Civilizing the Slightly Smarter Apes: An Introduction to ‘The Evolutionary Austrian School of Economics’ and Applications Regarding Jew-Gentile Conflicts (WWII and Israeli/Palestinian Conflict), and the Russia-Ukraine War.
Introduction
We are over two years into CovidMania and a new European war in Ukraine, the latest self-mutilations by the slightly smarter apes that have inadvertently come to dominate the planet. In August 10, 1915, British physicist Henry Mosely, who would have probably won the Nobel Prize that year, died in perhaps the most disastrous error the apes have thus far made, The First World War (1914–18). Slightly smarter apes that had absorbed German/French/British/Russian “identities”… students, fathers, engineers, “great minds” and “experts”, who even shared a common European Christian faith, reverted to their tribal ape-like nature, and for God, honor, flag and country, needlessly slaughtered each other across the trenches for four years leading to about 18 million deaths and millions more left invalid (6.5 million just in France). Why did this happen? And if it was such a big deal at the time, worth sacrificing so much, how come hardly anybody knows anything about it today? 20 years later via WWII the tribalistic slaughter led to over 80 million deaths and what followed was a “Cold War” that brought the slightly smarter apes close to nuclear annihilation several times. Why were our “great leaders” and “intellectuals” utterly powerless to prevent the WWI/II slaughters and were in fact its promoters? How can mankind today build mindbogglingly complex microchips, airplanes, satellites, the Internet and so much more, yet still not have figured out something as simple as peace and always be one spark away from another world-wide tribalistic tyrannical calamity as CovidMania and the war in Ukraine are clearly showing?
There is something missing from our understanding of how the world works, something as monumental in importance as Darwin’s theory of evolution, something that our “leading intellectuals” and “experts” have yet to discover and spread accordingly. Fortunately for mankind that “something” has already been discovered and explained by a group of little-known and widely misunderstood intellectuals often-times referred to as ‘The Austrian School of Economics’. And as 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics, F.A. Hayek(1899–1992) writes, their vital insights and “fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to Carl Menger[1840–1921]”.
Just like the human body/organism and the numerous “systems” that coordinate it like the respiratory/nervous/digestive “systems”, are the result of the actions of some 70 trillion human and bacterial cells but obviously NOT the result of any conscious planning or designing by them, and thanks to the likes of Darwin and a modern understanding of genetics we can understand how ‘natural selection’ was the inadvertent “designer” of such systems and complex order, the modern global socioeconomic order or what the great British 19th century thinker Herbert Spencer(1820–1903) cleverly referred to as “The Social Organism”, is also coordinated by a “system”, by what Menger’s intellectual descendants Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, referred to as “The Market Process”. ‘The Market Process’ and the “parts” it is composed of like money, prices, economic competition, interest rates, and the legal/religious/governmental frameworks that sustain it, “are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Adam Ferguson) similar to how cells inadvertently/unconsciously act to create the systems that coordinate multicellular life. The ‘market process’ shares this trait with language which is also a complex mechanism that is the result of human action but was not consciously designed or invented by people/cells. It took millions of years for natural selection to evolve the numerous complex biochemical ‘systems’ that allow single cells to cooperate in multicellular organisms. Sometimes these mechanisms fail and the cells revert to their solitary ways and replicate wildly, in other words, they become cancerous/tribal or uncooperative and prematurely destroy the larger multicellular organism/order they were a part of. Similarly, it took about 50,000 years for natural selection to evolve ‘the market process’ which reordered tribal homo sapiens into cooperative members of the ‘Social Organism’. Unfortunately, generally speaking man is as ignorant of the workings of the social order and its evolution as cells are regarding their role in multicellular organisms, and our ‘law of the jungle’ tribal instincts constantly has us, via massive monopoly/coercive bureaucracies/governments and wars, destroying the very freedom and tolerance that is needed to create/coordinate civilization.
There is one vital insight, the “flux-capacitor” idea that makes ‘time-travel’/‘understanding society’ possible. The evolution of money. Menger’s explanation of the emergence of money and its ramifications is in all likelihood the most important insight to have coalesced in the mind of a human being and is needed to understand the calamities above and prevent future ones before the slightly smarter apes inevitably self-destroy in some nuclear war, economic chaos, environmental disaster, or similar man-made calamity. In order to properly understand the above and appreciate Menger’s insights, let us first summarize some vital economic concepts and the role that trade and money play in the emergence and functioning of civilization. After familiarizing ourselves with some of the above men’s wisdom we will apply it towards understanding various aspects of the co-evolution of culture and economy and more specifically Jew/Gentile conflicts like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Jew/Nazi tensions leading to WWII.
Imagine you had a time machine and went back in time about 300 years to Salem, Massachusetts during the famed Salem witch trials where 19 women were hanged for witchcraft, and told people that the world could function much better if there was no slavery, that women should have the same rights/freedoms as men, that homosexuality should be tolerated and seen as natural, and that six million years ago we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees (we’ll assume they know what chips are). People would see you as some devilish monstrosity spreading heretical/sinful ideas and quickly try to kill you. Even if you succeeded in persuading a few people, the rate at which your ideas could spread would likely be no match for the rate at which existing fallacies/myths and the “incentive and ideological structure” of slave owners, religious leaders and the “experts” of their day would lead to your death. Would this mean that the people of the time were bad/malicious/”evil”? Or members of some “vast conspiracy” of “bad guys” or “special interests”? Of course not! Even if you didn’t get killed, as the superior ideas spread they may end up doing far more harm than good. Perhaps their spread may lead to ultimately unsuccessful slave revolts, or a civil war that ends up making society more susceptible to conquest by an external power like the French or Spanish at the time. Thus the spread of superior ideas or truths can end up doing far more harm than good. Knowing the risks, would you attempt to spread the ideas? Would it be “immoral” for you not to try? How would you attempt to spread them? Something along these lines applies to this essay and the dilemmas its authors face.
Living orders need information
The more complex a thing is, the more information is needed to create it and keep it in order. The biological order is created via the well-known mechanism of 'biological evolution' with genes being like the sentences which store the information necessary to create/coordinate life/order. Mutations cause new genes and thus new information to arise which leads to a different life-form which is then 'naturally selected' as it inadvertently competes with others, with the winner reproducing more and thus passing on more copies of the better-adapted/"fitter" genes/information/design to future generations. Tiny E. coli bacteria have about 4,000 genes and are relatively simple in structure and function. On the other hand, each human cell has about 25,000 genes thus containing far more information allowing each cell to specialize and take part in a vast “division of labor” by transforming itself into a heart/lung/nerve/etc. cell as a young fetus develops inside the womb. About 500 million years ago, life-forms with brains began to emerge which allowed information to be stored outside of genes. Eventually life-forms evolved that used their brains to be increasingly “social” and cooperate with others to reach even higher levels of relative productivity/fitness/competitiveness which leads us to ourselves, anatomically-modern man (about 100,000 years ago), whose ancestors had spent over 2 million years living in small nomadic tribes of about 15 to 100 people where everyone more or less knew how to do the same things so information was inefficiently repeated across the social order. Just like few genes/information leads to simple bacteria, few brains lead to a simple and relatively unproductive social order. Tribal man/order had an information storage/sharing problem.
From trade emerges the ‘division of labor and information’
Trade and money led to the “division of labor and information” which allowed the social order to efficiently compartmentalize information in only the brains that needed it and also accumulate a virtually limitless amount of information. For example, Mark’s brain contains knowledge of how to get coconuts and process them to create pastries. Tom’s brain contains knowledge of how to find the best vines and weave them together to make baskets. Jim’s of where to find rocks which when split can create sharp knives and how to sharpen them. When Mark trades his pastries for Tom’s baskets and Jim’s knives he is a benefactor of all the information needed to creating those items yet he only had to know how to make his pastries. Unlike the tribal social order where information is inefficiently repeated across every brain, trade allows for information to be efficiently stored fewer times freeing up more brains to contain more information. We can envision 1,000 men producing and trading 1,000 different types of items requiring 1,000 times more information which without trade and the ‘division of information’ that it enables would have been impossible to achieve in a tribal society. Also, when Mark trades his pastries for the baskets and knives he can now make less trips to gather coconuts by using the baskets and process them faster by using the knives and thus increase his ‘rate of production’, in other words, the rate at which he reorders/transforms matter to create human-usable wealth and subsequent order, from 2 to 10 pastries per day. The pastry-making process has become more productive and also more complex because it was enabled by basket and knife making knowledge. We now have a never-ending cycle of increased ‘rate of production’ and complexity -> population growth (more brains) -> increased ‘rate of production’ and complexity -> more brains -> … leading to where we are today with nearly 8 billion people and the inability to fully trace the knowledge that enabled the creation of even a simple pencil.
