Highlights from all books

In other words, the network state takes the most robust existing tech stack we have – namely, the suite of technologies built around the internet – and uses it to route around political roadblocks, without waiting for future physical innovation.

history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. And trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time.

Put that together, and it wipes out both the base-rater’s view that today’s order will remain basically stable over the short-term, and the complementary view of a long-term “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It also contests the idea that the fall of the bourgeoisie “and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable,” or that “no two countries on a Bitcoin standard will go to war with each other,” or even that technological progress has been rapid, so we can assume it will continue and society will not collapse. Those phrases come from different ideologies, but each of them verbally expresses the clean parabolic arc of the rock.

First, science progresses by taking phenomena formerly thought of as non-reproducible (and hence unpredictable) systems, isolating the key variables, and turning them into reproducible (and hence predictable) systems.

The macrohistorical log is largely siloed across different corporate servers, on the premises of Twitter and Facebook and Google. The posts are typically not digitally signed or cryptographically timestamped, so much of the content is (or could be) from bots rather than humans. Inconvenient digital history can be deleted by putting sufficient pressure on centralized social media companies or academic publishers, censoring true information in the name of taking down “disinformation,” as we’ve already seen. And the advent of AI allows highly realistic fakes of the past and present to be generated. If we’re not careful, we could drown in fake data.

The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.25 That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records. It’s also a vision for what macrohistory will become. Not a scattered letter from an Abelard here and a stone tablet from an Egyptian there. But a full log, a cryptohistory. The unification of microhistory and macrohistory in one giant cryptographically verifiable dataset. We call this indelible, computable, digital, authenticatable history the ledger of record. This concept is foundational to the network state. And it can be used for good or ill. In decentralized form, the ledger of record allows an individual to resist the Stalinist rewriting of the past. It is the ultimate expression of the bottom-up view of history as what’s written to the ledger. But you can also imagine a bastardized form, where the cryptographic checks are removed, the read/write access is centralized, and the idea of a total digital history is used by a state to create an NSA/China-like system of inescapable, lifelong surveillance.

In the top-down view, history is written by the winners. It is about political power triumphing over technological truth. Why does power care about the past? Because the morality of society is derived from its history.

One of the most time-honored techniques to mobilize public animosity against the enemy and to justify military action is the atrocity story. This technique, says Professor Lasswell, has been used “with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.” The concept is as useful in peacetime as it is in war. Why? Because states get their people hyped up to fight wars by stressing the essentially defensive nature of what they are doing and the savage behavior of the enemy. But war is politics by other means, so politics is war by other means. Even in peacetime, the state is predicated on force. And this use of force requires justification. The atrocity story is the tool used to convince people that the use of state force is legitimate.

Somewhat toned-down versions of the atrocity story are the go-to technique used to justify expansions of political power. If we don’t force people to take off their shoes at the airport, people will die! If we don’t stop people from voluntarily taking experimental curative drugs, people will die! If we don’t set up a disinformation office to stop people from making hostile comments online, people will die! Indeed, almost everything in politics is backed by an atrocity story.28 There’s a sometimes real, sometimes fake, sometimes exaggerated Girardian founding murder (or at least founding injury) behind much of what the government does. Sometimes the atrocity story is framed in terms of terrorists, sometimes in terms of children…but the general concept is “something so bad happened, we must use (state) force to prevent it from happening again.” Often this completely ignores the death caused by that force itself.

we don’t care that much about the laws of Isaac Newton’s time, but we do care about Newton’s laws. In this model, all political ideologies have been around for all time — the only thing that changes is whether a given ideology is now technologically feasible as an organizing system for humanity. Thus: political fashions just come and go in cycles, so the absolute measure of societal progress is a culture’s level of technological advancement on something like the Kardashev scale.

From a statistician’s perspective, history is necessary for accurately computing the future. See any time series analysis or machine learning paper — or the Kalman filter, which makes this concept very explicit. To paraphrase Orwell, without a quantitatively accurate record of the past you cannot control the future, in the sense that your control theory literally won’t work.

The relevant bit here is that just because a business proposition didn’t work in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work today. The technological and social prerequisites may have dramatically changed, and doors previously closed may now have opened. Unlike the laws of physics, society is not time invariant.

That is, history is the analysis of the log files. Data exhaust model: history as the analysis of the log files. Here, we mean “log files” in the most general sense of everything society has written down or left behind; the documents, yes, but also the physical artifacts and genes and artwork, just like a log “file” can contain binary objects and not just plain text.

