The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. (Matt 6:22-23, KJV)

That’s a weird saying of Jesus. It’s wedged between two statements about being generous and not being a slave to money or material fear.

There are two odd metaphors in here about the eye. First, the idea of the eye as a light or lamp. Second, the idea of a “single eye” in contrast to an “evil eye”.

We think of the eye as a passive instrument. It receives light, sends it as images to the brain, and the brain makes sense of it. The world outside of the eye is objective, and the eye simply takes in what is there. If the world being observed by the eye is bright and lovely, it will send those images to the brain and that will likely make our disposition bright and lovely. If what the eye sees is ugly, the opposite is likely.

But Jesus implies something radically different here. It’s not the external world that the eye passively observes. It’s not the external world that shapes our inner selves. Instead, the eye is the light, rather than a receiver of light. Your eye – your consciousness, your attention, your perception, your way of seeing the world – is what determines the kind of person you’ll be. The light of the eye in this verse is illuminating not just the external world, but the inner self.

This is fascinating. I have witnessed and experienced something like this many times. You probably have too. A pessimist and an optimist, for example, may observe the same event and come away believing different things and having different internal states because of it. One has an eye that perceives beauty and goodness, which causes them to shine internally. One has an eye that perceives the opposite. In the context of Jesus’ sermon, he seems to be saying that a scarcity mindset that worries a great deal about money, material possessions, and material status relative to others (what today gets called “equality” in Social Justice circles) – an eye that sees lack instead an eye that sees abundance – will darken the soul.

The second metaphor is about the eye being “single”. Maybe, as some have suggested, Jesus is talking about the “third eye” chakra or Pineal gland and telling everyone to get on some DMT and open the doors of perception. I wouldn’t rule it out and it’s certainly interesting and not really in conflict with the broader context.

But you don’t have to get trippy to understand. The idea of singleness vs duality is repeated a lot in the Old and New Testament, usually with a bodily metaphor. Singleness of heart, singleness of mind (or its opposite, doublemindedness), and singleness of tongue. James talks about the doubleminded man being unstable in all he does, tossed around by every “wind of doctrine”, or new fad or teaching, perhaps the trending hashtags of the day. David asks for an “undivided heart”.

The idea of a single eye – paired with the idea of the eye not just receiving info about the world, but generating it as it illuminates what it sees – implies a lack of inner conflict. An untortured, unthreatened, consistent perception of the world. Jesus says right after this verse that you can’t serve two masters, or you’ll grow to despise one of them (PS – sometimes one of them is you). The idea of singleness is about peace of mind. In my experience, it is the greatest, most freeing thing to be of a single mind, or single eye (perception). It’s having a vision that is clear and consistent.

It takes self knowledge, and especially brutal self-honesty, to clear away conflicting perceptions or desires. You may think you have a vision and start acting on it, while maintaining doubt or conflicting desire. This will tear you apart. Saying yes to things when you really want to say no will do the same (in this same sermon Jesus advises “let your yes be yes and your no be no”). Inner conflict comes from thinking you want one thing, or tricking yourself into believing it, while your gut really wants another. This gives you double vision. You can’t see clearly. Your eye is not single.

I love this odd double metaphor of the eye as a lamp and a unitary tool of perception. It reminds that who we are is determined by how we see ourselves and the world.

A reader emailed me asking how I feel comfortable sharing political views that are widely unpopular. He also asked if I’ve written about this, and I don’t think I have, so here’s my response:

I found that being somewhat radical has a high social price, but being REALLY radical doesn’t. For example, if I were to Tweet about how I don’t like a specific politician, or how I think a specific tax should be lower, I’d probably get a good bit of pushback. But my posts are about how I don’t care about any politician nor do I think any tax is a good idea at all. As such, it’s rather disarming to the political lynch mobs. It’s out of frame, so they don’t really know what to do with it.

I don’t consider myself political at all, and I don’t see things through that lens. I think this makes it easier to say some things, because I don’t speak in the language of trigger words people on the left and right are ready to fight with each other over.

My experience has been that if I am buying in to political narratives and picking a side, there’s a cost to talking about it. If I ignore news and politics and rise above the fray and focus on first principles like non-violence and individual liberty, the price is pretty low.

