The Folly of Realism - Mind Independence

Spider Webs

      Like all of us, Pareto's frustrations with our access to true or at least accurate things was a relationship between his mind and the world. His desire to find new ways of grasping that world, different more perfect paradigms, was no doubt an honest one. He might have been less flexible than some.

    His income came from his work as a civil engineer, he was a corporate executive in the Iron and Steel industry, he was a professor, he had a handsome inheritance. There's no doubt he had the convictions of the ambitious, his political activism on the side of classic liberal free trade, free markets and that whole anti-tariff tapestry of trust in the people to make their own decisions without the apparatchiks of state was much more than a hobby for our prince.

    Prior to 1893, before he drowned in sparkly cynicism, or failure, and moved to Switzerland to find solace in Sociology, Pareto had been a political man, one of the wolves. He wanted a parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage for Italy. He wrote pamphlets, he made speeches, he started an anti-protectionist league in Florence, he ran for office, failed to win an election, became sick and tired of being surrounded by militaristic, interfering, socialist eejits.

    You can look at his work and if you happen to be more like me, a geriatric F-You member of a the back row in good standing, you can see in his work the chauvinism of our body politic. It's a chauvinism that dominates the ruling class, the sort of "I've talked to Moses and the Arc stays" jackassery which if you're like me reaches into and throttles Business Studies, then comes up with the genuinely political idea that "We are the grown ups, they are the naughty children who need to be told what to do."

    Realism as a mind-in-the-world, would certainly agree with Pareto's suggestion that our species was unlogical. It doesn't follow a predictable pattern, odd things happen, odder behaviors follow. Pareto raised the flag of exasperation when he dismissed cardinal utility from his economics, it was pointless, it was that which cannot be uttered because it didn't readily lend itself to number. Ordinal utility, the number of widgets produced and purchased was collectible data. There's no universal solution to the equal sign that follows "I want a tortoise."  

Pareto Number

Spider Web

     Vilfredo Pareto had the intense eyes of the polymath child of an exiled Italian aristocrat. He had tight curly hair and a massive curly beard. He was an everything person, that rare creature a Renaissance Man, he could talk civil engineering, economics, political science and philosophy, and he saw in sociology a deconstruction, a critique of the idea that systems progressed in a linear fashion. He was born in Paris in 1848, he died in Switzerland in 1923. And to be polite he may have been a little neurodivergent.

   He proposed the idea of The Circulation of Elites. It was a theory about how bigwigs came in waves of passion and energy, they hung around for a couple of generations before drying up, becoming decrepit or corrupt, disappearing into the Cotswolds, Dordogne, maybe Rappahannock where they died of old age or a hunting accident. Pareto liked to think of his circulation of elites as "The graveyard of aristocracies." Indeed for the most part he saw the history of society as a history of a succession of aristocracies. The top looking down and slowly forgetting how to stay on top.

    His book, Mind and Society, looked at something else. He'd concluded that we humans in our day to day are unlogical, we lack a logical relation with the world around us, our actions rarely produce what we intend them to produce and yet, by our own judgement, we continue to insist that yes we make absolute and perfect logical sense at all times.

   Sure there's an element of "If you don't agree I'll punch you in the throat" in us people but the problem is we seem determined to spend many of our waking hours coming up with a whole bunch of magical, metaphysical and moral theories which in the light of day should make no logical sense whatsoever. For Pareto this unlogical relation with the world was a result of what he thought of as Instinctive Tendencies that were motivated by Sentiment. Naturally as a man of science, reason, an inheritor of the enlightenment and so on, he was  required to think of and then produce lists of Instinctive Tendencies arranged into categories which could be studied in detail, and from which schemes might be hatched that would solve the problems of the Human Condition. 

    For Pareto, his purpose for wandering into sociology was the failure of mathematics to accurately predict human behavior. In his economics Pareto's response to the problem of measuring cardinal utility was to to decide it was unnecessary to know what satisfaction a person got from purchasing a widget. It was only necessary to know the ordinal utility, how many of  this or that widget people purchased.

   His thinking was sufficiently self absorbed for his work to be considered a precursor to the Fascism that swallowed the second quarter of the 20th Century.  In the USA Pareto's ideas found a home in Harvard and dwelled mightily in the mind of the Machiavellian Talcot Parsons, a guru of US Business Management Studies which instructed bright young meteors on how to maintain an elite by squeezing the last drop of enthusiasm out of the unordained.

   I raise the subject of Vilfredo Pareto for what came to be called the Pareto Number. The number originates in an observation Pareto made about land ownership in Italy, it traveled far in its notoriety.  Apparently 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the people.

   In the minds of other thinkers this 80:20 relationship reflected the relationship between cause and effect. In other words a small number of causes result in a larger number of results. And on it went. In the factory a small number of people cause all of the labor unrest. In the street a small number of agitators cause the riot, damage to property and ruined reputations.

    Here, in my own world 20% of a population are wolves, 80% are sheep. Democracy is a method of determining the results of leadership quarrels amongst the 20% so that we sheep don't have to kill each other to decide disagreements between wolves. 

Waterloo, Peterloo, Luddites and Tech Bros

Walnut Palm

    We all agree good help is hard to find, humanity a difficult diversity of opinion, disobedience and attitude you don't really want seeing you naked, unless you can dismiss it as untitled and hardly human but when you come to the conclusion that Reddit or Facebook, any of these things, including what I do here, is Normal Human Communication then there's something seriously wrong with you.