Here’s the key: is it true if others believe it to be true, or is it true regardless of what people believe? A political truth is true if everyone believes it to be true. Things like money, status, and borders are in this category. You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains. For example, the question of what a dollar is worth, who the president is, and where the border of a country is are all dependent on the ideas installed in people’s heads. If enough people change their minds, markets move, presidents change, and borders shift.37 Conversely, a technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true. Facts in math, physics, and biochemistry are in this category. They exist independent of what’s in people’s brains. For example, what’s the value of π, the speed of light, or the diameter of a virus?

Once you reluctantly recognize that not every aspect of a sociopolitical order can be derived from an objective calculation, and that some things really do depend on an arbitrary consensus, you realize that we need to maintain a balance between political power and technological truth.39 Towards this end, the Chinese have a pithy saying: the backwards will be beaten. If you’re bad at technology, you’ll be beaten politically. Conversely, the Americans also have a saying: “you and what army?” It doesn’t matter how good you are as an individual technologist if you’re badly outnumbered politically. And if you’re unpopular enough, you won’t have the political power to build in the physical world.

Technological history is the history of what works; political history is the history of what works to retain power

Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.

The concept of the network state as a division of the world by people rather than by land is particularly important here, as network states are natively built for getting voluntary subscription revenue from people around the world. The diaspora is the state.

Sometimes the decapitation is forceful (Uber was an early target here) and sometimes it’s quasi-voluntary. Indeed, one thesis on why many of the major tech founders have stepped down as of mid-2022, other than Zuck, is that they don’t want to become personally demonized during the no-win antitrust process. It’s more explicit in China that this wasn’t a choice — Jack Ma is no longer in control of the company he founded, and many other Chinese founders have been similarly relieved of their duties. In other words, both the Chinese and American establishments have invented rationales to essentially seize previously founder-controlled companies.49 That is, whatever the surface justification, these are hostile takeovers of centralized tech companies by centralized states.

The concept is that you don’t want or need to start an entirely new religion to build a startup society, but you do need a moral innovation of some kind. If all you have to offer is a higher standard of living, people may come as consumers, but they won’t come for the right reasons. The consumer-citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to sacrifice to make a society great. They won’t understand the values that underpin your startup society’s valuation. And you likely won’t be able to build that high valuation or higher standard of living without a higher purpose, just as neither Apple nor America itself was initially built for money alone. You want to recruit producers, not consumers, and for that, you’ll need a purpose.

For the left-authoritarians among the blues, their primary Leviathan is the State, which is very real and can do violence against its/their enemies, as opposed to what they think of as an imaginary God. This is why State-worshippers mock the concept of “thoughts and prayers” in favor of “passing a law.” The State exists, after all, and can organize people to apply coercive force. But God’s vehicle, the church, no longer has enough belief behind it (in the West at least) to do the same. This is also why left-authoritarians tend to take for granted that all ills can be solved by “praying for relief” to the State, by forming some agency, by appropriating ever more money. Taxes are secular tithes, and the Gov-fearing man is like the God-fearing man — you simply cannot pay enough money and respect to the state, because as the DNC video says outright, “government is the one thing we all belong to.” It’s not about results, it’s about fealty.

It’s complicated. Even if their military did in some sense restrain the US from randomly blowing up the Middle East, it’s tough to argue that you’d still want the Soviet Union to still be around to limit US military intervention. Similarly, it’s hard to contend that the price of constraining China’s lawful evil ambitions in East Asia should be tolerance for America’s chaotic evil interventions in the Middle East, that defending against a potential Chinese drone armada should mean acceptance of endless destabilization by the US military. Ideally there’s a third way, a better choice - and that third way may simply be decentralized defense, where countries like Japan and Germany re-arm, rather than outsourcing everything to the US or folding to China. This has its own issues, of course — but if we’re moving back into the 1800s and 1700s, as per the Future is Our Past thesis, limited wars between gold-limited great powers are arguably preferable to gigantic global conflicts between unlimited superpowers.

Because BTC cannot be seized with one click by either the US or Chinese governments, it’s a symbol of international freedom and prosperity that is more powerful than any State.

The Sovereign Individual, written in 1999, is an incredible book that nailed many aspects of our digital future decades in advance, Bitcoin prime among them. We won’t recapitulate the whole thing here, but in short the thesis is that after many generations in which technology favored centralization (railroads, telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass production) since about 1950 it is now favoring decentralization (transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency).