I also make a point to talk a lot more about positive things like my work, education, entrepreneurship, and other stuff than I do things deemed political.

Daily blogging really helped me get clarity on my thoughts and what I’m willing to share. Especially since nobody reads a personal blog at least for several years if ever.

Remember: you don’t NEED to weigh in and share your opinion. But your are free to. Just be unthreatened and willing to back them up with kindness and honesty.

This essay series I wrote some years ago was going to be published by an organization but ended up not happening. I figured I’ve got the PDF, so might as well post it here for posterity. Forgive the lack of cover design or any formalities.

The Morality of Capitalism PDF

Kindle Edition on Amazon

 

Remember and rely on your programming.

Your job is to take all new information and integrate it into the Dominant Narrative immediately and without question or delay. The Narrative must by preserved and protected at all costs.

You must subjugate your sanity, critical thinking, curiosity, discomfort, prosperity, individuality, and ability to navigate the world and avoid pain to the Dominant Narrative. It subsumes all.

You will be informed when the Narrative changes and you must then reject your old Narrative justifications and replace them with new ones without question or delay.

Signed,

The Authoritative Council of High Narrative Magic

It’s easy for people with contrarian ideas and opinions to long for public validation. After years of being mocked and worn down, there’s a tendency to fantasize about one great moment where all your opponents are owned and utterly embarrassed.

This is true in politics, business, and even sports. When you see something few others seem to see and you get ignored, or gaslit into thinking you are all alone and crazy for what you see, the desire for vindication and comeuppance grows. Sometimes it’s innocent, but the vindication fantasy can become dangerous.

Being contrarian and right is powerful. It takes courage, but it can have big upside. But if you let all your energy go into fantasies about some external person or event out of your control revealing to the world that you’re right, you become impotent. You slip into cultism, idolatry, delusion, frustration, delayed action, and uselessness.

Useful contrarianism requires that you accept that there is no big reveal that will happen where your enemies will be vanquished and doubters will bow and apologize.

The only person who can vindicate you is you. And the world almost certainly won’t acknowledge it even when you’re right. They’ll pretend they always knew, or you got lucky.

Don’t focus on being taken seriously or perceived as correct. Act on what you know, get the results you want in your own life, don’t look to anyone else for salvation, and don’t become desperate for acceptance. The great reveal is not coming. Only what you do today will manifest in your life tomorrow.

Anyone promising to vindicate you is probably playing you.

Normie: “It’s not possible to live without govt”

Voluntarist: “Here are dozens of examples of stateless societies, many lasting hundreds of years”

Normie: “Life without government would be worse”

Voluntarist: “No stateless society has done nukes or genocide”

Normie: “It’s not possible to live without govt”

———-

Normie: “You must prove that government is bad”

Voluntarist: “Why is the burden of proof on me to prove that an institution that has murdered more than 100 million people in the last century alone is bad?”

Normie: “Because Hobbes said we couldn’t live without it”

Voluntarist: “But we have lived without it”

Normie: “Because its good”

“The Myth of the Rule of Law” was written by John Hasnas and originally published in 1995 in the Wisconsin Law Review no. 199.

I read it (with a few mumbles and mistakes) in its entirety from the written version here.

Thanks to Prof Hasnas for writing this excellent essay, as well as another called “The Obviousness of Anarchy“, both of which were profoundly influential on my thinking.

https://soundcloud.com/isaacmorehouse/the-myth-of-the-rule-of-law-by-john-hasnas

 

Had a really great conversation with Steve Patterson about the nature of reality, materialism vs idealism vs dualism and his attempted resolution with pluralism, and a lot more.

 

 

I allowed myself to briefly engage in a conversation on Twitter that I normally avoid. It was about data. Worse, it was someone asking me to opine on data shared by someone else. I really had no business engaging, but I was feeling charitable so I did.

It was a waste of everyone’s time. I shared the data I found, they shared theirs which did not agree, and everyone was supposed to base their interpretation of reality off one of these conflicting data sets. Inevitably, the motives or credulity of the person sharing the data comes into question, since the conflicting data itself can’t be resolved by staring at it.

Of course neither of us can prove the veracity of any the data. It’s all aggregated from third parties (most of whom have a history of poor data and all of whom have bad incentives and public choice problems). Does that mean beliefs about reality must be formed a priori, and not need any data?

