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Thanks for the chart and the commentary,
Wally. By this time I have several copies of the chart, which is a useful
reminder of Douglas' perspective. Victor's thorough and generally
lucid exposition is also very helpful, and it confirms me in the inferences and
interpretations I have offered on this list over the past seven weeks or
so. Although Victor has disagreed with some of my statements, our
differences are over word usage more than underlying
ideas.
And that is my principal focus in entering a
discussion on philosophy, which, unfortunately I will not be able to pursue as
intently as I would like over the next ten days or two weeks. I can say
now, however, that the position I am coming from is that difficulties in
communicating the social credit vision have quite a lot to do with argot.
Any political, religious or philosophical movement develops its own special
emphasis on certain words. These are a useful shorthand among the
initiated, but as the movement grows by the acculturation of children born to
it, the argot takes on a virtually sacred character. Then, when a newcomer
or adolescent member of the movement tries to explore the meaning of the
sacred words or phrases by offering alternative expressions, the reaction of the
faithful is often shock and horror. As I have come to understand the
Social Credit movement (mainly from this forum), Victor is its 'Mikhail
Suslov'. The chief ideologist has an obvious responsibility to
maintain the integrity of the argot, as well as to explain it.
For purposes of communication and influencing
public policy, however, it may be useful to consider alternative language as
time passes, circumstances change and once familiar phrases lose the power of
recognition among the current generations. This activity, of
exploring the meaning of words and phrases, searching more deeply for their
implications and ramifications and proposing possible alternative forms, is an
expression of philosophy as defined by the dictionary quotations
imported by Victor a couple of weeks ago. It is not,
however, the usage of philosophy by Douglas or by Victor himself as faithful
expositor. That Douglas was a philosopher there can be no doubt,
but his usage of philosophy in the phrase "policy of a philosophy" is
argot.
What Douglas obviously meant by the word is a set
of personal beliefs about the way the world is and ought to be. Strictly
speaking, a set of personal beliefs does not constitute philosophy, although I
do realize that the word is sometimes used that way in common
parlance. Douglas was not unsophisticated, however, and this usage was
therefore a significant mistake on his part in attempting to communicate his
radical ideas. I notice in reading some of Douglas' statements and in
Victor's exposition that Douglas was inconsistent in his relationship to
words. Sometimes, as in the phrase at issue above and in his peculiar
usage of religion from archaic etymology, he is insistent on his
special meaning; at other times he dismisses disagreement as quibbles over "mere
words".
From my limited reading of the literature, efforts
to make ideas clear and to explore their implications for truthfulness and
application is the quintessential activity of philosophy. Quibbles over word
meaning and mathematical reasoning are therefore of the essence. Great names in
philosophy of our own time, such as Chomsky, Derrida, Wittgenstein,
Russell, certainly conform to that interpretation. And is that not
the Socratic tradition?
I am very favorably impressed by Douglas' effort to
cast off received words, phrases, doctrines and to start over from a clean slate
in thinking about political economy. The problematic element in such an
enterprise, of course, is knowing how far back to go in order to have a clean
slate, and how to know when one has gotten there. Economists and other
utopian thinkers are prone to thought experiments like that of Daniel
Defoe. Douglas allows us to begin with the technological environment
of the turn of the 20th century, but his anthropology seems hazy. To
say, for example, that "systems were made for man; not the other way round" is
to invoke either some benevolent dictator (or super-enlightened democratic
society) from the past or to imply that God set the world up with sociological
systems when He set the world ticking. For Douglas' expositors in the 21st
century to keep repeating that phrase unexamined is to be trapped in argot.
The orthodox explanation for slow progress of the
social credit idea and its application--i.e. that it is non-acceptance of the
philosophy--seems intimately related to the misuse, or ambiguous usage, of the
word. If Douglas meant that non-acceptors disagree with his beliefs about
the requirement of effective consumer sovereignty for real democracy, then I
think he was mistaken about the attitudes of most people and especially of those
who think seriously about ethics. (And that includes economists who think
about ethics.) If, on the other hand, he had a more accurate notion of
philosophy in mind when he uttered that sentiment, he meant that
non-acceptors had failed to follow the rationale he developed from the set of
postulates (beliefs) he started out with. I doubt that very many of the
unconverted really disagree with his set of beliefs, for the specific reason
just given, and also for the fact that he doesn't seem to have been very clear
about what he meant when invoking Christianity, religion, and individual versus
group relationships. I keep seeing the phrases repeated by himself and his
expositors, but they don't convey very clear meaning to me, and that may be
because I am of a different generation and political context than his very
British one. Before I agree that my slowness in grasping the vision is
because I don't accept Douglas beliefs about the existential circumstance of
humanity, I'd like to understand more clearly just what it is that I am
refusing.
I look forward to enlightenment and
expansion on the content of his beliefs, therefore, and reiterate
that I have less personal interest in where he got them. That is, I would like
to have a discussion that is quite separable from the one that Jim
Schroeder is exploring. My interest will converge more nearly with
that of John Rawson.
Keith Wilde
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 2:38
AM
Subject: Re: [socialcredit] a change of
pace -- Douglas's "Chart" of 1951 with commentary by Vic Bridger (from
Wally)
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Re: [socialcredit]
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