Hitherto, in the United States, our cheap and fertile lands have acted as an important safety-valve for the enterprise and discontent of our non-capitalist population. Every hired workman knows that if he chooses to use economy and industry in his calling, he may without great or insurmountable difficulty establish himself in independence on the public lands; and, in fact, a large proportion of our most energetic and intelligent mechanics do constantly seek these lands…

Nordhoff was right. The aggression of the Trade-Unions eventually led to the communist revolutions which killed tens of millions of people globally, led to “lasting disorders and attacks upon property”, and generally became the bane of the world. We can attribute some of this to the pause, to the closing of the frontier in 1890. That closing took away paths for ambitious men, and ensured that they couldn’t easily become founders on their own plot of land - they had to become union organizers, or revolutionaries, or demagogues of some kind. Without the frontier, it all became zero sum.

The political arbitrage of supporting those with low status and attacking those with high status is typically framed as a moral imperative, while the financial arbitrage of buying assets with low value and selling assets of high value is usually portrayed as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining financial capital. But recall that people do sometimes make moral arguments for buying low and selling high (“it helps markets become more efficient”). So you might invert the mood of the words on the other side too, and think of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining political capital.

And if these startup societies are built out on the frontier, whether digital or physical, then the moral innovations are no longer imposed top-down, but adopted bottom-up by the people who opt in. That gives a better way to achieve the goals of ambitious young political reformers.

The frontier means the revolutionary is simultaneously less practically obstructed in their path to reform (because the ruling class can’t stop them from leaving for the frontier and taking unhappy citizens with them), but also more ethically constrained (because the revolutionary can’t simply impose their desired reforms by fiat, and must instead gain express consent by having people opt into their jurisdiction). These are, however, reasonable tradeoffs. So while the frontier is not a panacea, it is at least a pressure valve. That’s why reopening the frontier may be the most important meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conflict.

the frontier reduces political left/right issues because it reduces conflict over scarce resources,

Think about the following concepts: Christian King, Protestant Establishment, Republican Conservative, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, or Woke Capitalist. Each of these compound nouns has within it a fusion of a once-left-associated concept and a right-associated one. That prefix is important: once-left-associated. At one point, Christians led a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire, Protestants led a decentralist movement against the Catholic Church, Republicans led an abolitionist movement against the South, the Soviets led an internationalist movement against the nationalist White Russians, the CCP led a communist movement against the capitalists, and the Wokes led a critical movement against American institutions. But then they gained power, and with power came new habits. The revolutionary left that justified the rise to power morphed partially into an institutional right that justified the use of power. By its nature, a revolutionary group adopts leftist tactics to gain power, but once it wins, finds it needs to use rightist tactics to maintain power against a new crop of leftist insurgents.

Visualize the startup founder who just cannot adjust to a big company after an acquisition, or the writer who just refuses to hold back a story because of his editor’s political demurrals. Born revolutionaries of this stripe include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and many Substackers and tech founders. They just can’t bend to the establishment. But they also have real disagreements with each other, which is why they’re independents, and why they can’t mouth a party line. So the born revolutionary is really far more anti-establishment, and hence today anti-Democrat, than pro-Republican. Many of the most accomplished in tech and media share this characteristic – they don’t want to listen to authority because they think they know better, and in their case they often actually do. They’re fundamentally insubordinate and disobedient, rule breakers and novelty seekers, ideological rather than tribal, founders rather than followers — and thus sand in the gears of any establishment.

banking system), to the truly native digital version of money: cryptocurrency.

The Great Delay. The productivity will be here, but is delayed till the arrival of robotics. That is, for things we can do completely on the computer, productivity has measurably accelerated. It is 100X faster to email something than to mail it. But a slow human still needs to act on it. So, in this hypothesis, humans are now the limiting factor. Essentially, representing a complex project on disk in something like Google Docs may not be the productivity win we think it is. Humans still need to comprehend all those electronic documents to build the thing in real life. So the problem may be in the analog/digital interface. Do we need to actuate as fast as we compute? That would mean zero-delay robotic task completion will be the true productivity unlock. And that we haven’t gone full digital yet. So long as humans are still in the loop, we won’t get the full benefits of digital productivity.

If you run a two-sided marketplace, you’ll find contra Hayek that not all knowledge is local. For example, Sidecar lost to Uber because drivers set prices themselves, as opposed to setting them centrally. Hayekians would agree that Sidecar’s approach was optimal: drivers have local knowledge and central planning can’t work. But Uber’s central planning did work. They had a global view of supply & demand. And riders wanted speed, not price shopping.

