The Swadesi Indologist- 1

Consider the following shloka-

Now look at this translation-
'Act not in haste! A loss of sagacity (viveka) is the worst calamity. Fortune and prosperity comes to one who analyses and calculates.”

That's okay surely?

What great loss or guilt of misprision have we just incurred by accepting it? 

The answer, as evidenced by the subsequent trajectory of the translator, is that we have acted in haste. Ours is the sin of Epimetheus. In a moment of distraction (vikshepa) we have brought darkness and death into the world, for 'viveka' alone, as the Mahabharata teaches, is Illumination and Immortality.

Why, you might ask, have I brought Epimetheus into this? The answer is that that name has a 'dhvani'- a 'suggestiveness'- in English which most economically and accurately answers to that of the original.

Why? Well, the shloka is from Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. Yuddhishtra is admonishing Bhima for his impetuous desire to attack the Kauravas immediately.

Since Bharavi lived long after Ved Vyasa and had mastered the Itihasasas, we immediately grasp the irony here. We know that Yudhishtra's 'vishada' (mental depression or abulia) arose when Bhima said 'Look, I'd better go right now and kill off all our enemies myself. The sin of vow-breaking will fall wholly on me. The fact is, even if we fulfil the terms of our vow and then emerge victorious in battle, you will still gamble away the entire kingdom!' The notion here is that, since the head of the family lacks competency by reason of a particular addiction, a junior member has to impetuously step up to the plate, though incurring sin by doing so.

Thanks to Bhima's intervention, Yuddhishtra has to confront the seemingly insolvable problem of determining the correct dharma in relation to dependents. In Economics, this is studied under the rubric of agent-principal hazard. Whereas Arjuna, who is an agent, not a principal, can have his 'vishada' dispelled by, if not the text of the Bhagvad Gita, then at least the theophany that occurs within it, King Yuddhishtra has to audit both the 'Vyadha' or Butcher's Gita, as well as actually learn Statistical Game Theory in the 'nalophkyanam' episode. 

There is a further irony here similar to that whereby Epimetheus and Prometheus, impetuosity and foresight, balance each other out- one darkens the world with the shadow of death, the other steals fire from Heaven- because the doxastic commitment to 'cut down, with the axe of non-attachment, the hymn leaved banyan whose roots are in Heaven and branches down below' is actually inculcated by a mere agent, not a principal, Krishna having taken on the duty of a mere charioteer, to another, wholly heteronomous, agent to dispel the 'cognitive dissonance' and depression caused by an extraordinary situation where, as if by the Game Theoretic dilemma of Kavka's toxin, to do his duty to his eldest brother, Arjuna has to slay him in a fit of 'dark anger' (manyu) 

Like everything else in the Mahabharata this happens twice for a reason I have explained elsewhere.

Of course, there are people who have read the Mahabharata, even memorized portions of it, or- more impressively yet, who can spontaneously compose erudite, highly allusive poetry based upon recondite characters or episodes within it- who, nevertheless, say the stupidest and most false thing about it possible at the very outset of an essay meant for publication.

Such is the case with Shatavdhani Ganesh who, writing of Rajiv Malhotra's 'Battle for Sanskrit', begins his peroration thus-

'Before the Great War, Arjuna developed cold feet and Krishna counselled him to lift up his weapons and fight. But how would have Krishna reacted if Arjuna had been over-zealous to battle the sons of Dhritarashtra even before the Pandava side was fully prepared? Perhaps the way Yudhishthira reacted to Bhima’s impatience in Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniyam (Canto 2, Verse 30) – “Act not in haste! A loss of sagacity (viveka) is the worst calamity. Fortune and prosperity comes to one who analyses and calculates.”

At first blush, Ganesh appears to be asking an interesting question- the sort of thing you might set as a Prize Essay topic for High School students.

How would Krishna have reacted if Arjuna was eager to fight? Recall, Arjuna was suffering from Vishada only because he was able to foresee the outcome of the battle, in a manner regret minimizing to himself, thanks to a Gandharva's boon of chaksuchi vidya. Krishna Devakiputra had gained something similar in Chandogya. Thus, there was a symmetric situation- a balanced game. 

Incidentally the boon of chaksuchi vidya means Krishna didn't rig the outcome of the Gita by a display of force majeure because the Gandharva's gift of clairvoyance was qualified by the condition that any supernatural vision received by Arjuna would be occur in such manner and answer to such ends as were most pleasing and helpful to him. Moreover, the boon was 'asvamika'- not conveyanced- though the moment Arjun ceased to be master of himself it could lodge with him only to disappear as his 'vishada' was dispelled and he once again became his own master.

This means that Arjuna's vision of the desolation caused by the war, which he knows he will win, was one that was helpful to him. It was 'regret minimizing'- i.e. with hindsight, from the terminus of the best of all compossible decision trees, he would say 'that's exactly the right vision I should have had'. On the other hand, it couldn't disclose that he would kill his eldest brother because that's not what Karna wanted and he, not Yuddhishtra, was the true Principal, not Agent, among the Pandavas.

However, the moment, we realise this- and, at some level, this is an 'unthought known' for Hindus- Ganesh's question looks puerile- like 'Was Hamlet really mad or was he pretending to be mad?' or 'which came first? The Chicken of the Egg?'

The fact is, since both Krishna and Arjuna are agents, not principals, and- like every other episode and its dual, what is happening is a balanced game- still the only substantive information which we can get out of this 'epoche' relates to Karna's preferences. He wants a 'vishodhana' such that a large class of warriors gains heaven and, largely by his own actions, that's what he gets. An older Thymotic Society is dying, something new, apoorva, or hysteresis free, is coming into the World.

Is there a way to make sense of it all? Can people still live an ethical life when a great Revolution in Mores and Modes of Production is occurring? Sure. The theory of repeated games explains what is going on just fine. There will always be a Revelation Principle such that a well defined, for Muth Rational, Ethic supervenes on whatever correlated asymmetries arise by reason of cheap talk. True, there has to be a more or less costly signal to ensure a robust 'separating equilibrium' but that's what mimetic Muth Rationality is for; that's why it is more or less hardwired for most of us, and that's why diversity is conserved by Evolution. As the MhB says 'Tigers and Forests are mutually dependent. One can't exist without the other. The same is true of the Kauravas and Pandavas.'

Actually, the moment Karna was raised to Kingship, a minimally costly signal could have created a robust separating equilibrium.  Thus the real subject matter of the 5th Veda is revealed as subsuming signalling theory under the rubric of Sacrifice.

