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There is no standard of greater or lesser satisfaction other than individual judgments of value, different for various people and for the same people at various times. What makes a man feel uneasy and less uneasy is established by him from the standard of his own will and judgment, from his personal and subjective valuation. Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.

There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind.

The aspect from which history arranges and assorts the infinite multiplicity of events is their meaning. The only principle which it applies for the systemization of its objects—men, ideas, institutions, social entities, and artifacts—is meaning affinity

The state of absolute perfection must be conceived as complete, final, and not exposed to any change. Change could only impair its perfection and transform it into a less perfect state; the mere possibility that a change can occur is incompatible with the concept of absolute perfection. But the absence of change—i.e., perfect immutability, rigidity and immobility—is tantamount to the absence of life. Life and perfection are incompatible, but so are death and perfection.

It is nonsensical to fight the racial hypothesis by negating obvious facts. It is vain to denv that up to now certain races have contributed nothing or very little to the development of civilization and can, in this sense, be called inferior.

Acting man chooses between various opportunities offered for choice. He prefers one alternative to others. It is customary to say that acting man has a scale of wants or values in his mind when he arranges his actions. On the basis of such a scale he satisfies what is of higher value, i.e., his more urgent wants, and leaves unsatisfied what is of lower value, i.e., what is a less urgent want. There is no objection to such a presentation of the state of affairs. However, one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man's actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man's acting.

Any examination of ultimate ends turns out to be purely subjective and therefore arbitrary.

Neither is value in words and in doctrines. It is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

A judgment of value does not measure, it arranges in a scale of degrees, it grades. It is expressive of an order of preference and sequence, but not expressive of measure and weight. Only the ordinal numbers can be applied to it, but not the cardinal numbers.

A statement is probable if our knowledge concerning its content is deficient. We do not know everything which would be required for a definite decision between true and not true. But, on the other hand, we do know something about it; we are in a position to say more than simply non liquet or ignoramus.

Class probability means: We know or assume to know, with regard to the problem concerned, everything about the behavior of a whole class of events or phenomena; but about the actual singular events or phenomena we know nothing but that they are elements of this class.

It is, furthermore, impossible to substitute other people's work for that of the creators. If Dante and Beethoven had not existed, one would not have been in a position to produce the Divina Commedia or the Ninth Symphony by assigning other men to these tasks. Neither society nor single individuals can substantially further the genius and his work. The highest intensity of the “demand” and the most peremptory order of the government are ineffectual. The genius does not deliver to order.

Only the human mind that directs action and production is creative. The mind too appertains to the universe and to nature; it is a part of the given and existing world. To call the mind creative is not to indulge in any metaphysical speculations. We call it creative because we are at a loss to trace the changes brought about by human action farther back than to the point at which we are faced with the intervention of reason directing human activities. Production is not something physical, natural, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon. Its essential requisites are not human labor and external natural forces and things, but the decision of the mind to use these factors as means for the attainment of ends. What produces the product is not toil and trouble in themselves, but the fact that the toilers are guided by reason. The human mind alone has the power to remove uneasiness.

The questions whether society or the individual is to be considered as the ultimate end, and whether the interests of society should be subordinated to those of the individuals or the interests of the individuals to those of society are fruitless. Action is always action of individual men. The social or societal element is a certain orientation of the actions of individual men. The category end makes sense only when applied to action.

A Critique of the Holistic and Metaphysical View of Society According to the doctrines of universalism, conceptual realism, holism, collectivism, and some representatives of Gestaltpsychologie, society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the individuals. Then, of course, an antagonism between the aims of society and those of its members can emerge. In order to safeguard the flowering and further development of society it becomes necessary to master the selfishness of the individuals and to compel them to sacrifice their egoistic designs to the benefit of society. At this point all these holistic doctrines are bound to abandon the secular methods of human science and logical reasoning and to shift to theological or metaphysical professions of faith. They must assume that Providence, through its prophets, apostles, and charismatic leaders, forces men who are constitutionally wicked, i.e., prone to pursue their own ends, to walk in the ways of righteousness which the Lord or Weltgeist or history wants them to walk.

The principle of majority rule or government by the people as recommended by liberalism does not aim at the supremacy of the average or common man. It certainly does not mean, as some critics assert, the advocacy of the rule of the mean, of the lowbred, of the domestic barbarians. The liberals too believe that a nation should be ruled by those best fitted for this task. But they believe that a man's ability to rule proves itself better by convincing his fellow-citizens than by using force upon them. There is, of course, no guarantee that the voters will entrust office to the most competent candidate. But no other system could offer such a guarantee. If the majority of the nation is committed to unsound principles and prefers unworthy office-seekers, there is no remedy other than to try to change their mind by expounding more reasonable principles and recommending better men. A minority will never win lasting success by other means.

