says, a middle class life in an American suburb.

Euphoria is not a happy show. The feted HBO series captures a generation drowning in the postmodern muddle of middle class life in an American suburb, where teenagers are addicted to their phones and to pornography. Rue is addicted to prescription drugs. She takes fentanyl. She overdoses.

After our military killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, Stephen Colbert joked about the medias obsession with shark attacks during the summer before 9/11. Was that all we had to worry about? Of course not, and not by a long shot.

Yet for millennials, the joke might resonate. I took an Advanced Placement exam the day after we took bin Laden out. The end of my carefree childhood coincided perfectly with the dawn of the new world. Euphoria intentionally spotlights a generation born straight into that world, where sharks were permanently relegated to low-priority status.

The fluidity of gender is predicated on the fluidity of truth, which itself demands moral relativism. This is the postmodern muddle. Alongside failed wars, a Great Recession, and ambient tech addiction, its the world our experts hath wrought. Its the only world Gen Z knows.

Euphorias dreamy purple haze depicts the pain of the America Without Family, God, or Patriotism, described in a 2019 Atlantic headline.

In 1998, Derek Thompson wrote, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the waynaturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having children.

Twenty-one years later, Thompson continued, the same pollsters asked the same questions of todays 18-to-38-year-oldsmembers of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Todays respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion.

Theyre also less likely to trust authorities, or companies, or institutions, Thompson added. But thats good newsour authorities, companies, and institutions are not to be trusted. They lied to us about Afghanistan to protect and further their failed strategy. They lied to us about Wall Street. They lied to us about Silicon Valley. They lied to us about opioids. Whats worse, they destroyed our faith in reality itself.

There is nowhere for Gen Z to turn as it watches the scenes from Kabul flicker across their iPhone screens. Where should they find hope? If truth is relative, where does that leave God? Somewhere behind porn, Instagram, and prescription drugs used to get through the day.

Woodstock 99, a new documentary on the festivals failed 30th anniversary attempt, shows what presaged a dark turn in the new millennium. That trend may be dark, but all hope is not be lost because family can persevere, God is real, and America is truly great. Truth and a shared consensus on what it looks like are powerful.

When Gen. Mark Milley testified to Congress in June, he spoke of our responsible drawdown in Afghanistan. He also had some bizarre thoughts on critical race theory, signaling the militarys pivot to a different form of jingoism. After his testimony, the chattering class chattered about wokeness.

It was entirely fair, and thats exactly the problem. In an incisive piece of satire, Andrew Stiles wrote under the headline, American Triumph: The Most Inclusive National Embarrassment in History.

The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan has quickly become the most embarrassing national security debacle since the Vietnam War, Stiles noted. Perhaps more importantly, however, the debacle is one of the most inclusive of its kind in American history.

Jordan Peterson is a bestselling author because he tapped into a gnawing discontent with the pains of postmodernism, accelerated by tech oligarchs and accentuated by neoliberal blunders. The kids in Euphoria might listen to his podcast. They might oscillate between hardcore pornography and Wikipedia searches. Either way, they wont find what theyre looking for until we recommit to reality itself.

Of immediate concern are the many American lives lost or haunted by this tragedy, and the lives of those who joined us in the fight. The future feels almost as bleak. Like every generation, the Zoomers who end up in charge will lie about wars. But lying is made all the easier when theres no belief in truth.

When The Atlantic spoke of an America without God, it was talking about public perception. America is never without God, and thats the truth.

Go here to read the rest:

How Scenes From Kabul Play In The Post-Truth Minds Of America's Young - The Federalist

Controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson appears to have turned onto Bitcoin (BTC) in the latest episode of his podcast.

On Tuesday, Peterson published a podcast titled Bitcoin: The Future of Money? which hosted a panel of Bitcoiners including John Vallis, the host of the Bitcoin Rapid-Fire podcast; Bitcoin coder Der Gigi; film creator Richard James; and Robert Breedlove, ex-hedge fund manager and host of the What is Money? show.