From ‘private property’ emerges trade and ‘competitive knowledge discovery’
From our freedom to use/transform our private property emerges the ‘freedom to trade’ it with anyone in the entire planet which inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where people/companies are motivated to innovate and learn from each other(competitors) thus inadvertently cooperate to create and spread superior information and subsequent order. It is our freedom as consumers to trade our life/order-sustaining wealth for the best cars with the latest features/innovations, and as producers to go into the auto-manufacturing business, which motivates existing auto manufacturers(competitors) to innovate/compete/copy/learn to produce the best cars. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does having the ‘freedom to trade’ with everyone in the world allows the best ideas to compete/spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. Via advertising, competitors are motivated to spread the potential usefulness and superiority of their products/ideas as well as the defects/inferiority of their competitors thus accelerating the need to compete/copy/spread superior information and subsequent order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading relative prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas easily arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation/innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth has to be offered in exchange for labor as companies/orders compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone.
Superior morals also arise from ‘private property’
Morals are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise. As Hayek writes:
“Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.”
As millions of Britons, Germans, Jews and others from all over the world came to America, it was ultimately the competition which grows from ‘private property’ and thus individual liberty/freedom which stripped these people of their otherwise nationalistic/ethnocentric/tribalistic identities and evolved what came to be seen as the classic American character/ethos of wanting to be seen as a reputable/honest businessman/professional who treats everyone with respect and wears a business suit as opposed to older religious/ethnocentric dress.
Envision the real dynamic social order
It is important to envision the socioeconomic order as it really exists as if looked at from high above. Envision people coming together/apart as companies/orders emerge and dissolve in ever-changing conditions. Superior information arising and rippling/restructuring the social order thanks to competition. As orders get more productive they lure people to ‘trade-with’/’join-them’ by offering more money/wealth for their labor eventually causing the least productive orders to sort of dissolve as their ‘factors of production’ like labor, buildings, etc. are bid away to be parts of the better informed and thus more productive plans/orders. A sort of swarm intelligence emerges as the all-pervasive public constantly uses its ‘freedom to trade’ its wealth for what it calculates to be best to nourish the growth and spread of superior orders/companies/information, inadvertently expanding the worldwide “division of labor and information” as entire neighborhoods/cities morph themselves in specialized ways as complementary pieces of information/orders segregate themselves in distinct geographical locations like the software industry in Silicon Valley, California and manufacturing in Guangdong, southern China. As Menger’s intellectual descendant Ludwig von Mises(1881–1973) reminds us “The division of labour is a fundamental principle of all forms of life.” The division of labor is a pattern/way which natural selection rediscovers to enable smaller units/orders to efficiently compartmentalize labor/information as they contribute-to (and are nourished-by) a larger organism they become parts of(Organelles -> Cells -> Organs -> Humans -> Social Organism).
Prices, the impossibility of ‘central planning’, and ‘economic calculation’
In our role as consumers we trade money for wealth, and as producers/laborers we trade wealth/labor for money. As producers we also perform the vital task of setting the price of the wealth we produce. For example, a Cuban restaurant in Miami sells a meal for $10. Perhaps $1 might be profit, and $9 will be spent in costs, in other words, in the necessary consumption of wealth needed to produce the meal/wealth, things like equipment/electricity/food/supplies, and everything employees and their families will consume at home (food, energy) since this consumption is needed to produce their labor. The businessman discovered 2 vital pieces of information: 1) that there are enough customers willing to patronize the restaurant at the $10/meal price taking into account their ‘freedom to trade’ their money/wealth for other things thus providing a superior/competitive/winning alternative to society at that place and time, and 2) how to reorder $9 worth of stuff(labor/supplies/etc.) to profitably produce the meal. If he sets prices too high, customers will choose other superior competing options thus he’d be failing to reorder a section of society in a useful/superior way. If he sets prices too low, he won’t be able to cover costs and thus end up shrinking the economic pie by consuming more than what he produces. Every time a person uses his ‘freedom to trade’ his wealth for what he considers best, he is providing vital calculations, like some distributed sensor he is nourishing the maintenance/growth of useful products/companies and motivating others/competitors to innovate/learn or dissolve into more useful plans by withdrawing funds/wealth from them. Given the above we are now in a position to understand the vital fact that ‘central economic planning’ ideologies like Socialism/Communism can’t work because only free people/businessmen dispersed throughout society are at the right time and place needed to discover people’s desires(1) and (2) how to properly set prices and thus create a profitable and competitive order ( i.e., one that produces more than it consumes while also providing a superior alternative to customers/society).
How much wealth had to be consumed in order to produce a gallon of gasoline that sells in Seattle for $3.50? Or a pound of beef that sells in Boston for $5.35? We can’t know for sure, however, we can be fairly certain that it was less than the advertised price which on average must include the costs. Thus the price of any item in the world lets us know that there is an order/minds/CPUs at that particular time and place that is coordinated by information that can produce the item while consuming less than the advertised price. THAT IS AMAZING! Thus prices, and the vital information they convey, are what allow ‘economic calculation’. They allow wealth to be purchased and combined in a manner that ensures that the combination (like a car) can easily have a price set that properly accounts for the costs/consumption of the whole (car) by just adding the prices of the parts used to produce it (wheels, glass, robotics, labor, etc.), parts which themselves had a price set that included their costs/consumption and so on, each part/input managed/ordered by entrepreneurs/brains/CPUs with highly specialized time-and-place specific information who are always using profit/loss calculation to ensure they are increasing the economic pie leading to never-ending conveyor belts of interlocking cycles of production/consumption, each moving/reordering matter in increasingly valuable ways. The concept/tradition of ‘private property’ plays a vital role here as well, it is not until matter/things are privately owned, that they are controlled/coordinated by brains/CPUs that are incentivized to discover the best information with which to reorder/coordinate them in the most productive/profitable way possible.
Government is a coercive competition-immune/inefficient order and should be minimized
The role of governments/coercion should be minimized because governmental/‘public sector’ bureaucracies, being COERCIVE MONOPOLIES which get their life/order-sustaining wealth through taxes/compulsion are immune to the competitive-information-spreading incentives/pressures which motivate private sector entities to keep up with the competition in terms of information and hustle. Central/government plans can’t work if people are free to not go along with them so they inevitably require compulsion/tyranny. The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists/“experts” whose plans required the coercion of millions, but they were thoroughly crushed by relatively freer Americans and their resulting superior “competitive knowledge discovery”. The “classic” image below helps explain the difference between competitive/private/free orders(South Korea) and monopolistic/government/coerced orders (North Korea). Keep your eye on how information arises/spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order.
Regulatory Paralysis
In the free/private/competitive sector information moves from the bottom (individual minds/entrepreneurs/innovators) to others/influencers/many/top as it is ‘tested’/refined/preferred by the comparisons to other information by billions of minds thus ensuring superior information spreads and is ideally adapted to each specific time and place. This mechanism is bypassed by government regulations which are top-down/coercive/competitionless/monopoly information/action which is not subject to continuous improvement/replacement via competition so they paralyze entire industries slowing down ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, driving up costs (more lawyers/regulators/bureaucrats), and potentially making criminals out of people who harm nobody but just prefer to do things differently. Hayek reminds us:
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
Compare the increasingly regulated/paralyzed healthcare sector which has grown from consuming less than 5% of the economic pie in 1960 to over 20% today, to the free/competitive IT sector where even the poorest of Americans can afford rapidly improving amazing cell phones and technology. What a person must learn in order to legally offer medical advice via licensing of doctors, where he must learn it via licensing of medical schools, what chemical compounds can be legally consumed, how to test drugs, how the medical insurance industry should work, and countless other gigantic bodies of knowledge/information are dictated by monopolistic competition-less bureaucracies like the American Medical Association (AMA), the Food And Drug Administration (FDA), CDC and numerous others leading to the spectacular CovidMania tyranny. By comparison, the Information Technology sector has very few government regulations so competition motivates the discovery and spread of superior information at breakneck speed and is obviously transforming the world right before our eyes. In graph below one can see how the more regulated a sector is (Hospital Services) the more expensive/paralyzed/consumptive it becomes.
