Christian Michel

 

 

Wisdom Of The Elders,

Capitalism

And

Pornography

 

 

 

You will have noticed that the title I have given to this paper is not the one mentioned in the programme. Instead of “The Morality Of The Market”, I have chosen to address three notions : “The Wisdom Of The Elders, Capitalism And Pornography”.

 

It is much easier to speak of wisdom than of morality. Morality expresses itself in the form of obligations and prohibitions, it has a dogmatic aspect that is scarcely appreciated nowadays. And when talking of wisdom, it seems that it can only emanate from “the elders”. There is an objective reason for that : I can discover moral laws through reflection, through the use of judgement, but wisdom is acquired through experience. This is why it can only come with age.

 

When we talk of “the wisdom of the elders”, we also refer to history. Generally, earlier epochs seem more wise than our own. I do not think we will find anyone who will maintain that this 20^th century which we are about to leave was one of wisdom. The first half was steeped in the blood of collective madness, such as has been rarely experienced by humankind, and the end of the century, with its daring experimentation in every field, brings association with the foolhardiness of the teenager rather than with the serenity of maturity.

 

To associate wisdom and capitalism in the same proposition is tantamount to provocation. Is not capitalism despicably hedonistic ? Does it not practise the exploitation of the weak, the waste of natural resources ? Given this reputation, it would be rash to assert as I intend to do that capitalism brings out the wisdom in human beings more than does any other kind of societal organisation.

 

My attempt to find a wisdom in capitalism aims at freeing it from an economic, profit-based, dehumanising discourse. Capitalism does not reduce to figures. I believe that if we want to win more people to the cause of capitalism, we should emphasize the spiritual dimension of the market and of free enterprise.

 

To avoid any misunderstanding, the system of which we want to evaluate the wisdom, is hard-line capitalism : laissez-faire capitalism or anarcho-capitalism.1

 

Reality

 

Wise men, across the ages, have agreed on at least one point: wisdom comes from within us, it is futile to expect it from outside. All Buddhist teachers warn us: “Do not think that a certain recipe will turn you into Buddha, you have always been Buddha”. This assertion flies in the face of the great political concepts, those of Plato to Rousseau and Marx, which view the human being as a product of his social environment. Let us change society and we will create the new human being that we want, right? But if man’s happiness could thus be produced, Buddha, who was the son of a king, would only have had to legislate instead of preaching half-naked along the roads, and his subjects would have attained spiritual enlightenment by decree. Jesus would have accepted the kingship of Israel; Lao Tseu would have become minister… Yet, these masters of wisdom, like many others, have refused political action. “My kingdom is not of this world”. There is in this refusal of politics by men who have reached the highest level of wisdom a lesson that we should all consider.

 

But if it is not the outside world that brings us wisdom, this does not mean, far from it, that we could do as if reality did not exist. It is only psychotic individuals who create their own world, wise men live in the only reality that exists, the one around us.

 

Reality exists, and not only does it exist, but it also resists. In fact the best definition we can give of reality is “that which resists”. Through imagination, I can satisfy any of my desires: to be in Berlin and in Tokyo at the same time, to charm the most beautiful woman… But through imagination, I only find myself. This woman I imagine that I am charming does not have any other conversation, any other feelings than mine ; this Berlin or Tokyo I invent does not have any other traffic jams than the ones I put there. And therefore, if I want to meet Brahma, and not just my illusion of Brahma, it is in this very world that I must look for him. Teilhard de Chardin found the true way to God in what he called “the complete and wild reality”. Far from being a burden that would prevent our Self from rising towards Brahma, or simply towards more wisdom, reality relieves our Self of superficiality and, through work and commitment, compels it to surpass itself.

 

Evolution

 

There is an old tradition which associates wisdom with values of stability within a certain established order. Now, if wisdom consists in not rejecting the world, but on the contrary, if it consists to live immersed in reality and in harmony with it, then we must reconsider the conception we have of wisdom as a state of stability. Contemporary science teaches us this: the universe is not stable, our environment is not immutable. What we call “order” can no longer be considered as a fixed arrangement of things. Order takes on the aspect of a system which is constantly unstable, from which will emerge new elements of order, among a myriad of aborted attempts. This great movement of the universe is what we call Evolution.

 

If we accept that there is evolution -which seems scientifically indisputable-, we must draw the logical conclusion. Wisdom has changed shape. Old wisdom made a virtue of resignation and submission to the established order. “Inch’ Allah”. Evolution, on the contrary, incites us to act, imposes a duty of commitment. Today, we look for wisdom in Lao Tseu rather than in Confucius, in Sri Aurobindo rather than in Mohamed.

