The problem with shouting “Tyranny!” in a crowded theater

This is a brief excerpt from my “Action-Based Jurisprudence: Praxeological Legal Theory in Relation to Economic Theory, Ethics, and Legal Practice.” Libertarian Papers 3, 19 (2011), pp. 36–37.

It is popularly repeated in “civics” type discussions of fundamental rights and responsibilities that one may not shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Merely intoning the name of this famous example is thought to be enough to remind or instruct those present that “rights” are not “absolute” and must be “limited.”

Before delving into the problems with this reasoning, it may be instructive to understand the shady history of the example. The original statement was: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic” (Schenk vs. United States 1919).

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was penning an opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States. Even though specific speech acts were under discussion, the (constitutional) “right” of free speech was considered. However, what is less widely known is that the actual speech in the case involved neither fires nor theaters. At issue were statements opposing involuntary military servitude (the “draft”) in World War I. Among the examples were leaflets that included such statements as, “Do not submit to intimidation” and “Assert your rights.”

It turns out, then, that a supreme agent of the state introduced this example to rationalize an opinion that obfuscated an otherwise clear issue in favor of that same state. The court, in effect, upheld the punishment of legitimate acts of opposition to an exercise of tyranny that was both unjust on general principles and explicitly illegal under the constitution that established the court’s own existence (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” US Const, Amend XIII, § 1). It is no wonder that confused thinking might follow from such an example.

The rights/actions distinction shows how some of the general notions usually assumed to derive from the theater example are confused (see Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 113–18). First, a person has a right to be the one—as opposed to someone else—who controls his own voice. Yet shouting “Fire!” in the theater is an action. What is the means/ends structure? The means is to shout the word. It may be fair to assume, prima facie, that the end is to needlessly panic the crowd and disrupt the theater experience. This vocal act endangers and inconveniences other patrons and violates the explicit or implied rules set by the theater owner.

However, this need imply no “limitation” on the right of the shouter to be the one in charge of his voice. All that is needed is to say that he, as the absolute and undisputed user of that voice, is responsible for the actions that he takes with it, just as an “absolute and undisputed” motorcycle owner is responsible for the results that follow from how he rides his—or any other—motorcycle.

A simpler example more directly linked to the ownership model of rights further illustrates the importance and usefulness of the rights/actions distinction. The reason attacking another with a baseball bat is a non-aggression principle infringement has nothing to do with who owns the bat (maybe the attacker stole it) or whether ownership of bats can be “absolute” or not, or whether rights to own bats are “limited” by coming up against the rights of others not to be hit by them. Nor would it clarify matters if an archivist were to present a tattered parchment bearing a long lost, secretly ratified amendment establishing a “Constitutional Right to Own a Baseball Bat” (…which, especially for Americans, must not be denied or disparaged!).

What is relevant to praxeological legal analysis is the action of using a baseball bat to hit someone, regardless of who owns it or to which degree of alleged “absoluteness” it is owned. The bat is the means. The end is the result sought from the action of attacking—hurting the person and perhaps also stealing their property. The question of who owns the means—the bat—is not directly relevant to the injustice of the action—the hitting. It does not matter, unless there is some specific reason to argue otherwise (for example, ownership might function as one line of evidence showing what was done and by whom), whose bat is used.

Resolving the paradox of value

Philosophers struggled for centuries to understand the paradox of value, the mystery of why certain luxuries such as diamonds and gold are considered more valuable than certain essentials such as water and food.

Everyone must have water, yet it is usually not that hard to get. We can buy a bottle or it comes out of the tap. Diamonds are rare and expensive, but optional. Men, at least, seem to be able to get along well enough without them. It seems counterintuitive that something essential to everyone’s life could be less valuable than something that seems so much more optional.

Many thinkers tried to understand value as a property of things. They thought that a table, for example, has the property of being flat, having legs, being made of wood, and having a certain value or usefulness. Such approaches are called objective theories of value, because value is seen as a property of the object.

This idea is found in our everyday language when we say that “diamonds are valuable.” But this is also the kind of thinking that produced the paradox of value so it is unlikely to resolve it.

The breakthrough came with two of the greatest ideas in the history of economic thought: the subjective theory of value and the concept of marginal utility. Carl Menger, a professor at the University of Vienna, played a key role in formulating and spreading these two ideas in his 1871 book, Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, translated as The Principles of Economics.

Menger is considered the founder of what came to be known as the Austrian School of economics. The name started as a way to distinguish this approach from that of the German Historical School, and the name stuck. Ludwig von Mises, in his 1949 treatise, Human Action, further clarified and extended subjectivism and marginalism, and even insisted that these are among the foundations of any sound economic reasoning.

The subjective revolution clarified that the key to value is valuation. Valuing is an action; it is something that people do. The concept of value makes sense as a relationship between an acting person and the means they select in pursuit of the ends they seek. The object of valuation can be tangible or intangible, base or sublime. It can be anything whatsoever that a person chooses as an end or means as demonstrated in what they actually do. In this view, the value of a thing derives from people valuing it.

Different people have different priorities. The same person has different priorities at different times. A person might buy a bottle of water, but after reading an article on possible risk from plastic bottles, that same person the next day might disvalue and avoid an identical bottle of water. When this same person a year later flies to an anti-plastics conference and crashes in the desert, a plastic bottle of water might suddenly become one of the most valuable things in the universe—to that person, at that time, and in that place.

The marginal revolution built on this insight into the subjectivity of value. No one is actually ever in a position to make a choice between “water in general” and “diamonds in general,” or between all water and all diamonds.

Let’s say I want a drink of water. I go to the kitchen, pour a glass, and drink it. What I chose was not “water in general” but “a glass of water right now.” I didn’t choose two liters of water and I didn’t choose a glass of water tomorrow instead.

This leads to another important concept. If I have one apple, I might just eat it. If I have a second apple, I might give that one to someone else. If I have a third apple, I might keep it for later. In this example, there are three different uses to which I have put each of the three apples.

This has a key implication hiding just below the surface. I showed my priorities with these three uses of each apple. We know this because this is the actual order of uses to which I assigned each additional apple. We know in this example, that I valued eating an apple over giving an apple away because I ate the first apple and gave away the second one. Saving an apple for later was only my third priority for using apples. I only met that priority when I had the third apple and not before. If I had no third apple, my third use for apples would just be left unmet.

So each additional apple I obtained I put to a lower priority use than the apple that came before it. This means that each additional unit of the same good has a lower value to me than that of the unit I used before it. This is the Austrian, or subjectivist, version of what economists call the law of diminishing marginal utility.

All of this has important implications for the idea that value could be measured. To measure distance, we need a unit that is always the same, such as an inch. But with value, things are quite different. In our apple example, each additional apple had a different value than each of the others. Imagine trying to measure a distance if each inch you used was different from every other inch!

The Austrian theory of money and prices builds on this insight. Units of money can be analyzed just like units of apples. Money also has important additional properties and uses, but the theory of money and pricing in the Austrian approach is built on this theory of value and cannot contradict it. It can only elaborate on money as a special case. In other words, money too cannot correctly be described as a measure of value in the same way an inch is a measure of length.