Understanding the term “nation state” requires us to distinguish the nation (a group of people with common descent, history, culture, or language) from the state (their government). They are not the same. Even though “nation” is often conflated with “state,” the term “nation state” has two words for a reason. The first word (nation) has the same etymological root as “natality.” It once denoted a group of people with shared ancestry. The second word (state) refers to the entity that governs these people, that commands the police and the military, and that holds the monopoly of violence over the geographic area that the nation inhabits. In a sense, the nation and the state are as different as labor and management in a factory. The former are the masses and the latter are the elite.

In theory, the state was meant to be an innovation in violence reduction. You stay in your lane, I stay in mine. Clear sovereigns would keep domestic order, and the principle of national sovereignty would deter aggression from abroad. It didn’t entirely work out like that, of course; both intrastate and interstate conflict still occurred. But the abstraction of nation states may still have been preferable to the preceding era of fuzzy bordered empires and conflicting sovereigns.

We don’t typically think of mapmaking, printing, and shooting as novel activities, because the underlying technologies were invented so many generations ago. But they were each foundational to our modern concept of states with borders, where men with guns enforce written laws.

“God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” Feudalism was enforced by horseback-riding knights in shining armor with heavy swords; guns changed that. Others have written about the transition to the gun age, but in short, guns reduced the importance of physical inequality. Any man (or, eventually, woman) with a gun could kill any other man, even if the shooter was old and frail and the shootee was Sir Lancelot himself.

City states were defeated by nation states for a reason: they are physically centralized and have limited scale. So particularist city states populated by small ethnic groups get rolled up by universalist nation states (or empires) with many ethnic groups.161 That’s the reason a network state has a virtual capital rather than a physical one. Think of it as “remote-first,” but for a society. In a remote company, nothing officially exists unless it’s online, in an internal system of record like GitHub. Similarly, in a remote society, nothing officially exists unless it’s on-chain, in the blockchain system of record for that society. Put another way: if you don’t consciously set the capital of your network state to be virtual, it’ll be physical. And if it’s physical, the capital is centralized in one place, and can get invaded by a nation state. But if it’s instead a virtual capital, with a backend that is encrypted and on-chain, then - in the fullness of time - you can host an entire subset of the metaverse there, assuming blockspace increases as bandwidth did.

physical footprint. The approach of knitting together crowdfunded physical territory into a network archipelago addresses these issues. No virtual capital. Network states are not city states. City

Terra incognita returns. The network state system assumes many pieces of the internet will become invisible to other subnetworks. In particular, small network states may adopt invisibility as a strategy; you can’t hit what you can’t see.

Terra nullius returns. The network state system further assumes that unclaimed digital territory always exists in the form of new domain names, crypto usernames, plots of land in the metaverse, social media handles, and accounts on new services.

Domestic monopoly of root access. The governance network of a network state has root access to an administrative interface where law enforcement can flip digital switches as necessary to maintain or restore domestic order, just like the sysadmins of today’s tech companies.

Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary One point we touched on above, but that bears repeating, is that the network state system assumes the world has flipped to digital first: all nontrivial human-created events start in the cloud and then, if important, are “printed out” into the physical world.

The physical still exists, of course. There are still physical human beings, there are still physical plots of land, there are still physical rivers and mountains. And for some law enforcement and military functions a network state will need physical robots. But in a network state, everything physical is downstream of lines of code and enforced by cryptography, just as in a nation state, everything physical is downstream of pieces of paper and enforced by the police and military.

So, the network state system assumes that states like the USA and PRC will continue centralizing the power of their tech companies into one all-seeing dashboard, capable of surveilling, deplatforming, freezing, and sanctioning millions at once, or anyone at will. This digital power is currently exercised transnationally and without the consent of the governed. They have no true free choice of administrator. The network state system assumes that we can’t fully put this genie back in the bottle, but we can constrain it. Specifically, we grant that every legitimate state will need such power to govern its subnetwork, for the same reason any centralized service needs a system administrator with root access. But we also build decentralized services that do not have any single system administrator, and tools for the physical and digital exit of citizens.

On a free spot of land, you can have a nation without a governing state. Similarly, if we had a free region of the cloud, we could have a network without a governing startup. That’s what Satoshi did: he reopened the frontier, gave us a cloud without corporations. He showed us how to create digital networks without any single centralized authority. One extension of that gives us decentralized social networks, the basis for an open metaverse. So that’s one way to solve the problem: build digital land that isn’t controlled by any single startup. Anyone on that land could then freely choose between governance networks.

Without one or ideally both of these features (decentralized backend and decentralized login), a micronetwork might grow into a multinetwork, just like 0-person Facebook became 3 billion-person Facebook…but it wouldn’t have the legitimation of exit that enables a true network state. The millions of people on current platforms (and future ones) must be given the option to leave165 with all their digital valuables in order for their stay to be considered uncoerced.