Yuddhishtra has to learn Game Theory- not magic or sorcery or clairvoyance- and that is why he is a Just King even when he isn't actually the King at all, but merely the Hanann Consistent simulation of the Will of an occulted Crown.

Returning to Ganesh's article- and remembering that any well formed shloka is the dual of a canonical set of avadhanam constraints, does he really traduce, not translate, Bharavi?

Before deciding, first look at this passage-

'Sanatana dharma includes revelation of the seers (Vedas) as well as epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata). The Greek and Roman traditions have epics but no revealed scriptures. The Semitic traditions have revealed scriptures but no epics. Other traditions like the ancient Chinese, Mayan, Incan, etc. have neither.'

If you are stupid enough to believe this, or too lazy or lacking in access to Wikipedia, to verify that it is utterly false, then Ganesh's article benefits you because, if you ponder its message unceasingly, you will have less mental energy to devote to being a fucking asshole.

On the other hand, if- like me- you know Ganesh is saying something he can't possibly believe (coz the guy is a Tambram and knows the Sillapadikaram etc) then, suddenly, we will find some new apoorvata (novelty) making our Sanskrit kavya once again meaningful and a spur to creative thought and endeavour- or in my case saying no- like Kapila politely refuting the mimamsa of the cow which was beseeching him to eat it- to the shameless importunities of the bottle of Bacardi rolling around under my bed. I shall walk down to Waitrose to get that White Burgundy for under 6 quid everybody's talking about.

Or, fuck it, I'll just have a case delivered- and pour myself a little Ghadar era Ghalibian 'aab-e-hayyat' to be getting on with.

After all, Syumarashmi was right- Kapila's shite don't got no autopoietic Revelation Principle. It is a Yoga which, by itself, unites nothing on the basis of greater generality because no costly signal, or separating equilibrium, has been generated in a Hannan Consistent manner. Hence it can't be Muth Rational.

Anyway, this sweet Bacardi is being very wifely and affectionate, coyly darting its tongue into my mouth.

Second thoughts are best for of such is true 'Viveka'.

Estlund Authority & Aumann agreement

This is David Estlund talking to 3A.M magazine-
'I call a government “legitimate” insofar as it is morally permitted to coercively enforce its orders. That’s very rough, but enough for the distinction I want here. I say a government has “authority” insofar as it has the power (a kind of moral power) to put people under moral obligations (defeasible of course) to do things, by commanding them to do so. Again, there are details, but that’s already a clear distinction between two moral questions. It’s possible, of course, to hold that one is never present without the other, and also possible to deny it. By analogy, it might be that all and only the tall flowers in my yard are yellow. But their being tall and yellow are different things about them. A government’s power to generate obligations is different from its being permitted to enforce its commands. I don’t suppose anyone disagrees, but issues are often missed by simply defining “authority” or “legitimate authority” as combining both, and never asking what grounds one part and what grounds the other.'

Suppose there is a Government composed of a single person. Suppose that person feels she is not bound to obey any order given by that Government. Finally, suppose this were common knowledge.

Could such a person give orders, in the name of the Government, which would place 'people under moral obligations to do things'? No, because she is a person and, by our second assumption, we know that she doesn't feel any such obligation. Thus such a Government has no 'authority'. It also has no 'legitimacy' because the person who composes the Government can't coerce herself to enforce her own order to feel a moral obligation to do a certain thing.

Yet, as a matter of fact, there have been plenty of Polities- including ones which are recognisably Democratic- which have enjoyed 'legitimacy' and 'authority' despite maintaining, as a matter of Constitutional doctrine, that there always exists at least one person who is not under a moral obligation to act in accordance with the orders of the Government and, moreover, can't be coerced to do so by any morally permissible means.

It may be argued that 'legitimacy' and 'authority' are not separable but overlapping concepts within a particular type of deliberative discourse a la Habermas. In other words, there is some more or less public process of argumentation and deliberation which everyone would agree was authentic and fair minded, such that at the end of the process each person has a substantively rational acceptation of what is going on in Society such that no scandal arises by reason of any procedural asymmetry concomitant with the existence of a Governing and Governed class.

The problem here is that if such deliberation consumes scarce resources, or if pure strategies can be dominated, or if concurrency type problems arise, or if discourse is not incentive compatible, or if preference revelation is problematic, or if policy space is 'multi-dimensional', or if hysteresis effects predominate, or if Knightian Uncertainty obtains, or if there are increasing returns to scale and scope, or if external effects don't cancel each other out; then there is no a priori way to determine if any deliberative process is 'authentic' though there is an a priori way to show that it must be sub-optimal.

This is not to say we must all sheepishly endorse the Schmittian 'State of Exception'- yet, we can't deny that no State would retain its legitimacy very long if its 'authority' were based on a Universalizable as opposed to an essentially asymmetric, not to say heteronomous, theory of Morality. 
Perhaps there is a non-Kantian theory of Morality such that Elstund's claim to have said something meaningful w.r.t the separability of 'legitimacy' and 'authority' would be true.
If so, this theory would enable the Ruler, though refusing to grant the moral authority of her own commands in at least one case, can still justify her behaviour by some moral, as opposed to expediency based argument to the Governed, even if they do in fact acknowledge that authority. For Utilitarians, there are two possible ways this justification could be made. One would be to argue that she was acting with substantive rationality to achieve a State of the World militated for by Act Utilitarianism. The second would be to justify her actions as procedurally rational in accordance with Rule Utilitarianism.
Even if Utilitarianism is not the 'true Moral Theory', if it is admitted that some people can be swayed by its arguments, then it must be the case that either talk of 'deliberative democracy' or 'epistemic proceduralism' is wholly empty or that the relevant Public Justification we have stipulated for has sufficient alethic force to minimally fulfil an Utilitarian desiderata.