This means that value cannot be measured as we measure things in the natural sciences using length, time, or volume. That kind of measurement uses cardinal numbers such as one, two, and three. What we can use with value is the concept of ranking using ordinal numbers such a first, second, and third. An acting person shows a preference for one thing over another, demonstrates a ranking and ordering of values with every choice and every action.

The dual insights that value is the result of people valuing and that people do not value things in general, but things in particular, resolves the ancient paradox of value. While there were some precursors of these ideas in the history of economic thought, their clear modern formulations originated at the University of Vienna starting in the 1870s and they remain central concepts in the foundations of what is still called the Austrian School of economics today around the world.

IN-DEPTH | Logic takes on the physics paradoxes: Review essay on The Spacetime Model: A Theory of Everything by Jacky Jerôme

 The history of science is the record of the achievements of individuals who…met with indifference or even open hostility on the part of their contemporaries…A new idea is precisely an idea that did not occur to those who designed the organizational frame, that defies their plans, and may thwart their intentions.

—Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science[1]

A few days after watching CERN’s Higgs boson press conference, it occurred to me that if the hypothesized Higgs field is supposed to be responsible for mass, and gravity is directly related to mass, it should be fairly obvious that mass, gravity, and the Higgs field might all turn out to be aspects of the same deeper phenomenon, rather than separate, interacting layers.

A search soon revealed some theorizing out there to this effect. Given the list of seemingly impossible paradoxes that have been generated in the name of quantum physics over the past century, and which have spun off an entire quantum mysticism genre, I became curious as to whether there might be alternative models that attempt to bridge the usual list of physics paradoxes in a way that made more sense.

In a free 222-page PDF (Version 6.00, 2 July 2012 [Originally 2005]) replete with illustrations, Jacky Jerôme of France claims to have elaborated a single model capable of suggesting rational accounts of most of the headline physics enigmas. He characterizes it as a substantial build off of the basics of Einstein’s four-dimensional spacetime, that does not resort to any fantastic additional dimensions, yet is still consistent with experimental evidence and the accepted descriptive mathematics of both quantum mechanics and general relativity.

That is a big claim, yet he still tries to avoid overhyping it: “Despite the fact that this theory is logical, coherent, and makes sense, the reader must be careful, bearing in mind that the Spacetime Model has not yet been validated by experimentation.” That said, he offers reasoned degrees of confidence as he applies his underlying concepts to particular issues, and at several points suggests further experiments to test claims.

His work appears to be both compatible with the laws of logic and a provocative contender for the holy grail of physics, a “Theory of Everything,” that is, a physics model that accounts for the behavior of both the very large and the very small using the same principles.[2]

Students of economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises might quickly recognize the potentially large gains to be had if formerly separate “micro” and “macro” specialties can really be integrated into a unified model.[3] They will also recognize the possibility that in certain situations, thinkers outside of the current establishment can be offering superior ideas that are built on fundamentally different perspectives than the conventionally accepted ones. The dual themes of logic and physics here might also capture the attention of fans of the epic rationalist-fantasy storyworld of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which philosophy and physics are portrayed as the dual-pinnacle disciplines of the “rational mind.” Finally, serious students of contemplative traditions curious about the popular claims of quantum mysticism will have a fresh opportunity to consider whether and how the contrasting Spacetime Model may or may not relate to various traditional contemplative claims about the fundamental nature of reality.

Two ways to look at banging a drum

Jerôme’s writing caught my attention early when he made a critical distinction between the mathematical description of physical phenomena and their causal-rational explanation:

We could think that the basic laws of physics are extremely complex since the mathematics of general relativity and quantum mechanics are. Such is not the case…It is thus advisable to distinguish the basic phenomena, generally very simple, from the laws governing them, generally using mathematics, which may be extremely complex.[4]

He gives the example of a child knowing how to produce noise by banging a drum. We can readily understand in causal-rational terms that noise results from impacts on the drum, whereas describing the surface waves in physical-mathematical terms requires complex know-how and calculations including Bessel functions. Thus, causal-rational explanation and mathematical description are revealed as two different modes or aspects of knowledge about the same phenomena.

The claim I have sometimes heard that “one can only understand quantum physics through mathematics” always struck me as a little suspicious. It speaks of a mystery that is inherently unapproachable to the non-math-genius. Yet the above distinction enables an alternative interpretation. What if this claim only signals that while the speaker understands this rarefied mathematics, he also simply lacks a rationally acceptable causal explanation of what it describes? After all, even if the subject is the same, these are two different approaches to knowledge of that subject. Each employs different languages, skills, and methods. If these approaches form a team, isn’t it possible that one of those partners (causality) could go astray even as the other (math) remained on track?

Bridging these two approaches, Jerôme tackles paradoxes such as the wave-particle duality, the nature of photons, the constancy of the speed of light amid the relative motion of matter, the behavior of black holes, the location of the mysteriously missing antimatter in the universe, how such high energy is produced by nuclear reactions, and how fantastic numbers of electrons and positrons everywhere could have the same volume and charge (just either positive or negative) to unimaginably high degrees of precision.

By the end, he even offers a fascinating alternative to the “Big Bang” theory of the start of the universe. He claims the Spacetime Model makes much more sense of the relevant issues and observations, while accounting for a long list of otherwise “mysterious” phenomena in the process.

Any attempt at an account of the origin of the universe must ultimately be speculative to some degree, but here we must also note that any knowledge claim in the natural sciences can never be validated 100%, as those in the more abstract disciplines such as logic, praxeology, and geometry can be. Natural science hypotheses must compete with rivals on the relative question of which available contender better accounts for the observations. Yet this is not a matter of “empirical” experimentation alone. Logic (internal consistency, etc.) must also play a role in evaluating competing hypotheses. Jerôme notes that:

Wrong reasoning can lead to wrong results. For example, we know three different theories of mass and gravity, which are mathematically verified: the Higgs boson, Superstrings, and the Spacetime Model. At least two of these three theories are wrong, despite the fact that they are all three mathematically verified.

Here is a typical example of the way Jerôme attempts to make sense out of the numerous established mathematical principles that have been left to appear mysterious in causal-rational terms: “E = mc². This formula is fully verified using mathematics and experimentation, but no one is able to explain it using logic and good sense. However, the solution is quite simple within the Spacetime Model.”

Positivism still roosting at home?

Such an advance of mathematical description over causal-rational explanation in fundamental physics should not be surprising in view of the relevant history of controversies regarding the respective roles of reason and empirical observation. Radical empiricism and logical positivism viewed axiomatic logical principles as unscientific, metaphysical anachronisms, not “really real” because they could not be empirically “observed” (meaning measured). As Ludwig von Mises noted:

…the category of regularity is rejected by the champions of logical positivism. They pretend that modern physics has led to results incompatible with the doctrine of a universally prevailing regularity...In the microscopic sphere, they say…The categories of regularity and causality must be abandoned and replaced by the laws of probability.[5]

It was just this mindset that accompanied the emergence of enigmas allegedly implied in a series of experiments and models in fundamental physics. The slit experiments, Schrödinger's cat, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and so on, were trotted out as evidence that logic and causality had met their match, that the universe is at bottom governed by chance and uncertainty and that some entities (not really being entities as old-school philosophers might have understood them) can exist in one place and another at the same time. Maybe quarks are telepathic!