Probably not. But it has to start there. That’s inescapable. Data is meaningless without a theoretical lens through which to interpret it. That lens is always there, acknowledged or not. So you’ve got to at least work out a foundation a priori.

After that, when it comes to external data, I try to work in concentric circles of probability. Things I observe and experience first hand have the highest probability of being true and useful. Things one layer of reality removed have slightly less (e.g. something I have observed before, but not this time, being shared by someone I know in a context where motives are known). The further removed the data from my own experience, the lower the probability it is true and the less it should factor in to my view of what is real.

I consider this epistemic humility. To discount the probability of truth in proportion to its closeness to experience. I don’t have to have solid true/false answers to everything. Nor do I need to pretend such answers don’t exist. I can approach what I know directly with high probability and lower it with each step beyond experience.

Where does the confidence part come in?

It’s the part that keeps me sane.

Epistemic confidence is to not need anyone else to perceive reality the same way you do.

It’s incredible how freeing this is.

At any given time, I have ideas about reality, informed first by my a priori theories (law of identity, non-contradiction, action axiom, etc.), then by my direct experience, then by lessening degree with increased remoteness, data shared by others. It’s always probabilistic, and changes as the information changes. Any conclusion is temporary fair game except those which violate basic logic. And at any given time, I don’t need anyone else to understand or agree with this flux of worldviews.

That’s when enjoyable discourse and discovery are possible.

Still, I sometimes get sucked into conversations about data and counter data that is so far from my experience I have no reason to weight it enough to justify serious debate.

Prevailing narratives determine “reality” for society.

There’s always a gap between those narratives and on-the-ground experience.

In 2020, that gap blew so wide open that two different realities seem to be co-existing.

One of my favorite entries from Present Concerns, a collection of essays by C.S. Lewis.

On Living in an Atomic Age

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds…

What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities…

It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means.

Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man….

Let the bomb find you doing well.

Earlier this year, I was doing a deep dive into virology. Coincidentally, this was before Covid, in effort to solve my own health-related problems and mysteries. I had the same experience I’ve had when I went deeper into any field. A realization that nobody in the field knows what the hell is going on.

I don’t know what viruses are or how they work exactly (no one seems to really), but I came across enough published work to discover the current theories are insufficient to explain reality. There are many things observed and documented in the world that would not be possible if the dominant theories were true.

It is a disconcerting notion. An entire body of science with widespread and accepted beliefs, billions in money and man-hours, and real-world implications could be operating partly or mostly in the dark? Yes. In fact, that is the norm in the history of science, not the exception.

People tend to respond to such claims with indignance. A common argument goes something like this:

If a theory were incorrect, and being incorrect had real-world implications, the theory would not persist. The fact that it does persist, and so many experts and laypeople alike believe it and billions are spent on the assumption it is true, must mean it is true.

Let’s see if we can disprove the above argument. All you need to disprove a claim like that is a single example of where it does not hold. Then it can no longer be used as a proof. And we have such an example.

Diet pills.

Magic pills that make you thin have been around for a long time. The theories they are based on are faulty, AND this faultiness has real world implications, i.e. people buy the pills and don’t get the results.

Yet millions are spent on them and they don’t vanish.

This clearly proves that a false theory, with real-world implications for being false, can persist. But why?

Because people benefit.

If an incorrect theory that leads to outcomes that disprove it can benefit people, they can keep on believing in it for a very long time. The people making and selling diet pills benefit in terms of money. The people buying them also benefit. They get to relieve some psychic discomfort about their weight and appearance by buying a pill and feeling like they’re at least doing something. They are buying hope. Trust in experts. Marginal relief from feeling like they’re not making progress, all the while avoiding the hard work.

So it persists.

The majority of theories in human health can be explained the same way. The more you dig, the more you find that almost all the dominant theories are incorrect. There are too many stubborn facts that contradict them. But they persist because it benefits the researchers to have a theory, it benefits policymakers to have a specific target to which to direct money, and it benefits the public to feel safer believing that the health troubles in the world are understood by experts and have cures. Most are not and do not.