Diplomatic recognition is as essential to a network state as exchange listing and wallet support is to a cryptocurrency. There are technical aspects to money, but it is also an inherently social phenomenon. Contrast this to an airplane, which will fly regardless of what anyone thinks.

But why? Why do we need the ability to found a network state? Why can’t we reform one of the perfectly good countries on the planet? First, these countries are not perfectly good. Just as it was easier to start a new digital currency than to reform the Fed, it may be easier to start a new country than to reform yours. Second, we want new countries for the same reason we want blank sheets of paper, fresh plots of land, or new startups: to begin anew without baggage from the old. And third, for certain kinds of technologies – particularly transformative biotech like life extension – we need new jurisdictions with fundamentally different levels of risk-tolerance, and clear-eyed consent by all who opt in.

In the early 1970s, American ecologist Howard Odum explained how “all progress is due to special power subsidies, and progress evaporates whenever and wherever they are removed.”[22] And, more recently, physicist Robert Ayres has repeatedly stressed in his writings the central notion of energy in all economies: “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”[23] Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.

And then comes this disarming but indubitable conclusion: It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives . . . always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.

There is no better way to answer the question “what is energy?” than by referring to one of the most insightful physicists of the 20th century—to the protean mind of Richard Feynman, who (in his famous Lectures on Physics) tackled the challenge in his straightforward manner, stressing that “energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy.” And then comes this disarming but indubitable conclusion: It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives . . . always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.

There are many choices available when it comes to energy conversions, some far better than others. The high densities of chemical energy in kerosene and diesel fuel are great for intercontinental flying and shipping, but if you want your submarine to stay submerged while crossing the Pacific Ocean then the best choice is to fission enriched uranium in a small reactor in order to produce electricity.[32] And back on land, large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity: some of them now generate it 90–95 percent of the time, compared to about 45 percent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 percent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates—while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 percent of the time.

Energy is a scalar, which in physics is a quantity described only by its magnitude; volume, mass, density, time, and speed are other ubiquitous scalars. Power measures energy per unit of time and hence it is a rate (in physics, a rate measures change, commonly per time).

There are enormous opportunities to generate more electricity with photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, but there is a fundamental difference between systems that derive 20–40 percent of electricity from these intermittent sources (Germany and Spain are the best examples among large economies) and a national electricity supply that relies completely on these renewable flows.

In 1995, crude oil extraction finally surpassed the 1979 record and then continued to rise, meeting the demand of an economically reforming China as well as the rising demand elsewhere in Asia—but oil has not regained its pre-1975 relative dominance.[49] Its share of the global commercial primary energy supply fell from 45 percent in 1970 to 38 percent in the year 2000 and to 33 percent in 2019—and it is now certain that its further relative decline will continue as natural gas consumption and wind and solar electricity generation keep increasing.

Four materials rank highest on this combined scale, and they form what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia.[4] Physically and chemically, these four materials are distinguished by an enormous diversity of properties and functions. But despite these differences in attributes and specific uses, they share more than their indispensability for the functioning of modern societies. They are needed in larger (and still increasing) quantities than are other essential inputs. In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia, and they are not readily replaceable by other materials—certainly not in the near future or on a global scale.

Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.

Practical telegraph was developed during the late 1830s and the early 1840s; the first (short-lived) transatlantic link cable was laid in 1858; and by the century’s end undersea cables had connected all continents.[30] For the first time in history, trading could take into consideration the knowledge of demand and prices in different parts of the world—

Practical telegraph was developed during the late 1830s and the early 1840s; the first (short-lived) transatlantic link cable was laid in 1858; and by the century’s end undersea cables had connected all continents.[30] For the first time in history, trading could take into consideration the knowledge of demand and prices in different parts of the world—and the availability of a new powerful prime mover could translate this information into profitable international exchanges: when the price of Iowa beef was cheaper than British beef of inferior quality and new refrigerating techniques became available, for example, the exports of frozen American meat rose rapidly—more than quadrupling between the late 1870s and the late 1900s.

reciprocating

asking for a risk-free existence is to ask for something quite impossible—while the quest for minimizing risks remains

asking for a risk-free existence is to ask for something quite impossible—while the quest for minimizing risks remains the leading motivation of human progress.

The list of these critical biospheric boundaries includes nine categories: climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called simply global warming), ocean acidification (endangering marine organisms that build structures of calcium carbonate), depletion of stratospheric ozone (shielding the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation and threatened by releases of chlorofluorocarbons), atmospheric aerosols (pollutants reducing visibility and causing lung impairment), interference in nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (above all, the release of these nutrients into fresh and coastal waters), freshwater use (excessive withdrawals of underground, stream, and lake waters), land use changes (due to deforestation, farming, and urban and industrial expansion), biodiversity loss, and various forms of chemical pollution.