Proponents of such claims did not seem to notice the possibility that it was their previous rejection of logic that enabled an environment in which stop-gap speculations could gain sober recognition. Instead of these enigmas being viewed as no more than bemusing placeholders awaiting more coherent replacements, they were instead embraced and cited as evidence against old-fashioned reason and its “metaphysical,” a priori conceits.

However, such thinking not only missed its own circularity, it also missed that an experimental result and the quality of a hypothesis forwarded to explain it are entirely different matters. The quality of a hypothesis depends in part on applying the very axiomatic logic that had been abandoned. Paradoxes that appeal to the minds of those who have rejected the strictures of logic show no mystical insight, but only the failure to apply to their thinking the inescapable, ancient rules for forming and validity-checking explanations of anything whatsoever.

In this light, Jerôme’s comment is telling: “As a physicist, it is necessary to leave this philosophical aspect to the philosophers and try to solve this enigma in a scientific way, with a logical and rational explanation.”

This could be from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, since his let’s-get-practical use of the word “philosophers” in this sentence seems to imply that these are by definition anti-rationalist philosophers. Yet rationalist philosophers, part of whose message is precisely to uphold the requirements of logic and consistency for any valid knowledge claim, demand exactly the kind of “logical and rational explanation” that Jerôme sets as his goal.

A breath of relatively reasonable quantum air

Against this backdrop, I found refreshing Jerôme’s unabashed resort to “deduction,” “possibility,” and “logical consistency.” The results are consistently fascinating and provocative. He appears to make fairly short work of one physics paradox after another within a unified framework.

In a key early move, he specifies a more consistent definition for volume as “closed volume.” In doing so, he notes conventional inconsistences in volume definitions across scales, highlighting the importance of what is and is not “counted” as closed volume. In his model, it is closed volume alone, and not any of the other varieties of volume he details, that creates the central phenomenon of spacetime displacement. Particles and nuclei form closed volumes, but the distributed charges of the outer electrons of atoms are so diffuse that they do not. And whereas waves do not form closed volumes and therefore have no mass; particles do and therefore have. One might also take the converse perspective and define closed volume as “that which displaces spacetime.”

“Particles,” in this model, result from “pieces of wave” that form closed volumes in spacetime. As these move and reopen, they can subsequently turn back into waves. Only closed volumes cause displacement in the elastic four-dimensional spacetime fabric that Einstein described, which produces what we have come to see from two different sets of observations as “gravity” and “mass” (“mass effect”).

Even the hypothesized Higgs field entails an additional dimension. The Spacetime Model claims to be able to dispense with this while still accounting for the observations associated with the entire Standard Model of particle physics, Higgs boson included. As Jerôme puts it:

The 4D expression of the mass effect means that the universe can be described with only 4D expressions, as Einstein thought his whole life. We don’t need extra dimensions such as 5D, 6D, 7D...nD (string theory), or extra fields such as the Higgs field. In reality, the proposed theory is close to the Higgs boson theory. The major difference is that the famous Higgs field is nothing but spacetime....mass and gravitation are nothing but the consequence of the pressure of spacetime on closed volumes.

His conclusion that “Everything is made out of spacetime” can certainly still leave us with a sense of the mysterious, but somehow manages to clean up the mystery compared to the more typical litany of enigmas. As Mises often emphasized, any given state of theory in a field must run up against some “ultimate given,” that is, it can never be expected to explain every possible thing:

Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given. But there will always remain something that—for the human mind thirsting after full knowledge—is, at the given stage of the history of science, the provisional stopping point. It was only the rejection of all philosophical and epistemological thinking by some brilliant but one-sided physicists of the last decades that interpreted as a refutation of determinism the fact that they were at a loss to trace back certain phenomena—that for them were an ultimately given—to some other phenomena (UFES, p. 48).

Jerôme’s ultimate given is quite ultimate indeed: an elastic 4D spacetime with a substructure of Spacetime Cells (sCells). Everything else is built from that.

It may be easiest to start by conceiving of an sCell as a “neutral electron.” However, Jerôme’s real point is the converse: that an “electron” is a “negatively charged sCell.” Its positively charged partner in existence is called a “positron,” which explains the positive charges of protons in this model.

Positrons and electrons always do have the same mass (closed volume) of 510.998918 KeV (electron masses confirmed with “precision of <0.0000086%”) and protons and electrons the same charge (with the opposite pole) of 1.602176565(35) x 10⁻¹⁹ Coulombs. Jerôme writes, “The relative difference between the absolute values is less than 10^-21! So, the question is, ‘How can we explain the incredible equality of these electric charges?’”

He hypothesizes a joint origin of both characteristics in the splitting and reproduction of identical sCells that constitutes the ongoing creation of spacetime (more on this below), which would account for this uncanny precision of commonalities. Starting with a fabric of sCells, when the neutral charge of one transfers to another, the result is one below-neutral cell and another nearby and equally above-neutral cell. These two always appear as a precisely opposite pair because the above-average charge of one and the below-average charge of the other are nothing more than two symmetrical results of a single transfer. They always have the same mass because their shared sCell substructure already predefines this in the same way in both cases.

In this view, electrons and positrons are visible to us because of their charges, whereas sCells in their background average neutral state are undetectable (cannot be “observed” directly), precisely because of their neutrality, and are therefore hidden in plain sight. Positrons and electrons are just two types of lit-up sCell.

Electromagnetic waves, massless because they do not form closed volumes, propagate through this sCell fabric at a consistent speed in vacuum, but never any faster (light travelling through transparent matter has been measured at slower speeds and quite slow speeds have been measured under extraordinary experimental conditions within matter cooled to near absolute zero). Jerôme attributes this to a maximum cell-to-cell transfer rate that is a natural limiting characteristic of the medium of sCells themselves. That we have come to call this maximum transfer speed of 299,792,458m/s “the speed of light” reflects the way in which we observed it and can measure it.

Jerôme identifies neutral, positive, and negative states of sCells as the basic building blocks of all other particles. He proceeds to suggest how these components alone can account for the formation, disappearance, properties, masses, and charges of up and down quarks, protons, neutrons, hydrogen atoms, and onward. Neutral sCells can contribute to mass effects themselves, but only when they become enclosed within a subatomic particle or nucleus and thereby come to “count” as part of a closed volume.

This pair model simultaneously accounts for the location of antimatter in the universe. Rather than being hidden many light years away, it is hidden right under our noses, concealed quite near its partner in existence within other particles. Jerôme also claims to dispose of the hypothesized Strong force as a separate force; those effects result from the enveloping rubber-band-like effect of “distributed charge fields.” In fact, according to this model, there are only two fundamental forces from which the other apparently separate forces derive: Hooke’s Force (constraint and pressure), which applies to all particles, and Coulomb’s Force (attraction and repulsion), which applies only to charged particles (Figure 5-1).

He argues that the concept of a photon as a particle makes no sense. He explains why a photon must be a “quantified wave” and never a particle, and how a quantified wave travelling through an sCell substructure is both consistent with experimental evidence and in principle logically comprehensible. As for black holes, he writes: “Inside a closed volume, as inside a black hole, nothing happens. The light doesn’t exist and therefore can’t escape…”

He also claims to have solved the wave-particle duality. His method of doing so is largely logical and deductive, working from a simple set of widely accepted observations. And in another illustration of differentiating mathematical description and causal-rational explanation, whereas “Schrödinger’s probability concept must be replaced by a more realistic concept called the Distributed Charge Model,” the Schrödinger equation can still be used just as before!

