If a society relied excessively on financial markets to allocate resources, develop research, and improve industry, Keynes believed, it was destined for underperformance, instability, and unemployment. He had designed a theory and a policy agenda in which financial markets were subjugated to the authority of the state, believing the coordinated action of a government was capable of meeting the investment needs of society which financial markets could only secure through fleeting accidents.
Have financial markets become any more successful (in terms of any reasonable understanding of the common good) than they were in Keynes's day?
The financial run for safety happened very fast. It made sense individually. But when implemented simultaneously by the men and women who manage tens of trillions of dollars worldwide, it threatened total systemic collapse and forced massive intervention by the state.
Lots of individually rational decisions can result in collective failure (irrationality).
The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.
One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.
“The law is a coarse net; and truth is a slippery fish.” Yes: but a net, however coarse, is better than no net at all. Yet the purpose of law has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with truth. It is the establishment of justice—or, more precisely, the protection against injustice. And justice is of a lower order than is truth (and untruth is lower than injustice. All of Christ’s parables taught people to follow truth, not justice). The administration of justice, even with the best of intentions for correcting injustice, may often have to overlook or even ignore untruths during the judicial process.
Among Arendt’s chief concerns in Between Past and Future is to convey a concrete sense of the high price traditional thought will pay when a conception of human affairs, of political reality, which no longer conforms to our experience is relinquished. The traditional conception, which lasted for more than two thousand years, derives, as we have seen, from Plato, to whom Arendt refers more than any other thinker in this book, and nowhere more decisively than in her reading of his familiar cave allegory. The heart of her reading is Plato’s justification of the rule of philosopy, “the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm.”
From the Introduction written by Jerome Kohn.
In one passage [Buddha] rejects the premise that what is useful is true, what is useless, false. There are statements, he says, which are true but useless. Again, four categories are implied: (1) true and useful, (2) true and useless (like knowing how many insects there are in the world, to use a later Buddhist example), (3) false and useful, (4) false and useless. In this formulation he said that he himself bothered to teach only what was both true and useful.
In the rationalist and absolutist tradition self-canceling or uroboric formulas were excluded from the discourse about experience, where they were seen as invalid by contradiction, and were applied only in discourse about the transcendent and absolute One. The Neopythagorean Moderatus, for example, used the formula “It is neither this nor that” to describe the transcendent One; Plotinus said of the One, “It is the not-this.” In this tradition it was considered that Plato had shown (primarily, but not exclusively, in the Parmenides) that language must lapse into paradox when it approaches ultimate reality.
Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.