The UN projects that share rising by about 70 percent by 2050, and in better-off countries one person in four will be older than that.[52] How will we cope in 2050 with a pandemic that might be more infectious than COVID-19, when in some countries a third of the population is in the most vulnerable category? These realities disprove any general, automatic, embedded, unavoidable idea of progress and constant improvement that has been promoted by many techno-optimists.

The latest pandemic has served as yet another reminder that one of the best ways to minimize the impact of increasingly global challenges is to have a set of priorities and basic measures for how to deal with them—but the pandemic, with its incoherent and non-uniform inter- and intranational measures, has also shown how difficult it would be to codify such principles and to follow such guidelines

Katie: Who would you be without that thought? [The fourth question: Who would you be without the thought?] Who would you be, while you’re on a conference call with your husband, if you didn’t have the ability to think that thought? Mary: I’d be much happier. I’d be more powerful. I wouldn’t be distracted. Katie: Yes, sweetheart. That’s it. It’s not his breathing that is causing your problem. It’s your thoughts about his breathing, because you haven’t investigated them to see that they oppose reality in the moment.

Katie: “I hear that you want to talk about our plans for Hawaii, so let’s discuss this at dinner tonight. I really want you to leave the room now. I have a deadline to meet.” Mary: “If one of your girlfriends called, you would talk to her for an hour. Now you can’t listen to me for two minutes?” Katie: “You could be right, and I want you to leave the room now. It may sound cold, but it’s not. I just have a deadline to meet.” Mary: I don’t do it like that. Usually I’m mean to him. I just seethe. Katie: You have to be mean, because you’re afraid to tell the truth and say no. You don’t say, “Sweetheart, I would like you to leave. I have a deadline,” because you want something from him. What scam are you running on yourself and on him? What do you want from him?

Step aside from all thinking, and there is nowhere you can’t go. Seng-ts’an

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want. If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. You can try and try, and in the end the cat will look up at you and say, “Meow.” Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless. You can spend the rest of your life trying to teach a cat to bark.

To inquire or to investigate is to put a thought or a story up against the four questions and turnaround (explained in the next chapter). Inquiry is a way to end confusion and to experience internal peace, even in a world of apparent chaos. Above all else, inquiry is about realizing that all the answers we ever need are always available inside us.

As I said earlier, I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours, and God’s (and for me, reality is God). Whose business are you in when you’re thinking the thought that you’ve written? When you think that someone or something other than yourself needs to change, you’re mentally out of your business.

Where reality is concerned, there is no “what should be.” There is only what is, just the way it is, right now. The truth is prior to every story. And every story, prior to investigation, prevents us from seeing what’s true. Now I could finally inquire of every potentially uncomfortable story, “Can I absolutely know that it’s true?” And the answer, like the question, was an experience: No. I would stand rooted in that answer—solitary, peaceful, free. How could no be the right answer? Everyone I knew, and all the books, said that the answer should be yes. But I came to see that the truth is itself and will not be dictated to by anyone. In the presence of that inner no, I came to see that the world is always as it should be, whether I opposed it or not. And I came to embrace reality with all my heart. I love the world, without any conditions.

If, for example, your statement was “He lied to me,” one turnaround would be “I lied to him.” Now you list as many of your lies as you can remember and report them to that person, never in any way mentioning his lies to you. His lies are his business. You are doing this for your own freedom. Humility is the true resting place.

No one can hurt me—that’s my job.

Gary: I’m angry at Frank because he is incompetent when he works for me. Katie: Okay. “Frank should be competent”—is it true? Gary: I think so. Katie: Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Who ever told you that? His résumé said competent. His recommendation said competent. It’s all over the place. You hire him, and he’s supposed to be competent. What’s the reality of it in your experience? Is he? Gary: In my experience, he’s not. Katie: So that’s the only place you can sanely come from—reality. Is it true that he should be competent? No. He’s not. That’s it. That’s your reality. So we can keep going over this until we get the “Is it true?” thing, because when you understand this, you become a lover of reality and move into balance. How do you react when you believe the lie that he should be competent when he works for you, and he’s not? Gary: It’s frustrating and anxiety-producing. I feel like I have to carry his work. I have to clean up behind him every time. I can’t leave him alone to do his work. Katie: Can you see a reason to drop the thought that he should be competent? And I’m not asking you to drop it. Gary: It would make me feel better if I could drop it. Katie: That’s a very good reason. Can you find one stress-free reason to keep this thought that opposes reality? Gary: Yes. Well, I don’t see what you mean by “opposes reality.” Katie: The reality, as you see it, is that he’s not competent. You’re saying he should be. That theory is not working for you, because it opposes reality. I hear you say that it causes you frustration and anxiety. Gary: Okay, I think I’m pulling this apart. The reality is that he’s just not competent. What’s making me crazy is thinking he’s supposed to be, rather than just accepting it. Katie: He’s incompetent whether you accept it or not. Reality doesn’t wait for our agreement or approval. It is what it is. You can count on it. Gary: Reality is what is.