For the finale, he offers a simple, elegant, and unified account of the beginning and ongoing growth (“expansion”) of the universe through sCell expansion and division reminiscent of the way that living cells divide and reproduce in vast quantities with nearly unimaginable precision and a few extremely rare minor variations. This approach simultaneously supplies accounts of a long list of observations for which the Big Bang offers only question marks.

A single internally consistent model is thus able to suggest accounts of the major observations at both the micro and macro levels of physics, including most of the usual list of enigmas. The real nature of spin and some other points remain relatively elusive, he admits, but ventures some tentative parameters and possibilities in each case.

Simplifications are used to get the basics across to general readers, while the math-heavy sections and recalculations of fundamentals using closed volume definitions are set off as supplemental information, which can be skimmed or skipped by the non-specialist. Most of the book should be within reach of those with a reasonable general science education (though more would make things easier) and might be read in a motivated afternoon or two. The prose is brief and clear and the illustrations helpful in bringing home the arguments. The English is “off” just enough to reveal that it is not the author’s first language, but the meaning remains clear and easy to follow. Although the book is clear, a quick copyediting by a native speaker would still lift the quality level.

Any bones left for quantum mysticism?

If this model does pass the tests of internal logical consistency, it is still left to face tests of experimentation. In contrast, some of the competing paradox-ridden and n-dimensional theories it targets do not appear to pass the tests of logic, Ockham’s Razor included. Some may be rejected on logical grounds alone. Others might be rejected if there exists a competing theory that both explains the observations and better passes the tests of logic.

Ideological opponents of “metaphysical” a priori logic would have been loath to reject a hypothesis based on logic alone. Yet not doing so has probably contributed to allowing dead-end speculations to run, permeating scientific culture, and poisoning tendencies in pop philosophy for a century.

The Spacetime Model could put a damper on many of the popular claims of the “new physics supports mysticism” genre, particularly claims that logic, predictability, and consistent causality are mere illusions, or that subject-object differentiation is not to be relied upon. That said, there are still some extraordinary and mind-bending claims to be found in the Spacetime Model itself that might easily be viewable as resonant with certain claims found in some traditional contemplative traditions.

In the Spacetime Model, it is not only that “all is spacetime”, but more specifically that particles (matter), waves (energy), and space (medium) all consist of the same stuff, which is, in this view, “elastic four-dimensional spacetime substructure.” From there, consider some traditional formulations such as the Tibetan “non-duality of form and formlessness” and the typically pithy Zen “not one; not two.” Matter, energy, and space are presented as being both different from each other (not one) and also consisting only of the same spacetime stuff as one another (not two).[6]

However strange images from our attempts to understand the deep structures of physics may appear, and even though atoms are quite clearly “99.999% vacuum with 0.001% waves or matter-energy,” as Jerôme puts it, none of this has any bearing on the reality in which we as persons do and must live and act. Matter, however strange its ultimate substructure, still behaves according to the laws of causality, and so does its substructure.

Probability is ultimately a measurement of our own degree of ignorance about the precise operations of physical causality.[7] Moreover, what is visible at one level of magnification (atomic level: mostly empty) does not necessarily also apply to the view at another level of magnification (the scale at which we live and act, where stuff does bounce off walls).

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out,[8] Paul Lorenzen, in Normative Logic and Ethics,[9] argues that all of our knowledge of natural sciences, even physics itself, presupposes certain a priori true assumptions and norms that are not derivable from “empirical” experimentation, a set of knowledge types he labels protophysics, which are “definitions and the ideal norms that make measurements possible” (p. 60). Nothing we discover by measurement can validly contradict the presuppositions of measuring or we will have taken the rug from under the basis of our own claims, rendering them nothing more than sounds, chirps or barks!

And the winner is…?

So where is the grand reaction to Jerôme’s rather comprehensive challenge to conventional physics models and hypotheses? I have not been able to find much of one online, either by specialists or anyone else.

Is it because our Mr. Jerôme is just dead wrong and hopelessly naïve in his imaginings? Is it because there are so many competing “theories of everything” out there, a dime a dozen? Or might there be something special about this one?

What if this Spacetime Model really is a simpler, more elegant explanation of all the observations than the mixed and matched crop of better-known theories it challenges, and is compatible with experimental results and QM/GR mathematics, as claimed? What if it does explain much of what is in need of explaining in a better way – not perfect, just better – than the competition?

A conventional mindset would have to quickly reject such possibilities: Let’s get real. He has no official position in the physics community. His speculations and diagrams are self-published on his own website! Certainly it must just be an amateur effort compared to the real experts in the establishment with their mysterious, peer-reviewed ways!

Maybe. But in light of our earlier discussions of the philosophical background radiation and our distinction between mathematical description and causal-rational explanation, such a conclusion may now look less reasonable than it might have. There certainly are mathematical geniuses at work and checking on each other in a language very few people can speak well enough to even listen in. That is all to the good as far as it goes (gains from specialization), but is it also a good excuse for not making sense in causal-rational terms? Maybe these are two separate matters that deserve more robust differentiation.

So I retain doubts about just writing this all off based on institutional factors such as academic pedigree and position. Yet speaking of institutional factors, we do know that establishments in many fields tend to want to remain…established. We also know that one of the ways guilds and priesthoods have always tried to preserve advantages and privileges is through the construction and preservation of a public image that highlights the great mystery and impenetrability of their subject, which is obviously accessible only to the anointed!

The very first line of the copyright notice page of Jerôme’s book reminds us that: “Scientific peer journals do not accept papers from independent researchers whatever their content.”

Whatever their content?

Including author bio as one factor among others in accepting papers would surely make sense, but it is hard to imagine something less “scientific” and more pre-modern and guild-like than excluding intellectual work based on the author’s institutional status alone.

Fortunately, in this day and age, Mr. Jerôme’s carefully developed, clearly presented set of arguments are just a click away at no cost but time and mental effort for anyone to review, consider, and attempt to refute or improve upon (or maybe print out and tape to the doors of CERN?).

However this comes out, though, we ought to keep up the hard work of applying the laws of logic even when it is not easy, and not start mumbling in resigned despair: “It doesn’t really matter. Who is Jacky Jerôme anyway?”

Postscript: What about Beckmann?

After initially writing a draft of this review of Jerôme's book, an early reader led me to Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary by Tom Bethel, which is largely a presentation and update for general readers of the ideas of Petr Beckmann, as presented in the more technical Einstein Plus Two. This is certainly also worthy of a careful reading and also touches many issues of the relationship between empirical knowledge, the role of logic, and problems with “official” knowledge institutions that I address in the review of Jerôme’s book. However, the Beckmann/Bethel line of thinking operates only at the "macro" relativity level. In quick summary, it argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s special theory of relativity is on weaker, not stronger, empirical grounds, than general relativity, whereas general relativity is stronger empirically, but was made unnecessarily complex in order not to contradict the earlier special relativity claims. The observed evidence for general relativity, claim these authors, can be explained using classical physics, whereas special relativity is essentially “unfalsifiable” (its assumptions inevitably "don’t apply" to any case of evidence that actually threatens to contradict it).