The customary terminology misrepresents these things entirely. The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

The liberals do not maintain that majorities are godlike and infallible; they do not contend that the mere fact that a policy is advocated by the many is a proof of its merits for the common weal. They do not recommend the dictatorship of the majority and the violent oppression of dissenting minorities

In our time the most powerful theocratic parties are opposed to Christianity and to all other religions which evolved from Jewish monotheism. What characterizes them as theocratic is their craving to organize the earthly affairs of mankind according to the contents of a complex of ideas whose validity cannot be demonstrated by reasoning.

Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated action of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man's life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended. These natural facts are: First: the innate inequality of men with regard to their ability to perform various kinds of labor. Second: the unequal distribution of the nature-given, nonhuman opportunities of production on the surface of the earth.

There is still a third fact, viz., that there are undertakings whose accomplishment exceeds the forces of a single man and requires the joint effort of several. Some of them require an expenditure of labor which no single man can perform because his capacity to work is not great enough. Others again could be accomplished by individuals; but the time which they would have to devote to the work would be so long that the result would only be attained late and would not compensate for the labor expended. In both cases only joint effort makes it possible to attain the end sought.

If and as far as labor under the division of labor is more productive than isolated labor, and if and as far as man is able to realize this fact, human action itself tends toward cooperation and association; man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare.

Mechanization is the fruit of the division of labor, its most beneficial achievement, not its motive and fountain spring. Power-driven specialized machinery could be employed only in a social environment under the division of labor. Every step forward on the road toward the use of more specialized, more refined, and more productive machines requires a further specialization of tasks.

One must not tell the masses: Indulge in your urge for murder; it is genuinely human and best serves your well-being. One must tell them: If you satisfy your thirst for blood, you must forego many other desires. You want to eat, to drink, to live in fine homes, to clothe yourselves, and a thousand other things which only society can provide. You cannot have everything, you must choose.

Praxeology as a science cannot encroach upon the individual's right to choose and to act. The final decisions rest with acting men, not with the theorists. Science's contribution to life and action does not consist in establishing value judgments, but in clarification of the conditions under which man must act and in elucidation of the effects of various modes of action. It puts at the disposal of acting man all the information he needs in order to make his choices in full awareness of their consequences. It

It is always the individual who thinks. Society docs not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naïve thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals. There is joint action, but no joint thinking. There is only tradition which preserves thoughts and communicates them to others as a stimulus to their thinking. However, man has no means of appropriating the thoughts of his precursors other than to think them over again.

Men must try to think through all the problems involved up to the point beyond which a human mind cannot proceed farther. They must never acquiesce in any solutions conveyed by older generations, they must always question anew every theory and every theorem, they must never relax in their endeavors to brush away fallacies and to find the best possible cognition. They must fight error by unmasking spurious doctrines and by expounding truth.

A country's public opinion may be ideologically divided in such a way that no group is strong enough to establish a durable government. Then anarchy emerges.

Faced with the choice between the consequences of obedience and of disobedience, the ward prefers the former and thus integrates himself into the hegemonic bond. Every new command places this choice before him again. In yielding again and again he himself contributes his share to the continuous existence of the hegemonic societal body. Even as a ward in such a system he is an acting human being, i.e., a being not simply yielding to blind impulses, but using his reason in choosing between alternatives.

Complacency, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy exult in scorning the “dollar-philosophy” of our age. Neurotic reformers, mentally unbalanced literati, and ambitious demagogues take pleasure in indicting “rationality” and in preaching the gospel of the “irrational.” In the eyes of these babblers money and calculation are the source of the most serious evils. However, the fact that men have developed a method of ascertaining as far as possible the expediency of their actions and of removing uneasiness in the most practical and economic way does not prevent anybody from arranging his conduct according to the principle he considers to be right. The “materialism” of the stock exchange and of business accountancy does not hinder anybody from living up to the standards of Thomas à Kempis or from dying for a noble cause. The fact that the masses prefer detective stories to poetry and that it therefore pays better to write the former than the latter, is not caused by the use of money and monetary accounting. It is not the fault of money that there are gangsters, thieves, murderers, prostitutes, corruptible officials and judges.

There are people to whom monetary calculation is repulsive. They do not want to be roused from their daydreams by the voice of critical reason. Reality sickens them, they long for a realm of unlimited opportunity. They are disgusted by the meanness of a social order in which everything is nicely reckoned in dollars and pennies.

Such is the myth of potential plenty and abundance. Economics may leave it to the historians and psychologists to explain the popularity of this kind of wishful thinking and indulgence in daydreams

All that economics has to say about such idle talk is that economics deals with the problems man has to face on account of the fact that his life is conditioned by natural factors. It deals with action, i.e., with the conscious endeavors to remove as far as possible felt uneasiness.

needs of all men are of the same kind and that this equality provides a standard for the measurement of the degree of their objective satisfaction. In expressing such opinions and in recommending the use of such criteria to guide the government's policy, one proposes to deal with men as the breeder deals with his cattle. But the reformers fail to realize that there is no universal principle of alimentation valid for all men. Which one of the various principles one chooses depends entirely on the aims one wants to attain. The cattle breeder does not feed his cows in order to make them happy, but in order to attain the ends which he has assigned to them in his own plans.