In the video, Peterson, who claims to have an IQ of around 150, puts forward a succinct description of the innovation from which Bitcoin derives its value:

Throughout the episode, the 59-year-old author prompted his guests to provide their views on the value that Bitcoin provides to society, and in turn, he then rearticulated their answers back to them in an attempt to form a fundamental understanding of its key concepts.

So, [Bitcoin] is completely transparent. Its completely distributed. Theres no centralized authority. It cant be cracked. It cant be stolen. It doesnt inflate. It cant be inflated. It isnt subject to any form of overt administrative control, he said.

While Peterson isnt known as a crypto proponent, he may know more about Bitcoin and blockchain technology than he let on in the video. The psychologist started accepting BTC donations back in 2018 after he boycotted Patreon over free speech issues.

Peterson has publicly discussed the significance of blockchain tech on multiple occasions, and during an interview with Grant Blaisdell in January 2020, he tentatively stated that:

Peterson also questioned the guests on what they thought were the downsides of Bitcoin and referred to Elon Musks environmental concerns surrounding the sustainability of mining practices behind the asset.

Related:Is being late into Bitcoin about perspective?

The consensus among the guests was that the energy required to maintain the Bitcoin network was worth it because of its transformative effects on society in terms of decentralization, with Gigi suggesting that society, in general, asks these questions about all kinds of things, Are cars worth it? Are smartphones worth it? Is the internet worth it?

Peterson then boiled down the discussion by stating if Bitcoins value propositions were found to be true, the result would be that:

And so therell be a net energy gain not a net energy loss if you calculated it across the entire system. And so, its a mistake just to look at the cost of generating Bitcoin in the absence of considering the efficiencies that Bitcoin would produce, he said.

Read more:

Jordan Peterson wraps his divisive giga-brain around Bitcoin - Cointelegraph

Its amazing how fast Jordan Peterson caught on to the complex ideas behind Bitcoin. The Canadian psychologist and media personality invited four very different Bitcoin experts to his podcast. Their conversation is deep but easy to follow, a treasure for future educators. Its not exactly a Bitcoin 101 class, Peterson is so sharp that he easily grabs the core concepts and, armed with that, asks the right questions. He also synthesizes what his interviewees tell him in one-liners that we can all use from here on out.

Related Reading | China Gives Out $40 Million Of Digital Yuan In Red Envelopes To Boost Adoption

This podcast episode is a mandatory watch for everyone interested in Bitcoin, and we transcribed the key quotes and ideas for you all to use and spread around. Fasten your seatbelts, were going far, above, and beyond.

The podcast title is: Bitcoin: The Future of Money? and it came to be because the Bitcoiner Book Club read Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. He invited:

This gang of misfits doesnt waste one second. Valis defines Bitcoin as an extreme form of ownweship that wasnt available in the world until Satoshi Nakamoto conjured it. He claims that Bitcoin changes your relationship to responsibility and lowers your time preference. Bitcoin fixes the incongruencies that a system with fake fiat money generates. This idea will be the episodes leitmotiv.

For more information on the time preference concept read our analysis of The Bitcoin Standard.

From everything the guest says, Jordan Peterson deduces that Bitcoin provides an incorruptible language of value. James defines Austrian economics as a system that uses logical deduction rather than empiricism. Jordan Peterson was reading on the subject and defines economics as The science of comparative value. And then, money becomes an index of that comparative value.

Its time for Breedlove to answer the question that serves as his podcasts name, what is money? Money is a contract of the future. And today, fiat currency is a violated social contract. He claims that inflation effectively robs out future and corrodes socioeconomic fabric, social morality. And, to drive the point home, artificial central-bank-induced inflation is a corrosive moral cancer on society.

For more information on government money and hyperinflation, read our analysis of The Bitcoin Standard.

Its time for the programmer to participate, Gigi defines Bitcoin as a distributed system of accounting that checks and verifies copies of this ledger and makes invalid copies useless. On the users side, ideally, only you know and own your private keys. Cryptography is inherently defensive and those keys are the secret that unlocks your funds. If you know it, theres no problem. If you dont, there are infinite possibilities to try. The whole system is probabilistic. Chances are no one will guess your private keys. Ever.