 

Property Rights

 

Wisdom is revealed through action. But what must I do? Capitalism does not answer the question. It is the reason why Soljenitzin, for one, condemns capitalism for “moral shortcomings”. Yet, the moral strength of capitalism is precisely to be a method of organising society which does not tell people how to conduct their life. Capitalism is wisdom in the sense that it refuses to remove all sense of responsibility from people. In a holistic view of the universe, capitalism is an entity which integrates its components while giving them total independence.

 

Capitalists do not consider life as a quartering of various “societal options” which would mutually exclude each other. By following a simple rule which governs the relations between human beings and between humans and nature, each one of us can follow his or her way of life alone or in community in peaceful and fruitful coexistence with all others. This rule is universal because it can be founded on reason. It can be enunciated thus: everyone can do what he wants with what belongs to him and only with what belongs to him. Jurists call this simple rule: property rights.2

 

Many philosophers, from John Locke to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from Rothbard to Nozick, have dealt with this question of ownership. They have shown how the human being who establishes a first link with an element of nature (by homesteading) creates a right to ownership of this object.

 

As Ayn Rand has pointed out, however, ownership is not the right to something, it is the right to an action, and it is the right to the favourable or unfavourable consequences3 of this action. Therefore, property rights are an attribute of the human being’s creative nature.4  And this creative activity of the human being is the manifestation of the highest form of wisdom, since only the human being in the whole of nature has a conscious activity, and man’s role in the world is precisely to leave an imprint of consciousness and of reason on matter.

 

Man is linked to Nature, he comes from it, but he is essentially superior to it because of the higher level of his conscience. This assertion frightens ecologists. Is this alleged superiority of the human being not Promethean pride, the scientist’s folly? Indeed if the universe were completed, trying to add something to it or to change it would be a sacrilegious rebellion against the Spirit. But since the construction of the universe is not completed and since we, human beings, have appeared in the course of the evolution before it reaches its term, it means we have a role to play, with our intelligence, our passions and our ambitions. Wisdom consists in acting in the world to accelerate this evolution. Today’s wise man is an entrepreneur in every field.

 

As a result, among all forms of ownership, capitalist property is morally the highest. Christian wisdom has been proclaiming this since Thomas Aquinas: the ownership of the means of production is a natural right, it is in keeping with God’s will, it is the very plan of the Creator for His creature.

 

The evil denounced by the Church and the wise men and which may affect us all, is the impoverishment of our person. The remedy for this dull and meaningless life is the full and complete reaffirmation of property rights. In a socialist regime, most of the people are deprived of the right to control their lives, because the absence of property rights makes impossible a fair relation with reality. For a human being, who is not an angel in ether, to live is to act, and to act on things. If we do not own anything, we do not have things with which we can act. And if we do not act, we cannot bring about events for which we are responsible. And for an event for which we are not responsible, we will neither be thanked, nor sanctioned, nor congratulated… that is to say irresponsibility weakens the relationships which we maintain with others and it distances us from reality.

 

Relationships

 

Capitalist ownership does us the service of not separating us from our acts. So the true purpose of property rights is to establish relationships. Capitalist ownership establishes links and relations in the world, that is to say, the world is no longer indistinct. Love, friendship and culture fulfil the same role as property rights. They break the uniformity and the banality of the world: not any human being, but my friend ; not any object, but a symbol, the deciphering of which links me to my culture… Likewise, when we become the owner of a tool or of a company, we take out of uniformity an element of nature with which we establish a special connection: not any tool, but my tool ; not any company, but the one of which I am a shareholder…

 

Of course, we entertain relationships with nature other than those of an owner.5  We are moved at the sight of the sea, the majesty of a landscape, so many experiences which link us to elements of nature without our having to become their owners. These relationships and these emotions are in harmony with the most profound Self ; however, these experiences cannot be made universal, precisely because they are so personal.

 

On the other hand, respect for the ownership by each individual of his self and of what he produces can be made a universal canon: it is the least we owe to one another on this planet. This acknowledgement of property rights is the basis on which friendlier convivial and family relationships are built.

 

The place where we establish relationships between human beings and with nature and which are not relations of friendship and of contemplation, this place is what economists call “the market”. Like art or meditation, the prime function of the capitalist market is to make us aware that a force is at work through us, acts within us, and that we do not control it completely. Many people cannot stand the idea that the mind is not able to control each of their actions. If it is not their own mind, then at least someone else’s: dad, mum, the big boss, the government…This idea that “nobody is in control” frightens them.