The value judgments of an individual differentiate between what makes him more satisfied and what less. The value judgments a man pronounces about another man's satisfaction do not assert anything about this other man's satisfaction. They only assert what condition of this other man better satisfies the man who pronounces the judgment. The reformers searching for the maximum of general satisfaction have told us merely what state of other people's affairs would best suit themselves.

For it is impossible to eliminate the entrepreneur from the picture of a market economy. The various complementary factors of production cannot come together spontaneously. They need to be combined by the purposive efforts of men aiming at certain ends and motivated by the urge to improve their state of satisfaction. In eliminating the entrepreneur one eliminates the driving force of the whole market system.

The market economy is the product of a long evolutionary process. It is the outcome of man's endeavors to adjust his action in the best possible way to the given conditions of his environment that he cannot alter.

The orders given by businessmen in the conduct of their affairs can be heard and seen. Nobody can fail to become aware of them. Even messenger boys know that the boss runs things around the shop. But it requires a little more brains to notice the entrepreneur's dependence on the market. The orders given by the consumers are not tangible, thy cannot be perceived by the senses. Many people lack the discernment to take cognizance of them. They fall victim to the delusion that entrepreneurs and capitalists are irresponsible autocrats whom nobody calls to account for their actions.11 The outgrowth of this mentality is the practice of applying to business the terminology of political rule and military action. Successful businessmen are called kings or dukes, their

In an unhampered market economy the capitalists and entrepreneurs cannot expect an advantage from bribing officeholders and politicians. On the other hand, the officeholders and politicians are not in a position to blackmail businessmen and to extort graft from them. In an interventionist country powerful pressure groups are intent upon securing for their members privileges at the expense of weaker groups and individuals.

Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature imposes upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature. Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people.

The ultimate source from which entrepreneurial profit and loss are derived is the uncertainty of the future constellation of demand and supply.

Bureaucratic conduct of affairs is conduct bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. It is the only alternative to profit management.

Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

Production and consumption are different stages in acting.

one might be tempted to say that modern man in contrasting a producers' policy with a consumers' policy has fallen victim to a kind of schizophrenia. He fails to realize that he is an undivided and indivisible person, i.e., an individual, and as such no less a consumer than a producer. The unity of his consciousness is split into two parts; his mind is inwardly divided against himself.

People sometimes ask my help in making big decisions. They’re usually trying to decide between two options. But that’s not a decision — that’s a self-created dilemma! You have to remember that there are always more than two options. When someone says they have only one option, they’re really saying, “I have no choice,” and you know that’s wrong. At the very least, add “do nothing” and “go insane” as options. When people say they have only two options, it means they got stuck. Once people get two options, they start comparing the pros and cons of those two, and forget to think of more.

Beware of advice Imagine that you hand someone your camera, and ask him to take a photo of you. He does, but when you look at the photo later, you notice that he took a photo of himself by mistake. Imagine you’ve got a big question like, “Should I quit my job and start my own company?” You go ask the advice of some successful people you respect. Because they can’t know everything about you and your unique situation, they’ll give advice that’s really just a reflection of their own current situation. So let’s look at some ways that advice is biased. Lottery numbers: When successful people give advice, I usually hear it like this: “Here are the lottery numbers I played: 14 29 71 33 8. They worked for me!” Success is based on so many factors. Some are luck. Some are not. It’s hard to know which are which. So which do you learn from? Underdog opinion in their context: Someone giving advice doesn’t want to say what’s been said too much already. But he’s basing that on his surroundings, not yours. So if everyone around him is quitting their jobs, his advice to you will be to keep your job. That advice has nothing to do with what’s best for you — it’s just the opinion that seems under-represented in his environment that day. Creative sparks: You ask, “What should I do, option A or B?” He replies, “Zebra!” He’s treating the situation as an invitation to brainstorm, giving a crazy suggestion just to open up more options. Like an Oscar Wilde quip, it was meant to be mostly entertaining, maybe useful, and probably not correct. The problem is taking any one person’s advice too seriously. Ideally, asking advice should be like echolocation. Bounce ideas off of all of your surroundings, and listen to all the echoes to get the whole picture. Ultimately, only you know what to do, based on all the feedback you’ve received and all your personal nuances that no one else knows.

The purpose of goals is not to improve the future. The future doesn’t exist. It’s only in our imagination. All that exists is the present moment and what you do in it. Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment. A bad goal makes you say, “I want to do that some day.” A great goal makes you take action immediately.