Finance/Banking, interest rates, inflation, and the ‘Business Cycle’
Thanks to the finance/banking industry people are motivated to consume less than they produce and thus increase the amount of saved/unconsumed wealth, which is then loaned to and borrowed by entrepreneurs as they nourish their consumption while they produce wealth at a rate greater then the prevailing interest rate. This allows the quick and easy pooling of large quantities of saved wealth to sustain the creation of large projects/buildings/factories which would have been impossible to do if people were limited to the savings/wealth of friends and family. And, very importantly! It also gives a ‘computational boost’ to society by both, motivating the accumulation of saved/unconsumed wealth, and placing it under the control of entrepreneurs/CPUs whose superior ideas can grow the economic pie quicker than prevailing interest rates.
When governments via their central banks create money to lend it to businesses and “stimulate” the economy, they are doing immense harm and leading to the ‘Boom and Bust’ cycles. Such money-creation, or inflation of the money supply, creates harmful fake savings. Creating money is NOT the same thing as creating wealth, it just leads to more money per existing unit of wealth and thus higher prices. It gives the illusion that there exists real saved/unconsumed wealth that can be consumed/used/transformed by businesses as they produce wealth when in reality it doesn’t exist. Imagine there is enough saved/unconsumed wealth(bricks/food) that can be used/consumed while 9 skyscrapers are completed, but because the government via the central banks created a bunch of money (fake savings) it gives the illusion that there is enough saved/unconsumed wealth(bricks/food) which can be consumed/used to create 12. Unfortunately only 7 can be completed instead of 9, because much wealth/savings/bricks were misallocated creating the bases/scaffolding for 12, thus 5 skyscrapers/projects had to be abandoned after much wealth was consumed. The new money(loans/‘credit expansion’) coupled with the reality that the needed wealth/goods simply does not exist ultimately causes prices of factors of production(bricks/laborers/wealth) to go up more than expected as entrepreneurs use the new money to compete for the limited existing wealth, causing the original profit/loss calculations and plans to eventually reflect the reality that there just isn’t enough wealth/bricks for all the newly attempted skyscrapers/projects to profitably complete. As Mises explains:
“However conditions may be, it is certain that no manipulations of the banks can provide the economic system with capital goods[wealth/bricks]. What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods[wealth], not money or fiduciary media. The boom is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.” ([brackets] added by me)
‘The Market Process’ coordinates ‘The Social Organism’
We have discussed how from the tradition of private property(1) emerges the ‘freedom to trade’(2) which leads to the emergence of the ‘division of labor and information’(3), ‘competitive knowledge discovery’(4) which helps civilize our morals and discover the truth, and ‘economic calculation’(5). These 5 things, coupled with money, interest rates, the finance and banking industries, stock markets, as well as governmental/religious/legal structures which enforce rules that sustain their functioning, taken as a whole comprised what Menger’s most famous intellectual descendants, Ludwig von Mises, Ludwig Lachmann, Israel Kirzner and F.A. Hayek referred to as ‘The Market Process’. ‘The Market Process’ is to civilization or ‘The Social Organism’ what the respiratory, circulatory, nervous, and other “biological systems” are to multicellular organisms. Just like the human body/organism and the numerous “systems” that coordinate it are the result of the actions of some 70 trillion human and bacterial cells but obviously NOT the result of any conscious planning or designing by them, the ‘Market Process’ which coordinates the ‘Social Organism’, is similarly “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Adam Ferguson). The ‘market process’ shares this trait with language which is also a complex mechanism that is the result of human action but was not consciously designed or invented by people/cells.
So how did this wonderful ‘market process’ and resulting ‘Social Organism’/Matrix evolve without man’s deliberate intention? As Menger phrased it:
“How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed toward establishing them?”
Menger, writing in the late 1800s after Darwin showed us how the biological order could arise without design via an evolutionary process, knew that the key was to also look at society as an organism in an evolutionary manner. Menger was a fan of and arguably heavily influenced by Spencer’s all-encompassing evolutionary framework. Spencer summarizes:
“We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.”
Menger writes of Spencer: “the works of … H. Spencer… which are excellent in their way, have really contributed essentially to a deepening of the theoretical understanding of social phenomena”. Menger elaborates on the vital “similarity between natural organisms and…structures of social life”:
“There exists a certain similarity between natural organisms and a series of structures of social life, both in respect to their function and their origin…Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, i.e., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as “natural” products(in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development. One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc.”
Below Menger further stresses the need to study the social order with the tools of biology/organisms:
“Now if social phenomena and natural organisms exhibit analogies with respect to their nature, their origin, and their function, it is at once clear that this fact cannot remain without influence on the method of research in the field of the social sciences in general and economics in particular….Now if state, society, economy, etc., are conceived of as organisms, or as structures analogous to them, the notion of following directions of research in the realm of social phenomena similar to those followed in the realm of organic nature readily suggests itself”
Menger thus felt like the methods of the physical sciences, like their use of mathematics, was as inappropriate for understanding the monumental complexity and evolution of the social order as it was for the biological one. He writes:
“I do not belong to the believers in the mathematical method as a way to deal with our science….Mathematics is not a method for…economic research . . .”
Mises and Hayek would of course follow suite. Mises:
“As a method of economic analysis econometrics is a childish play with figures that does not contribute anything to the elucidation of the problems of economic reality.”
Hayek also ridicules the:
“…extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists”
Menger eventually stumbled upon the “flux-capacitor” idea of the social sciences. The idea that makes ‘time-travel’/‘understanding society’ possible. The evolution of money.
Without money, if Tom wasn’t interested in Mark’s pastries, Mark would have to waste time/effort/expense/consumption figuring out what Tom wanted(chairs), who made it(Gina), visit her and hope she was interested in his pastries. But what if Gina wasn’t interested in pastries and instead wanted blankets made by Lucas? Even more time/consumption would have to be wasted. This problem, of having to consume increasing amounts of wealth setting up intermediate trades to make the trade you really want is commonly referred to as “The Double Coincidence of Wants” problem because for a trade to happen you need the coincidence that both parties are interested in the goods they have available for trade. Thus with direct barter above, the ‘cost of transaction’, in other words, the amount of wealth that had to be consumed in order to produce the desired trade/transaction, becomes too high/expensive greatly limiting the benefits of trade (1–5 above) to small/tribal populations and thus preventing the emergence of ‘The Social Organism’/civilization.
Did some clever individual invent money as a way to overcome the ‘double coincidence of wants’, or as part of designing ‘The Market Process’? Of course not. It is as mistaken to believe that man and his “reason” invented money and the emerging ‘Market Process’ as it is to believe that cells invented the various ‘biological systems’ that coordinate multicellular organisms. So how did money arise? Quite easily actually. As people bartered their ‘private property’, there were some goods that people were willing to trade for, not necessarily because they wanted to consume them, but because they knew they could later use them to trade for the things they really wanted. For example, let’s assume goats were very common in Mark’s village. People would use them for their fur, milk, and meat, and half of households had at least a few. Because of this, even if Tom already had more goats than he needed for milk/skin/meat, he would still be willing to accept them as payment from Mark for his basket. Even if Tom did not want Mark’s pastries or goats and insisted on a chair, there would be a good chance that Gina would accept the goat for her chair thus still saving Mark from having to see Lucas to trade for his blankets which Gina wanted. Essentially what happens is that by offering to trade a more popular or ‘salable’ good Mark increases the chances that his attempt at trading will be successful so the average number of intermediate trades and ‘costs of transaction’ goes down the more widely accepted the goats are. Goats now were valuable for 4 things, their fur, milk, meat, and as ‘medium of exchange’/money. This process incentivizes more people to accept goats for payment and continues until eventually the majority of people would be using goats and thus goats became the major source of money. Let’s quote Menger:
“As each economizing individual becomes increasingly more aware of his economic interest, he is led by this interest, without any agreement, without legislative compulsion, and even without regard to the public interest, to give his commodities in exchange for other, more saleable, commodities, even if he does not need them for any immediate consumption purpose.”