   Then if your mission in life is to convert all Normal Human Communication to Reddit or Facebook or what I do here, then "pity the fool" is an inadequate epigram to describe the extent of your dangerous retardedness, at the same time "go stuff yourself" might be an even less sufficient reaction to the paucity of your being-in-the-world that's full of other wonders, other possibilities you have foresworn for what?

   A history of The Luddite reaction has lessons for us. The psychologists too have lessons for us. Ned Ludd, struggling with the unfairness of his status and the conditions of his employment lost his temper, he vandalized two of his master's weaving machines. The machine owners, a propertied class, in those days it was 3%, who dominated the Houses of Parliament, passed a statute which declared it a hanging offense to damage capital equipment. In 1813, a year after the statute became law 17 men were publicly hung in the grounds of York Castle. 

   In the summer of 1819 a cavalry unit called the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry which had been raised to confront the unrest that followed the Napoleonic Wars  and  the 15th Hussars who had charged the French lines at the Battle of Waterloo advanced on  a peaceful crowd of 70,000 gathered on the field of St. Peter's in Manchester England. 18 were killed, around 700 wounded.

    In that same summer of 1819 the Cotton Mills and Factories Act passed the Parliament. The Committee of the Ruling Class banned the employment of free children under 9 years of age in cotton mills, limited a working day to 12 hours, not including lunch break, in cotton mills and there was to be no night shift for Cotton Mill workers.

    In 1819 a Free Child lived at home. Free Children had parents. Some parents hired their children out to work in a cotton mill. An Unfree Child was bound by legal contract to a factory owner or a Parish and was protected by the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802.

   Charles Dickens was born on February the 7th 1812. Karl Marx was born in 1818

   

Schopenhauer's Ding an Sich and the wordless prayer.

Foots

    "The World as Will and Representation" was a book first published in 1818. A second two volume edition was published in 1844.

   Reacquainting ourselves with the spelling of Schopenhauer's name reminds me how much I enjoy his understanding of Will and how much sense it makes to me. What hints at his character and genius will in my last days remain his assurance to me and to anyone who would listen that Hegel was a charlatan, a chicken shit - my words - and a paid lackey of the Prussian State. 

   Difficult to think of Schopenhauer as anyone's disciple, his purpose in life seems to have been to ferociously disagree with everyone on principle, but lucky for his disciples he was able to give us all hope by fundamentally disagreeing with Kant on one very important aspect of Kant's thinking.

  Kant's thing-in-itself, his ding an sich - the true underlying reality - was unknowable. Schopenhauer's ding and sich was very knowable because we can feel it, experience it, it was there whether we liked it or not, nothing we could do about it, and essentially it was the source of all misery, discord and the awfulness of having to go though life as a human. Hegel was a moron, a weak minded idealist.....

    "Can you remind me what it was?"

    Schopenhauer called it The Will. It wasn't thoughtful, it wasn't conscious - consciousness for Schopenhauer was derived from the brain, consciousness was put there to serve as an indentured servant to The Will -  the will itself  had no plan or reason, it had no clue what it was doing, it was an endless, whining, urge to exist, force itself onwards into ever expanding nothingness, it was quite insatiable.

   And it was everywhere, in the sea, the mountains, on the way up to his rented rooms, it was in plants, animals, even in the seamstress who took him to court for pushing her downstairs because she was talking to loudly to his neighbor while he was busy solving the problems of the universe.

   The world and everything in it was a representation of The Will, and depressing though it was, its true underlying reality was absolutely knowable. And yes indeed, a lonely life was his, a Saint in a land of the heathen, until he came across a a book called Oupnek'hat - translates as 'Secrets to be Safeguarded.' 

   The book that gave Schopenhauer what he called  "the solace of my life and the solace of my death" was published in 1801 in Berlin. It was a Latin translation of a 17th Century Persian phonetic rendering of a Sanskrit text which contained the Upanishads, or some of them. The Upanishads are a collection of hymns from the late Bronze early Iron Age in North Western India that greatly contribute to later movements of thinking within the many and splendid directions of the Hindu Religion. 

   "Schopenhauer found solace?"

   He did. He called it solace, no holding back, he wasn't ashamed to admit Oupnek'hat was a comfort from anguish. Like many he was generally disgusted by the inadequacies and convictions of conventional theism, but more than that the Vedic texts confirmed his own directions in philosophy, and it's always good for us people to bathe in those moments when we don't feel shunned, alone and surrounded by idiots.

   Instead, as confirmed by the ancient texts, the world was an illusion, a veil of multiplicity, a subjective abundance, the truth so much deeper, the best you could do is belong to it. Liberation from suffering was a denial of will, quietness, renunciation and the death of ego. But again, Schopenhauer didn't completely agree with scholarship from the East, he was still totally miserable, doggedly going were few had been before him. 

   The  understanding of the underlying Will he shared with the Hindu tradition remained what he thought of as a unity reaching out, always reaching. But, as the Vedic scholars saw it the Gods didn't come first, they came afterwards, their underlying Will like Schopenhauer's had always been, not as a blind all-encompassing unity of some sort of un-directed purposelessness, it was a supreme intelligence, it was absolute unity, it was bliss, it was Teresa of Avila's wordless prayer that god was more than words, that god was real.

   Yes indeed, to loosely quote our man, "reading is thinking with another's mind," and thinking with another man's mind just wasn't something Schopenhauer was prepared to do.