I do not discuss the Beckmann/Bethel line here in detail so as to focus on Jerôme’s theories, but my general impression is that the Jerôme and Beckmann/Bethel perspectives do not appear necessarily contradictory. Meanwhile, Jerôme’s model appears to make even stronger claims, which go beyond the behavior of gravity and mass to explaining what both gravity and mass are in causal-rational terms that are built up right from the micro level. One Beckmann/Bethel addition to that might presumably be to modify Jerôme’s language for describing the macro level to further remove specifically Einsteinian terminology, even “four-dimensional spacetime,” which Jerôme is still fond of maintaining in his book (and which I will also keep in my review below for simplicity). I found no evidence that either of these parties is aware of the work of the other, and yet I do not see any obvious reason why both alternative theories could not be bounced off of one another and probably cross-improved for the trouble. The Beckmann/Bethel line of thinking is also summarized elsewhere.

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[1] Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (2006) 117.

[2] While context does or should limit the meaning of “everything” here, the “Theory of Everything” formulation still ought to be qualified to head off reductionist interpretations. As the American philosopher Ken Wilber has often pointed out, any physics “theory of everything” cannot cover “everything,” as it excludes phenomena of consciousness viewed from the interior, that is, as Mises might phrase it, from the subjective perspective of an acting person. We cannot deny that such a perspective exists without self-contradiction and it is not reducible to material description. Subjective phenomena of consciousness are emergent from, but not reducible to, physical phenomena. Thus, “everything” should at least be used with this reservation to avoid what Wilber calls “flatland,” as described, for example, in Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambala (2000), pp. 70–71.

[3] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute (1998 [1949]). Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market. The Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute (2004 [1962, 1970]).

[4] While the original text is quite clear and easy to read, the author is not a native speaker of English, and in citing quotations, I have made occasional typographical alterations to language and punctuation only to head off unnecessary distraction for readers of the present article.

[5] The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (pp. 19–20).

[6] The Spacetime Model also suggests an uncanny depth to the basic elements of Ken Wilber’s integral four-quadrant model of all phenomena, one element of another “theory of everything,” but one not limited to the field of physics. Various accounts may be found in: The Marriage of Sense and Soul. New York: Random House (1998), esp. Chap. 5; Integral Psychology. esp. Chap. 14; and Integral Spirituality Boston: Integral Books (2006), esp. Introduction and Chaps. 1, 7, and 8. The second stage of the start of spacetime within the Spacetime Model is an expansion of a single sCell until it splits into two identical sCells (and then four, eight, 16, etc.). Here, 14.1 billion years ago, we already have the singular/plural distinction that forms the vertical axis of Wilber’s model. Then, at the very first sign of matter from the rare appearance of density variation in a few sCells, we find a positron and electron pair and with each of those, we already have closed volumes defining an interior and an exterior. That polarity forms the horizontal axis of Wilber’s model. The Spacetime Model thus offers possible root foundations for the construction of the integral four-quadrant model from among the very first things to ever happen in the history of spacetime.

[7] As Mark R. Crovelli recently summarized this view: “If every event and phenomenon which occurs in the world has an antecedent cause of some sort, then we are forced to say that probability is a measure of human ignorance or uncertainty about the causal factors at work in the world…Man’s uncertainty in such a world could only stem from his inability to comprehend or account for all of the relevant causal factors at work in any given situation” (p. 166). in “All Probabilistic Methods Assume A Subjective Definition For Probability,” Libertarian Papers. 4 (1): 163–174.

[8] “On praxeology and the praxeological foundation of epistemology,” The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, 2nd Edition. Auburn: Mises Institute (2006), pp. 265–294.

[9] Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut (1969).

IN-DEPTH | Ron Paul, Flatland, and the left–right long con: Beyond the Nolan Chart

Note: The first half of what follows is a revised version of, Is the left–right spectrum in flatland? A better way to graph Ron Paul (13 January 2012). It is followed by a new critique of the personal/economic dichotomy and the Nolan Chart, which is built on it. Minor copy revisions were made on 24 January 2014.

The Ron Paul campaigns badly strained the interpretive power of the conventional left–right political spectrum. The San Francisco Chronicle took a stab at placing Paul somewhere along it (Is Ron Paul left of Obama, or a throwback to Ike?). Even the Paul campaign itself at times engaged in nomination-trail rhetoric to establish which candidate was “more conservative,” which is generally understood to mean more to “the right.” This tactic may help win some votes, but is it accurate?

What if we could graph the core positions of the Paul campaign without trying to squeeze them into the usual left–right spectrum? What if that spectrum itself is analogous to the imagined world in the 1884 novel Flatland? In Flatland, two-dimensional beings live as flat geometric shapes within a plane. One day, residents are shocked by a three-dimensional being who, while passing through their plane, seems to appear out of thin air, change shape, and then vanish again without a trace.

Back in our world, how might we locate an entire additional dimension of political spectrum? It is made to seem as though the whole range of possible opinion must exist somewhere along one line. Such a line is only one-dimensional; it does not even allow us the Flatlanders’ relatively generous two.

What if we add a second dimension? Imagine looking down at two lines that form a cross on the ground. The usual political scale stretches out to your left and your right, but a second scale crosses over that one. The “front” is closer to you (a living human person, as it so happens) and the “back” is farthest away from you (in the realm of abstractions that are supposed to trump the value of real human persons, as it so happens).

Now what if the whole left–right scale could have some thickness, making it more of a band rather than a line. This whole band could then be seen to move along the front–back scale over time. This could be used to represent a gradual movement of a whole political culture, even as the relative positions of left and right to each other remained. I will label this new scale with subjective percentages to illustrate relative positions and directions of movement over time. The precise numbers will not be as important as the relative positions they indicate, yet it may be clearest to begin from the farthest extremes as ideal types.

Far-out definitions

Let us say that all the way at 100% in the back of this new scale is totalitarianism. This is the idea that the state can and should do to and with individual people and variously defined groups whatever it pleases. The historical “far right” fascists and “far left” communists had different flavors of totalitarianism in common. Adherents to such views thought that their own favorite party should rule over any individual or traditional civic or community interest. In this sense, the familiar litany of 20^th-century dictatorial leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, stood side-by-side on the front–back scale. This is not to ignore their many differences; it is only to say that when viewed along this scale, their differences were incidental and their commonalities overwhelming.

Now let us say that all the way in the front of this new scale at 0% is philosophical anarchism. This is the idea that the state has no justifiable place within human societies at all. This body of thought also comes in a range of distinctive “left” and “right” versions with regard to the ideal rules and institutions for a statefree society, such as mutualist and private-law models. Fewer people are familiar with such distinctions, but here is a breif hint at the range of viewpoints possible here. Toward the left, mutualists emphasize such institutions as cooperatives, labor-unit trading associations, and an occupancy theory of land ownership (the illegitimacy of absentee ownership). At the other end, “private law” philosophies refer not to each person having a law unto themselves, but to the quite opposite idea of upholding legal principles that are equally applicable to all people in their capacity as “private” persons, allowing no special exceptions to general rules for “public” agents, such as those special exceptions to general rules that are made under “public law.”