Menger gives us a brief history of money:
“In the earliest periods of economic development, cattle seem to have been the most saleable commodity among most peoples of the ancient world. Domestic animals constituted the chief item of the wealth of every individual among nomads and peoples passing from a nomadic economy to agriculture. Their marketability extended literally to all economizing individuals, and the lack of artificial roads combined with the fact that cattle transported themselves(almost without cost in the primitive stages of civilization!) to make them saleable over a wider geographical area than most other commodities…The trade and commerce of the most cultured people of the ancient world, the Greeks … showed no trace of coined money even as late as the time of Homer. Barter still prevailed, and wealth consisted of herds of cattle. Payments were made in cattle. Prices were reckoned in cattle. And cattle were used for the payment of fines… Among the Arabs, the cattle standard existed as late as the time of Mohammed.”
Once money emerged and the ‘double coincidence of wants’ problem was overcome, the ‘division of labor and information’, ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, ‘economic calculation’, and other aspects of ‘The Market Process’ inadvertently emerged leading to the growth of ‘The Social Organism’/civilization.
A similar example of this process, where socially beneficial things inadvertently arise without intention or design, was the Protestant Reformation. For centuries the Catholic Church’s traditions/myths held immense coercive/monopoly/competitionless power which prevented/retarded individual freedom and resulting ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. In the early 1500s Martin Luther preached that a person could go to heaven by believing in Christ without the Catholic Church’s approval, and that the Bible itself, not the Pope/Church’s edicts/interpretations, was what mattered. This helped reduce the coercive/monopoly power of the Church and spark a pro-freedom and thus emergent ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that would lead to skyrocketing rates of innovation/production/prosperity in Europe/Christendom thus taking Europeans to prominence. Now, very important! Did Martin Luther reason that his religious interpretations would accelerate ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ leading to our relatively advanced civilization? Of course not! Again, just like solitary cells millions of years ago inadvertently created the respiratory/circulatory/nervous/etc. “systems” that led to multicellular organisms without ‘designing them’, so is ‘the market process’/Capitalism “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. The ‘market process’/Capitalism is mankind’s greatest invention, yet it was not “the execution of any human design” and emerged “as unintended results of historical development” !!!!
Knowing that ‘private property’ is the simple concept/institution that leads to a chain-reaction of incentives which creates ‘the market process’/‘competitive knowledge discovery’/civilization, we can easily see that those tribes/orders/cultures whose customs/religions/myths inadvertently became more peaceful and thus less violent, extended peace/friendship/trade to those outside the tribe, etc., in other words, those who tended to respect ‘private property’ and thus individual freedom more and more, would inadvertently gain the benefits of superior ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, become more advanced/powerful, and as they grew, they would inadvertently spread the very customs (increasing respect for private property, tolerance, and commercial culture that emerges from it) and evolving economic system (capitalism) that allowed them to reach such relative heights. Essentially 100,000 years ago there was a sort of petri dish of cultures/tribes, and ‘natural selection’/competition selected those whose sort of ‘cultural mutations’ led to a more productive/fitter/powerful social order, with respect for private property ultimately being the most important tradition given the ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that inadvertently emerged from it. This ‘cultural evolution’ happened mostly without the design/intention/reason of the slightly smarter apes. Hayek elaborates:
“We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have stumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.”
And regarding the tradition of private property and thus all the emerges from it:
“…I am quite convinced nobody invented it for a known purpose, and to me the proof of this is that even now hardly anybody yet understands what the advantages of private property and the market society are.” (Hayek essay “Individual and Collective Aims” published in “On Toleration” ISBN 0–19–827529–3)
Of course! Once we understand the basics of how ‘The Market Process’ works and the VITAL fact that its evolution was NOT the result of man’s design, understanding our problems and history becomes trivial.
For most of human evolution man has lived in small communal tribes where things like money, finance/banking, the tradition of private property and resulting ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ did not exist. Jealousy/hatred of those that have more, especially in times of need, and the altruism that motivates us to share, are intuitive, while understanding the aforementioned economic concepts is not and requires a tolerance and respect for private property and individual freedom which goes against out tribalistic/communist/egalitarian instincts. As Hayek explains:
“…man’s instincts…were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.”
Warfare/predation was an important evolutionary strategy and one of the reasons we are social and have evolved big brains to begin with. As Steven Pinker writes:
”… men go to war to get or keep women –not necessarily as a conscious goal of the warriors(though often it is exactly that), but as the ultimate payoff that allowed a willingness to fight to evolve. Access to women is the limiting factor on male’s reproductive success. Having two wives can double a man’s children, having three wives can triple it, and so on. The most common spoils of tribal warfare are women. Raiders kill the men, abduct the nubile women, gang-rape them, and allocate them as wives.”
To be successful in war/hunt you need a strong sense of unity which translates itself into the strong tribalistic/nationalist/militaristic/patriotic tendencies we are so susceptible to and has the planet littered with nuclear weapons and “civilized” taxpayers believing we must have them. The bond men make as co-warriors may be stronger than male/female love. A female is easily replaceable (another raid, etc.) but the loss of that co-warrior that will help get the next female and/or defend you when you only get one chance at life is probably even more important. Just like natural selection has shaped us to enjoy sex due to the vital biological/evolutionary importance, it has also shaped us to enjoy war/violence and easily segregating ourselves into the in-group/us/”good” vs. out-group/them/”evil”. Given its importance, war/patriotism easily fills us with a great sense of purpose. England’s prime minister during WWII and national hero Winston Churchill shows us how inspiring, exciting and purposeful WWI was to him when he mentioned:
“I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.”
And in another occasion:
“My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling… Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me…”
Towards the end of WWII, Russia’s Red Army is estimated to have raped over 2 million German women. Equally human, the Allies/Americans weren’t much better and generally saw the Japanese as an inferior race and cared little for their suffering or views, as US president who needlessly nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Harry S. Truman, mentions in a letter:
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”
We shouldn’t be shocked when men murder, rape and torture, or masturbate to tentacle porn, the real miracle that has taken thousands of years of cultural/legal evolution to create, are the modern cultural values/laws/ideologies/software we absorb that program homo sapiens into respecting the body/property/thoughts of all human beings regardless of age, sex, beliefs, and race. Being the social slightly smarter apes that we are, fellow humans are our biggest assets which helps explain the evolution of altruism/compassion, as well as our biggest competitors which helps us understand our horrendous violence and cruelty towards fellow men.
By the late 1800s, especially after Darwin, the slightly smarter apes began replacing the evolved wisdom/information/laws espoused by religious mythology (private property, freedom and family) which had tamed/brainwashed the savages into civilization (Exodus 22:19 “Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal is to be put to death.), by the “reason” of “expert/scientist” apes. Not having the slightest clue how the vital information that orders/creates civilization “emerges” from ‘private property’/freedom since this amazing mechanisms/order had been designed, not by clever men, but by an evolutionary process we didn’t even really understand at the time, they understandably fell for all the usual anti-Capitalist and central planning fallacies. They saw economic freedom as a recipe for chaos, exploitation and ‘social injustice’. Some like Hitler (a socialist) erroneously saw many aspects of finance/banking/stock-markets, especially due to the at-times overrepresentation of Jews, as some sinister and malicious way for Jews/Capitalists to enrich themselves at the expense of others(more on this in a sec). Most ultimately believed that a competitionless coercive tax-funded monopoly of “experts”/ideologues/“great leaders” could better order society, and increasingly saw religion and its traditions of private property and family as something backward, unnatural, and a tool of the growing business/Capitalist/”Bourgeoisie” class, or just selfish people in general that “don’t care about others”. Just like complex environmental factors create selective pressures that favor the spread of certain genes, the environment was ripe for the emergence of a new religion/mythology, Socialism/Communism/Statism. Eventually some slightly smarter arrogant ape would describe these increasingly popular fallacies/myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized ‘Communist Manifesto’:
“the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”….”Abolition of the family!”
