Free Advice

An understandable stumbling block for people who encounter the Christian worldview is the notion that some external being is threatening to burn you for eternity if you don’t live up to his rules, even though you never agreed to them. What the hell?!

If we frame the situation like that, then yes it sounds grossly unfair, and God seems like a tyrant. I can understand why people write books like this (in the same way that I can “understand” why people rob banks and commit murder).

But even though (as we’ll see) I think these standard descriptions are perfectly accurate, I think there is a much more defensible explanation of the situation humans face. Here goes:

Imagine for the sake of argument that there really is an afterlife.
When you die, you encounter God. That is, there really is a Being who is the Author of everything.
When you “meet God” for the first time, you suddenly see the entire history of humanity. You get it. You have the superhuman ability to understand how every event interlocks. You see the awesomely complex chain of events, starting in the beginning, and ceasing at the end of the world.
Now, at this moment of infinite comprehension, you freely choose to react in one of two ways:

Choice A: You can be in absolute awe at the beauty of God’s construction. You see how He designed the very structure of reality to turn everything into the fulfillment of His loving plan for creation. (Fans of Adam Smith already have an inkling of how this works, with the “Invisible Hand” that turns our greed into service. But it’s more general than that, where “things just work out” in the long run, so that good triumphs.) You suddenly understand why the Holocaust happened, and why God allows infants to die of leukemia. In the presence of a Being who could invent a story so intricate and lovely, your only sensible response is to sing praises to Him with all your might, glorifying His accomplishment.

Choice B: You can be in absolute horror at the misery of your own actions on Earth. You had no idea what a horrible person you were, but with 20/20 hindsight and foresight, you can see the ripple of destruction you unleashed, going down through the generations, long after you died. Note, this isn’t God judging you, it’s you judging yourself. You feel shame, guilt, confusion, terror, and also FURY because IT’S NOT FAIR that you were plopped into this world with no say in the matter. You are OUTRAGED. How DARE God trick you into doing all of these horrible things, when if He’d just EXPLAINED IT BETTER. If you had realized how everything fit together, you would’ve preferred to NEVER HAVE BEEN BORN but this tyrant created you anyway AGAINST YOUR WILL. How DARE HE?!!?

Now, since the passage of time is something that happens in the material universe in order to make it comprehensible to our finite minds, note that your choice above is final. You choose how you want to react to the instant and infinite comprehension, and then you are effectively in that condition for eternity.

In case it hasn’t hit you over the head: We can summarize Choice A as “heaven” and Choice B as “hell.”

Finally, note that there are things you can do while you’re still alive to condition yourself to make one choice versus the other. If you consciously tell yourself that you deserve hell and that all things good flow from God, and that only through a loving and merciful God do we have any shot at salvation, then you aren’t going to be shocked when you see just how awful your life was. It will just be filling in the specifics; you already vaguely knew that you deserved hell and were no better than Charles Manson when compared to God’s righteousness. If you spend hours per week singing praises to God and reading about His power and mercy, then you are preparing yourself to pick Choice A. Yes, you will be dismayed to see just how bad your actions were, but you’ll know “it’s not about you” and you will forget about yourself when you finally experience the full majesty of the LORD as you’ve been pining for since you were a little kid.

On the other hand, if you don’t think you need a personal Savior, if you think you are leading a pretty decent life and that you’re basically a good person, and/or you’re not even sure if there’s a “higher power” out there…then you are going to react in the second way when you confront the truth in your shell of confident narcissism.

02 Dec 2017

Stop Lying

All Posts, Jordan Peterson 46 Comments

Jordan Peterson is hands-down the most interesting “public intellectual” I’ve discovered in the last 10 years. I’ve been listening to his podcasts and I occasionally have to turn them off to process the profundity I just heard.

Not only is he on top of several disciplines where I am not well-read, but he also can distill complex subjects down into quick, practical conclusions. For example, his advice for young depressed people who are overwhelmed by the injustice of the world: (1) Clean your room, and (2) Stop telling lies in your daily life. I am in awe of the thinker who produced such output.

Yes, Peterson is notorious for his stance against “gender neutral pronouns.” Forget that stuff for a minute. If you want to hear him at his best, listen to this lecture. It is nominally about “The Psychology of the Flood” (in the Genesis account of Noah) but he doesn’t even talk about Noah for the first hour. Even if you’re an atheist, check it out. (In fact, especially if you’re an atheist, check it out.)

Here are two key points from that lecture:

==> At some point deep into it (sorry I didn’t jot down the time), he says that people have outsourced the problem of sanity. What he means is, we get constant feedback from each other, when our behavior exceeds the bounds of social acceptance. (Raised eyebrows, explicit verbal condemnation, social ostracism, etc.) That’s how we collectively solve the problem of maintaining our sanity, and it’s why someone who is isolated from everybody else will “go crazy” (my words, not necessarily his). I was on a road trip listening to Peterson on this, thinking, “Man this is like how Hayek thinks about prices,” and then Peterson himself went there! He explicitly likened his discussion of social cues to how the stock market works, because “Nobody knows what billions of prices should be, it’s too damn complicated” (or words to that effect).