The late Dr. Trejo-Mathys quotes Elstund as attacking Habermas for a sort of nihilism such that Public Justification goes ahead without sufficient alethic force.
Deliberative democratic theory claims to employ only purely procedural standards for the public employment of reason. “The notion of a higher law,” Habermas urges, “belongs to the premodern world.” There are no standards that loom over the political process, policing its decisions, not even any standard of reason itself. “We need not confront reason as an alien authority residing somewhere beyond political communication.” The only normative standards that apply to political decisions are noninstrumental evaluations of the procedures that produced them—in particular, standards of “procedural rationality” based on the power of reason in public political discourse. Any imposition (in theory or practice) of substantive political standards would preempt the ultimately dialogical basis upon which Habermas thinks political normativity must rest. There is an echo of Arendt here: politics is the site of discursive contestation, so politics cannot begin with conclusions. Here is where the price of the nihilist view is evidently too high to pay, or so I will argue. No appeal to good outcomes is permitted on this view, there supposedly being no such thing. … The task for deliberative democratic theory, then, has become the odd one of explaining the central importance of substantive public discussion of the procedure-independent merits of possible political decisions, without ever granting that there actually are any procedure-independent standards.

Trejo-Mathys defends Habermas as best he can but gives the game away when he says - 'In Habermas’ view, all normativity rests on an “ultimately dialogical basis”, and science, morality and art criticism are just as much “sites of discursive contestation” as politics is.'
The problem here is that people who allow themselves to be Governed, rather than seeking to run away from any such stationary bandit, only do so because this is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. For them 'normativity' is linked to those preferences or tropisms which ensure survival and reproduction upon an uncertain fitness landscape. Nobody, not a gobshite by profession, actually gives two shits for 'discursive contestation' and nothing has an ultimately 'dialogical basis' because only professional gobshites indulge in dialogic which is why we relegate them to the role of Child Minders to the more cretinous portion of our Credentialized offspring. Meanwhile, cheap 'out of control' mimetic effects shape Revealed Preference though, no doubt, Preference Falsification based Availability Cascades regulate what people say they want as opposed to what they vote with their feet for. There is a good reason why Public Discourse is essentially hypocritical and misleading. The fact is, Newcomb type problems lie at the heart of Language. We all swear to quaff Kafka's toxin at Dijkstra's banquet because- since substantive, that is ergodic, rationality and procedural, that is hysteresis afflicted, rationality never sync up on an uncertain fitness landscape, hence breeding 'capacitance diversity' which is why these types of rationality evolved in the first place- it serves only to starve philosophers- whereas we have quietly stolen as much of the silver as we decently could and are already plotting our escape to where the grass is greener if only for having fed on others' bones.

Thus, it is perfectly adaptive, at least if one is by nature a worthless gobshite rather than someone whose Loyalty might be valuable, to indulge in the sort of 'cheap talk' given below (my comments are in bold) while reserving 'costly signals' for the purpose of Exit, rather than Voice.

3:AM: .. you’re defending the idea that we can’t do without an epistemic or truth-seeking dimension to the democractic ideal and as we’ve seen, you think this is the way to go given that the commoner defences don’t work. How do you not fall into the despotic character that Hannah Arendt observed when she said ‘ from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character.’

DE: I’m glad you asked that, and I have a long answer. The reason I’m glad is that Arendt’s view about “Truth and Politics” (as the title of her central essay on that topic puts it) is understandably, but wrongly I think, thought to ground a deep objection to thinking of democratic authority in even partly epistemic terms (as I do). If normative truth has no place in political discourse, then the question whether democratic arrangements might tend to get things right can’t ever arise…it might seem. So let me try to explain why I think that is not her view at all. (The key: she and I agree there are procedure-independent standards of political judgment, which is all I need, but for certain reasons she doesn’t want to call them “truths.”)

Arendt does not mount a critique of normative truth or standards that would show that they have no place in political thought or discourse. And we should note that there are two ways in which they can hardly be avoided. One is the point at which a person participates in politics. A person might simply amorally pursue her aims, I suppose, but this is not how almost anyone understands their participation. But only because such misunderstanding is strategic and also has a lower computational cost. Rather, a person will normally (so we know from piles of empirical research) have a view of how her interests, competing interests of others, and other considerations, ought to be somehow brought to bear in action. Yes, in the short run, it is cheap to have an 'attitudinal' or 'trait based' view and even, at the margin, to send 'costly signals' on that basis; however there is a mimetic tipping point after which 'situational rationality' prevails and 'Identity' proves increasingly spectral. The participant won’t necessarily think that her own opinions about these things ought to be imposed even as others disagree, but she does have opinions, and she does disagree with others. She can hardly add that there’s nothing to her view except that she happens to hold it, as if any view is as good as the next. She will take herself (however uncertain she might be) to hold it for reasons that warrant her holding it. She has a view about what people ought to support doing collectively, and she thinks (maybe tentatively, maybe not) others to be mistaken, at least partly. So she appeals to what she will see as certain controversial normative—I think broadly moral—judgments whose validity (let’s call it) is not up to her or anyone. I'm afraid this isn't so at all. Where there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' something like the 'bourgeois strategy' is eusocial in the short run- i.e. before the fitness landscape has been explored. That's what fools philosophers into thinking there are universalizable moral laws. However, this 'bourgeois strategy' disappears longer term( because resources can be invested in acquiring or losing a particular signal) so ergodicity is restored. The second point at which even a follower of Arendt must not think that everything normative is up to us is this: The very idea that what gets done ought to be determined politically (rather than despotically, say) is a moral or normative principle or standard that her view cannot avoid, and surely its own validity is, again, not subject to what gets decided in actual politics. If a Society knows it is Democratic or Despotic then an uncorrleated asymmetry arises. Assuming Societies compete under scarcity, it follows that resources will be diverted to changing signals till the informational asymmetry disappears. The comedy of 'People's Democracies' competing with genuine ones ended, at least in Germany, once 'Exit' became possible. Parts of the former G.D.R are demographically worse off, and face a grimmer future, now than 20 years ago because Exit, especially among better educated young women, has continued even under Frau Merkel. Wolves, however, are flourishing, as are Neo Nazis.

I think Arendt could easily agree with all this. When Arendt says that “truth has a despotic character,” she explains that she means that as a single person investigates questions in, say, physics or math (even aspects of history, though that’s more complicated), the correct answers are not in any way affected by the fact that there are other minds with other perspectives. It’s simply between me and the non-negotiable world. By contrast, in the domain of the moral and political, there is no subject matter at all if not for multiple minds and perspectives. The right answer is not only hard to know without help from others—that’s also true about lots of math, physics, and history (she emphasizes the need for witnesses, for example). More importantly, in normative matters the right answer is itself some accommodation of multiple perspectives, such as competing aims and convictions. But her point here is easily exaggerated. She is not arguing that there are no moral or genuinely political judgments that have any validity or correctness apart from multiple people’s actual opinions or statements or arguments. She rejects that conventionalist view, and holds that people’s actual statements or views might be mistaken even about moral or political matters. Indeed, a common way for a person’s moral or political opinion to go wrong, on her view, is through a failure of (solitary or socially assisted) imagination, an insufficient “representation” of the positions of others. Yet, what is happening in East Germany has nothing to do with 'the domain of the moral or political' or the problems of preference aggregation or mechanism design or the pseudo-problem of alterity. The same thing is happening in other European countries with wholly different moral and political availability cascades.