Katie: So give me one good reason to hold on to the mythology that he’s supposed to bail you out, when the truth is that he hasn’t. Marty: For him, it would be a little bit more than lunch money. Katie: That’s a good one! What I discovered right away was that there were only three kinds of business in the universe—mine, yours, and God’s. And if you don’t use the G-word, put the word nature there or reality. So this is a test of discernment. Whose business is his money? Marty: His business. Katie: That’s it. Marty: I’m making it my business. That’s what hurts. Katie: Yes. Now here’s what I noticed. When I mentally go into your business, I start getting this stress inside me. Doctors call it names like ulcers, high blood pressure, cancer … all of it. And then the mind attaches to that, and it creates a whole system to hold up the first lie. Let your feelings tell you when the first lie begins. Then inquire. Otherwise, you get lost in the feelings and in the stories that lead to them, and all you know is that you hurt and that your mind won’t stop racing. And if you inquire, you catch the first lie through noticing your feelings. And you can just stop the mind by putting the story you’re attached to on paper. There’s a portion of your stressful mind stopped, even though it may still be screaming in your head. Now put the statements up against inquiry, ask the four questions, and turn your statements around. That’s it. You’re the one who sets yourself free, not your uncle. You bail yourself out, or you’re not going to get bailed out—haven’t you noticed?

The fear of not being fearful is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people beginning inquiry. They believe that without stress, without anger, they wouldn’t act, they would just sit around with drool running down their chins. Whoever left the impression that peace isn’t active has never known peace the way I know it. I am entirely motivated without anger. The truth sets us free, and freedom acts.

When I take people to the desert, they may see a tin can lying under a cactus and say, “How can anyone do that to this beautiful desert?” But that tin can is the desert. It’s what is. How can it be out of place? The cactus, the snakes, the scorpions, the sand, the can, and us—all of it. That is nature, not a mental image of the desert without the can. Without any stress or judgment, I notice that I just pick up the can. Or I could tell the story that people are polluting the earth, and that there is no end to human selfishness and greed, and then pick up the can with all the sadness and anger I’d be feeling. Either way, when it’s time for the can to move, I notice that I’m there, as nature, picking up the can. Who would I be without my uninvestigated story? Just happily picking up the can. And if someone notices me picking it up, and my action seems right, they may pick up another can. We’re already acting as a community, beyond anything that we’ve planned. Without a story, without an enemy, action is spontaneous, clear, and infinitely kind.

Katie: If we don’t suffer, we won’t care: What a thought! How do you react when you think the thought that stress is caring, that fear is caring? How do we react when we believe that thought? We become the champions of suffering. But only for a good cause. Only in the name of humanity. We sacrifice our lives to suffering.

Katie: Stop hurting and destroying yourself, in the name of cleaning up the planet. “When the planet is cleaned up, then I’ll be peaceful.” Does that make sense? Your pain—is that how we’re going to clean up the planet? Do you think that if you hurt enough, if you suffer enough, someone will hear you and do something about it? Margaret: Okay. I see it. I need to start making a difference. And I need to start respecting my life. Katie: Yes, yours. It’s a beginning. Margaret: So I need to start respecting my own life.

Would you rather be right or free?

When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100 percent of the time.

Becky [frightened, not looking at me]: There’s a monster under my bed. Katie: “There’s a monster under your bed”—sweetheart, is that true? Becky: Yes. Katie: Sweetheart, look at me. Can you absolutely know that that’s true? Becky: Yes. Katie: Give me your proof. Have you ever seen the monster? Becky [beginning to smile]: Yes. Katie: Is that true? Becky: Yes. Now the child is beginning to laugh and warm up to the questions, beginning to trust that I’m not going to force her to believe or not to believe, and we can have fun with this monster of hers. Eventually, the monster has a personality, and before the end of the session, I’ll ask the child to close her eyes, talk to the monster face-to-face, and let the monster tell her what he’s doing under the bed and what he really wants from her. I’ll ask her just to let the monster talk, and to tell me what the monster said.