 

But if “nobody is in control”, the market is nonetheless not chaos, since, like evolution, it is governed by an organising principle, in its case: property rights, i.e. the principle of non-aggression. “Between people who respect their properties, no conflict can exist”, wrote Ayn Rand. This is not totally true: conflicts exist because people who respect property rights can wrongly think that their right has been transgressed. However, we can discover through the work of judges and outside the framework of any positive legislation, whether this transgression is real. Property rights therefore really exist in nature, they can be identified. As a consequence, relationships between people are not inevitably submitted to the arbitrariness of government-made laws.

 

Because the market is not the will of one man or of a group of men, it is not limited in its potential, by the capacity of this man or of that group. The capitalist market is one of the many currents in the huge river that is evolution and which flows in the universe since the Big Bang. 6  Far from being an illusory search for stability as many classical economists believe, the market requires that we perpetually surpass ourselves and that we reach an ever higher level of consciousness. And it is precisely because it is neither controlled nor constrained by the mind that the market can imagine. It invents, it creates, and above all, it accepts the unexpected. To accept the unexpected means that the capitalist market is not only productive, it is also fertile.

 

I would like to read a few lines which, for me, express perfectly Tao thought:

 

“He [each individual] intends only his own security ; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

 

In 1776, Adam Smith postulated “the Tao of economic processes”.

 

The paradigm of the “invisible hand” is the affirmation that we can trust Evolution, Nature, the Spirit, you name it; the “invisible hand” is a sign that Creation is good.

 

Trust

 

However, should we not find here a worrying dismissal of Reason? Can we blindly trust the market?

 

The division of labour which is the method of economic organisation of humanity, is in fact, an act of trust to which we submit. To know that we do not control the supply of our most essential staples should provoke the greatest anxiety. Food, medication, energy come from people we do not know, at the end of a long chain no one commands; and it is precisely when someone has tried to command that chain through economic planning that it has broken and shortages have been experiences.

 

But should we go any further in government non-intervention? Can we really take the risk of capitalism?

 

The alternative is simple:

 

·        Either evil lies in society, humanity is irreparably corrupt. If it is the case, then those to whom we give the powers of State will not be spared of that evil. The powers that we give them only amplify their capacity to act evil.

·        Or evil does not dominate evolution; then, we can trust the “invisible hand” and the State becomes a useless, indeed dangerous burden.

 

In either case, we would be better off if we did not have a government. We would be better off if we left capitalism to go to the end of its wisdom.

 

If the market is not chaos and if conflicts can be solved by non-arbitrary means then why not opt for laissez faire? As the market is governed by an organising principle which excludes violence, capitalism is less dangerous than any other regime since other regimes do not prohibit violence; on the contrary, they institutionalise it. Violence is not proscribed; it is a monopoly which governments jealously keep for themselves.

 

Repression

 

All I have told you so far, you probably have heard already, in one form or another. Now, I would like to put to test with you some farther fetched ideas. Let’s start with this one:

 

The left hemisphere of our brain, the seat of reasoning, represents a higher stage of development in evolution than the right hemisphere where primitive functions, emotions and sexuality are incurred. In the course of evolution, it is common to find the more advanced stage repressing instead of integrating the less developed one. The psychology of the emotions since Freud is based on this finding. Patients inflict upon themselves unnecessary suffering by repressing their emotions ; because the mind is the most developed element in the order of evolution, to these patients, releasing their emotions would be tantamount to a regression in the chain of evolution.

 

Now, putting an end to these sufferings cannot be achieved by operating inversely: repressing the mind and giving free rein to our instincts. The end of suffering coincides with an awareness that reason and emotions, the left and the right hemispheres of the brain, are not engaged in a power game, but rather that they can function together. Typically, this is discovered when the patient finds enough courage to let go, to stop mind control. Only then does he discover the wealth that lies in his unconscious, the richness of his sexuality, of his emotions, of his imagination; he stops being afraid of them. He establishes contact with a fertile source of energy of which he had been deprived because he lacked confidence in his true self.

 

When a human group adopts capitalism, it stops inflicting upon itself the unnecessary suffering caused by political repression. The whole vitality and energy of this community which, so far, had been centred on bureaucratic controls, are channelled to the creative process.

 

Like the patient who is persuaded that the free expression of his emotions will be the cause of his downfall, we believe that a society which exerts no repression is condemned to chaos. In this connection, let’s note that the worst horrors of our times were brought about not because of disorder, but because there was a craving for order. Governments do not act as a safeguard, the only safeguard we need is the one that will protect us from governments.

