Keynes loved the pyramids. The attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the pyramid project is part of a larger cultural effort to prop up the respectability of government in general and the nation-state in particular.
FULL ARTICLE by Paul A. Cantor
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{ 15 comments }
Credibility is blown by calling Social Security a pyramid scheme. SS is a universal welfare program and a flat capped income tax. SS funds go into the Treasury and are spent on current budget needs as required by the SS legislation. Why doesn’t anyone ever worry about the Army going broke? Both “funds” come out of the same treasury.
Look, when a fund promises a greater payoff than one pays in by taking small amounts of money from a large amount of new members in order to give larger amounts of money to old members, that’s a pyramid scheme. The fact that this particular program isn’t divorced from the general treasury does not change the fact that most Americans’ willing participation in this scheme is due to our being led to believe that we will receive the same benefits current retirees are receiving without anyone being forced to pay more than we’re currently paying, which isn’t possible in the long run and is only currently possible because there are more payers in than payers out.
“Credibility is blown by NOT calling Social Security a pyramid scheme. ”
Totally.
SS is most certainly a pyramid scheme. The only part that isn’t true to the definition is that rather than making the participants of the scheme to recruit new members, the top participant (government) forces every new person who begins work to participate.
However billwald prefers to spin social security, the fact remains that the U.S. government does enslave its citizens to SS by seizing our wages through taxation to fund a program where those at the bottom pay for those at the top. But now the pyramid has flipped so that the numbers paying in and the dollars collected have shrunk, and an ever-growing number of beneficiaries are at the top, a classic pyramid/ponzi scheme if ever one existed. Slavery is the absence of choice. We are not given a choice of whether to pay in to SS, just as the well-fed slaves who built the pyramids were still slaves in that they had no choice in their livelihoods.
Of COURSE “television documentaries tend to be statist in their outlook.” They’re nearly always funded by the government.
As for “We have difficulty imagining that people were ever organized into communities other than nation-states,” it doesn’t seem to be too hard for Zionist Jews or Al Qaida (to pick two modern, radically different, obvious examples) to think along those lines.
…and just because we Americans (especially entrepreneurs) pay an effective tax rate of 80%+, that doesn’t mean we’re slaves. Slaves can’t leave the country. Not that there is any place to go, barring a change in our caste…
Serfs then. Slaves own none of their labor, serfs own part of it, and free men own all of it. Isn’t that how the saying went?
You aren’t really free to leave the US.
If you try, the government will take half of your stuff.
Classic, just classic:
I recently watched one of those documentaries on German TV, and even though I had heard of the new theories before, I must say I was also quite shocked to discover that a film director expected his public to cheer at this revelation: pyramid builders were doing their “tax duty”, working for several months in the year for pharaos’ glory. Yey!
Of course, I am quite relieved to hear they were not whipped daily… but something feels just too stupid in that whole buzz, I agree with the author.
Much more interesting would be to re-read CG Jung on the Egyptian subject then, keeping in mind his deeper understanding of the archaic religion vs. State opposition (IMHO its study really would have a justification on Mises.org) . According to his psychological analysis, pyramids represent at the the broad base level, the worldly collective instinct of man, and at the top, the refinement of the single summit: the individual psyche.
It just seems perfectly suited to this blog:
http://www.lolhome.com/funny-picture-1375382952.html
Simply brilliant! Thank you.
Great article by Professor Cantor!
I had often thought about the economics of the society in which the pyramids were built. While reading this article I associated together this economic riddle about the pyramids and Julian Jaynes theory about “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.
In Jaynes’ theory, the pyramids have been built by people, who had not yet developed consciousness. The organisation of pre-conscious societies came about through the “slave-like” following of orders, which they hallucinated. And these orders originally came from their ancesters, of whom they didn’t really belive that they were dead, because they still heard (i.e., hallucinated) their voices which told them what to do. The oranisation of these pre-conscious societies led to the god-king concept. The god-king became the representative of the ancestral order, whose voice they heard and whom they had to obey. They had no other choice. This voice was not imposed upon them by suppression. This voice directed them from within.
Now, there is no doubt in my mind, that the theory about the free market economy and it’s practical economic order wouldn’t work at all without fully conscious human beings. Beings, that are able to recognize their own needs, but are also able to recognize the needs of other human beings and are even able to manipulate the needs of other people. Needs translate into economic demands (the consumer side), and the recognition of the needs of others (and the manipulation thereof) translates into supply, organised by entrepreneurs. (Whereby the consciousness of the latter is probably higher developed than the consciousness of the consumer population as a whole.)
Back to the association of Mises’ and Jaynes’ theories applied to the economic order of ancient Egypt.
The motivation of building the pyramids is clearly based upon the pre-conscious mind, which even had no way to recognize the irrevisibility and finality of death. They would have lost all orientation if the hallucination of the god-king’s voice would have stopped. They needed to eternalize the god-king. I think this explanation for the collective behaviour of people, who still had a bicameral mind (i.e., a pre-conscious mind) might solve some of the puzzle of what drove the builders of the pyramids. A free economy in the sense of Mises is not possible with a pre-conscious mind set.
Not that I’m an expert, however, when you consider how much Freud’s achievement in psychology has been criticized, and himself criticizing that of Jung, then you look at that theory as exposed here briefly of Jaynes… there’s not much chance for any broad acceptance at all of an evolutionary explanation of pyramid building.
Dear Artisan,
broad acceptance doesn’t really matter when we are really interested in reality and in those theories which come closest to reality.
Jaynes’ theory implies evolution: the human brain must have been fully developed in terms of phsysiology before consciousness had a chance to evolve. An additional physiological mutation was not necessary. He imagines the “breakdown of the bicameral mind” as a kind of change of the operating system in the brain, which predominatly happened in the brain centers for language. One could call this a kind of “creative break-through” instead of a physiological mutation. His theory also implies that the subcoscious mind is perfectly able to think and to create civilization (and therefore also a form of pre-conscious economics) and even a kind of culture which is, the way Jaynes interprets bicameral artifacts, clearly distinct from those writings and artifacts, which were created after the historical break-through to consciousness.
What makes me feel good, even humorous about this view: Keynes clearly belongs to a category of economic theorists, that can see economic reality only through the eyes of a pre-conscious mind and wants historical evolution turn back to a bicameral society.
The great thing about Professor Cantor’s essay is that he inspires to see economics tied together with ideology, civilization and culture and therefore with human consciousness or the lack thereof.
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