Why VIII

by John Weyland

Overview

This book contains 115 essays. They are all meant to say something new about the subject dealt with.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504949262
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	10/30/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	260
File size:	290 KB

Read an Excerpt

Why VIII

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By John Weyland

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2015 John Weyland
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5049-4707-7

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CHAPTER 1

Arguments are not presented properly.

Consequently, they cannot be discussed properly.

Arguments should be reduced to their essential propositions.

These propositions should be presented one-by-one in their logical order.

If any one of these propositions is found to be false, the argument fails.

A presentation like this cannot be read in the normal way.

The reader has to stop after reading each propositions and ask himself if he finds it true or false. Only after he has decided can he go on.

The presentation should be as brief as possible. The human memory has only a very limited capacity.

St. Thomas Acquinas presented arguments somewhat like this.

But this does not serve as a good example because the arguments were false, resting as they did on a belief in the supernatural.

Euclid is another example of this kind of presentation. It is still used in mathematics. Unfortunately, the arguments have been reduced to symbols, which are not accessible to the general public.

General argumentation is in a very sorry state.

People think they are arguing when they are expressing their feelings.

Feelings have their place, but it is not in arguing.

Activists have found they are most effective when they appeal to feelings, so that is what they do.

Feelings preceded intelligence in human development. They are interfior to intelligence.

But feelings tell human beings what they want to do. It is hard for them not to do that, even when intelligence is the better means.

CHAPTER 2

Written material is not to be trusted.

The public has too much trust in written material.

This dates back to childhood.

Children are told to learn what is in textbooks.

They assume this is true.

Just as they assume what adults tell them is true.

As they grow older they find out some of what is in books is disputed.

But they retain an inclination to believe what gets into print is believable.

They go through life like this. And consequently get misled frequently.

It is a revelation to ask what measures are taken to insure printed material is true.

Next to none.

Authors must get well-known facts correct. Otherwise they would make laughingstocks of themselves. But that leaves them with endless opportunities for misrepresentation.

And they are tempted by misrepresentation. They have causes. And proponents of causes want to present them favorably. They have other motives for misrepresentation.

There are no controls on writing. No punishments. Except for libel. And that enters into material rarely. And stops being a cause for legal action once the person involved is dead.

So readers have to be critical. They cannot read the way they did in school.

This calls for a general wariness. The author knows more about the situation than they do. So usually they are not sure and can only doubt. But doubt they must. They are such easy victims.

CHAPTER 3

Organizations are made up of people but they do not act like people.

Organizations are perfectly selfish. People are not.

Organizations spare people the problem their imaginations cause them.

Imagination cause people to have sympathy for others.

Others outside their immediate family. Where the sympathy they feel serves a survival purpose and is instinctual.

Imagination cause people to have sympathy for others because it enables them to put themselves in the place of others. It not only enables them to do that. It causes them to do that whether they want to or not.

This is a problem for people because they can find themselves in situations where their selfishness and sympathy are in conflict. As a matter of fact, they find themselves in this situation whenever they deal with the outside world. With time they harden themselves, but the conflict remains.

When people act for organizations, they know they have no choice. The rule of all organizations is to put their interests first. And act accordingly. This spares people a sense of responsibility for what they are doing.

The usefulness of this arrangement has not been generally recognized. Because of it people are not as troubled by sympathy as they otherwise would be.

CHAPTER 4

Advocates of workers persuaded the public that conditions in industrialized countries were much worse than they really were.

Any look at these countries shows that they became steadily better off once industrialization started. Compare conditions in any of them at the end of the 18th century with conditions at the end of the 20th century. There was a great change for the better during those two centuries.

The public was taken in by the workers' organizations. They naturally wanted the public to side with them so they could get their demands met.

The false impression spread by the workers' organizations was taken up by the writers who wrote on the subject.

Writers naturally sided with the workers against the factory owners.

The poorest workers did live in miserable conditions. They were there for all to see. While the owners lived in luxury and flaunted their wealth. The writers' sympathy was bound to be with the workers.

The lot of those who did moderately well did not attract attention. Anybody could see their prosperity in the cities that grew up in industrialized countries. But this was not as dramatic as the poverty of the slums.