==> Around 74:00, Peterson explains that people don’t see “objects” in the world. For one thing, we see other people, and people are “too damn complex” to be mere objects. But beyond the social world, it’s more accurate to say we see the world in terms of “tools and obstacles.” And then when Peterson elaborates, he says something like (not exact quote), “Once you adopt a conscious goal, how you perceive reality is transformed into the things that tools that help you achieve the goal and the obstacles that get in your way.” This is very complementary (coming from the psychology / neurobiology side) to the writings of Mises and Hayek on the social sciences.

Now it’s true, Peterson gets into areas that make some people really uncomfortable. For example, in this classroom excerpt he offers a theory for personality differences between men and women, and why this can lead to conflict in romantic and business relationships. (Note, the title of the YouTube is clickbait.) The short version: Women are designed (Peterson would say through evolution) to optimally deal with helpless infants. This is not the optimal way to interface with adult men. Couple that with physical strength differences, and you end up understanding–so Peterson thinks–a lot about the male/female dynamic.

In the below clip, Peterson is explaining to Camille Paglia why it’s up to women to police themselves:

That’s obviously not something you would offer in a job interview at GE, but surely you can understand what he was saying.

With that context, let’s turn to this recent critique of Peterson. Among other claims, it said of the above interview–without linking of course: “In a conversation with Camille Paglia, he lamented that men can’t exert control over “crazy women” by physically beating them.”

The author of the hit piece also wrote: “What [Peterson] is not, however, is the author of any lasting work of scholarship, the originator of any important idea, or a public intellectual of any scientific credibility or moral seriousness. Peterson’s sole discovery is that “postmodernism” can be usefully exploited alongside the more familiar, established populist scare tactics.”

Here’s a list of his peer-reviewed research. (It’s odd that Peterson could have taught at Harvard for five years, too, isn’t it, given that he is just a provocateur?)

Now if the above hit piece had come to my attention because a bunch of antifa people circulated it on Twitter, that would be one thing, and I wouldn’t have brought it up. But it was promoted by an Austro-libertarian colleague, and I’ve seen others in our camp offhandedly refer to Peterson in very derogatory terms.

If you don’t like his stances on postmodernism, or you hate the type of people who have embraced him in the last year, fair enough. Go ahead and say that. But don’t link to articles that quite obviously lie about his positions and work. As Peterson stresses, you fracture yourself if you consistently lie in your daily life, as a matter of course.

(Note: I’m not saying I’m perfect. But on this issue, I really do try to practice what I preach. For example, people often say, “Krugman wants aliens to invade, ha ha!” [Look at the title of this YouTube.] I try to be careful and not misrepresent him on that, since what Krugman said was that he wanted us to erroneously believe aliens were going to invade. Etc.)

01 Dec 2017

Understanding Bitcoin

Bitcoin 32 Comments

Not sure of the last time I pushed this… Anyway, if you want to learn about Bitcoin, here is the guide that Silas Barta and I wrote back in late 2014. It assumes you know nothing, and then takes you as deeply into the mechanics of it as you want to go.

28 Nov 2017

Potpourri

Potpourri 28 Comments

==> I asked Scott Horton for a summary of the situation in Yemen; here he is on the Jason Stapleton show.

==> I really don’t have any strong view on this situation right now; I have to think it through. Anyway, in case you hadn’t heard, apparently Project Veritas got caught trying to trick WaPo into admitting they are out for Roy Moore. If people think this account is biased, I’m happy to hear alternative accounts.

==> I am NOT endorsing this, and I don’t get any financial consideration for linking to it. But “I knew a guy” who asked me to look at this new cryptocurrency (which automatically stays linked to purchasing power of the USD) and I thought it was interesting. I pass it along merely to show how people are trying to create new coins that don’t operate the same way as Bitcoin.

==> I kinda like this article, “Why the Most Incredible Women Often Have the Worst Dating Lives.” Even if I might quibble with some of the particulars, I applaud the approach.

==> I thought this was too funny not to screenshot. (This is not a joke; this was a real NYT column, and tweet pushing it.)

28 Nov 2017

Reductio Ad Absurdum on Keynes?

Economics 19 Comments

I got this email (with permission to reprint). I would have to think about it some more before offering my own reaction, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts first.

Message: I may have invented this reductio ad absurdum regarding Keynesianism. It starts predictably, but goes further than the usual construction.

Keynes says that taking money from Peter and paying Paul to build tanks improves the economy.

But since it’s the payment to Paul, and not the produced tank that is good for the economy, we can just take money from Peter and pay Paul to build tanks, then to disassemble them, and that improves the economy.

But since the tanks never get built, we can just take money from Peter and pay Paul for doing nothing and that improves the economy.

But there’s nothing special about the Peter, the individual, compared to Paul, the individual, in Keynes’ formulation, so we can take money from Peter and hand it right back to Peter, and that improves the economy.

But, since Peter only ends up with the money he started with, then we can just let Peter keep his money [and that] improves the economy. So doing nothing automatically makes the economy better.

–John Scott, Professor of Economics, University of North Georgia

28 Nov 2017

Contra Keynes

Contra Krugman 21 Comments

Krugman has been writing nonstop on tax policy, so Tom and I did an evergreen: We just tackled Keynesianism per se in this episode. Fun for the whole fami– OK fun for just you.