An ambitious Jordan Peterson asks Gigi to simply define Bitcoin. He tries, its a list of transactions that is transparent and radically distributed. Of course, thats just one aspect of it.

The Dollar is a pyramid scheme, claims Breedlove. The free market itself, as youve described it, Jordan, is a distributed computing system. Any intervention, any regulation, is a move towards an economic tyrany, because it pushes the desires of a few.

For more information on the magical properties of prices to describe our reality read our analysis of The Bitcoin Standard.

According to Valis, inflation dilutes money artificially and that introduces incongruencies in the system. If we had pristine information, that would inevitably cause emerging order. Then, he uses Jordan Peterson s vocabulary to drive the point home. Inflation is changing the relationship between the matrix of value hierarchies without decremental sacrifices, and thats what creates pathological hierarchies.

Here, Jordan Peterson has a breakthrough. So, you guys really do see it as a distributed form of governance. Boom! Thats what Bitcoin is. Of course, thats just one aspect of it.

Related Reading | $3.6 Billion Crypto Theft: South African Bank Denies Relationship With Fraud Accused Africrypt

Risk is error, Breedlove claims to close this point. Because we have centrally planned money, its pushing hidden risk into the economy. Those false signals confuse the free market distributed intelligence. Intelligence, defined as error correction, is mitigated by the central planning of money.

And then, Jordan Peterson synthesizes the whole point. So, you think of incorruptible money as computationally advantageous, essentially.

Impressive. The man really got it.

In part 2, the gang tackles Elon Musks environmental claims, when will Bitcoin become a medium of exchange, and the risks it brings into the world.

See the article here:

Jordan Peterson Learns About Bitcoin And The Whole World Benefits. Part 1/ 2 - bitcoinist.com

Rule IX: If Bad Investments Still Upset You, Write Them Down Carefully And CompletelyA REIMAGINATION OF BEYOND ORDER BY JORDAN PETERSON THROUGH THE LENS OF BITCOIN.PREFACE

This writing mirrors the exact chronological structure of Beyond Order offering reflection through a Bitcoin lens. This is chapter 8 of 12. If you read the book it adds a second dimension. All quotes credited to Jordan Peterson. All reflections inspired by Satoshi Nakamoto.

But Is Yesterday Finished With You?

Learn from the past. Or repeat its horrors, in imagination, endlessly.

Americans are notoriously bad at history. As Norm Chomsky hinted, America suffers countrywide amnesia. We forget our atrocities almost as soon as we commit them. The challenge with fiat currency is that the lessons are dispensed over decades, if not centuries. In 2020 we witnessed the Lebanese lira implode inflating by 56% in a month. Dig back a hundred years to the Weimar Republic (modern-day Germany) where their currency became worthless in two years. Rome, one of the most studied historical empires, was also undone by the temptation of currency debasement.

America is especially vulnerable because many of us lack an appreciation of history. The moral of monetary debasement is a 100% mortality rate. The citizens of those societies did not have the benefit of opting into bitcoin, but I am willing to bet if it was available it would have been feverishly popular. Currencies are diving headlong into a concrete pool like three blind mice saying, so and so did it so why cant I? Learn from history, to avoid repeating the horrors of fiat currency.

If you do not know what roads you have traversed, it is difficult to calculate where you are.

Bitcoins hard-cap supply is 21 million. The entire blockchains history can be viewed from a full node. More fascinating is the precise knowledge of bitcoins inflation rate over the next hundred years. This historical and forward-looking clarity is insanely useful for everyone to make economic calculations especially in a world navigating through immense turbulence.

In the 1500s Geneva was the epicenter of Swiss watchmaking. Its metronomic accuracy and dependability set the highest standard that lives on in reputation to this day. Its hard to show up for a meeting when you dont know what time it is. Money should have the same steady heartbeat found in a swiss watch. Bitcoin is to money in the 2000s what Geneva was to watches in the 1500s.

We must recollect ourselves or suffer in direct proportion to our ignorance and avoidance.