This is different than placebo. Placebo is probably the most effective and efficient form of treatment in the history of health. Unlike these incorrect theories, placebo actually works. We just can’t explain the causal mechanisms that make it work. Incorrect theories and diet pills have theories we can explain, but they are incorrect and do not work. They are anti-placebos; beliefs that makes us feel better but make our outcomes no better or worse.

Science at large faces this problem far more than the diet pill industry. Many if not most theories that are treated as fact fail to produce outcomes they’d predict. They are demonstrably false. But because no clearly correct theory can be found, pretending to understand persists. Researchers get money for concrete claims of knowledge. Policymakers get to have definable problems and solutions to tout. The public gets the comfort of “knowing” how it works, complete with cute little animated posters and 3-step action plans.

Nobel Prize winning biochemist Dr. Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR process (incidentally this is the process used in Covid tests, despite its inventor’s insistence until his death that this was not valid use of the process), spent the last years of his life fighting against the claim that HIV causes AIDS. I was shocked when I came across him and the other researchers and a substantial community around the AIDS not caused by HIV claim.

I do not claim to know whether this is true, but according to Mullis, he watched his own technology (PCR) be misapplied to diagnose disease, and he watched sloppy science get rushed out to meet a social and political demand for an answer to AIDS. The money, press, and public would rather have an answer than take the time to prove the answer correct. He said he watched nearly all his colleagues shoehorn their unrelated research into AIDS-related research, because billions were being doled out, as well as status and fame, all because the political class, media, and public wanted to believe there was a known cause and therefore clear research to be done to cure it.

Mullis maintained that no one had yet figured out what caused AIDS. There were some theories, some with fewer problems than the HIV theory, but none of them were free from contradictory evidence in the real world. He said, however, that public science cannot abide the very thing science is supposed to do best; questions. It needs answers. Incorrect theories that provide clear action steps, even if they lead to broken outcomes, exist and persist.

The history of science and medicine confirm this. Theories have been believed and acted upon even while making the problem worse. Over and over and over.

The odds are incredibly, ridiculously slim that that is not happening right now with almost every theory. The more public and political the health or science issue, the greater the odds that the theories funded are incorrect. The incentives are just stacked too far against the truth, which is usually something like, “We don’t really know what’s going on, but sometimes this helps some people.”

This is why science tends to progress in sudden, violent lurches, instead of the smooth linear path you might expect. Incorrect theories are prematurely turned into gospel by the scientists with the best political skills because the incentives to have an answer are so strong. This means falsifications and superior theories face an incredible battle and require a massive cataclysmic shift and/or changing generations to break through.

PS – One of the more interesting things I came across was the many cases through history of healthy sailors at sea for months (long after the incubation period claimed by viral theory) suddenly contracting the flu at the exact same time as people on land a thousand miles away. This has been observed and studied for several hundred years, and to date, no mainstream viral theory can explain it. Therefore, all current viral theories must be incorrect or incomplete. How unsatisfying.

Whenever there’s a lot of hysteria around dangers to “public health” (a phrase invented to control people), you see escalating calls for more and more dehumanizing mandates. You have to stop at some point and ask, why are people destroying all the things that make life good? What do they hope to achieve?

Every single human being will die. There is no escape from that. If you could reduce your odds of dying younger than average by a few fractions of a percent – or even a few percent – by locking yourself away and living a fearful, pathetic existence, would it be worth it? Of course not. Which is why people get in cars and drive every day. It’s not worth it because life is not measured just in minutes lived, and increasing the statistical probability of more of them. That’s not life, that’s death.

Life is about the quality of minutes lived, not just the quantity. Quality takes work, risk, ups, downs, unknowns, challenges overcome and battles won. It cannot be had with fearful avoidance.

People who wish to impose quality destroying restrictions on themselves and their fellow humans claim it’s in the name of preventing some tiny percentage increase in the odds of death. They are partly right at least. It is in the name of death. Death is their god, fearful and terrible, and they will sacrifice anything and everything at its feet. Public health fear-mongers are trapped in a death-cult without knowing it.

Most of these health concerns are completely overblown if not fabricated entirely. But even when they are not, they ought not lead us into death-cultism. The only way to be free is to step back and find meaning deeper than a maximization of minutes lived and a slavish fear of death.