For purposes of an epistemic dimension of democratic authority, this is enough, and it’s highly consonant with how I see things. Arendt doesn’t doubt for a moment that even democratic political decisions can go wrong, be invalid, lack “impartial generality,” in her term. That impartially general perspective is not up to us, as a matter of decision on her view (or Kant’s, on which she deeply draws, or Habermas’s which draws on them), though it does essentially involve the existence of multiple points of view, which is her point. I think it’s misleading to say, as she does, that in the political (a part of the realm of “opinion” rather than “truth”) “our thinking is truly discursive,” since that might suggest that it depends on what actually gets said. That is not the view as she explains it. On the other hand, she clearly thinks that trying to understand or reach that impartially general stance requires, as an epistemological matter, hearing from others—not because their opinions are somehow automatically valid or determinative (they aren’t) but because our imaginations are limited and need this aid. But it is crucial to this whole view that the impartially general (and so valid) stance is not constituted by what actually gets said in discourse, or even by whatever people happen to think, since even together, even democratically, we could always get it wrong. The impartially general stance sets a standard that is independent of any actual human (even democratic) procedures, even if it isn’t independent of the existence of multiple minds and agents. In my account of democratic authority, that’s the aspect of the vernacular idea of “truth” that is operative: procedure-independent standard for judgment or belief. (This leaves entirely open whether the valid impartial stance might be explicated by some imaginary idealized procedure, as Habermas argues. The point here remains: its independence of any actual procedures. The implications of the hypothetical procedures, on such a view, are still not up to us. Real politics could always get it wrong. Habermas is easy to misunderstand on this.)

In that case, where Aumann agreement obtains, so must Elstund type procedure-independent 'truth'. However, in real time, if membership in the Government is stochastic in at least one respect, an uncorrelated asymmetry can arise during an Aumann agreement process. This means that a legitimate Government may lack Elstund 'authority'. Weakening Aumann's conditions won't get us to robustness because we know a priori that this entails so exponential an increase in concurrency and race hazard type problems- which militates for Hotelling type convergence or even Coasian internalization- compounded by congestibility and signal degradation problems with the result that Braess's paradox gains salience and only closing at least some autobahns and boulevards of Public discourse can rescue Communication itself from logjam. 
One workaround is to make policy space 'multi-dimensional'- but that just gets us to McKelvey chaos.

Mysterianism as a meta-metaphoricity.

Mysterianism—is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans.
Meta-metaphoricity refers to the worhtless shite that human beings spout when they take a metaphor for reality- i.e. confuse a figure of speech for a fact about the world- and construct another metaphor on that basis which itself is taken to have equal alethic force. 

Thus 'the mind'- which doesn't actually exist except as a figure of speech- is a metaphor for something that has salience in certain co-ordination games. If this metaphor is considered to be a concrete fact about the world then a second metaphor- viz that 'minds' are organs similar to hearts or livers and are contained in bodies- can burgeon such that worthless shite is talked about things like the interaction pseudo-problem.

Chomsky speaks of Newton as introducing mysterianism and rejecting Galileo's mechanistic philosophy by permitting some mysterious force called Gravity which acted at a distance rather than by means of some elaborate clockwork or Rube Goldberb  machine. Thus Chomsky says 'Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, in his words, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.”
Descartes took a wrong turn, Chomsky claims, by thinking there were two different substances- that of Thought and that of Matter. With typical perversity, Chomsky thinks Cartesian 'res cogitans' has not been debunked unlike the 'res extensa' of Matter. 
Thus he writes- 'The properties of matter, Newton showed, escape the bounds of the mechanical philosophy. To account for them it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact. Not surprisingly, Newton was condemned by the great physicists of the day for invoking the despised occult properties of the neo-scholastics. Newton largely agreed. He regarded action at a distance, in his words, as “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” Newton however argued that these ideas, though absurd, were not “occult” in the traditional despised sense. Nevertheless, by invoking this absurdity, we concede that we do not understand the phenomena of the material world. To quote one standard scholarly source, “By `understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: `understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.”

Chomsky wrote this quite recently. He reads the newspapers. He must be aware that Scientists can create things- like the Higgs boson- with their sophisticated equipment. I don't know if 'gravitons'- i.e. something material which establishes the reign of Gravity by means of 'contact action'- can be created or destroyed in the laboratory and if 'anti-gravity' will give us 'Back to the Future' type hover-boards. I do know that photons exist and their power can be harnessed by ubiquitous household objects like my wristwatch and garden lights. What's more this is Common Knowledge for me, you, Chomsky and everybody that Chomsky knows. Yet Chomsky is pretending that Newton 'exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact'. In other words, the billions of pounds invested in the CERN laboratory represent nothing but superstition or a sinister boondoggle of some sort.

Far better that money were given to me to conduct research into 'Adi Vigyan'- the original science, which consists of throwing your ills onto your reflection in a mirror by chanting the appropriate mantra.

You see, Newton has exorcised machines- which is why they can't do anything useful. However, ghosts are intact and, as is well known, ghosts have a lot of super-powers and can be made to do stuff for you if you know the correct linguistic mantra.

Oh dear! I suddenly see why Chomsky is so popular. He is a practitioner of 'Adi Vigyan'. He takes Science as his mirror and casts his own ills onto that supposed reflection.

Like you and me he is a worthless shithead and knows he is a worthless shithead because he aint doing proper Science just indulging in that 'meta-metaphoricity' which, purely as a figure of speech, treats shitheads who teach Linguisitics, or Child Minders who try to keep Poli Sci, or Comp Lit majors from masturbating to death or eating each other, as doing something worthwhile- i.e. Scientific.

Chomsky & Orwell's problem

Noam Chomsky will be ninety in a couple of years. His has been a remarkable life. Fifty years ago, his name was mentioned as the equal or Freud or Marx or Keynes- or other such meretricious Messiahs to our embattled bildungsburgertums ; promising milk and honey, in one or more of the various Academic Wildernesses of utterly worthless Credentialized Careerism.