The slightly smarter apes via Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia (1918) and other apes throughout the world (Mao/China, Castro/Cuba, Pol Pot/Cambodia) with the utmost arrogance and cruelty went wild using their “reason”/“the science” and instincts to create massive central-planning-coercive bureaucracies that destroyed ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and thus their own socioeconomic order that was created by it.
Lenin, as well as most people, believed that “the key feature is people, the proper choice of people”, and if we could just have the right apes/experts/’Great Leaders’ with the right values/ideas government/‘central planning’ would work. But Lenin was wrong of course, it is not so much the individual cells/people that matter, it is the system, it is freedom and its emergent ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and socioeconomic order spreading mechanisms. It makes perfect sense how a bunch of economically clueless vicious slightly smarter tribal apes would go wild looking for and pledging support to the ape they feel has the right personal qualities (courage, honesty, intelligence, toughness, etc.) and coercing each other via governments to go along with the “master plans” as they inadvertently destroyed the very non-human-designed customs/traditions like private property which gave them life to begin with.
It is important that we see Communism/’Central Planning’ and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution not as some ‘nefarious conspiracy’, but as an almost inevitable spread of viral self-reinforcing ‘echo chambers’ of economic fallacies and disastrous ‘incentive structures’ that were just bound to finally spark in truly sustainable reactions as the social order got more complex and thus more fertile for economic fallacies. A young idealistic Russian could worry about how to make a good living in the always-uncertain and competitive private sector, or by joining Lenin and his Socialist Bolsheviks(government) he could become a hero to mankind by just forcing farmers/‘private sector’/others to give up (share) their grain/wealth to feed a bureaucracy/monopoly of “experts” who would plan a superior order. Sign me up! We should also highlight the fact that the apes ultimately stumble upon the realization that in order to carry out their wonderful/vital central plans, they must either coerce the public directly via edicts/taxes/regulations, or even better, simply control the ability to create money. It becomes a lot easier to create an ‘incentive structure’ where most people go along with your wonderful ideas when you can create the money and assure the public that you can provide the money/wealth they need. The money=wealth fallacy/myth easily causes the slightly smarter apes to self-destroy as 1) It allows transfers of wealth from the productive/innovative private sector to the centrally-planned inefficiently ordered bureaucracies which will consume more than they produce thus destroying social order 2) It easily motivates the apes to peacefully fool themselves and even clamor for such an ultimately disastrous rearrangement and attack the critics(obviously “right-wing extremists”). The apes go from fear and uncertainty to the comfort of working towards the ‘master plan’ by the ‘trusted expert apes’ and see how they are getting the money they foolishly equate with wealth. As this happens, more wealth is transferred to the minds that want to spread and make a living via the ‘central planning’ fallacies/myths/‘echo chamber’ from those that don’t, making it harder for the latter to resist until complete central planning tyranny/chaos is reached. As Spencer explains:
“Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist its further growth and control.”
We can easily see the inadvertent evolution and repetition of this process today where what increasingly matters to politicians/ideologues/masses is who will appoint or control the technocrats who run the ‘central banks’/’Federal Reserve’ and will thus be able to keep creating money/“stimulus” to seemingly accomplish anything like having millions not work/produce and stay home during CovidMania lockdowns, the Green New Deal, free education and healthcare, ‘racial/gender equality’, etc. The central banking technocrats are the new Popes/Oracles of the new faith/religion of ‘central planning’, not via Soviet Style direct threats/edicts, but by nonetheless using money to attempt a similarly disastrous/fateful ‘centrally planned’ rearrangement of society. Visit gatesnotes.com or weforum.org for an up-to-date list of all potential ‘social problems’ and how the 6 pounds of flesh in economically clueless great leaders/ideologues Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab’s heads have ‘master plans’ that can fix them all, or we die.
Fortunately for mankind Ludwig von Mises nearly single-handedly put the intellectual brakes on Socialist expansion when he showed the impossibility of central planning (summarized above) and persuaded Austrian politicians away from Communism/Bolshevism in 1919:
“I knew what was at stake. Bolshevism would lead Vienna to starvation and terror within a few days. Plundering hordes would take to the streets and a second blood bath would destroy what was left of Viennese culture.”.. “The most important task I undertook…was the forestalling of a Bolshevist takeover… The fact that events did not lead to such a regime in Vienna was my success and mine alone.” –Mises (Memoirs)
Later Hayek’s classic book “The Road to Serfdom”(1944), but also perhaps more importantly, the brilliantly written ‘condensed’ version which “Reader’s Digest” magazine placed in millions of US homes in 1945, would play a vital role in educating future freemarketeers like future British PM Margaret Thatcher, and 3-time presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul who writes:
“My introduction to Austrian economics came when I was studying medicine at Duke University and came across a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. After devouring this, I was determined to read whatever I could find on what I thought was this new school of economic thought — especially the works of Mises”
It is important that we see our problems in terms of an understandable economic ignorance for which no one is really to blame. Again, ‘the market process’ and resulting civilization has inadvertently evolved without man’s deliberate design, and our tribalistic instincts and economic ignorance has us constantly falling for coercive central planning that will eventually destroy the social order. It should be easy to realize that Socialism/Communism/Nazism/’viral economic fallacies/myths’ did not spread and destroy much of the 20th century because of a few bad apples or tyrants; they first spread through the minds of well-meaning citizens and intellectuals which then gave the future leaders the moral and intellectual justification for their actions. Hayek writes:
“It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but high-minded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.” (Hayek F. A., 1973, p. 70)
“Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.” (Hayek F. A., 1976, p. 134)
When one looks at the biographies of fellow freemarketeers it is easy to notice how prior to stumbling upon the proper understanding of economics most were essentially “wild” humans, Socialists/Communists/Statists to various degrees. This just makes sense, our nature is that of the ‘Law of the Jungle’, how freedom leads to order instead of chaos is definitely not ‘in our genes’. Jealousy, vilification, tribalism… It all seems so obvious when we stand on the above men’s shoulders. Supposedly the Dodo bird quickly went extinct because it had not evolved to recognize humans as potential dangers, we similarly just line up for central planning/coercive self-destruction over and over and over and over. We essentially go from “wild” and extremely dangerous slightly smarter apes to “civilized” ones by understanding how civilization actually works and emerges from respecting private property and thus liberty.
Most of us mistakenly believe that the best thing we could do for ourselves is to work hard, be productive, etc. Sounds reasonable right? Yes and no, although those things are important, perhaps it is even more important to join Mises in his “intellectual battle”. He writes:
“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”
If mankind proves to be an evolutionary dead end in the near future as certainly looks to be the case, it will not be because of the “evil” or clueless politicians and masses. It will be because those who have had the fortune of stumbling upon these and like-minded men’s ideas failed to educate fellow citizens.
Spencer/Menger’s evolutionary perspective is also vital for understanding our socioeconomic conflicts and resolving them. When a lion takes over a pride and kills the cubs so that the females will once again be ready to mate, we don’t say that the lion is “evil”, we rightly understand the complex evolutionary factors leading to such actions. It is likewise important to look at our socioeconomic problems like WWI-II, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and current Russia-Ukraine war using an evolutionary lens that is free of “blame” and full of sympathy and understanding.
Our “reason” easily shows us that all human beings are slightly smarter economically ignorant tribal apes who based on being born at a particular time and place absorb a certain culture or “identity” (Russian/Chinese/Jewish/Christian/Muslim, etc.) that has been shaped by cultural evolution and persists through generations. It should be obvious to realize that there is no “good” or “evil”, just ideas/software that program minds with identities, incentives, etc. We must learn from Mises:
“It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.”
Mises, being a Jewish intellectual and Nazism/Socialism’s greatest intellectual opponent, was almost apprehended by the Nazis as he cautiously escaped Europe in 1940 when the Nazis quickly overran France and tried to get the Swiss government to hand him over. But regardless of Nazi tyranny, Mises’ profound understanding of the world had him blaming, not Hitler, or “evil” or “antisemitism” or “mad men”, but the economic ignorance that inevitably led to them given their unique historical circumstances. He writes:
“There are psychiatrists who call the Germans who espoused the principles of Nazism lunatics and want to cure them by therapeutic procedures. Here again we are faced with the same problem. The doctrines of Nazism are vicious, but they do not essentially disagree with the ideologies of socialism and nationalism as approved by other peoples’ public opinion. What characterized the Nazis was only the consistent application of these ideologies to the special conditions of Germany.”