 

The collective laissez faire of humanity as it adopts capitalism is, therefore, not very different from the letting go of an individual as he establishes contact with the deepest and most creative part of his self.

 

Clergy

 

An often-heard objection to laissez faire comes from ecologists and New Agers. Here we have those who do not like the reasoning and technical mind. They are the ones who readily encourage us to let the mind go. Long live intuition, imagination, spontaneity, these lovers of the natural say. But, paradoxically, when it comes to defending Nature, they want to impose on us the verdict of scientific experts.

 

Now, experts cannot establish the scientific truth of their analyses of the state of relations between the planet and humanity (the evidence simply lies in the disagreement between them).7  There is, in fact, no vantage point from where these experts could look upon our human condition to analyse it scientifically, as one does with an element isolated from Nature, a crystal or an insect …

 

As a result, we do not have access to Gaia’s truth. But we know that if everyone looks after a small element of Nature with which he has established a link, that is if everyone looks after his property, then together we won’t do any harm to the planet.

 

Indeed, in order to measure the impact of our action on Nature, we are guided by the feedback Nature gives us. Property owners who would ignore Gaia’s message would soon be confronted with reality. Their element of Nature would lose its value.  Faced with the risk of this loss of value, each owner changes attitude, the one who owns a river pollutes it less and forbids others to pollute it, because a sewer does not sell as well as a river, the one who does not take care of his body realises that his health insurance premium increases… The role of the market is to open our conscience to reality.

 

That is capitalist wisdom. Since Max Weber, we know the link between “Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism”. Protestants want to discover by themselves the word of God in the sacred texts rather than having recourse to a clergy. Likewise, to learn what the planet expects from us, capitalism encourages us to communicate directly with it, without the intermediary of the new clergy of government experts and politicians.

 

Dialogue

 

This direct interpretation of Nature is possible if we broaden our conscience sufficiently to get away from ideology and to meet reality. Now, there is a place where human needs and desires, where Nature’s resources and constraints reveal themselves. This place is the market. It is the market that provides us with information concerning the demand for material goods and the capacity for Nature to satisfy them. The easily understandable language used in this dialogue between human beings and Nature is that of prices. Economists of the Austrian school and Friedrich Hayek have taught us this, prices are only information; prices constitute the message which Nature sends us as to its capacity to meet human needs for one of its resources at a given time. This dialogue could be simplified thus: the price of a product falls, and it is as if Nature tells us : “My stocks are plentiful, help yourselves, even find other uses for these materials I offer you”. Inversely, prices increase, and it is the means that Nature uses to indicate: “You use this commodity wrongly, save it, find substitutes”. Could there be a more objective and a more genuine dialogue between Gaia and us ?

 

For an understanding of this dialogue between human beings and Nature through the market, it is important that the content is not censored. Now, politicians stifle information under price controls, production quotas, trade barriers, monopolies, subsidies…8   Consequently, we are always further cut off from reality.

 

Capitalist wisdom is compatible with Hans Jonas’ “principle of responsibility”. In a capitalist system, everyone can adopt the lifestyle that suits him or her : communism, primitive tribe, small partnership, multinational organisation, Trappist monastery, polygamous or polyandrous family…9 Each of these experiences becomes a model that others will or will not follow. The satisfaction derived from this lifestyle, but also the psychological and financial cost, will only fall on those who have adopted it. If their lifestyle is not in harmony with their human nature and with the environment, the cost will soon make them give it up. So the society is reducing the risk by spreading it, which is acting responsibly, in the sense of Jonas.

 

On the other hand, when a government drives a whole country to a certain policy, the mass effect amplifies the consequences. The feedback from Nature takes much more time to become legible. The cost of a possible mistake has to be borne by the entire community, including those who did not want this policy in the first place. By the time the policy is changed, damage caused to human beings and to the planet may have already become irreversible. It is the logical consequence of political violence.

 

We do not have access to Gaia’s truth, but if everyone looks after his property and allows himself to be guided in his initiatives by the readily legible impact they have on this property, which includes his body, then no one will damage Nature. Each one of us will become more aware of his personal relationships with reality. And if individually, no one causes any damage to Nature, globally the planet also will not suffer any damage. On the other hand, if politicians dictate at world level how we must behave, they in fact interfere between us and reality. They deprive us of the direct experience of reality without being able to guarantee that their action, at the global level, is beneficial. On the contrary, the amount of information that this universal government would have to process is far too important for us to even imagine it can be centralised.[i]9

 

Violence And Seduction

 

The absence of the centralisation of power is the best guarantee of freedom that capitalism gives us. It does not propose that we conquer a White House or a Kremlin. Capitalism is not democratic; it does not require that we give up our power to delegates. But does it mean that there are no relations of power in capitalism? Of course there are, but economic power is of another order than political power. Political power is the power of armed men. I would say that it is the male side of power. As Ken Wilber puts it, throughout the ages, the main problem of our human societies was to contain the effects of the saturation of testosterone in the world. Too much brute force, too much political power, too much army and police.