 I should explain, this was at a time when Freud and Marx were considered to have made fundamental discoveries of an essentially scientific kind and Nixon had embraced Keynes to the extent of proclaiming a 'Prices & Incomes Policy'- i.e fucked up so massively he had to be impeached.

Now, however, Chomsky is considered stupider than Ali G- not because he fucked up Second language learning and, in some American School Districts, even First Language literacy- by and large both were positive developments- but because he has rigorously re-purposed the General Intelligence he alone denies he has to always says the stupidest thing possible- even when it is boring rather than funny.



What went wrong?

Noam came of excellent stock; his father was a great expert in Hebrew; his mentor- Zellig Harris- was brilliant and just ten years older than himself;  at M.I.T he had the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Information Technology Revolution which has given us such things as Siri and Google Translate; his main political influences, anti-Stalinists like Rudolf Rocker and Anton Pannekoek, were in tune with a technocratic depoliticizing Zeitgeist which permitted a stable, if loveless marriage between Rawlsian Equity and Hayekian Liberty; while his own personal life was blissfully uxorious and bountiful of progeny.

Yet, intellectually, he has but unmade alliances and laid waste the laboriously cultivated estates of his own designated heirs for no better reason, it appears, than a certain shallowness of mind and callowness of heart which strategised minimalism to achieve a sort of tautological multiple realisability such that he himself would be disqualified him from achieving any Punctum Archimedis insight into those two subjects, alone, whose government he had overthrown.

Why?

The answer is that he was employed as at an American University and thus was under pressure to publish or perish with the result that his Idionomic Research Program- i.e. his petty bourgeois 'integrity' as a skilled 'knowledge worker'- could with the greater virtuosity do both by means of precisely the sort of paranoid Pannekoekean putsch he would dedicate the remainder of his life to discovering everywhere except in  the government of his own oeuvre. In other words, Chomsky is the name of an algorithm which makes a distinction only to elide it by saying it makes no difference which is why the distinction must, minimally, yet again be made.

This, admittedly, is not the common-sense view. After all, Chomsky was employed at an American University during the only decade when Professors had some relevance to Politics because of the Vietnam War and the Conscription it entailed.
Put yourself in Chomsky's shoes. The year is '68. The Tet offensive is at its height. That fucking 19 year old gormless hippie chewing gum in your lecture hall should be getting his head blown off by gooks not sitting in front of you making excuses for why his term paper will be late.
What makes things worse is that fucking fraud Foucauld is probably storming the Bastille at the head of hordes of randy students demanding superior facilities for fornication- this being France's comeuppance for having tricked the US into the Vietnamese quagmire before doing a runner itself- with the result that De Gaulle himself has to flee for fear of loosing his anal cherry to Daniel Cohn Bendit.
According to this view, Chomsky turned political because prolonged contact with 'students'- as if the possibility of a Mentalistic Paideia, as opposed to a Mechanical Productivity, were not epigenetically foreclosed between the ages of 19 and 29!- is profoundly demoralizing. The natural instinct, at least for men with kids of their own, is to wish to see these soi disant students being blown up or shot on an industrial scale.
Since the gooks were too fucking lazy to send more than 50,000 body-bags home, obviously, it was up to the U.S Army and National Guard and the Feds and all them Fascist bastards to kill or otherwise fuck over the little shits who keep turning up year after year at Uni and stinking up the place with their pheromones and bongs and cheap deodorant.
Why won't these students just fucking attack the Pentagon already and get machine gunned or nuked or whatever till they are all fucking dead?
What is the point of their stinking up our lecture halls in the name of getting an 'education' if they can't take the hint that they should just kindly fuck off and get shot already?
Fuck is their major malfunction?

The answer has to do, obviously- because we're talking about American students in the Sixties who had been brought up on TV- with Capitalist Media mindlessly 'manufacturing consent'.
In the same way that the German proletariat, in the opinion of Pannekoek, had lost its revolutionary potential because of a civilizing contact with the Self-employed and Government Servants and Army Officers and so on, so too had those vicious young cannibals we see entering our campuses every Fall, been civilized by 'I love Lucy' and 'Peyton Place'. That's why they don't simply eat each other or attack the Barracks so as to feast upon the brains of the hapless young soldiers there.

Chomsky, not content with crediting Descartes with an atheistic linguistics, now proceeded to denude Plato of his characteristic theory of methexis before going on to completely miss the point of Orwell's 1984.

Popper might have had the problem Chomsky identifies, had he been unwilling to grasp the nettle of admitting that everything thought to be known is certain to be falsified. Plato can't have this problem because his theory of 'participation' can be easily recast as saying that the individual mind 'cloud sources' ideas, at Schelling focal points, on a just in time basis so as to get near zero knowledge proofs, cheap error correction etc. This cashes out as David Lewis's theory re. Conventions.

Orwell's problem, on the above view, is just the dual of Plato's problem. The protocols for 'Knowing' and 'Understanding' are costly and impose a risk because they can have intensional effects, i.e. corrupt other files- so it is better to have minimal & air gapped- or else just-in-time mimetic- doxastic commitments. 

Bizarrely, Chomsky thinks Plato's problem cashes out as Sciency stuff (as opposed to Anthropic Principle question begging) and is interesting whereas Orwell's problem is the familiar bleeding heart scandal of how like everybody knows, but nobody is doing anything, about the suffering of trillions of starving Secular Socialist Sanjeev Sabhloks who are being systematically raped, sodomized and forced to commit suttee by the Hegemonic Neo-Liberal Nomenklatura despite this being a blatant violation of the Eighteenth Amendment (coz shite like that tends to go down when I bin drinkin) not to mention Grotius's fundamental principle of Natural Law which says Dutch people get to enslave Tamil peeps and starve them to death on their Ceylonese plantations coz, fuck u Mennonites, that's just the Law okay?

Compared to Chomsky's minimalist program of telling the stupidest lies possible because Science and Politics are immiscible, Ali G's reflexive 'is it coz I iz Black?' resolves the Race Hazard of their univocity in a manner reminiscent of, the Catholic, Rudolf Rocker, resolving the central aporia of Jewish Anarcho-Syndicalism such that the doors to genuine Popular Sovereignty are thrown open at Westminster with the withdrawal of all Whips and the apotheosis of Black Rod like in dat porn film I once saw.