Weve kicked the can down the road since 2008s Great Recession. A reckoning is coming. We have always complained about the debt but people have had no tools for recourse at our disposal until now. Our government has exhausted all of its tools for a true recovery, focusing on maintaining inflation in a technologically-driven deflationary world. Our government is simply out of touch with the reality that technology is changing everything. What our leaders brand recovery is simply the waning stages of a shipwreck with all hands on deck pretending to prevent capsize. Jeff Booth details our predicament in his book The Price of Tomorrow.

But the body knows what the mind does not yet grasp. And it remembers. And it demands that understanding be established. And there is simply no escaping that demand.

Americans will have a harder time with this new reality because this is our first time confronting the fact our country is bankrupt on multiple dimensions. Getting pushed out of the nest of comfort into the realm of the unknown is fragmenting America. We act in desperation playing a zero-sum game forgetting that a positive-sum game is what took America to the top.

Your instincts tell you that we are deep in a bad place. Theres too much information for your mind to make sense of it. But we are entering a massive paradigm shift. There is no escaping these long-term cycles. Luckily, Peter McCormacks interview with Brandon Quittem, titled Bitcoin is Fourth Turning Money, helps us make sense of these huge macrocycles to better prepare ourselves for the road ahead.

Do Not Fall Into The Same Pit Twice

The memories my client brought into my office had remained unchanged for decades. The memories she walked out with were markedly altered. Which, then, were real?

Secretary treasuries and Federal Reserve chairs have all repeated the same act for decades: increase debt, ignore and avoid debt repayment, and tell everyone that everythings going to be okay. We were told they needed to print more money for economic recovery, for foreign invasions, and to fight the war on drugs. But life on Main Street U.S.A. was good in the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s, so we all went along with it. Today we look back on our actions in 2003, 2008, and 2020 with horror. Our actions put us in a financial straightjacket. Yet here we are repeating the same cycle again, in part because our government does not have an alternate strategy.

Like every drug story gone south, it felt great then and it feels terrible now. The more we delay the inevitable the worse this all gets. When will we stop repeating the same mistakes with our money? When will we come to terms with what is real? The most real aspect of fiat currencies is their primary role in digging ourselves into insurmountable debt. It is baffling how fiat currency caused such self-inflicting wounds yet so many continue begging for more.

Possessed By Ghosts

Schizophrenics lose the ability to monitor themselves effectively

Schizophrenia is the breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior. Inability to find healthy integration causes a schizophrenic individual to seem out of touch with reality. Similarly, society is struggling to properly integrate technology, money, and humanity. We are all out of balance. To make matters worse all three change fluidly and rapidly.

Bitcoin maximalists know its not about the U.S. dollar price because the U.S. dollar is a moving target. Its about how much bitcoin you own, because that denominator is absolute. If you sell apples and the government prints $10 trillion new dollars and then the price of an apple increases, what changed? The dollar or the apple?

The dollar denominator changes fluidly because no one knows how many dollars exist or will be printed tomorrow. In a world exhibiting increasingly schizophrenic behavior, bitcoins predictable supply curve is the sanity check. When you measure life in bitcoin, everything around you gets more affordable. It is technological money that saves humanity from fiat insanity. Id prefer a less schizophrenic world, and bitcoin may just offer the integration that leads to sanity.

His face had hardened They no longer had the habitual look of deer caught in the headlights. They looked like people from whom decisions emanated, rather than people to whom things merely happened.

Bitcoin is hard money and the community is biased toward taking action because thats the demand of responsibility. Bitcoin maximalists tend not to sit around waiting to see what others do. Fiat currency happens to you because you play the reactive role of the innocent bystander. Bitcoin is an open system encouraging active participation. Its a major difference.

He now understood and admitted enough of the potential dangers that surrounded him to make his way in reasonable safety through the world.

Before bothering with Bitcoin you need to understand how the dollar works. The only understanding you can possibly arrive at is that your society is now a 100-story house of cards, the mother of all Ponzi schemes. Once you recognize the danger your life is steeped you will freeze, fight, or flee. Most people freeze and play possum hoping their daddy will fix everything. Bitcoin is both a fight and flight to reasonable safety from an unsustainable system.