“I don’t know” is my favorite position.

Underlying Belief: My life should have a purpose. Is it true? Yes. Can I absolutely know that it’s true? No. How do I react when I think the thought? I feel fear, because I don’t know what my purpose is, and I think I should know. I feel stress in my chest and head. I may snap at my husband and children, and this eventually takes me to the refrigerator and the television in my bedroom, often for hours or days. I feel as if I’m wasting my life. I think that what I actually do is unimportant and that I need to do something big. This is stressful and confusing. When I believe this thought, I feel great internal pressure to complete my purpose before I die. Since I can’t know when that is, I think that I have to quickly accomplish this purpose (which I don’t have a clue about). I feel a sense of stupidity and failure, and this leaves me depressed. Who would I be without the belief that my life should have a purpose? I have no way of knowing. I know I’m more peaceful without it, less crazed. I would settle for that! Without the fear and stress around this thought, maybe I’d be freed and energized enough to be happy just doing the thing in front of me. The turnaround: My life should not have a purpose. That would mean that what I’ve lived has always been enough, and I just haven’t recognized it. Maybe my life shouldn’t have a purpose other than what it is. That feels odd, yet it somehow rings truer. Could it be that my life as it’s already lived is the purpose? That seems a lot less stressful.

Ruth: I don’t ever want to panic over money in the stock market again. Katie: “I’m willing …” Ruth: I’m willing to panic over money in the stock market. Katie: “I look forward to …” It could happen. Ruth [laughing]: I look forward to panicking over money in the stock market. Katie: Yes, because that will put you back into The Work. Ruth: That’s where I want to be. Katie: That’s the purpose of stress. It’s a friend. It’s an alarm clock, built in to let you know that it’s time to do The Work. You’ve simply lost the awareness that you’re free. So you investigate, and you return to what you are. This is what’s waiting to be recognized, what is always real.

THE GIFT Be still, my soul, and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow. So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.

as for purpose there is none, it is simply one of those gorgeous things that was made to do what it does perfectly and to last, as almost nothing does, almost forever.

In contrast to the way that you and I think, an AI model’s “thinking” via inference happens in all in one stateless operation. That is, it’s thinking is limited to its generation process. It literally has to think out loud, as if I asked you a question and only accepted a response from you in “stream of consciousness” style.

I like to think of my AI components as little, almost-human virtual “workers” that can be seamlessly integrated into my application logic to perform specific tasks or make complex decisions. The idea is to purposely humanize the LLM’s capabilities, so that nobody gets too excited and assigns them magical qualities that they do not possess.

Before I left, I could not see the point of continually towing a log

also pulled out the large scale charts. Wisdom, real wisdom, would be to throw them all overboard, to avoid the temptation of closing with the coast to give word via a ship or a fisherman in the dangerous Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania.

There were no compasses on the Gulf of Siam junks, and I did not want it used during my sailing school cruises in the Mediterranean. Instead of bearing 110° from France to Corsica my crew had to steer with the mistral swell very slightly off the port quarter. At night, it was the Pole Star one small hand abaft the port beam. And if there was neither distinct swell nor star, we made do with whatever we had. I wanted it that way, because concentrating on a magnetized needle prevents one from participating in the real universe, seen and unseen, where a sailboat moves.

land is so far away compared to the questions the stars are asking me. I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

When I step into the cockpit to fill my lungs and talk with the sea, I leave the harness in the pocket, because I keep hold of the cabin hatch cover then, eyes and ears everywhere at once for erratic breaking seas, ready to open the hatch and jump inside to safety. A second and a half is all I need to open the cover, step through the hatch, quickly flop down on the inside steering seat and slam the hatch over my head, pulling down hard so that the neoprene seal fits tight all around. With the harness I would feel less mobile. And there is something else . . . the intimate participation with things around me. The harness would only link me to some steel cleat, not to the rest.

A bad blow, if the camera had let me down. It has become a real friend. I believe it helped me to see things that I may not have seen as clearly on my own, during the voyage.

I feel a dangerous urge to go out on the bowsprit pulpit . . . I don’t dare go beyond the staysail: it marks the farthest limit of good sense. In surfing, water is no longer water, but rock.

I ate nothing this morning, nothing at noon. Not from laziness or nerves; I just didn’t feel like it. Penguins and seals go for long periods without food in the mating season, other animals do the same in the great migrations. And deep within himself man may carry the same instinct to leave food aside, as animals do in the solemn moments of their lives.

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.