But as already highlighted, it is not so much “reason” which runs the world, but the evolution of complex myths/ideas and how they inadvertently lead to the information which coordinates the social order. All of our problems should be understood in terms of economic ignorance without blaming anyone no matter how horrific the disasters. We really need to understand how the slightly smarter apes brainwash themselves with ideas which cause them to segregate and see each other as “evil” in order to justify and carry out various slaughters/injustices. The easiest and most important examples are Jew vs. Gentile conflicts since the modern world and emergence of ‘the market process’/Capitalism in the Western world is a cultural inheritor of Judaism. Jew/Gentile conflicts also involve easy to identify “identities”, economic fallacies, and still have tremendous ramifications. Let’s briefly look at Zionism and resulting Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and also Jew/Nazi hatreds culminating in WWII. However, before discussing these two let us briefly discuss how “unintended results of historical development” (Menger) and economic ignorance inadvertently led to Jews being hated and blamed for both Capitalism and Communism.
By not seeking converts and thus always remaining a minority among the larger Christianity and Islam and easily losing their land from time to time among other factors, Jewish culture/identity was shaped/evolved/selected to be more commercial and thus ‘Capitalist’ and eventually hated by the economically ignorant masses/socialists like Hitler obviously. Historian Paul Johnson gives the classic example:
“The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession” (Johnson, Paul. (1988). A History of the Jews. , p. 174)
Similarly, factors like Socialism/Communism’s atheism which would rid Jews of the religious persecution, its alluring scientific aura, and need for the better educated (which Jews were) to lead the central planning apparatus inadvertently caused Jews to be more attracted to Socialism/Communism and thus be leaders in both Socialism and Capitalism. They obviously did not “invent” or “plot” Socialism/Communism/Capitalism like Hitler and naïve thinkers to this day claim. It could be said that Jews were ‘naturally selected’ to be both Socialist AND Capitalist/finance leaders, thus giving the impression that they were its “creators/plotters” when such overrepresentation was “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” and the “unintended results of historical development”. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, nicely summarizes the recent co-evolution of Jewish culture and Socialism and Capitalism:
“We are what the Ghetto made us. We have attained pre-eminence in finance, because mediaeval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated. We are again being forced into finance, now it is the stock exchange, by being kept out of other branches of economic activity. Being on the stock exchange, we are consequently exposed afresh to contempt. At the same time we continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer very severely in the struggle between classes, because we stand in the most exposed position in the camps of both Socialists and capitalists.”
The point of the above is that we must deconstruct hate/“evil”/disasters into economic ignorance/misunderstandings/fallacies!!!!! Ok, on to Zionism and then Jew/Nazi hatreds.
By the late 1800s, as the Church and its monarchical rulers were being replaced by nationalist representative governments eventually the idea of Jews having their own country/state (an ideology known as Zionism) gained enough of a traction which understandably became stronger as Hitler rose to power. Theodore Herzl, the sort of father of Zionism, envisioned this country in Palestine which contained many ancestral Jewish sites like Jerusalem. At first his pitch for Zionism was not very popular. The rabbinical establishment, reflecting views shared by most Jews in Munich, Germany, where Herzl wanted to hold the First Zionist Congress, strongly rejected the idea so the meeting was moved to Basel Switzerland(29–31st/8/1897). They told him :
“…how can one speak with people who on the one hand are fanatics regarding Jewish nationhood and, on the other hand, complain that the Austrian government required a baptismal certificate from the candidate for the position of secretary of Bukowina. If the Austrian Jews support the efforts of the Zionists, then they should not complain that they are treated by the government like foreigners and are barred from public office. We, however, can say to our fellow countrymen with complete conviction that we comprise a separate community solely with respect to religion. Regarding nationality, we feel totally at one with our fellow Germans and therefore strive towards the realization of the spiritual and moral goals of our dear fatherland with an enthusiasm equaling theirs….Eighteen hundred years ago, history made its decision regarding Jewish nationhood through the dissolution of the Jewish State and the destruction of the Temple”
Since Jews tend to be an extended blood-related family that has been an oftentimes persecuted minority due to religious squabbles of antiquity/etc., the sense of “identity” and ethnocentrism is understandably stronger and has been an important albeit unfortunate factor in both antisemitism and Zionism. Both antisemitism and Zionism are rooted in the same intellectual error, that the slightly smarter apes who “identify as Jews” are so different from the other slightly smarter apes that they must leave the real thousands of towns and Synagogues where for hundreds of years they were an integral part of Western Civilization, to create a country based on religious mythology in an area already populated by others who had a different “identity”(Muslims, Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews) and for numerous understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to living under such a theocratic/ethnocentric “Jewish State”. Theodore Herzl himself, highlighted this ideological congruence of both Zionists and anti-Semites in his foundational book “The Jewish State”(1896) that:
“The anti-semites will be our most steadfast friends.” “The anti-Semitic countries will be our allies” “Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before.”
During the early days of political Zionism Jews were divided into the Zionists and anti-Zionists (“assimilationists”). Chaim Weizmann, the leading Zionist figure after Herzl’s death in 1904, lamented how “assimilated Jews” were “dead against Zionism” and identified Zionism (correctly in my opinion) as “a primitive tribalism”, Weizmann writes:
“For assimilated Jews…They looked upon it…as a primitive tribalism. They felt themselves…called upon to “rescue” Judaism from Zionism…these people are dead against Zionism…Zionism is not meant for those people who have cut themselves adrift from Jewry…”
Right! We already mentioned how freedom and the competition that grows from it was removing the “ethnocentrism”/tribalism of all peoples and turning us into worldly citizens/businessmen. Those very well educated cosmopolitan “assimilated Jews” spread all over Europe and the USA just wanted to be worldly citizens free of ancient tribalisms/mysticisms/identities and thus had increasingly ‘cut themselves adrift from Jewry’ or were evolving the ‘Jewish identity’ in a less ethnocentric way ultimately closer to the obvious truth that all human beings are just fellow homo sapiens that absorb a particular ‘identity’ based on pure luck. Unfortunately, for very understandable reasons/factors for which nobody is to blame and are ultimately rooted in economic ignorance, misunderstandings and complex cultural factors, like a rocket that is just about to reach orbit but runs out of fuel and comes crashing down to earth, Zionism would inadvertently pull Jews and all of Western Civilization back to an increasingly ethnocentric identity-based worldview with numerous understandable and inevitable disastrous consequences.
Many Christians with the best of intentions also played a significant role, for example American president during WWI Woodrow Wilson too liked the idea: “To think, that I the son of a manse should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” Wanting to win the support of Jews everywhere for their war against Germany, on November 2nd 1917, via the ‘Balfour Declaration’, the British government officially made it a policy to help create a “National Home” for Jews in Palestine. Former British Prime Minister James Balfour mentioned in a cabinet meeting that:
“The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America… now appear to be favorable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favorable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda in both Russia and America.” (Judis, p. 59)
British Prime Minister Lloyd George added that:
“the Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a National Home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally to the Allied cause.” (Judis, p. 59)
The British/Allies won WWI and thanks to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire which had allied itself with a defeated Germany, now had control of Palestine. What about the views and wishes of the 700,000 or so Arabs who already inhabited Palestine?
When the First World War ended (1918) and the victors (British/French/US) were deciding what to do with the acquired lands (Palestine), in order to better understand the wishes of the local population regarding the possibility of creating a Jewish state in the land, the USA organized the King-Crane commission. Among their findings/recommendations were:
“We recommend…serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State…The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.…it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine — nearly nine tenths of the whole — are emphatically against the entire Zionist program…there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people’s rights…It is to be noted also that the feeling against the Zionist program is not confined to Palestine, but shared very generally by the people throughout Syria as our conferences clearly showed. The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms…That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.…The places which are most sacred to Christians-those having to do with Jesus-and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under those circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands, or under the custody of Jews… In fact, from this point of view, the Moslems, just because the sacred places of all three religions are sacred to them have made very naturally much more satisfactory custodians of the holy places than the Jews could be…In view of all these considerations, and with a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause, the Commissioners feel bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist program be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that, only very gradually initiated. This would have to mean that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.”
