Good Evening Friends,

Believe me, I didn't want to do this. I tried my best to avoid it. I'd give all the change in my pockets not to have to do this. But it simply can't be avoided.

Later on we're going to have to talk about reason. What is reason? Do human beings actually have reason? If not, can we acquire reason?

We shan't use an elaborate definition of reason. We are going to define the term like this...
Reason: the characteristic of being both persuasive and persuadable. There must exist the possiblity of being persuaded (not on the basis of "facts," necessarily because there is so little agreement, oftentimes, about what a fact is [we're talking about social reality]; but rather we will be concerned with what I shall call patterns of experienced social reality by the variously disadvantaged social and economic groups, suggesting, of course, that there is something wrong with the social reality.

In addressing the question of whether or not human beings have reason, we are going to think about how "paradigm shifts" occur. I doubt we'll actually be able to answer the question. But then again, who knows? Insight may come from surprising places. Perhaps the Democratic pollster, Mark Penn, with his theories of "micro-trends," may be of assistance to us. You never can tell.

As we do this you should also keep in mind the remarks I cited from a Noam Chomsky book, which cited the remarks of Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman - who talked about how economic orthodoxy is created. Conventional wisdom is not stable, he said, but rather like that of a herd mentality.

The question we'll have to pose is: Do human beings, in general, achieve their worldview by thinking or reacting (being "reactionary," which I will argue is a synonym for reflexive, automatic class solidarity of the bourgeoisie. This is an area of inquiry we might call moral philosophy, I suppose.There is a related matter that come from legal philosophy.

The question we will ask is: What is stealing?

Friends, if I've said this once, I've said it a thousand times... In the glorious novel, The Godfather by the immortal Mario Puzo, Godfather Corleone said to his son, Santino, "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." And in Puzo's novel, The Last Don, Don Clericuzio sent his eldest son, Giorgio, to a fancy high-priced business school with the expressed purpose of learning the intricacies of stealing money while staying within the confines of the law.

To what extent is capitalism a system of lawyers stealing money with briefcases? Is this what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession?"

You know, pre-Castro Cuba under Batista should be considered every bit as much a "neoliberal" project as Chile under Pinochet in the seventies. T.J. English wrote an excellent book on this called Havana Nocturne: How the Mob owned Cuba... and Then Lost It to the Revolution (2007, 2008).

Under the heading of what can only be called "It Takes One to Know One," English wrote:

In the early thirties " A new kind of Mob was born, based more on the philosophy of robber barrons like Cornelius Vanderbuilt, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and the Rockefellers than on rural Mafia societies back in Sicily. Luciano, Lansky, and a few others in New York were seen as the masterminds of this dramatic new direction and were therefore established as prominent members of the Commission, a governing body composed of like-minded Mob leaders from Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and just about anywhere else where the American underworld enforced its will" (English, T.J. Havana Nocturne. p.15).

Suggested translation: The Mafia modeled themselves on the "robber barrons," like Ford and the rest of them, because the former (the Mob) thought the latter ("robber barron") were better thieves than they were, because the big industrialists had the aura of legality around themselves. They were part of the system.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

By the way, we'll pick up with finance as an organism likened to an alien, intelligent slug-like creature that moves from host to host, next time.