A.R. Orage, the literary critic and student of the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff, believed with [George Bernard] Shaw that imagination is the propellant of evolution. ‘Evolution is altogether an imaginative process,’ he wrote. ‘You become what you have been led to imagine yourself to be’.
There are two problems with Keynes’s vision.
First, we have attained a level of material abundance approximately double the eight-fold increase posited by him as more than sufficient for economic nirvana. Yet we have by no means exited the tunnel of necessity, because economic growth seems inevitably to produce more mouths, more wants, and, above all, more complexity. So the tunnel continuously extends itself before us. In fact, thanks to diminishing returns and an inexorable increase in the cost of complexity, we find ourselves running harder to stay in the same place. Thus growth is a flawed and self-defeating strategy for achieving economic nirvana.
The second concern was anticipated by Keynes: “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.” And this was no small matter: “I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.” Only the uncommon few “who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself . . . will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.” Hence
there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.
The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the Republican Party. The facts said otherwise.
“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”
However, we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.
Whatever is thus immediately given is removed from the sphere of argument.
What's RGC talking about? Perceptions, such as what we sense or feel.
If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.