A group of prominent Arab Muslims and Christians sent a letter to the Paris Peace Conference (1919) expressing their opposition to Zionism.
“The principles of justice and equity cannot admit of the crushing of a nation by an influx of a greater number of another foreign nation that will assimilate her… The country is ours and has been so of old. We have lived in it longer than they did, and have worked in it more than they did. Our historical and religious relations with it, we Moslems and Christians, far exceed those of the Jews. Therefore, their claim to their ancient historical rights in the country do not give them the right of appropriating it, in as much as in our historical rights we Arabs cannot justify our claims in Spain, our old home, where our rule and glory flourished for eight centuries and this gave birth to the modern civilization of Europe… Does justice then allow of the violation of the rights of the majority?”
But the imperialist attitude of the British/Europeans is perfectly captured by former Prime Minister Lord Balfour who said at the time:
“I am quite unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to our telling the Moslem what he ought to think”
And:
“For in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are. The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
If the Palestinians/natives had some form of truly representative government the Zionist error could have been prevented but to a significant degree this was not to be thanks to Zionism’s perhaps most influential ally, Winston Churchill. During the years 1920–1922 Churchill was the Colonial Secretary allowing him to call the shots in the British controlled Middle East. On May 12th, 1921 Palestinian representatives sent the Colonial Office resolutions asking for representative government, the annulling of the Balfour Declaration, and prohibition of Jewish immigration, but on May 31st Churchill told the British Cabinet that:
“he had decided to suspend the development of representative institutions in Palestine ‘owing to the fact that any elected body would undoubtedly prohibit further immigration of Jews’ ” (Gilbert, 1991, p. 437)
Notice how everything going on above happened long, long, long before Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1918, when Palestine became a British dominion there were about 60,000(8%) Jews and 700,000(92%) Arabs, by 1922 84,000(10%) Jews and 760,000(90%) Arabs, by 1931 Jews were about 17% of the population. Once Hitler rose to power the years 1933–36 brought record numbers of Jews to Palestine, 30,000, 42,000, 62,000, and 30,000 respectively, about 164,000 in total, which quickly led to Jews being almost 28% of the population by 1937. Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had no problems understanding the Arab point of view:
“There is a fundamental conflict. We and they want the same thing: We both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict”… “Were I an Arab…I would rise up against immigration liable sometime in the future to hand the country and all of its Arab inhabitants over to Jewish rule. What Arab cannot do his math and understand that immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine?” (Teveth, pp. 166–8)
By 1939 enough evidence of the Zionist error was creating much discussion in the British government pushing for considerable abandonment of Zionism, but Churchill helped keep it going, he said in speech on May 23rd, 1939:
“To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made? It was not made to the Jews of Palestine, it was not made to those who were actually living in Palestine. It was made to world Jewry and in particular to the Zionist associations. It was in consequence of and on the basis of this pledge that we received important help in the war”
It is important to note how Churchill is admitting that Zionist Jews helped them win WWI against Germany which led to the vindictive and disastrous Treaty of Versailles which led to the rise of Hitler and his policies trying to overturn it.
David Ben Gurion mentioned in 1938:
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Morris, 1999, p. 144)
On Feb 6th, 1948 as Palestinians were being expelled to make way for the Jewish State, Ben Gurion again:
“The war will give us the land. The concepts of “ours” and “not ours” are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose their meaning” –Ben-Gurion’s War Diary, Vol. 1, entry dated 6 February 1948. p.211
In another occasion:
“Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement program. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out transfer on a large scale.” (Morris, 2004, p. 48)
Little else needs to be said about this conflict and its numerous ramifications and history. When one understands the root intellectuals errors, the chain reaction of spiraling violence and “good vs. evil” polarization becomes trivial. Jews increasingly tied their “Jewish identity” to an intellectual error, and inevitably increasingly saw criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitism. Sometimes very bright and well-meaning people make monumental errors. Socialism is a perfect example, and so is Zionism. Next we look at Jew/Nazi hatreds which is also obviously tied to the Zionist error and more that flows from it.
To understand and learn much from Jew/Nazi hatreds we once again have to focus on how economic ignorance lies at the core. Hitler was a Socialist thus already totally clueless, the inadvertent over-representation of Jews in both Capitalist institutions like stock-markets and banking, as well as in Socialist/Communist movements (Karl Marx was Jewish, etc.) had him mistakenly characterizing both as some kind of malicious plot by Jews, he also mistakenly attributed the relative superiority Europeans had in technology to race instead of the inadvertent increase in liberty and emerging ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ Europeans had stumbled upon, and then further saw Jews as some ‘racial tuberculosis’ culminating in absurdities like:
“Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.”
And of course there was the older type of religious antisemitism like Jews having killed/rejected Jesus, Shakespearean ‘pound of flesh’ type of nonsense which hardly needs serious analysis and we can attribute mostly to religious squabbles of the past which were fortunately losing their importance but were still significant factors. Hitler’s mind was obviously polluted by many errors but one can understand how they emerged and were in fact shared by many others at the time. Churchill was as racist and draconian in numerous ways.
“I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.”
“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”
“[Mahatma Gandhi] ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.”
“I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.”
“I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place.”
Slightly smarter apes who absorbed a “Jewish identity” were understandingly also full of fallacies. Most Jewish intellectuals of the early 20th century were in fact totally clueless dreamy-eyed Socialists/Communists. Religious people, and of course Jews, also understandably see the world in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Unable to deconstruct Hitler’s intellectual errors they were understandably left with vilification which only led to further polarization of hatreds/fallacies culminating in WWII. Here are a few statements from leading Jews at the time long, long, long, long, long before the war broke out on Sept 1st, 1939, or Jews even faced legal restrictions via the Nuremberg Race Laws (9/15/1935). Keep in mind that Jews in Germany in say 1936, were treated far better than Blacks in the USA, yet nobody refers to white Americans of the day as some maniacal evil-doers. In a radio broadcast which was also printed in the August 7th 1933 edition of the New York Times, prominent Jewish lawyer and civic leader Samuel Untermeyer mentioned the following:
“Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you should buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronises German ships or shipping…. we will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.”
The same speech is full of fatalistic/mythical language, gross exaggerations, and maniacal good vs. evil characterizations of all Germans in general:
“…the holy war in the cause of humanity in which we are embarked. Jews and non-Jews alike, for we are equally concerned that the work of centuries shall not be undone, and that civilization shall not be allowed to die. It is a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds of bigotry, race hatred and fanaticism that have descended upon what was once Germany, but is now medieval Hitlerland, have been dispersed. If we will but enlist to a man and persist in our purpose, the bright sun of civilization will again shine upon Germany… …which has thereby been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beast… …We owe it not only to our persecuted brethren but to the entire world to now strike in self-defense a blow that will free humanity from a repetition of this incredible outrage. This time the Jews are the victims, next time it may be the Catholics or the Protestants… …Now or never must all the nations of the earth make common cause against the monstrous claim that the slaughter, starvation and annihilation, by a country that has reverted to barbarism, of its own innocent and defenseless citizens without rhyme, reason or excuse is an internal affair against which the rest of the world must stand idly by and not lift a hand in defense… …fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children, of the terrors of worse than death in which they are living…the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination… …rescue these 600,000 human souls from the tortures of hell…this brutal, senseless, unprovoked assault upon civilization.”
On January, 1934 (over 5 years before start of war) Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leading Jewish ideologue who played an important role in the creation of Israel:
“For months now the struggle against Germany is waged by each Jewish community, at each conference, in all our syndicates, and by each Jew all over the world. There is reason to believe that our part in this struggle has general value. We will trigger a spiritual and material war of all the world against Germany’s ambitions to become once again a great nation, to recover lost territories and colonies. But our Jewish interests demand the complete destruction of Germany. Collectively and individually, the German nation is a threat to us Jews.”
