Be careful with rationalist intellectuals; they are dangerous
The human being is not comprehensible when only using reason. This is why rationalist intellectuals cause considerable harm; they are intellectual authors of millions of deaths. Even Karl Marx could have been influenced by someone else. The French Revolution caused many victims. The human being is multidimensional, possesses reason, but also emotions, and reason is not awakened if an emotion does not aim to be attentive. Humans need motivation, which is something that teachers know only too well.
Memory accumulates information. Memory acts only as a storage place if you do not know how to relate different things. A good memory does not ensure intelligence. Some people with amazing memories are also incredibly stupid. There are plenty of them at universities. Some behaviour is irrational, counterintuitive, and intelligence is needed to realise them. Talking about falling in love is not necessary; humans underestimate what abounds, even though it is marvellous; the brain asks tennis players to rest after winning a set, and they relax.
Is fans’ behaviour rational when they get angry after their team playing their favourite sport loses an important match? The vote itself can hardly be rational. People imitate the behaviour of those who better them, which is the basis of advertising. All this is not rational behaviour, but it is human. A wise man, however, was able to observe and explain it. T. Veblen (1857-1929) knew this before Goebbels.
Capitalism is also counterintuitive. It is based on hard work, savings, and on continuously and intelligently reinvesting profits. To do so, many virtues are required: discipline, sacrifice, patience, perseverance, and being industrious, cold. What makes someone normal who earns money is spending it, having a good time, showing off what one has, but not making sacrifices and reinvesting it. Capitalism is not understood by reason alone; one has to be wise. The Austrian School dismantled Marxism, but there are still many about; university is full of Marxists, but not of the wise.
Wise people like Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) or Adam Smith (1723-1790) explained how seeking individual interest may result in benefits for others. Free trade is a winner-winner situation because valuing an asset is subjective. Someone with a lot of something values it less than someone who has nothing, but wants it. This is why trade exists. No-one exploits anyone. There is no deceit, but interests freely converge.
Those who deceive or are wrong are communists, who tell us that trade is stealing, the wealthy exploit, and mankind is bad by nature and the State is preferable to individual freedom. Yet once in power, they live certain privileges paid by the taxes they squander from us.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a philosopher, writer, sceptic and moralist, the son of wealthy traders with converted Jewish blood, at least on his mother’s side. He was the first person to use the essay in which to publically make views known in writing.
When unbelievers become moralists, they replace God and aspire to sometimes broadcast false theories. They tend to use reason, or something similar to science, to justify their theories. The French Revolution was devised by rationalist intellectuals. Great thinkers make major mistakes, and only a few dare to fight them. In his Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx (1818-1883) probably obtained his ideas from Montaigne. Even today, both have followers who continue to be mistaken.
Nowadays intellectual atrocities are made that come over as science by introducing quantity to measure what cannot be measured, and telling what cannot be told. Quantitative concepts and methods are used to theorise about human behaviour, which is genuine sorcery with improbable hypotheses, numbers and rankings.
Excellence is substituted for quantities, metrics and rankings, but comes over like science. Universities are full of mediocre professors. They state that good teachers are those with good surveys given by students who do not attend class, and do not know their fractions without using calculators or how to write without making spelling mistakes. They award researchers to defraud by publishing dozens of articles every year as if innovation grew on trees. The university has been lost for two decades.
They get excellence into knots, excellence being the habit of doing things well, and convert it into making things known, into looking good in rankings. They generate disposable, redundant knowledge. Propaganda and populism use quantity by replacing excellence. In fact as Donald T. Campbell stated in 1975, they obtain the opposite of what they seek. Is a war won if it causes the most deaths and the enemy does not give up? Is a painter the best because (s)he paints the most paintings?; Is a policeman the best if (s)he writes out the most fines or puts the most alleged criminals behind bars?
The Montaigne fallacy was unveiled by Ludwig Von Mises (1881-1973), characterised by being against the intervention of power in the economy. He showed the mistake of Marxism consisting in the belief that an objective price exists for a tradable asset. Montaigne wrote in his essay 22 from his book of Essays about someone always taking advantage of someone else in trade; that is to say, someone is always better off at the expense of someone else losing. He stated: “one man’s profit is another man’s harm”.
Montaigne had no idea about economics, and should have known that one thing is to attend to the poor, but promoting poverty is an entirely different thing, which is what socialism does. The basis of Montaigne’s mistake is that an asset has no objective value. Both gain; the buyer is willing to freely pay for an asset at the offered price; the seller has a value that equals the sale price. The consequences of this fallacy are still tremendous and have ruined many countries, like Spain. However, what is worse is that these zero-sum theories of winners and losers are taught at all public universities because educational contents ignore liberal ideas at all levels. Not even teachers know them, which transmits a mistaken socialist vision.
The consequences are tremendous because every graduate who leaves a public university in Spain is an unaware socialist who ignores that (s)he is shrouded by socialism with equality, feminism and quantity, especially by votes. For this reason, three in every four graduates admit they aspire to be a civil servant. If to this we add that the mean civil servant salary is 30% higher than the mean public salary, then they are two of a kind. As so few enterprise and as taxes and national insurance contributions are so high, the private sector dwindles and the public sector grows. The consequence of all this is debt that has multiplied by 4 in two decades and the GDP has remained the same after deducting inflation.
We have trained 1.25 million public university students, subsidised up to 80%, in the last 2 years, and more than 400,000 Spanish graduates have migrated. We train graduates who emigrate and welcome immigrants to do manual work because Spanish youths do not want to get their hands dirty. We have 3 million immigrant workers and 3.5 million on the dole, with 600,000 camouflaged under the name of “non-permanent fulltime workers”.
The Spanish public university has obeyed socialist power for two decades, and did so even while Rajoy governed, who either had no idea at all or could not have cared less. He did not unravel the mess left by Zapatero, which still remains. The present Sánchez government provides them the resources from the EU that should have been employed to save the private firms that had to close during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any extra money has also been squandered instead of saving firms or making the most of university because it disappears by being spread out among so many centres, and was not expected. Only people’s submissiveness to the government increases.
Essentially it is pure patronage-type embezzlement. All posts and intermediary less important posts obey like sheep led by a sheepdog to their sheepfold. Any sheep that escapes is appropriately repressed. Both PP and VOX should ask for auditing to clarify where European funds have ended up, and they should report its findings in the European Parliament instead of acting as accomplices. All this is because the Spanish government has used European funds to buy votes, to increase public spending, and to allow thousands and thousands of small- and medium-sized enterprises and self-employed workers to close, which have not reopened due to lack of aid.
Socialism does not know how to govern without overspending. Votes cannot be bought when there is no money. Sánchez increased Spain’s debt by 280 million euros a day in the last year by distributing privileges to the public sector. This is an example of tyranny; a stick is taken to those who do not vote him, and those who do receive carrots. Those who do not vote socialist, but obey, are disguised; they are unaware socialists who are being warmed up in the hot water of earning a secure salary. They are like frogs that do not jump until they are scalded
Muy buena columna. Adelante.