 

As it develops, capitalism brings about the rise of another form of power, which is its feminine side. The capitalist and feminine form of power is seduction. Indeed, seduction is a power, but it is not the power of armed men, it is the power to arouse our desires. If companies like Michelin, Microsoft, Mitsubishi can, one day, exercise power on me it is only within the exact framework whereby I desire to enter into relationships with them. If I do not desire what they offer, these companies can do nothing against me. Political power is the power to constrain and its limit is the death of its victims; capitalist power is the power to seduce and its limit is the interest in exchange. The emergence of this feminine energy which drives capitalism is another sign of human evolution.

 

Pornography

 

And where does pornography fit in all this? I’ll tell you, if you call a lecture “Wisdom Of The Elders And Capitalism”, nobody will show up.

 

But more seriously, I am not considering pornography in its etymological sense. For me, pornography exists when things are done without love. Nothing that we do with love can be demeaning. Love transforms everything. Now, love cannot exist outside a free relationship. It is not possible to love someone while refusing him his freedom. But the societies in which we live today squeeze us with legal and administrative obligations. Spontaneous relations become strained and therefore, the space left to love becomes narrower.

 

Decisions which concern intimately our life are taken in our stead. In a social-democratic society, we are not responsible for the form of relationship which we establish with others, be it marriage or children education, that is, little by little, these relations of love and trust lose their importance because we are deprived of our responsibility for them.

 

At the level of the society, if my neighbour is ill or unemployed, it is not my problem because there are social services to look after that. In a social democratic society, each one of us is encouraged to withdraw inside a cocoon and not to take any interest in the fate of others. Each to himself, the State to all.

 

Social democracy builds a materialistic and egocentric world. It cannot promise any of the things we value in life, happiness, love, health, beautiful children, an interesting job… The State can provide only money. But this money is not freely given. We all pay taxes allegedly to take care of the poor, the sick and the elderly, but taxation is not voluntary. Politicians create the illusion of a generous society, just like the prostitute fakes love. Gestures of love, but not love itself. We practise gestures of generosity, but we are not a generous society. Gestures are meaningless if they are not freely carried out. Slaves who build a hospital are not benefactors; if we believed that, rather than liberate them, we would have them whipped into being even more generous! Taxpayers are not generous: they are robbed. The Welfare State is a pornography of generosity.

 

 

Music

 

A civilised and kind society is not one where everybody lives in an ambient of love (that would be Utopia). A gentle society needs only to be organised to allow the articulation of individual projects leading to a greater conscience for individuals and to benefits for all. For example, in certain primitive societies, for someone to become a hero -and this is a purely individual ambition, is it not?- he has to capture the greatest quantity of game; then he makes donations. The more the hunter wants to be great, the more his ego is inflated, the more the community takes advantage of his voluntary donations. This is exactly what happens with capitalists. They gather fortunes, then set up foundations which bear their names and finance all sorts of initiatives to the greater benefit of the community (a foundation for scientific research or to help the poor…).

 

I don’t know whether Teilhard de Chardin was a libertarian but I approve wholly this reflection: “In spite of all the failures and of all the unlikelihoods, we are necessarily coming closer to a new age when the world will throw away its shackles to abandon itself to the power of its internal affinities… If we continue to put our hopes in a social order obtained by external violence, it would be equivalent to abandoning all hope of taking to its limits the spirit of the Earth.”10

 

In a public park next to my house, during the long summer evenings, musicians often meet to play jazz. They don’t always know each other. During a long moment, they try to come to some harmony; they manage to do so over a few beats, then they fall back into a cacophony. It would then be easy for one of the musicians to turn towards the others and say: “I have written a score, this is what we must play.” Luckily, I am sure that the drummer, or perhaps the saxophonist, will protest: “Why should we play your music? Where do you get the right to give us orders?” And all together, they set out again to find harmony. Suddenly, a tune comes out of an instrument, the other musicians bring in the chords, the rhythm is found…

 

May I invite you to take your place in the music of capitalism…

 

 

 

 

http://www.liberalia.com/                                                               cmichel@cmichel.com

 

 

 

From a conference presented at the International Society For Individual Liberty world convention, held in Berlin, August 1998.