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(This is the text of my comment on a post on 'Orwell's fatal attraction to Democratic Socialism')

Orwell, like Chomsky, thought the Spanish POUMists had got it right- in other words both believed that it was possible to have a truly democratic people's movement in which the humblest private soldier or volunteer had the right to question the General and to only obey orders after he or she was thoroughly convinced of the need to rape and murder the nun or other class enemy in question.

Both Orwell and Chomsky believe in an 'i-language'- a perfect internal, intensional, language which miraculously exists thanks to some random mutation which has spread to all human beings. They think bad things happen only because evil Capitalist bastards are using 'Advertising' and 'Management Jargon' and other naughty things to pollute the pure i-language established by the Holy Mutation. They do admit that Communists can rape and murder nuns and other class enemies without first having benefited from a long discussion of why it should be done so as to create a truly humane Society in which the rape and murder of nuns and other class enemies is properly remunerated and granted appropriate Social recognition. However, the sin of these Communists is venial merely and they can be absolved of it through proper consciousness raising discussions couched in the pure and prescriptive i-language which is our common human heritage for reasons Darwin and his ilk were too stupid to understand.

However, unlike Communists, Capitalists are damned eternally because they object to the rape and murder of nuns and other class enemies. They are welcome to read Orwell and Chomsky but can never purge themselves of their Original Sin of having been caught up in the nexus of impure 'extensional' language.

POUM was crushed by Franco, much to everybody's relief because it was utterly shite. A hilarious attempt to revive it after Franco's death was made but it was still shite so nobody voted for it. This is a good example of how the failure of the Media to adopt the pure i-language engendered by the Holy Mutation led to the 'manufacture of consent' to the proposition that POUM, which everybody knew to be shite, was in fact shite. You see, in an intensional language, empirical facts don't matter. Thus 'POUM' for Chomsky and Orwell means 'the good guys who only rape and murder nuns and other class enemies after they have had a proper democratic discussion about why it's such a cool thing to do' because that is its intensional definition. 

Since, empirically, POUM is linked to being utterly shite; the extensional meaning of POUM is 'bunch of nun-raping psychopaths who were and are shite'. Thus, Orwell and Chomsky denounce Capitalist subversion of language such that extensional language, and empirical reality, gains popular acceptation. Nun-raping Communists who don't get a chance to participate in endless discussions about why nun-raping is essential for the attainment of True Socialism, will inevitably end up in cahoots with Capitalists. This is a very bad thing because they may start going easy on the nun-raping and genocide of class enemies- which is like totally not cool.

'After the Dark'- film review.

A bunch of gorgeous teenagers, at an elite International School in Djakarta, are attending their last Philosophy class. Their teacher- himself a bit of a hunk- wants to teach them one final lesson- how philosophy is linked to life.

'Philosophy is to life' one bright young spark suggests, 'As masturbation is to Sex'.

Our Philosophy tutor is not amused. He is preparing his students for REAL LIFE- where ACTIONS have CONSEQUENCES and people need to take RESPONSIBILITY.
So he begins by mentioning things like the trolley problem- should you throw a switch to save five people even if by that action you condemn an innocent to death?

The teacher thinks that 'Act Utilitarianism'- hard headed realism focused only on objective outcomes- militates to the conclusion- 'Yes! You've got to be ruthless. Our Species-Being demands we take responsibility and make the hard choice.' To drive home his point, the teacher involves the students in a series of gendanken- thought experiments- involving a nuclear bunker with only a limited number of places. In order to ensure the survival of the species, the students have to turn on each other and ruthlessly discard those without utilitarian skills or endowments. Hilariously, the poet keeps getting shot in the head the moment he discloses his vocation.

The film 'After the Dark', referenced above, came out a couple of years ago and, oddly, was trashed as incoherent precisely because of its philosophical content.

 However, the fault lies with Philosophy- in particular, the doctrine of Act Utilitarianism, which is utterly nonsensical because it ignores information asymmetry- the fact that you know a lot about what's good for you but can't know as much about other people- and thus has no relevance to a species which evolved by natural selection.

Take the Trolley problem. You know what will make you happier at this moment- the prospect of claiming credit for saving five lives though feeling shitty about having killed an innocent or the prospect of walking away and pretending you saw nothing. If you act on the basis of what makes you happier- fine, you are an Act Utilitarian though all you did was act according to your nature. One might with equal justice say you acted the way God created you to act or your action was determined by your karma or conditioned by the Hegemonic methexis of the Neo-Liberal Succubi of Planet ~X.

Since you have no way to decide if the continued existence of the 5 will yield more aggregate happiness than the continued existence of the one innocent (Economists call this the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of Utility); pure Knightian Uncertainty obtains- no statistical argument has salience unless you aren't in fact an Act Utilitarian at all but rather a Rule Utilitarian who is obliged to turn Knightian Uncertainty into a probability distribution according to some pre-existing convention.

It might be argued- and this is the gedanken used in the film- there are extreme situations where your actions critically impact the entire future of the human race and thus your own possible happiness. Under these circumstances, your happiness is predicated on the survival of your species and so you are bound to act according to the rule adopted by an omniscient (but not clairvoyant) Benthamite planner- which would be to plug in 'objectivist' statistical probabilities so as to remove Knightian Uncertainty and get a tractable constrained optimization type decision problem with a unique 'inter-subjective' solution.

Unfortunately, this argument fails immediately because constrained optimization isn't any good when dealing with existential threats or catastrophic occurrences. Instead, 'regret minimization' gains salience. As a matter of fact, Evolution uses regret minimizing strategies- which conserve diversity (as happens in the film, when the empathic heroine rejects her harsh Utilitarian tutor and chooses likable 'losers' for her bunker-mates)- not 'survival of the fittest' type constrained optimization solutions.

One other point has to do with the notion of a 'wild card'. The Utilitarian tutor, who had actually rigged the game in advance, refers to himself as the 'wild card' but is revealed, in the course of the film, as no such thing. This is because Evolution is proof against 'high impact, low probability' events encountered on the fitness landscape. A meteor hits the earth? Dinosaurs survive as birds. Neanderthals and Denisovans disappear? They are still in our DNA. Earth explodes? Some bits of R.N.A get carried to the far reaches of the Galaxy on the frozen heads of comets.

However, there is one sort of 'wild card' which Evolution has bred into our species. It is that of linking inclusive fitness to eusocial 'costly signals' or Zahavi handicaps. In the film, the unexpected heroism of an average Joe- who sacrifices himself to save the heroine- is one such 'costly signal'.