Inspiration is not receiving information. Inspiration is applying what you’ve received. People think that if they keep reading articles, browsing books, listening to talks, or meeting people, they’re going to suddenly get inspired. But constantly seeking inspiration is anti-inspiring. You have to pause the input and focus on your output. For every bit of inspiration you take in, use it and amplify it by applying it to your work. Then you’ll finally feel the inspiration you’ve been looking for. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I told my old coach that I really wanted to start my new company. He said, “No, you don’t.” I said, “Yes, I do! This is really important to me!” He said, “No, it’s not. Saying it doesn’t make it true.” I said, “You can’t ignore what I’m saying. I know myself well. I’m telling you what’s important to me.” He said, “Yes, I can ignore what you’re saying and just look at your actions. Our actions always reveal our real values.”

He makes his critique of historical monism in order to break down abstract approaches to history, to do away with preconceptions of how things ought to be, and to force a concrete examination of the facts in each specific problem rather than an adjustment of the facts to fit the requirements of some schematic theory. Monistic theories of history, he believes, are a great obstacle to a recognition of the facts.

to the masses and make platitudes and grimaces in honor of the union of the classes. Unfortunately for these great thinkers, things do not happen in this way; violence does not diminish in the proportion that it should diminish

Countless experiences have proved that a firm blow now may forestall a thousand given and suffered tomorrow. A doctor who denied the reality of germs would not thereby lessen the destructive effect of germs on the human body. In politics those magical attitudes which medicine has left behind still prevail. It is still firmly believed that by denying the social role of violence, violence is thus somehow overcome.

“The present study,” Robert Michels writes in the Preface to the English translation of his masterpiece, Political Parties,[*] “makes no attempt to offer a ‘new system.’ It is not the principal aim of science to create systems, but rather to promote understanding. It is not the purpose of sociological science to discover, or rediscover, solutions, since numerous problems of the individual life and the life of social groups are not capable of ‘solution’ at all, but must ever remain ‘open.’

“Napoleon III did not merely recognize in popular sovereignty the source of his power, he further made that sovereignty the theoretical basis of all his practical activities. He made himself popular in France by declaring that he regarded himself as merely the executive organ of the collective will manifested in the elections, and that he was entirely at the disposition of that will, prepared in all things to accept its decisions. With great shrewdness, he continually repeated that he was no more than an instrument, a creature of the masses.”

A man’s conduct (that is, human action) is “logical” under the following circumstances: when his action is motivated by a deliberately held goal or purpose; when that goal is possible; when the steps or means he takes to reach the goal are in fact appropriate for reaching it.

The laws of political life cannot be discovered by an analysis which takes men’s words and beliefs, spoken or written, at their face value.

From the 16th century on, the application of scientific method to one after another field of human interest, other than social affairs, has uniformly resulted in human triumphs with respect to those fields. In every field, science has solved relevant problems; indeed, science is in one sense merely the systematic method for solving relevant problems.

Those who have privileges almost always develop false or distorted ideas about themselves. They are under a compulsion to deceive themselves as well as others through some kind of irrational theory which will seek to justify their monopoly of those privileges, rather than to explain the annoying truths about

A dilemma confronts any section of the élite that tries to act scientifically. The political life of the masses and the cohesion of society demand the acceptance of myths. A scientific attitude toward society does not permit belief in the truth of the myths. But the leaders must profess, indeed foster, belief in the myths, or the fabric of society will crack and they be overthrown. In short, the leaders, if they themselves are scientific, must lie. It is hard to lie all the time in public but to keep privately an objective regard for the truth. Not only is it hard; it is often ineffective, for lies are often not convincing when told with a divided heart. The tendency is for the deceivers to become self-deceived, to believe their own myths. When this happens, they are no longer scientific. Sincerity is bought at the price of truth.

It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.

Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.

Long story short, that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to solve the petty annoyances of their day.

You can tell it’s an important question when the answer to it could completely change (or disprove) your business. If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question.

The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn’t there, and decay inevitably followed.

Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals; they are passed milestones on our road. And the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.

manipulating which meanings go with which words.

Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything. It’s embarrassing

Curiosity, as a human emotion, has been around since long before the ancient Greeks. But what set humanity firmly on the path of Science was noticing that certain modes of thinking uncovered beliefs that let us manipulate the world.

If you are a scientist just beginning to investigate fire, it might be a lot wiser to point to a campfire and say “Fire is that orangey-bright hot stuff over there,” rather than saying “I define fire as an alchemical transmutation of substances which releases phlogiston.” You should not ignore something just because you can’t define it.

“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”

“People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control. “Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence. “We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people.

The real challenge of any public spending idea is whether the country actually has the resources and ability to do the job. We can’t build a colony on Mars not because we “can’t pay for it” but because we literally lack the ability to do

In the case of sincere seekers, the answer is only slightly less obvious: who of us would want to become finders, as long as our search so meaningfully - so nobly! - structures our time and wards off boredom, and as long as the Nothing - which some say lies at the end of our quest - reads at this safe distance much more like an unveiled threat than a veiled promise? No, we have every reason to remain humble seekers! We are not enlightened! The fact is that in us all lurks an existential terror, a powerful and altogether natural resistance to what - seemingly - amounts to sudden death and annihilation.