Did any of these writers ask why the workers kept coming in from the country if conditions were so terrible. The answer was obvious. Conditions in the countryside were even more terrible. A poor life in the cities was better than an even poorer life--and perhaps no life at all--in the country.

The cause of the misery was the runaway population increase. Which industrialization caused because it enabled larger numbers to survive. But that meant many of them at the lowest level, which attracted the most attention.

It would be thought that people would look around them and see the truth of the situation. But many of them did not.

CHAPTER 5

Colonialism was the only way to develop black African countries.

It was stopped too soon.

Which explains why the African countries have remained so backward.

The colonial powers did a disservice to these countries by yielding to childish arguments and withdrawing from them after World War II.

Black Africa did not have the capital to develop itself.

The childish arguments take no account of capital.

But capital has to come from somewhere is a country is to be developed.

There was no development in black Africa when the colonial powers began taking over.

Businessmen from the colonial powers could not go in on their own.

The natives would have robbed and killed them.

They had to be given protection by their governments.

This was relatively cheap to do because of the great advantage colonial powers had in weapons. A few of their soldiers could defeat great numbers of natives. Subduing a black Africa country was easy.

The colonial powers did not make a lot out of black Africa. All it had to offer was natural resources, and it did not have that much of those.

The colonial powers went into black Africa more as a gamble on the future than anything else. They were afraid they would be losing something that would later prove to be valuable.

After World War II the natives trained by missionaries came of age. And were in a perfect position to take over. The colonial powers were not getting much out of their possessions. The cost was probably greater than the gain. Their own people, taken in by the childish arguments, were against colonialism. The colonial powers left.

This was disastrous for black Africa. The money that would have gone to investments went to politicians instead. It made them rich, but it did not make the countries rich.

CHAPTER 6

The enemies of Germany wanted the world to think that the Germans knew about and approved of the treatment of the Jews.

This is not true. Only a few did.

It was natural for the enemies of the Germans to want to vilify them. This is normal behavior toward enemies. But time enough has passed to give more attention to the truth, which has been slighted for so long.

Historically, what is interesting is how Hitler tried to keep his treatment of the Jews secret. The popular version in the countries that fought against him was that his propaganda campaign had turned the Germans against the Jews and made them support what came to be called the Holocaust.

This was not so. The propaganda campaign--plus previous history--had made many of the Germans anti-Jewish. But not to the point where they wanted Jews killed wholesale.

There is ample proof for this.

Hitler never publicized the concentration camps. He kept them secret to the very end.

He would not have done this if he had thought the Germans supported the killing of the Jews. It was because he believed they did not that he maintained silence.

Skeptics will say that although the government did not disclose its programs against the Jews, the German population must have known about them. The guards and others who ran the concentration camps must have talked to their families and friends. Word would have spread.

Those who had not lived in totalitarian states find it hard to believe how they can terrify and control their populations. They think it is impossible because they have not experienced it.

Spreading any kind of information the government does not want spread is a crime. During a war often a crime punished by death. Informers are everywhere. In this situation people do not talk. They do not repeat what they heard. If they hear anything.

Defeatism was forbidden in Germany. Defeatism being admitting that Germany was losing the war. Toward the end everybody knew Germany was losing the war. Evidence was everywhere. But nobody said Germany was losing the war.

So while in other countries a government's silence about the concentration camps would not have prevented their existence from being known, it could have in Germany. It was quite possible the overwhelming majority of Germans did not know about the killing of the Jews. They might have had their suspicions, but no more than that.

CHAPTER 7

"I think, therefore I am."

These are probably the five most famous words in philosophy.

They are wrong.

Philosophy was playing around with a lot of issues at the time Descartes came out with this pronouncement.

Philosophy really could not do much because it had to defer to Christianity.

Which is not philosophic.

So to give themselves something to do--that they could do--philosophers picked issues that did not come into conflict with Christianity.

One of them was whether human beings existed or not.

Christianity certainly thought human beings existed. But the Church considered Descartes' pronouncement too esoteric to bother with and did not go after him about it. (As the Church did Galileo.)