Another, according to Chomsky, who doesn't believe in God but does believe in Spider-Man, is linked to the indubitable fact that, once upon a time, a hominid was bitten by a radio-active sentient parrot which caused a mutation such that Language in a perfect 'intensional' form came into existence even before it was every actually used. How did the mutation spread?

The Babel's Dawn blog explains Chomsky's theory thus- “Language evolved, and is designed, primarily as an instrument of thought”  Communication, for Chomsky, is secondary and, therefore, there is to be no searching for social evolutionary pressures—neither in terms of group selection nor altruistic kin/gene selection.

A rewiring of the brain, “presumably the effect of some small mutation” occurred in an individual “not a group.” This individual was endowed with “complex thoughts, [superior] planning, [superior] interpretation, and so on.” Over generations this gene spread and dominated “a small breeding group.” Only then would there be a reason for “externalization” of the language capacity, i.e., only then would speech be possible or useful.

… so the [language] capacity would be linked as a secondary process to the sensorimotor system for externalization and interaction, including communication. [p. 23]

The speech that emerged was not a pidgin or protolanguage, but true language.

How does 'a small breeding group' suddenly overwhelm all others simply as result of 'exteriorizing' their perfect internal, intensional, language faculty?
Perhaps, people with the mutation told each other to rape every available female and hunt down and kill every male who lacked it- coz that's the sort of shite goes down once people start getting bit by radio-active parrots or spiders or whatever- kindly watch X Men II to see why all this is perfectly rational and scientific.
Except, there's a teensy weensy problem. If raping and killing hominids involves some risk of harm, then people with the language mutation would lie about having done so. Thus there has first to be a costly signal to make language-use a 'separating equilibrium' (i.e. multivocal) rather than just a univocal roar or noisy fad.

In fact, in any scenario involving the spread of language use, or any symbolic currency or type of information, cheap talk is just noise till a costly signal arises and a 'separating equilibrium' becomes Schelling focal.

The film makes this point explicitly. The costly-signal of altruistic self-sacrifice is rewarded with lots of sex with nubile lasses.
As a group, the teenagers have learned that Philosophy is just a wank but, since they have learned this lesson through something like the evolutionary salience of 'regret minimization', they have also learned that you can have a wank before having a shag later the same day.
Indeed, wanking removes dead or senile sperm, for men, and improves the vaginal environment, for women. But only if you come. That's a costly signal. Utilitarianism is a wank that never jizzes till it starts visualizing the deep bosom'd fitness landscape of regret minimization as opposed to the unclean arsehole of hedonic maximization.
Anyway, that's what I told my K.G class after I made the little shits watch the film with me today. Tomorrow, we will tackle 'Last Tango in Paris' as a critique of Hilary Putnam.

Didier Fassin and the Critique of Humanitarian Reason

Following the end of the Cold War, and during the period Economists called 'the Great Moderation', it was suggested that Humanitarian Reason, as exemplified by organizations like 'Doctors without Borders', had replaced Kantian 'Practical Reason' or Marxist 'Dialectical Reason', or- the joker in the pack- Post-Colonial Reason (i.e. whining about being Black, or Bengali, or being a Black Bengali Belgian or whatever)- and thus we were on the verge of seeing a new kind of Politics- i.e. a new way of wasting other people's money- a new type of Jurisprudence- i.e. a new pretext for confiscating it in advance- take on a vanguard role.

Thus some worthless shithead was bound to write a book called 'the Critique of Humanitarian Reason' same as Satre who wrote 'A Critique of Dialectical Reason' when strung out on speed and Gayatri Spivak who wrote 'A Critique of Post Colonial Reason' while shopping for a handbag.

At first blush, Didier Fassin looks like the man who has pulled it off. He's French; he quotes Benjamin and Agamben and Hannah's Aunt; he's a Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. He must be shite.

Sadly, this is not the case. The fucker is an actual Medical Doctor. He was Vice President of Medicin sans Frontiers. Yes, he quotes Benjamin and Agamben but only because he's a fucking Medic and doesn't realize how stupid this makes him look.

Before examining what he has to say, let me briefly outline the standard, if unspoken, theory of Humanitarian Reason. Essentially one non dissipative way moral entrepreneurs- i.e. shameless people who seek a reputational rent from being holier than thou- compete is by pretending to have saved a lot of souls. If they do this under some rubric other than the purely Humanitarian- i.e. souls are not linked to bodies- they then have to show that some ingroup capitalized goodwill has accrued from their arbitrage. If not, the reverse is the case- i.e. there is rent dissipation for the ingroup- or, at least, a further stratification.

However, actually saving a few lives and acquiring an alethic knowledge base (as opposed to holier-than-thou gobshittery) and genuine administrative skills segments the market such that some moral entrepreneurs have a shadow price (i.e. they have scarce skills) in first-order markets- i.e. they can actually do something to increase the output of valuable goods and services rather than shamelessly pretend that their 'activism' is a 'second order' activity which somehow boosts the supply of the good or service they are demanding, rather than crowding it out. Thus, there is a costly signal in the background which leads to a separating equilibrium.

Modern Nation States found that some, not shameless but unabashed, Moral Entrepreneurs were highly useful- like Joseph Lancaster who used the South Indian model of popular education to boost literacy among the British working class, or Florence Nightingale who compiled better statistics about morbidity among soldiers than the War Office, and thus whose proposed reforms saved the Government money while boosting its tax base- i.e. increasing rents all round.

Furthermore, some noveau riche Technocrats found that Humanitarian Work acted like the old Roman 'Cursus Honorum'- i.e. accomplishing a feat of Disaster Management in a Crisis area permitted one to go on to occupy Public Office.  Herbert Hoover is the paradigmatic example here. His reputation for getting things done enabled him to negotiate minimum wages (and price cartels) in what were previously 'repugnancy market' industries characterized by sweated labor. Unfortunately, his reputation is now mud because he didn't understand the nature of the monetary shock the U.S suffered during his Presidency. In the end, by increasing wage and price stickiness, he contributed a little to the severity of the Great Depression and its legacy of duality in a range of markets.

I suppose I could mention Quisling as the other Head of Govt. who rose thanks to his Humanitarian work- he was Nansen's protege and dealt with the Ukrainian Holodomor. However, clearly, this affected his world view and later, thanks to well meaning Quakers!, he ended up converting to the Nazi ideology.