One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery 20after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. If we take mysterianism as a serious option we might as well all give up and go home. So, let’s not.

The real problem accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties.

The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity. This is the same flaw that lies at the heart of the zombie argument.

Equally important, it pushes back against the limiting idea that consciousness is just ‘one thing’ – a single intimidating mystery that might elude scientific explanation altogether. We will instead see how different properties of consciousness come together in different ways, across species and even among different people. There are as many different ways of being conscious as there are different conscious organisms. Eventually, the hard problem itself may succumb, so that we will be able to understand consciousness as being continuous with the rest of nature without having to adopt any arbitrary ‘ism’ stating by fiat how phenomenology and physics are related. This is the promise of the real problem.

At any one time we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is – mathematically – what is meant by information.

This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.

It’s important to recognise that these challenges – including that of measuring intrinsic information, rather than observer-relative, extrinsic information – are only problems for us as scientists, as external observers, trying to calculate Φ. According to IIT, any particular system would just have a Φ. It would go about its business integrating information in just the same way that when you throw a stone, it traces an arc through the sky without needing to calculate its trajectory according to the laws of gravity. Just because 68a theory is difficult to test doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means it’s difficult to test.

More than a thousand years later, but still a thousand years ago, the Arab scholar Ibn al Haytham wrote that perception, in the here and now, depends on processes of ‘judgement and inference’ rather than providing direct access to an objective reality.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them. Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world is revealed directly to our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection – a ‘reading’ of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light. There is no redness-as-such in the world or in the brain. As Paul Cézanne said, ‘colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’

In statistics, the essence of prediction is in catering for the absence of sufficient data. Whether this is because predictions are about the future – one can think of the future as ‘insufficient data’ – or about some current but incompletely unknown state of affairs, doesn’t matter.

Thinking about action in this way underlines how action and perception are two sides of the same coin. Rather than perception being the input and action being the output with respect to some central ‘mind’, action and perception are both forms of brain-based prediction.

Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs.

The concept of the beholder’s share cries out to be connected with predictive theories of perception – like the controlled hallucination theory. As Kandel put it: ‘The insight that the beholder’s perception involves a top-down inference convinced Gombrich that there is no “innocent eye”: that is, all visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpreting visual information. One cannot perceive that which one cannot classify.’

I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants.

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise. When I experience an action as voluntary, the character of the experience is not only that I did X, but that I did X and not Y, even though I could have done Y.

This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds

Capitalist economy is strikingly characterized by a special kind of periodic economic crisis, not met with or occurring only very rarely and on limited scales in other types of society. These capitalist crises of production have no relation either to “natural catastrophes” (drought, famine, plague, etc.) or to people’s biological and psychological needs for the goods that might be turned out, one or the other of which determined most crises in other types of society. The capitalist crises are determined by economic relations and forces. It is not necessary for our purpose to enter into the disputed question of the exact causes of the crises; whatever account is given, no one denies their reality, their periodic occurrence, and their basic difference from dislocations of production and consumption in other types of society.

An “ideology” is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called “rationalization” in the sphere of individual psychology. An ideology is not a scientific theory, but is nonscientific and often antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.

Among the elements entering into the ideologies typical of capitalist society, there must be prominently included, though it is not so easy to define what we mean by it, individualism. Capitalist thought, whether reflected in theology or art or legal, economic, and political theory, or philosophy or morality, has exhibited a steady concentration on the idea of the “individual.” We find the “individual” wherever we turn: in Luther’s appeal to “private interpretation” of the Bible as the test of religious truth;

According to the prevailing capitalist idea, the fundamental unit of politics, psychology, sociology, morality, theology, economics was thought of as the single human individual. This individual was understood as complete “in himself,” in his own nature, and as having only external relations to other persons and things. Though Hegel and his followers notoriously reject this conception, it is unquestionably typical, and is implicit where not explicit in most of the influential doctrines and public documents of the fields just mentioned. The Church, the state, the ideal utopia, are not realities in themselves but only numerical sums of the individuals who compose them.

Finally, in capitalist society, the theological and supernatural interpretation of the meaning of world history was replaced by the idea of progress, first appearing in the writers of the Renaissance and being given definite formulation during the eighteenth century. There were two factors in the idea of progress: first, that mankind was advancing steadily and inevitably to better and better things; and, second, the definition of the goal toward which the advance is taking place in naturalistic terms, in terms we might say of an earthly instead of a heavenly paradise.

If socialism is to come, the working class, as we have seen, has always, and rightly, been held to be the primary social group which will have a hand in its coming. According to Marx himself, the inherent development of capitalist society as it tended toward centralization and monopoly was such that there would take place the “proletarianization” of the overwhelming bulk of the population; that

There has been a corresponding change in the technique of making war, which, since social relations are ultimately a question of relative power, is equally decisive as a mark of the deterioration in the social position of the working class.