He made what he now knew part of his personality part of the map that would guide him henceforth in his actions and freed himself from the ghosts that possessed him.

Bitcoin is a community made up of strong-willed, independent, free-thinking individuals. And a small, strong group of individuals under constant threat can thrive when each member possesses willpower and competency individually. This is possible because we do not suffer the tragedy of commons. Strength comes when you call bs within your community. We dont need blind yes-men. There is no bottom to the Bitcoin rabbit hole so there is no expectation to know everything. There is united energy in pushing to grow our personal map to free us from being possessed by rules we did not vote on.

Uncomprehended Malevolence

I had another client, a young man who was terribly bullied in his first year of vocational college. When he first came to see me, he could barely talk, and was taking a high dose of antipsychotic medication.

America has become a country of overly-medicated lost souls looking for the next pill to miraculously solve problems. Ironic how the systems that generate products based on infinite growth suffer cancerous outcomes. Society peer pressures us to keep up with the Joneses and when everyone is playing a materialistic game of everything you can do I can do better we all become insecure. But we are addicted to the next fiat solution to dig us out of our shame. Fiat currency has systematically given Americans Stockholm Syndrome. And we all keep falling for it. Bitcoin is the only known vehicle offering citizens around the world the ability to snap free of fiats spell without leaving their country.

he had the right to defend himself He realized that he had taken far too much insult at school without reaching out for help He could have confronted his tormentor directly

The latest report shows 17% (46 million) Americans hold bitcoin. These are certainly encouraging signs. Yet that also means the majority of Americans are yet to confront their tormentor directly. Its telling that legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller is one of the 1%, yet even the 1% are publicly sharing the truth.

We walked through his life, developing a particularly detailed account of everything he had suffered at the hands of his tormentor. He became sophisticated enough to articulate some initial understanding of her motivations.

If you are not able to articulate the problem with national currency then you have no reason to own bitcoin. If you develop a detailed account of what inflation has done to your net worth you may be open to exploring new ideas for the sake of your own survival. Start by understanding fiat currency. Heres insight from Stan Druckenmiller.

Potential Into Actuality

We literally make the world what it is, from the many things we perceive it to be.

Do yourself a favor and listen to Robert Breedloves Saylor Series. It is a crash course on the history of engineering and energy networks. Understanding from first principles makes you impervious to FUD. Energy is prosperity. This weak talk about Bitcoin being an ecological disaster is literally fiat in nature: a juicy clickbait headline with no substance or proof. Michael Saylor easily disarms this FUD with reality.

Not only do our choices play a determining role in transforming the multiplicity of the future into the actuality of the present, but more specifically the ethics of our choices play that role.

Critics love calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme full of whales waiting to dump their bags on greater fools rushing in to make fast money. The irony is that the sheer number of HODLers goes to prove the exact opposite. Maximialists understand that only the Bitcoin tourists get washed out with each dump. It all boils down to time preference and those with high time preference lose in Bitcoin. There is something that goes beyond price. It speaks to honest, ethical money. That is why it is so hard to shake. Bitcoin is playing the central role in restoring ethics and honesty to money.

The Word As Savior

we are so captivated by people who can tell a story and who get to the point the moral of the story Such information is irresistible to us all.

The story of money is as old as time. Its often said that money makes people do immoral acts. I believe it depends on the quality of the money. Desperate short-sighted money makes desperate people. Money carries a dirty connotation because most people alive today are living in a monetary experiment and have never tasted sound money. It takes a creative open mind to imagine the positive opportunities that sound money offers humanity. A good story is what people want but Bitcoin tells a story incomprehensible by people tainted with fiat brain.

The Word the tool God uses to transform the depths of potential is truthful speech.

Terence McKenna said, The world is made of language. Bitcoin is language, speech. And it is designed with one purpose: to inscribe an immutable truth to its scroll every 10 minutes. Bitcoin is a tool that transforms the depths of moneys potential.

If Bad Investments Still Upset You, Write Them Down Carefully And Completely

This is a guest post by Nelson Chen. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

More here:

Learning From Bad Investments Will Lead You To Bitcoin - Bitcoin Magazine