This raises a puzzle for the usual left–right spectrum. It is able to combine left totalitarians and left anarchists at one end and right totalitarians and right anarchists at the other, a major case of lumping together quite opposite views. Imagine Stalin and a peasant freely trading units of labor time. Sounds dodgy. Imagine national socialists promoting a set of universal social norms that apply equally to all human beings everywhere regardless of grouping and classification. Sounds even more unlikely. Something about this scale, taken alone, therefore seems far too simplistic. A naive observer of the left–right scale alone might be forgiven for assuming that the two sets of “opposite” anarchists and “opposite” totalitarians, while they might disagree on many issues, might be at least as likely to find common ground with one another as with their alleged neighbors.

Some readers may by now have thought of the well-known “Nolan Chart,” which may at first seem similar to the model proposed here. However, the Nolan Chart is actually different in important ways, the implications of which we will explore below.

An example: Applying the front–back scale to American history

Where might 1770s American revolutionaries appear on the front–back scale? Some were probably around 0–10%, depending on which ones. They were rebelling against perceived overreaches of monarchy and mercantilism and wanted to replace them with somewhere between nothing and as little as possible, that is, with a novel “limited” state that was supposed to differ substantially from monarchism.

As usual, there was a division between the “left” and the “right,” in this case between the revolutionaries and the loyalists. This difference was largely over the question of what the proper natural order of society was. What represented the true natural order of society? Was it familiar monarchy or some novel form of self-government? It can be hard for us to imagine today that at that time, it was monarchy that appeared to be the self-evident natural order and self-government the seemed to be a reckless new social experiment.

Both revolutionaries and loyalists generally viewed society as a kind of natural order, a few that is closer to the front of our proposed new scale. This contrasts with central planners deciding how society should be, and then using the police powers of a state to engineer it that way, closer to the totalitarian end of this scale.

After the revolution, some, particularly the Hamiltonian Federalists, were still in favor of a powerful state, just one that they would run instead of some distant monarch. Few today, even in the Ron Paul camp, seem to recall that many Jeffersonians already viewed the Constitution of 1787 as a dangerous step toward perpetually growing government, one that clashed with the revolutionary ideals of 1776 and had already most likely been a net victory for big-government Hamiltonians. As it has turned out, the entire American political culture has been moving toward greater state power since soon after the revolution, and judging from the impressive scale of the current US Federal government, which that constitution set up, the anti-Federalist Jeffersonians were correct.

US history using the left/right scale can be viewed as having progressed in a zig-zagging pattern between “left” and “right,” represented by various parties in different epochs. However, this simple, one-dimensional story tends to obscure a pervasive undercurrent in which left, right, and center all move “back” together along a second dimension—in the direction of a more powerful central state in all areas.

It has often been observed that the modern US Federal government’s effective powers vastly exceed those that most monarchs would have dared even imagine. Modern powers to tax, borrow, and inflate are immense and business and life are hyper-regulated. In other words, the entire left–right scale, as a band, has been moving along the front–back scale toward the back for a long time.

Where is this band now? Centered around 65%? More? Each observer might suggest a different subjective number, but it has moved far from its former positions and the “consensus” direction of movement remains toward more central state power.

Where on this front–back scale should one place “legalized” extralegal military detention or assassination? What about raids on small-scale farmers selling to eager customers in search of more healthful products? What about detention without charge based on the failure of snoops to understand modern English idiom in the tweets they scan?

The original French “left–right” model was focused on the question of change. Should the familiar old ways be preserved or should something new be done? Included in the “left” were the great French economists Bastiat and de Molinari, who wanted to largely or completely eliminate the powers of the state to let civil society and economy function properly. They did not want to transfer those same or greater powers to some other form of coercive organization. Their main goal was to eliminate those powers, not reassign them. Left-wing “change” originally meant reducing the powers of the state and the cronyocracy.

A preference for change versus a preference for the status quo is a highly contextual distinction. Change what? How? In what direction? The original left–right concept itself is relational; it emerged in a particular historical context. In today’s context, however, the model applies quite differently. In fact, the presumed direction of desirable “change” now seems to mean exactly the opposite of what it once did.

Things are not better at the “right” end. The idea that the modern right wants smaller government is a faint ghost from the “Old Right,” whose ideas survive in mainstream politics as mere words devoid of effective content. The modern right generally wants the central government to be bigger and stronger in somewhat different places than the modern left does. However, both major parties have long been united in the big picture on ratcheting up government; they just differ at times on exactly how, where, and for the benefit of which blend of special interests.

From the perspective of any quite different position along the front–back scale, the major parties have become increasingly indistinguishable in practice on the most important issues, issues such as war versus peace, police-state versus republic, and technocratic central planning and cronyocracy versus authentic economic liberty.

How to graph Ron Paul

Whatever one’s opinion of Ron Paul, it is widely agreed that he is focused on making serious changes to status quo policies. Relative to him, then, all of the other candidates, the sitting president included, are broadly in favor of the status quo. Moreover, the “status quo” itself is not static; it is a moving pattern of massive state growth. Most of the talk of “cuts” in Washington refers to reductions in the rate of growth. Thus, Paul, who is from the “right” according to conventional wisdom, is far “left” on a “change versus status quo” scale applied to today’s context. The change he wants, however, is in the opposite direction from the one usually presumed – away from centralized state interference in people’s lives. Graphing that requires another dimension.

By stepping back from the permutations of the left–right scale, we can more clearly view Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns as appealing to issues better defined along the front–back scale. Paul himself opened his 2008 The Revolution: A Manifesto by deconstructing the false alternatives the modern left–right scale sets up. In contrast, his unique location among modern politicians on our proposed front–back scale better explains his broad crossover appeal on certain key issues.

Imagine the whole left–right scale nowadays as a band crossing over the front–back scale at somewhere around 65% central state power. The real Ron Paul would be effectively invisible to anyone looking only along the usual scale from left to right. Conversely, he might stand out in the eyes of others for exactly the same reason. He is the only candidate who is substantially off of the left–right band as it is currently positioned along the front–back scale. He therefore appears either 1) completely unfathomable, as the three-dimensional character was to the two-dimensional Flatlanders, or 2) as the only intriguing alternative to the various flat shapes within our usual political flatland.

Mainstream candidates of both parties argue about how and where to grow state power. Meanwhile, Ron Paul is saying that we should be moving that whole state power meter, left, right, and center, in the other direction along the front–back axis.

There are always left and right camps on each major issue and in each historical context. One side might lean more or less toward the front or back, tilting the angle of the whole crossing band one way or the other. Nevertheless, a monocular focus on the left–right scale obscures the long-term movement of the entire political culture toward greater central state power and away from individual liberty and civil society institutions.

We are supposed to be enchanted by the theater of differences between the heads of a two-headed beast. We are not supposed to notice that the whole two-headed beast has been lumbering in the direction of ever-expanding powers for itself and special privileges for its camp followers of all parties. That makes it encouraging that more and more people, especially among the young, are beginning to notice. Could this be a sign that the illusion-holding power of the one-dimensional left–right scale is weakening?

The three-dimensional visitor to two-dimensional Flatland was not a beast, but the two-headed bipartisan leviathan is. Ron Paul is the only candidate who is working to turn that whole beast around and walk it back toward its cage.