The general field of the science of politics is the struggle for social power among organized groups of men.

“Defense” for an individual usually means preventing some other individual from hitting him; “struggle” means literal and direct physical encounter, and we can easily observe who wins such a struggle. But “defense” and “struggle” in the case of social groups—classes or nations or races or whatever the groups may be—are far more complicated matters. Such words are, when applied to groups, metaphors. This does not mean, as we are told by our popularizing semanticists who do not understand what semantics teaches, that we ought not use such words. It means only that we must be careful, that we must not take the metaphor as expressing a full identity, that we must relate our words to what actually happens.

First, that the net result in terms of alterations of the structure of society was to benefit, above all, the bourgeoisie, as against all other sections of society, and to leave the bourgeoisie ever more securely the ruling class in society. Second, the bulk of the actual fighters were not themselves capitalists. Presumably, at least where it was not a matter of direct compulsion, most of those who fought believed that they did so for ends which were beneficial to themselves; but, at least so far as economic and social benefit went, this turned out, for the non-bourgeois bulk of the fighters, either not to be the case at all or at least far secondary to the benefit resulting to the capitalists. Similar remarks apply to the development of the new ideologies. From the time of the Renaissance a number of more or less related new ideologies—religions, philosophies, moralities, theories of law and politics and society—were developed, and some of them became widely believed. None of these ideologies spoke openly in the name of the bourgeoisie; none of them said that the best kind of society and politics and morality and religion and universe was one in which the capitalists were the ruling class; they spoke, as all important ideologies do, in the name of “truth” and for the ostensible welfare of all mankind.

It must be stressed that the building of bourgeois dominance began and was carried far within feudalism, while the structure of society was predominantly feudal in character, while, in particular, the political, religious, and educational institutions were still controlled in the primary interests of the feudal lords. This was possible because society accorded the capitalists, at least to a sufficient extent, those “rights” necessary for carrying on capitalist enterprise—of contract, of taking interest, hiring free workers for wages, etc.—in spite of the fact that most of these rights were directly forbidden by feudal law, custom, and philosophy (often, as in the case of taking interest, pious formulas were used to get around the prohibitions), and in spite of the fact that the wide extension of capitalist relations meant necessarily the destruction of the social dominance of the feudal lords.

A bourgeois state, a state “controlled” by the bourgeoisie, means fundamentally a state which, by and large, most of the time and on the most important occasions, upholds those rights, those ways of acting and thinking, which are such as to permit

A third source of conflict is found in what we might call “occupational bias,” a point to which we shall return later. The different things which these different groups do promote in their respective members different attitudes, habits of thought, ideals, ways and methods of solving problems. To put it crudely: the managers tend to think of solving social and political problems as they co-ordinate and organize the actual process of production; the nonmanagerial executives think of society as a price-governed profit-making animal; the finance-capitalists think of problems in terms of what happens in banks and stock exchanges and security flotations; the little stockholders think of the economy as a mysterious god who, if placated properly, will hand out free gifts to the deserving.

These two rights (control of access and preferential treatment in distribution) are fundamental in ownership and, as we have noted, determine the dominant or ruling class in society—which consists simply of the group that has those rights, or has them, at least, in greater measure than the rest of society, with respect to the chief instruments of production.

But if we reinterpret the phrase “separation of ownership and control” to mean “separation of control over access from control over preferential treatment in distribution”—and this is partly what lies back of the Berle and Means analysis—then we are confronted

The contention of the last chapter that control over the instruments of production is everywhere undergoing a shift, away from the capitalists proper and toward the managers, will seem to many fantastic and naïve, especially if we are thinking in the first instance of the United States. Consider, it will be argued, the growth of monopoly in our time. Think of the Sixty Families, with their billions upon billions of wealth, their millions of shares of stock in the greatest corporations, and their lives which exceed in luxury and display anything even dreamed of by the rulers of past ages. The managers, even the chief of them, are only the servants, the bailiffs of the Sixty Families. How absurd to call the servant, master! Such would have been the comment—except, perhaps, of a few in a few small towns—Florence, Genoa, Venice, Bruges, Augsburg—if anyone had in the early fifteenth century been so much a dreamer as to suggest that control was then shifting from the feudal lords toward the small, dull, vulgar group of merchants and traders and moneylenders.

The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them, in fact not in name, controls society,

The inability of a ruling class to assimilate fresh and vigorous new blood into its ranks is correctly recognized by many sociologists as an important symptom of the decadence of that class and its approaching downfall.

