Cultural Misology and Fiat Currency
Cultural Misology and Fiat Currency
Exploring the Introduction to "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason" by D.C. Schindler
As explored previously in this series, misology is an utterly ruined form of reason: one that surrenders any felt need to distinguish between what is rational from what is irrational. There are certain cultural habits which characterize this radical trivialization of reason and its claims. D.C. Schindler enumerates four such habits:
“First, perhaps the most obvious cultural habit is the general tendency toward pragmatism. One claims that “talk is cheap.” There is a rush to “cash out” ideas, to determine their application, and this application is considered to be what justifies having taken the time to reflect on them… because making pragmatic considerations determinative means breaking off inquiry the moment it ceases to produces some praxis, we may appropriately call this tendency a habit of intellectual impatience.”
When market actors are faced with the prospect of ever-declining purchasing power, as they are when operating within an economy run on fiat currency, they inevitably suffer from an increase in time preference. This term can be somewhat counterintuitive, as a higher time preference means a smaller sphere of temporal concern, and thus a greater proclivity to consume rather than invest. In this way, fiat currency causes diseconomization and impoverishment, as capital and attention is directed away from “work” and towards “play.” With the time preferences of market actors thus elevated, intellectual impatience is the obvious result, along with an attendant cultural drift towards immorality and misology. Schindler continues:
“Second, there is, moreover, a pervasive tendency in contemporary Western culture toward abstraction, understood in this context to mean the isolation of one aspect of an issue from others, and to treat that aspect as complete within itself… Connected with this isolation of particular aspects is a disproportionate valuation of expertise and specialization and a subsequent fragmentation of thought in and about the public order.”
Most of us moderns are programmed to regard propositional knowledge as the only important kind of knowledge. However, as John Vervaeke so eloquently explains, propositional knowledge is only one type—the other three types of knowledge are participatory, procedural, and perspectival. Participatory knowledge involves the relationship between agents and arenas of action: to know what it’s like to be a CEO of a public company, there is no substitute for participating in a corporate hierarchy as a CEO. Procedural knowing is know-how: reading books about brain surgery is inadequate to prepare one for performing the procedure of brain surgery. Perspectival knowing involves the empathic adoption of other points of view, which can be done imaginatively or actually, and can be enhanced by the use of digital technologies. When a culture over-indexes on propositional knowledge, these other forms of knowledge are given short-shrift, giving rise to misological tendencies. As a compensation, an over reliance of technology often ensues, as Schindler writes:
“Third, related to these first two points, and in a certain respect their practical synthesis, is a tendency to absolutize technology as a response to problems.”
Although it may be tempting to use a tool to fix a fundamental divergence from reason, it is an ineffective approach. Without a solid epistemic footing, the use of technology can only amplify the errors that inevitably arise from having “lost one’s footing” on the ground-stuff of reality. As a result, this misguided emphasis on technology causes the power wielded by human beings to swell, while simultaneously causing concern for relation to what is real to shrink, leading to a perverse over-identification with the political aspects of personality, both individually and collectively.
“Fourth, finally, there is the tendency to reduce thinking to politics—meaning, for our purposes, the manipulation of and by opinion, rather than the study of the nature of the human community.”
The through-line among these misological forms of “intellectual impatience” are undoubtedly, to at least to some extent, manifestations of an elevated time preference. As a primary driver of time preference elevation, fiat currency is a major contributory factor to the onset of widespread cultural misology and its concomitant self-destruction. So if you’re wondering why the world seems to be going mad, Supreme Court justices cannot discern whether an individual is male or female, and why group identity politics have possessed many lost souls throughout the world, look no further than the broken incentives of our money. In sum, broken money breaks the world, which is why Bitcoiners have adopted the opposite yet equally true mantra: fix the money, fix the world.
Be sure to check out the “Platonic Philosophy Series” where John Vervaeke and I take a ~10 hour deep dive into these essential topics:
Thank you for reading Cultural Misology and Fiat Currency
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