Actually, the "I think, therefore I am" established nothing. Human beings were in the same state after Descartest said this as they had been before.

That is one count against it. The other is--to repeat--it is wrong.

Human beings do not exist because they think. They exist because they have a consciousness that is separate from existence.

Other animals do not have a consciousness like this. They are conscious only of what they sense.

Thinking is one activity of the human consciousness. But it is only one. There are others. Whatever the second human consciousness can imagine.

It would seem that anybody would realize this. We all have a consciousness whose content we can observe.

CHAPTER 8

Classical economics paid too much attention to diminishing returns and too little attention to innovation.

Because of their belief in diminishing returns classical economists did not foresee the great future capitalism would have. They expected things to get worse, not better. That's why economics was called the dismal science.

The thought behind diminishing returns was that a piece of land would produce increasing returns to start with but as more capital and labor were applied to it the returns would start decreasing and keep decreasing. This was supposed to hold for any kind of production.

Classical economists paid little attention to innovation. Diminishing returns are easy to see. They are easy to imagine. So they got a lot of attention.

Classical economists paid little attention to innovation. Innovation cannot be seen before it happens. It is difficult to imagine. Because if it could be imagined it would be made.

In the 19th century, when classical economics was developed, there was lots of innovation around. That is what made the Industrial Revolution. But people in general, including classical economists, tended to think all the innovation that would take place already had taken place. They could not see anymore innovation coming because it was not there to be seen.

In the 19th century most products that were produced had been produced for a long time. Some of the methods of production were new but not the products themselves.

This was a time of competition in prices, not in products. Farm A grew wheat. Farm B grew wheat. Factory A made tea kettles. Factory B made tea kettles. Competition drove prices down so that companies made only enough profit to keep them going.

Companies were not happy with this. They preferred to produce products that were different from other products. Then they could get patents on those products and have a monopoly. They still had to compete with other producers for the money that was being spent. But they did not have to compete in prices alone. They could made more money than just enough to keept them going.

This situation caused innovation to happen.

Farmers were not able to do this. Wheat was wheat. But manufacturers could.

In the 20th century more and more products were different from other products. Or were made to seem different by advertising. Innovations were the big factor, not diminishing returns.

Classical economics did not work in this situation. All the close reasoning and certainty were gone.

Economics would have been in a sorry conditions. It could not cope. But luckily for economics, although unluckily for the world, the Great Depression arrived.

With the Great Depression governments intervened in their economies. Economics had a new subject: government intervention. That is what economics has devoted itself to ever since.

CHAPTER 9

Jesus had to become a redeemer because he was executed.

The execution took Jesus and his disciples by surprise.

It was not as if he had been a hunted fugitive.

Jesus had started out as a messiah.

He was going to save the Jews.

But he could not very well have been a messiah if he was executed.

So his followers turned him into a redeemer.

As a redeemer he died to save sinners.

So this gave his death a purpose.

Otherwise it would have made him look like a failure.

But it did not make much sense.

Jesus had predicted that the world would end soon.

Within the lifetime of people living then.

That meant there was only a short period during which Jesus could function as a redeemer.

Once the world ended there would be no more sinning.

Even during the short period left for sinning how redemption by Jesus was to work was not explained.

The Last Judment had already been described.

That did not allow for any redemption of sins.

The dead had either led good lives of deserved heaven.

Or had led bad lives and deserved hell.

Christianity eventually came up with a scheme to fit redemption in.

This was forgiveness of sins by the priesthood acting for Jesus.

But Jesus had not anticipated this scheme. He never said anything about it. It was invented later so he could be called the redeemer with some semblance of sense.

CHAPTER 10

Profits do not only measure how much businesses make. They measure how much value businesses add to total production for the general public.

Profits have been attacked as theft. They are the opposite. Businesses benefit from them. The general public benefits from them.

There are all these resources. Businesses combine them. Profits show how much those combinations are worth to the general public. The more than are worth, the greater the profits. The greater the profits, the more the general public has gotten.

So profits can be used to measure how well businesses are doing. And they can be used to measure how well the the general public is doing.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Why VIII by John Weyland. Copyright © 2015 John Weyland. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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