In capitalist society, the role of government in the economy is always secondary. The government acts in the economy chiefly to preserve the integrity of the market and of capitalist property relations, and to give aid and comfort, as in wars or international competition or internal disturbances, where these are needed. This we have noted in describing the general features of capitalist society. This restriction in the government’s sphere of activity—whatever the form of the government, dictatorial or democratic, in the political sphere—is not a coincidence, but, it must be stressed again, an integral part of the whole social structure of capitalism. Capitalist economy is a system of private ownership, of ownership of a certain type vested in private individuals, of private enterprise. The capitalist state is therefore, and necessarily, a limited state.

you cannot call an economy of state ownership capitalist, because in it there are no capitalists A capitalist is one who, as an individual, has ownership interest in the instruments of production; who, as an individual, employs workers, pays them wages, and is entitled to the products of their labor.

There are many millions of persons and many groups in the world today who consciously advocate state ownership of the instruments of production. They do so out of a variety of motives: some because they think it will bring a classless society and freedom, others because they think it will make possible universal material well-being, others from even more abstractly moral reasons. The attitude and actions of these persons and groups are one of the important social forces tending to bring about state ownership. Nevertheless, the result of state ownership does not depend upon the motives from which these persons advocate it.

Many persons want state ownership and control, but the tendency toward state ownership and control is not by any means dependent exclusively on the fact that many people want it and deliberately work toward it. There are persons who want to revive feudalism, who would like socialism, no doubt even those who wish for chattel slavery; but actual conditions prevent their wants from having any chance of being realized. The circumstances, problems, and difficulties of the present, however, all combine to furnish soil on which state ownership and control grow rapidly. Private enterprise proves unable to keep the productive process going; the state therefore steps in. Modern total war demands the co-ordination of the economy; this can be done only through state control. Private investment dries up; state investment takes its place. Private enterprise fails to take care of the unemployed; the state gives them jobs.

managerial economy is no longer “the profit system.”

Managerial economy would not be going to replace capitalist economy unless it could solve, at least in some measure, those key difficulties (which we noticed in Chapter III) that are faced by capitalism and make impossible the continuance of capitalism. We know, without waiting for the future, that managerial economy can do away with mass unemployment or reduce it to a negligible minimum. This was done, by managerial methods, in Russia and Germany at the same time that England, France, and the United States proved incapable of doing it by capitalist methods. The question here is not whether we “approve” of the way in which mass unemployment was or will be got rid of. We may think that unemployment is preferable to, for example, conscript labor battalions. Nevertheless, mass unemployment is the most intolerable of all the difficulties that any economy can face, sufficient, by itself, to guarantee the collapse of an economic system; and we are concerned with the fact, already sufficiently proved, that managerial methods and managerial economic relations can get rid of unemployment, whereas capitalist methods no longer can do so.

Put in the crudest way, there will continue to be, as there has always been in human history, fighting over the spoils. The fight may translate, and thereby partly hide, itself into political and juridical, as well as physical, forms that we do not as yet suspect, but it will go on. And this is sufficient reason, if there were no others, why we should have as little faith in the promises of the ideologies of the managers—fascist or Leninist or Stalinist or New Dealer or technocratic—as we ought to have learned to have in those of the capitalists, when they tell us that following their pipe will guarantee

Any organised society patterns its life according to certain rules—customs, laws, decrees. These rules may not be written down, may not be explicitly formulated even in verbal terms, but they must exist or there would be no sense in calling the society organized. The origin of many of the rules, at any given moment, is lost in a remote past; but there must be within the society some mechanism for enforcing those taken over from the past, and, since the rules are always changing and being added to or dropped, for stating and enforcing new or changed rules. A social group which makes and enforces its own rules for itself, and does not recognize rules made for it by an agency outside the group, is called “autonomous” or “sovereign”—such as the capitalist nations all claimed to be and the chief of them in fact were.

The “sovereignty” of the group, by virtue of which rules are made, cannot, however, simply float in the group air. It must be localized, concretized, in some human institution which is accepted as the institution from which rules (in complex society called “laws”) come.

Freedom along certain lines always implies restrictions along other lines.

The key characteristic of “democracy” as we use the word (whatever it may have meant to the Greeks who invented it) is the granting of the right of political expression to minorities. More fully: democracy is a political system where policy is decided, directly or indirectly, by a majority, and where minorities, differing in their opinion from the majority, have the right of political expression and the opportunity, thereby, of becoming a majority.

Furthermore, there are always, in fact, restrictions about the limits of democratically acceptable opposition. When the minority goes beyond these limits it is not given rights to propagate its views but suppressed as “subversive” or “criminal” or “vicious.”

Discontent and opposition, under an absolute dictatorship, having no mechanism for orderly expression, tend to take terroristic and, in times of crisis, revolutionary forms. The example of capitalist parliaments shows how well democratic possibilities are able to make discontent and opposition harmless by providing them with an outlet.

Sovereignty for a nation implies that the nation makes laws for itself and recognizes no superior lawmaker. It means that the nation sets up tariffs and other import and export controls, regulates its own foreign policies and its own currency, and maintains civil, diplomatic, and military establishments. The simultaneous existence of many sovereign nations in the modern world necessarily means an anarchic situation in world politics. This must be because, since each sovereign nation recognizes no lawmaker superior to itself, there is in the end no way except by force to mediate the deep conflicts that are bound to arise among the various nations.

