The Road to Serfdom

Friedrich Hayek was right to worry that central planning of an economy would lead to full totalitarianism. Hayek explains in The Road to Serfdom that economic liberties and personal liberties are inseparable. Politics is the authoritative allocation of values and resources, therefore when a government controls all aspects of the economy, it controls all aspects of people’s lives.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek writes: “Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. An authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable. It would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”1 According to Hayek, the government should not have the power to decide beforehand who is going to be successful in society. The government cannot effectively plan for outcomes and when economic power is consolidated in the government, it can lead to despotism.

According to Hayek, the rule of law requires that all people follow the same rules. The role of government is to enforce the rules of just conduct. A state cannot have central planning and the rule of law because central planning limits individual freedom while the rule of law is not meant to limit freedom, but rather protect the individual. The rule of law is nullified by central planning because central planning reduces the value of the individual to a means to serve the ends of the totalitarian regime and disregards the happiness of the individual. The rule of law means nothing if the people live in a state of slavery. Hayek writes: “Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.”2

Hayek’s view on the government helping people who have been negatively affected by economic conditions is simple: the government should redistribute wealth. According to Hayek, the government should help people, not industries, so when an industry fails, the government should not bail it out but rather let it fail. By choosing what industries to keep running, the government decides who will be successful and disregards the market. If there is no demand for an industry to continue or an industry becomes obsolete due to the emergence of a new industry, the market dictates that it should fail, and the government should not intervene.

Communism was more than just an idea to Hayek, he observed how socialism in Germany led to the full scale totalitarianism of the Nazi regime and how communism in Russia led to the totalitarian dictatorship of Josef Stalin. His view was not warped by what he saw in Germany and Russia, instead his views on economics and the rule of law were directly informed by the arbitrary administrative government led by dictators. When the government creates a plan for each person, it engages in soft despotism which creates rules that limit the freedom of the individual. When the government is controlled by a dictator, it can disregard the value of human life in pursuit of its political goals. In both cases, the freedom of the individual is restricted by the regime.

A modern day example of how central planning of an economy can fail and lead to massive social unrest is in Venezuela. When oil production, the main source of income for Venezuela, became under government control, led by the dictator Hugo Chavez, oil prices fell dramatically leading to an economic collapse. The recession in Venezuela has cause food shortages, inflation and unsustainable debt. According to Hayek, the government should have stayed out of the economic planning because it could not have predicted the fall in oil prices. Although European and South American countries continue to move towards socialist policies, Hayek would have warned them that their economic future depends on their ability to allow the market to operate on its own and only seek to prevent monopolies.

Footnotes

The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek, Routledge Press, United Kingdom, 1944

The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek, Routledge Press, United Kingdom, 1944

Being proud to speak the truth

 Never again shall we be afraid to speak the truth or afraid to upset the fragile minds of those who cannot handle the truth. Forever we shall be proud to speak the truth for it is a righteous action.

A Mask

One can study the sun and moon externally, but you have the sun and moon and God within you. We must always start with ourselves because we cannot see others through the mask they wear. Only if we know ourselves can we see another, for all people are alike inside. Others are like us, they have the same good intentions to change but they cannot.

-George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

The Wall of Society

We only bash our heads against the rocks for long enough to learn the lesson of who we are. This society provides us with many rocks for bashing. There are many dead ends for every road forward. Much of what I have learned has now become distilled down to a single distinction: the creative and the non creative. The creative must strive to exist in soil that allows them to grow. In an uncreative industry, environment or soil, someone who can see beyond what is material and has the gift of creativity can never grow.

It is useless to feel negativity towards the cogs of the uncreative machine. People may serve a purpose in this world even if they are as rigid as a stone and have a stick way up their ass. It's not for me to decide, it is for me only to not continue down the closed paths and dead ends. It is for me only to find the eternal way.

The 4th Way

The teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff cannot be reduced into a sensible description. The process of waking up from a state of dreamlike consciousness, from a mundane mechanical state of going through the motions is not easy to understand for many because it begins with an insult.

By all measures, telling someone that they are asleep at the wheel of their life is an insult. It is to say that you are not in control. If there is one thing that ego centric, highly programmed and reactive humans cannot be told, it is that they are not in control because their belief system and their surrounding economic system is based upon control. It undermines both the man and his nation to tell him that he is asleep. And yet for most people alive today, it is true. 

To awaken, I believe it is key to understand one concept, one which is unique to Gurdjieff, as far as I know. It is that our level of knowledge is greater than our level of being. What is a level of being? To Gurdjieff, it is the quality of food, air and mental impressions a person takes in. It is also what constitutes food for a being higher in the chain. How can a level of being be raised? Gurdjieff lays out that two fundamental practices exist for this: relaxation of muscles and self remembering. Self remembering stands in contrast to direct normal perception. At every moment, along with every outward perception, one must remember themselves.

The practice of remembering oneself goes hand in hand with elimination of wasteful mental energy. Daydreams, monologues and expression of negative emotions are all types of waste. It is one thing to understand the complexity, the variety, the ferocity of Gurdjieff's teachings and it is another to put them into practice. In my time as a human being, the teachings of Gurdjieff surpass any teaching on any subject in any format that I have ever encountered. The place to begin is the book written by his student Peter Ouspensky called In Search of The Miraculous.

Evil

I can think of no greater evil on this planet, God’s Green Earth, than the American Democratic Party. All things which stand as good, true, righteous and moral are inverted, destroyed and mocked by their beliefs. In every conceivable way they denigrate the people who stand for family, tradition, country and simple common sense. With an iron fist, they attempt to constantly control the framing and phrasing of all information that is present in current events. 

They cast the darkest spell known to mankind: deception, inversion, destruction. Their spells hold the minds of millions of young and old people, preying upon one of the oldest sins in existence; pride. Not only do they believe that they are right, they believe that they have the moral highground. As Ahriman’s energy contracts, Lucifer’s energy expands infinitely and believes that it is greater than God. In the same way, these people have a belief that they are superior without knowing the history of what they actually support. The level of self-deception is infuriating, every word they speak is cognitive dissonance. People who refuse to look into the history of something while blindly supporting it are people that I cannot associate with. 

I cannot upon my own moral compass, give any energy of my spirit to them because of the nature of the things they support. They support the eradication of tradition, of structure of simplicity and of concreteness. They support the idea that gender is a spectrum, that it doesn’t really matter whether someone is born with male or female chromosomes, what matters is what the individual says that they are. Without being able to see that it is the ultimate folly of subjective philosophy. A man can plainly state to everyone that he is an elephant, not a human, and be fully wrong. Just as a man can state to everyone that he is now a woman, it is just with a greater level of foolishness that this happens today regularly. Furthermore it is the darkest of dark thoughts to imagine a young boy, being guided by those who subscribe to Democrat ideology, to the surgery table. A surgery table awaits them where a brainwashed and highly immoral surgeon will carry out his orders of removing the boys’ genitals in an irreversible procedure. Billions of nerve endings, blood vessels and tissue cells are severed. The possibility of ever fathering a human life is severed. All reason and morality has been severed by those who support unthinkable procedures such as this.

 
Gentle is often the way to approach human beings, but gentle and kind is not the way to treat people who support this mind virus. It is with a fatherly strictness, a blunt honesty, a frankness of speech and a directness born of compassion for their soul that they must be treated. In many cases it is not their fault that they were deceived and they need to be led towards the light. How can they be led towards the light if you are content to watch them be guided by the devil into the pit of the fires of hell.