Understandably, American Jews’ cry for war against Hitler would reach fever pitch and play an important role in pushing England and France, and then the U.S. to war. On February 9th 1938, almost 7 months before the outbreak of war, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, reported back home to the Foreign Minister in Warsaw on the Jewish role in influencing American foreign policy:
“The pressure of the Jews on President Roosevelt and on the State Department is becoming ever more powerful … The Jews are right now the leaders in creating a war psychosis which would plunge the entire world into war and bring about general catastrophe. This mood is becoming more and more apparent.
…in their definition of democratic states, the Jews have also created real chaos: they have mixed together the idea of democracy and communism and have above all raised the banner of burning hatred against Nazism.
This hatred has become a frenzy. It is propagated everywhere and by every means: in theaters, in the cinema, and in the press. The Germans are portrayed as a nation living under the arrogance of Hitler which wants to conquer the whole world and drown all of humanity in an ocean of blood.
In conversations with Jewish press representatives I have repeatedly come up against the inexorable and convinced view that war is inevitable. This international Jewry exploits every means of propaganda to oppose any tendency towards any kind of consolidation and understanding between nations. In this way, the conviction is growing steadily but surely in public opinion here that the Germans and their satellites, in the form of fascism, are enemies who must be subdued by the ‘democratic world.’”
On Sept. 11th, 1941, a year after the war had started but before the U.S. would join, American hero at the time, the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, Charles Lindbergh, gave a brilliant speech where he criticized the British government and Jewish community for being more involved in trying to get the USA into the war as opposed to negotiating for peace:
“If it were not for her hope that she[England] can make us responsible for the war financially, as well as militarily, I believe England would have negotiated a peace in Europe many months ago, and be better off for doing so. England has devoted, and will continue to devote every effort to get us into the war. We know that she spent huge sums of money in this country during the last war in order to involve us. Englishmen have written books about the cleverness of its use. We know that England is spending great sums of money for propaganda in America during the present war… The second major group I mentioned is the Jewish. It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.”
But it was too late. Hitler and the Nazis were not just your average economically clueless European bureaucrats, they were some pre-Darwinian religious/mystical maniacal/evil force to be destroyed at all costs, and obviously anyone treating them as fellow human beings, was some kind of traitor, and of course, an anti-Semite, as Lindbergh would later be seen by many.
Again, free of any mysticism or linguistic constructs inherited from pre-Darwinian days like “evil”, we want to understand how the economically ignorant tribalistic apes brainwash themselves into some kind of slaughter. Either Communist-style slaughters where the apes use their own governments to self-mutilate via coercive central planning, or worse, all-out war. It is vitally important that we try to learn from history, especially at this time as the Russia-Ukraine war continues to polarize the apes just like happened in WWII.
WWII was the understandable result of Hitler trying to undue various injustices brought about the widely-recognized vindictive Treaty of Versailles forced upon the losing Germans at the end of WWI, like trying to unite the Germans in the city of Danzig to the mainland via some railways through Polish territory. This was a very reasonable request, former US President Herbert Hoover criticized the pro-war Roosevelt administration when he wrote:
“Another action by Mr. Roosevelt was his influence upon the Poles not to negotiate the question of Danzig. The adamant attitude of the Poles against negotiations received support from the Washington Administration. The separation of the German city of Danzig from Germany, and the size of the Corridor at the time of the part Treaty of Versailles had long been a cause of agitation by the Germans. Both were a part of vengeance and there was merit in the German claims. I had stated at one time that they should be corrected.”
The inability to resolve this peacefully led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Things could have ended there with negotiations. Every historian knows Hitler did NOT want a major European war or to conquer France/etc., but, again, by this time it was too late. Good vs. evil ape-hysteria had polluted too many apes in the French/British/US governments leading to world war.
Given the above are “the Jews” to blame or at fault for the Zionist and WWII disasters? Of course not! The above are understandable intellectual errors. Errors made not by Jews, but by Europeans/mankind, the slighter smarter apes in general. Had there been no antisemitism/Jew-Gentile conflicts in ‘Western Civilization’, Zionism and WWII and resulting ongoing disastrous ramifications simply would not have occurred. The world is full of people who mistakenly fall for all the popular ‘antisemitic tropes’ which then helps shape ‘Jewish identity’ to inadvertently radiate the ‘good vs evil’, and “<insert name here> is the next maniacal Hitler we must have a war with” that plays an inadvertent but massive role in today’s conflicts. Even though established religion does not run the world like it did a few centuries ago, the apes understandably still easily fall for the ‘evil madman’ myth which Jews are understandably the biggest spreaders of through no fault of their own.
The same economic fallacies pollute the thinking of virtually all political movements. For example, most organizations sympathetic to Palestinian suffering due to Zionism are just as clueless regarding the root causes of problems as the Jews and the anti-Semites, they mistakenly accuse the Zionists of being these simplistic racist white Capitalist European colonizers instead of understanding the complex mostly economic errors mentioned above. With the above in mind we can see further factors leading to the modern political Left/Right divide that has the USSA on the brink of civil war. To one economically ignorant horde of slightly smarter apes the political “Left”/”Democrats”/”Liberals”, the political “Right”/”Republicans”/”Conservatives” is just the “racist white man who uses capitalism and religious talk about ‘individual rights’ to maintain the status quo and the freedom to exploit and oppress for financial gain”. That’s pretty much it. Again, “identity politics”, where the “racist white man” and his antiquated values(religion) oppresses or discriminates against various groups/”identities”(women/minorities/gays/third-world) and overturning such supposed political/economic oppression is what is needed to fix the world’s problems by sharing more wealth and funding social programs (competition-less government monopolies) that treat everyone fairly/equitably. The fact that many whites understandably make the erroneous assumption that their blood/race/religion was a very significant factor in the recent emergence of civilization only helps add fuel to the Left/Right polarization/hatreds. Many whites/liberals, with the best of intentions, might be ashamed of the imperialist past of their ancestors or of the racism of their parents/uncles/friends/etc. or their own “shameful” preference for perhaps blue-eyed blondes and erroneously believe that such a past/racism/preference is a significant factor in the relative underachievement/problems of other groups/minorities. A well intentioned economically ignorant person can easily find some “racist CEO/boss” who discriminates based on race and “voilà! this racism is the root of the problems!”. This sort of collective sense of guilt is what allows Black Lives Matter rioters to destroy cities virtually unopposed, and white people via their own clueless intellectuals pushing ‘Critical Race Theory’ believing that getting white people to understand why they may discriminate is they key to solving our problems, while obviously overlooking the real cause of our problems, the economic ignorance that leads to economy and culture destroying coercive government bureaucracies and related political infighting. Both groups are wrong. The relatively-few whites who think their race is “superior” as well as those who believe abolishing such thinking is vital for prosperity. It should be easy to see that the explosion in relative human prosperity and technology mankind has stumbled upon during the last 200 years has little to do with biological differences and much more to do with the expansion of the global ‘division of labor and information’/free-trade/competition/Capitalism, etc. If a human being can grow up and learn something as complex as a language, which can take even the brightest of people years to master, everyone has more than enough intelligence to understand the basics of how freedom/privatization/free-(trade/movement) are the keys to rapid socioeconomic progress. Clever economic education/marketing is obviously the key.
Wherever there is complexity the apes create mythology
Again, there is no one to blame for these conflicts, without the proper understanding of the co-evolution of ‘the market process’ with culture we are lost in some kind of ‘identity politics’ blame-game that must lead to conflict.
We clearly see the same ‘next Hitler’ pattern repeat with Putin and the Russia/Ukraine war. Issues relating to the Donbas region in East Ukraine where the majority of people are Russian-speakers and do NOT want to be a part of the Ukrainian government and other factors has led to Putin’s invasion(similar to Hitler with Danzig). As with Hitler, Putin is an economically clueless bureaucrat who made a mistake with an invasion. Putin is a fellow slightly smarter ape trying to deal with complex issues and is far from some genocidal maniac and we once again see the apes spread tribalistic/simplistic caricatures of Putin and the Russians as being some unreasonable evil and cruel conquerors. “Intelligence” is impervious to ape-tribalism. For example:
Again, above we see the apes making simple-tribalistic-ape accusations, trying to create the necessary ‘echo chamber’ of monkey-vilifications needed to slaughter each other. The Russian/Ukraine conflict can be ended immediately by Putin just withdrawing his troops without pre-conditions, or the Ukrainians accepting Putin’s reasonable terms.