All organized societies are cemented together, not merely by force and the threat of force, and by established patterns of institutional behavior, but also by accepted ways of feeling and thinking and talking and looking at the world, by ideologies.

The problem with an ideology is not, when properly understood, whether it is true, but: what interests does it express, and how adequately and persuasively does it express them?

Scientific theories are always controlled by the facts: they must be able to explain the relevant evidence already at hand, and on their basis it must be possible to make verifiable predictions about the future. Ideologies are not controlled by facts, even though they may incorporate some scientific elements and are ordinarily considered scientific by those who believe in them.

The major ideologies of capitalist society, as we noted briefly in an earlier chapter, were variants on the themes of: individualism; opportunity; “natural rights,” especially the rights of property; freedom, especially “freedom of contract”; private enterprise; private initiative; and so on. These ideologies conformed well to the two requirements stated above. Under the interpretations given them, they expressed and served the interests of the capitalists. They justified profit and interest. They showed why the owner of the instruments of production was entitled to the full product of those instruments and why the worker had no claim on the owner except for the contracted wages. They preserved the supremacy of the field of private enterprise. They kept the state to its limited role.

In 1933, in Germany itself, no group among the masses was willing to risk life to stop the Nazi assumption of power; Hitler took power without a civil war. The capitalist ideologies did not provide a sufficient incentive for heroism. In the Saar and in the Sudetenland, the masses had had their experience of capitalism and capitalist democracy. They chose Hitler and Nazism. There is not the slightest doubt that overwhelming majorities in both were in favor of becoming part of Hitler’s Germany. It may be granted that terrorism and skilled propaganda methods played some part in influencing opinion. But to imagine that these were the full explanation would be shallow and absurd. Terrorism and skilled technique cannot by themselves put across an ideology that has no roots in mass appeal. The fact is that Nazism was preferred by the masses to the capitalist ideologies.

differences, but these are of no serious importance. The anticapitalist pages of fascist and communist analyses could usually be interchanged without anyone’s being able to tell which came from which. This holds for the critiques of capitalist economy, politics, and ideologies. The two ideologies are the same also—and this is most influential in developing patterns of attitude—in their scorn and contempt for “capitalist morality,” in their scathing dismissal of “natural rights” as capitalism understands these rights. They unite to attack “individualism,” root and branch. In both ideologies, the “state,” the “collectivity,” “planning,” “co-ordination,” “socialism,” “discipline” replace the “individual,” “free enterprise,” “opportunity,” as attitude-terms to hammer into the consciousness of the masses. Fascist and communist ideologies denounce in the same words the “chaos” and “anarchy” of capitalism. They conceive of the organization of the state of the future, their state, exactly along the lines on which a manager, an engineer, organizes a factory; that is, their conception of the state is a social extension generalized from managerial experience. And they have identical conceptions of “the party”—their party, with a monopoly in the political field.

Communism (Leninism-Stalinism), fascism-Nazism, and to a more-partial and less-developed extent, New Dealism and Technocracy, are all managerial ideologies. That is, in short: as ideologies they contribute through their propagation to the development of attitudes and patterns of response which are adverse to the continuance of capitalism and favorable to the development of managerial society, which are adverse to the continued social acceptance of the rule of the capitalists, and favorable to the social acceptance of the rule of the managers.

The mysteries and puzzles that are found in connection with Russia, the failure of predictions about her future course, can be accounted for in just the same way that similar mysteries and puzzles and failures are accounted for in other fields: by the fact that the phenomenon of Russia is treated from the point of view of false theories. The false conclusions drawn, the bewilderment, show us that the theories from which they proceed are wrong. Commentators, in desperation, fall back on the “morbid Russian soul” to excuse their inability to understand events. Disappointed friends of Russia keep complaining that the Russian government is “inconsistent with its principles,” that it has “betrayed” socialism and Marxism—in

The Russian Revolution was not a socialist revolution—which, from all the evidence, cannot take place in our time—but a managerial revolution. It was not the only possible kind of managerial revolution, but it was one kind, the kind the pattern of which this chapter has explained. The sharp revolutionary crisis has been succeeded by the consolidation of the new class regime in a manner altogether analogous to a number of the capitalist revolutions. The outcome of the revolution is the development of a new structure of society—managerial society, a new order of power and privilege which is not capitalist and not socialist but that structure and order which this book has described. Leninism-Stalinism (“Bolshevism”) is not a scientific hypothesis but a great social ideology rationalizing the social interests of the new rulers and making them acceptable to the minds of the masses. There is nothing inconsistent between this ideology on the one side and the purges, tyrannies, privileges, aggressions on the other: the task of the ideology is precisely to give fitting expression to the regime of those

Money left its “free” metallic base to become “managed currency” under the direction of the state.