The personal/political dichotomy and the Nolan Chart

We have examined the implications of adding a new dimension to the political spectrum, one that crosses the left–right spectrum and runs from front to back between the political ideal types of philosophical anarchism and totalitarianism.

The Nolan Chart was also an effort to add dimensionality to political interpretation to help people question and see beyond the left–right spectrum. David Nolan developed it in the early 1970s and it forms the basis of the well-known “World’s Smallest Political Quiz.”[i] The Nolan Chart divides the world into “personal” and “economic” realms to illustrate a seemingly paradoxical preference of the left for more freedom in “personal” areas and less in “economic” ones, with the inverse set of preferences on the right, which allegedly prefers economic freedom and enforced social control. Libertarians are depicted in another corner preferring freedom in both personal and economic areas, while totalitarians (or communitarians in one variation) are placed in the opposite corner, insisting that some other set of political considerations should take precedence over liberties.

The Nolan Chart was a substantial improvement over left–right reductionism. It allowed space for possibilities that are invisible along the left–right spectrum, namely libertarianism. Simply conflating libertarianism with “the right” is deeply confused and tends to lend an undeserved laissez-faire credibility to the fundamentally authoritarian right. This perspective also suggests that the main risk of the Ron Paul movement attempting to work within the Republican Party is that, as is often the case, vote-catching words can be assimilated into the conventional party while their meanings are ignored.

The concept of a scale that runs from total state control to no state control at first appears the same as in our proposed model. The important difference is that the Nolan Chart uses two distinct scales of freedom, each one qualified. This turns out to be an important difference that reveals some of the Nolan Chart’s weaknesses and shows how a still deeper layer of illusion is embedded in the conventional left–right spectrum.

Source: Wikipedia CommonUses and possible origins of the personal/economic dichotomy

The Nolan Chart’s most important weakness is that it accepts the conventional division of the world into personal and economic realms. This may seem uncontroversial at first, but as we examine this division step by step, and from various angles, the separation between personal and economic realms, used as a political assessment tool, may begin to look more and more flimsy, to the point that it may seem to fall apart altogether.

First of all, it may be that separating personal and economic categories is in part a legacy of certain economists’ attempts to create an artificial, reductionist model of “economic man.” Such a creature fit into mathematical and deterministic models much better than pesky living people. An “economic” calculating machine devoid of “personal” idiosyncrasies was just what advocates of such models needed if they were to make them seem relevant.

In contrast, Ludwig von Mises argued that real economics:

…deals with the real actions of real men. Its theorems refer neither to ideal nor to perfect men, neither to the phantom of a fabulous economic man (homo oeconomicus) nor to the statistical notion of an average man (homme moyen). Man with all his weaknesses and limitations, every man as he lives and acts, is the subject matter of catallactics. Every human action is a theme of praxeology (Mises [1949] 646–47).

A second perspective is that the personal/economic dichotomy may have arisen out of differing streams of rhetoric used by advocates of political control over people. Different threads of coercion-justifying rhetoric have different historical and philosophical origins, some of which are more “economic” and some more “personal.”

Listing up the various elements of life into categories is itself an artifact of a bureaucratic view of life. It results from habits of “seeing like a state,” in the memorable phrase of Yale Professor of Agrarian Studies James C. Scott. State administrators are eager to divide out and prioritize attention on those parts of the real world that are “legible and hence appropriable by the state” (Scott 2009, 39). Thus, what the state and statists view as “economic” will tend to involve those aspects of social life that are easiest for the state to regiment, monitor, and measure from the outside and, most importantly, tax. The production of grain was historically a worldwide favorite of states in this regard. From field to storage, it is visible, trackable, measureable, divisible, and therefore most readily taxable.

On the other hand, interest in using the state for social control of the “personal” realm may be associated more with the mashing up of law and religion. For example, in considering the impact of the 16^th century German Reformation on the Western legal tradition, the late Harvard legal scholar Harold J. Berman argued that, “What has traditionally been called a process of secularization of the spiritual law of the church must thus also be viewed as a process of spiritualization of the secular law of the state” (2003, 64). Secular law was increasingly infused with the quasi-religious objective of attempting to make people “better” by using police powers to force them to perform certain lists of duties that religious bureaucrats defined as “moral.” This basic approach of attempting to use the state’s coercive powers to press-gang others into joining in a pursuit of moralized objectives may be traced right up to the assumptions underpinning a host of forcible modern wealth-transfer bureaucracies.

This latter, more “personal,” coercive dynamic today coexists with the more general interest of states in categorizing and directing “economic” activity into those channels that can most easily be recognized, measured, and exploited. Nevertheless, control and freedom are not so easily separated, not in theory or in practice, especially when viewed over the longer term.

Is that personal or economic?

But surely, you might say, we can set aside such theoretical considerations and try to list some categories for “personal” versus “economic” areas of life that everyone can agree on.

Very well. We might start with some typical subjects of political discourse: employment, education, housing, religion, marriage, and food. Consider each one in turn.

Is it clear which area is personal and which economic? Perhaps this should be examined more closely.

With greater “economic” independence of decision-making, a given person may enjoy greater freedom of “personal” action. So is such freedom definable as economic or as personal?

One might imagine a guaranteed “personal freedom” under some constitution or another. Does one still have such freedom when it no longer extends to whatever that particular state has most recently decided to reclassify as an “economic” area of life? Surely your “freedom of expression” on the Internet is subject to certain “economic” regulations of the medium or the “economic” products and services you use to access it, is it not?

Or it may be that your “personal” freedom from yesterday is actually covered by “interstate commerce” today. Or maybe it has some bearing on “national security.” Either way, the practical message may well be, “Sorry folks, that was yesterday’s freedom. This is today.”

What about one’s ability to open, relocate, expand, or contract one’s own business? What about one’s choice of place of work and of co-workers, one’s place or type of residence, what foods one can or cannot eat or sell, or where, how, and when oneself or one’s children are educated?

Those are all “economic” matters in some ways. But are they not also each very personal? Clearly, they impact large portions of the days and hours of one’s life and the quality and content of one’s experiences. They can also all impact issues of employment, saving, retirement, income, and expense, which of course makes them all…What? impersonal?

But surely we can all agree that marriage is completely personal! Well, marriage within modern states is in effect a bureaucratically defined legal status that has a direct bearing on tax rates, exemptions, and insurance coverage. It surely has major impacts on the financial affairs of all those involved, impacting bank accounts, housing, transportation, inheritance, the distributions of child-rearing expenses, etc. So then marriage is actually “economic” rather than “personal”?

Will the seemingly solid personal/economic division really go down that easily? Maybe we should give it one more chance. Surely we can define it objectively for all people this way: the “economic” has something to do with the use of money. The economic is the monetary.

All right, then, let us try this one out. What are some quintessentially “personal” areas within conventional political discourse? How about vice? This is one of those personal areas that the right is famous for wanting to use the police state to control, including areas such as prostitution and substance use.

People acting within such realms almost invariably employ, well…money, for transactions. One might suppose that actors in these sectors also use money for at least some degree of budgeting and cost accounting. So the money = “economic” attempt at a definition soon begins to break down once again.