However, the real point I'm making here is that Humanitarian Work of genuine Utility can be a deceptive signal of suitability for high office because perverse hedging effects in second-order markets- e.g. that of Financial Instruments- can gain salience and thus second-order solutions, which are the reverse of Utilitarian, crowd out such do-gooders as actually do some first-order good.

 More generally, since it had become blindingly obvious that what had saved the Economy was. Game Theoretic, Operations Research based, Total War, Humanitarian Reason as part of Republican Paideia's Cursus Honorum died still born. Thus Joseph Kennedy didn't send his son off to minister to Displaced People in Taiwan or West Berlin. Instead he got him onto Sen. McCarthy's Committee- along with Nixon and Roy Cohn- and the rest, as they say, is history.

Turning to what Dr. Didier Fassin has to say- and let me emphasize once again that this guy started off as an actual Doctor, not a festering haemorrhoid on the arsehole of Academia- we find, that in conformity with the theory of contested rent seeking, that there is- at least in France- a close nexus between the separating equilibrium  of 'moral entrepreneurship', and recruitment into the higher ranks of the Bureaucracy or even Ministerial Office. Given the 'closed', elitist, highly dual, character of the French Economy, this should be no surprise. Equally, it should come as no shock that there is a further separating equilibrium whereby such technically proficient recruits shamelessly start talking worthless Credentialist shite so that aggregate waste of resources is conserved.

“Humanitarianism is not a political issue and it should remain separate from political maneuvering,” asserts Rony Brauman, a former president of MSF. Pointing to the renaissance of nongovernmental humanitarianism during the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when communism’s star was waning, he even sees in this new configuration a sort of historical fluid mechanics based on the principle of the communicating vessels: “It is as if, during these periods when the ideological tide is going out, humanitarian action comes to occupy the space left vacant by politics.”
'Agamben offers a more radical version of this thesis, suggesting that “the separation of politics and humanitarianism that we are witnessing today represents the last phase of the separation of human rights from civil right.” For the Italian philosopher, the image of the refugee becomes “the most significant sign of bare life in our era,” and he sees the refugee camp as the “biopolitical paradigm.” This being the case, humanitarianism, insofar as it distances itself from the figure of the nation-state, abandons the political field.
 However, I believe that the contemporary world does not become more intelligible viewed in these terms, and one may doubt whether there exists, in one’s own society or in any society, a space empty of politics or even a space outside politics—all the more given that these interpretations relegate the dominated and the excluded to this depoliticized space, leaving the political space to the dominant and the included. They are thus doubly problematic—first empirically, for all investigations show that on the contrary, forms of political life continue to arise even in the camps, and second ethically, since this reading appears to reinforce the domination and exclusion by denying the possibility of a political life to those who are subjected to them in practice.
 Other avenues therefore need to be explored. In fact everything suggests that rather than become separate, humanitarianism and politics are tending to merge—in governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental spheres. In France at least three former presidents or vice presidents of MSF have become ministers; some have been elected to political office, others have entered the civil service at high levels—not only in the traditional aid sector, but also in health and social welfare
 Conversely, former ministers of social affairs or of health have become presidents of Action contre la faim (Action Against Hunger) and the French Red Cross. Thus one is seeing a humanitarianization of national health and social policy and a politicization of humanitarian organizations. 
Okay, the good Doctor made a mistake by reading Agamben, but then he is French so allowances should be made. What he isn't saying- and this is the nigger in the woodpile- is that, during the 'Great Moderation' Western Economists came to see Refugees as a good thing- they freed up a Supply Side constraint. They couldn't actually come out and say 'we need more dusky foreigners desperate to drive our cabs and look after our infants and Alzheimer afflicted elders'. So they tugged their forelock to some supposedly Kantian Categorical Imperative to let dusky people do shitty jobs so cost-push inflation would be contained.
That's it. That's the whole story. Our good Doctor presents all the evidence but can't draw the only tenable conclusion. Second Order Moral Entrepreneurship- including the Agamben Availability Cascade- crowds out First Order, Utilitarian, separating equilibrium Moral Entrepreneurship because, once the Business Cycle reasserts itself, Second Order solutions- i.e. the creation of stratified rents- reduce Uncertainty and freeze up the malignancy of hedging effects transmitted by Second Order markets.

Why can't there be a 'Critique of Humanitarian Reason'? After all, Seyla Benhabib gave a talk to the Germans with that title a couple of years ago. What's stopping her dashing off a thousand page tome? The answer is that Frau Merkel has now pulled that particular rug from under Academia's feet. Furthermore, in the age of You Tube, the Refugees have increased Hirschman 'Voice' and 'Exit' whereas the Academo-bureaucratic dicks are already calculating their redundancy packages or golden parachutes.

Fassin, poor credulous fool, didn't get the memo that Levinasian alterity, like Subaltern Studies, is shite. He thinks there are two types of lives- one's which can recount their own story and others which can only be recounted by others. This is shit. I am a starving Black Man, who judging by my book sales, can't recount any sort of story to fucking save my life, but I just used another starving, not Black, but Nepali origin man, as illiterate and inarticulate as myself, as a sort of human selfie stick. The picture he sent to my local tandoori was sufficient to elicit an immediate humanitarian response. A young Pakistani gentleman, not necessarily starving but modishly emaciated, will deliver my standard order of sag-aloo and garlic naan in thirty minutes or less. No money will change hands thanks to the good folks at Paypal.

That's Humanitarian Reason achieving Pareto Efficiency right there. All it needs to become operational is a Second Order market for Credit- i.e. Belief, Faith, doxastic commitment, semantic normativity- call it what you will.
The conditions under which this happens are
1) the existence of at least one uncorrelated asymmetry giving rise to a separating equilibrium- e.g. some people being able to cook sag-aloo and others literally starving because they haven't that ability
and
2) enough turbulent flow in the underlying dynamics to canalize latent liquidity
Or, more succinctly, Humanitarian Reason is unproblematic so long as Human frailty is tolerated- i.e. rent dissipation is not total.

Doubting Thomas & Thy Mantrin Maharaj

Your Literalism bankrupts utterly & latterly drives The Son to self-slay

Is ours alone the catastrophe of endless cataphoric delay?

Your Credit's Golgotha's the Gedankenlosigkeit Cemetery of over-extension.

Till its uncorellated asymmetry works that sentence's suspension!

Envoi-      

Prince! thus did thy Mantrin Maharaj with Doubting Thomas dispute

So savoury the roast seed of His bitterest fruit!