Archive for June 26th, 2007

An Intellectual Exercise: Why Money Doesn’t Buy Power

As an experienced old man, I have a set of basic rules about human behavior which are useful for anyone to take into account. That is what I want you to absorb.

Let’s take “money buys power” and run it through my way of thinking:

1) A person who has little or no money will tell you all about how rich people get rich;

2) A person without power will be glad to explain to you about where all the power is, who has it, and how they got it.

3) A person who has neither power nor money will tell you that money = power.

4) NOW TO A REALLY BASIC RULE OF LIFE:

Any opinion which is explicable is probably WRONG.

We take this for granted every time we watch a commercial or an infomercial: This person is trying to sell me something, so he is not being completely truthful with me.
But since our Obedience Training in World War II, this rules ends right there. We have things called “professional objectivity” and “peer review,” both of which should make a rational person laugh out loud.

A lawyer or a doctor may not be trying to SELL you a specific product, but they have a very definite idea about WHO should end up with a huge share of the money and power. Social science professors are the same way.

In fact, my main view of the future is a battle I talked about in my first book over thirty years ago, but which no one is aware is developing. It is the war between social science and hard science.

This latter combines my rule on EXPLICABLE opinions versus simple truth. We all know that hard science is pretty reliable (Pace SysOps) until it begins to conflict with social science. Then the “scientist” who wants to keep his job bends over backwards and lies with absolute shamelessness. That is because the only excuse social scientists have for demanding power and money is their doctrine of Political Correctness, and since professors rule campuses, it has been easy for hard science to stay out of PC’s way.

Until now. But the power to bring endless life and happiness, once the province of the theologians and now the province of Political Correctness and Marxism or Libertarianism is becoming REAL. And hard science will have it.

It is as simple as that.

Just as science could not continue under the rigid rule of theologians, it cannot go ahead under the rules of PC. The conflict is just in a few areas now, and is hardly noticed. But what makes the future is NEVER noticed in the present.

Which leads us back to anther basic thought: Opinions which are EXPLICABLE are not true. Which is why the field of Futurology is a bad joke. What does Futurology EXPLAIN? Does it have anything to do with explaining the FUTURE?

Of course not! Futurology depends on funding and publication TODAY. A professional Futurologist must predict a future which will hit the mass media and appeal to the “peer review” committees that give out money TODAY. All Futurist predictions are explicable in those terms. I gave you a good example of this by telling you why demography is known among sane economists as “panic science.” Population predictions that make it to the media and produce movies like Soylent Green get fame and funding,

And this leads me back to the original subject. Why does money NOT buy power? For the exact same reason that Futurology money produces nothing but misinformation about the real future. Funding produces experts who tell rich people how to influence “the people,” but those “people” are as alien to real people as any E.T. They are “the people” Marxists talk abut, “the people” professors talk about, and therefore “the people” that the rich believe in. Just how many members of “the working class” she has talked about all her life has Jane Fonda ever LISTENED to?

This rule was stated LONG before Bob discovered it: “No one ever tells the truth to a rich man or a beautiful woman.”

.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

8 Comments