Out of the paradox

One secret to unraveling this puzzle is that both the personal and economic categories themselves are subjectively defined. They make the most sense when viewed from the perspective of a person considering his own decisions in a given context. They depend for their meaning and application on how each issue is being viewed, who is looking, and why the viewer is asking. The question of whether an issue is personal or economic is itself an individual matter. Who wants to know?

For example, if Anna decides to take a particular job, she might think to herself that she is mainly doing it to advance her career in an interesting work environment, which would make her decision lean more toward the “personal” side of things. However, she might also decide to take the same job mainly for its income potential, which might make her think of her decision as more of an “economic” one. From a rigorous economic-theory perspective, observers cannot determine this distinction from the outside one way or another, as it has to do with how the acting person is conceptualizing what they are doing in terms of ends and means.

It would also not suffice to ask the regional economics czar or the head of the Bureau of Personal Satisfaction assigned to the territory in which Anna lives. In any case, those two bureaucracies would not be likely to agree even with one another. After all, the classification of her action might impact their respective budget appeals next year in different directions. As for Anna’s decision, only she can really know what her decision was mainly about. She might never even tell us the truth about why she took the job, depriving us of any chance to effectively use our neat little bureaucratic categorization scheme into “personal” and “economic” statistics.

The personal/economic distinction referenced in the Nolan Chart and other political charting models, while at first seeming intuitive and clear, thus turns out to look increasingly arbitrary and malleable the more closely we examine it. Moreover, the distinction depends on categories that help define the same conventional left–right spectrum that we have been attempting to build a pathway for transcending.

Indivisible

To the extent that the personal/economic distinction might be meaningful at all, it is also important to recognize that when the state controls either alleged “half” of freedom, it already has the leverage to control the other half. Those who use or threaten state-orchestrated violence to control others in the “economic” realm also gain discretion over them in the “personal” realm, and vice versa. This is not to say that authorities with discretion to direct violence to control the lives of others will actually do so in any particular way at any given time. Each state, for example, remains somewhat different from the others in its current style and practices. The key is that they can.

The personal/economic distinction functions within statist discourse to help sell state control, but different packages are available to appeal to different sets of preferences. The “left” version says that you can have your freedom in the personal realm so long as the state has the discretion to tell you (mainly tell other people, of course) what to do in the economic realm. The “right” version is the mirror image. You can have your freedom in the economic realm so long as the state has the discretion to tell you (mainly tell other people, of course) what to do in the personal realm.

Each seductive package appears to make sense right up until the moment it is too late. That is the moment when the creature you have been supporting tells you what to do in an area over which you had preferred to retain personal control. The secret power of this distinction is its “confuse and exploit” effectiveness against entire populations of individuals, each of whom is willing to buy into some attractive, customized variant of this deceptive pact with the devil, and pay for it—with other people’s liberty.

All of these packages, however, are long-term scams, or “long cons.” Neither variant of half-freedom is meaningful if you cannot act in disagreement with the authorities who control “the other half.” Whichever half of liberty has been ceded is held in reserve and can always be used to undermine the half that supposedly remains. The key is that with any such scheme of divided liberty, you are left with no reliable foundation from which to disagree—and act on such disagreement—without facing the threat of officially meted-out fines, confiscation, imprisonment, or death.

Citizen A, for example, might be arrested and imprisoned for a “personal offense” such as sampling some forbidden substance. While in prison, she will not be able to exercise her “economic” freedom by continuing to work at the company she started. Meanwhile, Citizen B’s “economic offense” of creating a popular website that offends powerful incumbent economic interests with strong lobbying operations might likewise land him in the lock-up, from which his “personal” life will be out of reach.

Say you want to start a food co-op with your neighboring farmers and friends. This is an exercise of “economic” action in support of “personal” food freedom. However, this risks running afoul of the government’s bipartisan system of food regulation and its lobbyist-driven support for certain kinds of politically favored industrial products that are marketed for human consumption. Having been duly raided and warned, you would probably be arrested if you persisted too far. Before long, both your “personal” and “economic” freedoms might be narrowed down to the choice of eating the agro-congressional complex’s mystery-grain GMO prison chow or going on hunger strike.

Differently labeled frogs in the same pot

The overall preference for state control over civil and individual freedom in all areas has been rising – left, right, and center. Meanwhile, all the little frogs divided into their left, right, and center teams, are focused on their differences along the left–right spectrum. What none of them seems to notice as they croak back and forth is that the water temperature in the pot they are all floating in together is rising.

The image of the entire left–right spectrum as a band shifting along the front–back axis over time makes even more sense if the division of the world into “personal” and “economic” realms is illusory. All freedoms, or their absence, are ultimately interdependent and, in the big picture, tend to rise and fall together.

The fake division of the world into personal and economic realms has proven an effective mechanism for helping to divide and control every one of those hapless simmering frogs. Even the venerable Nolan Chart, while it went a long way toward expanding political perspectives, did not manage to fully transcend that division. Taking a fresh look at the Ron Paul movement in these terms may help us all enhance the dimensionality of individual acts of political interpretation.

References

Berman, Harold J. 2003. Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mises, Ludwig von. 1998 [1949]. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute.

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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[i] There have been many alternative charting attempts over the years since the Nolan Chart. I recently discovered that the Political Compass Organization had already proposed a two-axis model with even more visual similarity to the one discussed here. Looking further, however, it seems that that chart’s labeling and the underlying assumptions suggested in its diagnostic test still end up differing considerably from the model I suggest. I base this quick assessment on the chart’s labeling, the actual questions on the accompanying test, and the somewhat surprising result I obtained from taking it (hardly where I would have placed my views on it by looking at the definitions).

Two types of A Game of Apples

IP is evil in a Game of Thrones kind of way and is wasting a tremendous amount of all of these companies' time and resources. It is an inherently non-market game, a win/lose game. And IP has to some degree forced all companies to play that game one way or another (defensively is less morally offensive than aggressively).

That said, it still must be noted in the context of comments such as the above that execution and "invention" are utterly different things. The definition of "product" in the video is technological, but not subjective. The "product" is the entire thing that the consumer is buying, including the surrounding experience. That is precisely the "technological recipe" discussed, which is just the right idea, except that the speakers seem to continue to imply the technical elitist view that this is an inherently lesser function than supposedly pure "invention."

However, without execution, invention serves no one. Creating an end-product that people actually buy is at least as much an art, and Jobs' vision was explicitly to work at the intersection of technology and humanities, including aesthetics. It is the result of making the recipe (the dish on the plate) that _always_ constitutes the consumer product that is bought, not the underlying technologies that are of interest mainly to engineers and technical elitists. A consumer does not go to a restaurant and ask for a portion of one of the ingredients from a bin in the kitchen.

Apple legal is being evil and Jobs had, among his weaknesses, an IP and overstretched credit-claiming mentality. But this is a different matter from the company's habit of reinventing entire industries for the benefit of ordinary people, which they did precisely by realizing that not only the ingredients, and not only the recipe, but the dish on the plate _is_ the important thing in business; not the "technology" taken in isolation from what matters to the end users. I think all this can still be appreciated separately from judgements about the company's horrific IP antics, which amount to trying to prevent competing chefs from using certain types of ingredients in their cooking!