Would Diogenes be successful in finding an honest person in the Halls of Congress or the enclaves of the Executive Branch, where the desire to get and keep power overwhelms any sense of obligation to grasp and speak the truth?
Recommended reading: Graduate school professors of macroeconomics should assign the reading of CWL 3, Chapter 2, Subsections 2.2.3 “Classification and Correlation”; 2.2.4 “Differential Equations”; 2.2.5 “Invariance”; and 2.2.6 “Summary”. And the professors should require a report on the relevance of those sections to scientific Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics. Wrestling with Lonergan’s presentations will help the students appreciate the mind and learning that Lonergan brought to Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics.
I’m told that Burton Malkiel’s stock-market acumen (A Random Walk Down Wall Street) has been exceeded as to excellence only by his excellence in declamation at Boston Latin School – something about Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and a “mewling infant.” Arma virumque cano …
We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America: We acknowledge as the exemplary and final causes of this Union of States the supreme act of understanding and its unity and identity with ultimate intelligibility; and we acknowledge as the unitary principle of this Union of States the unity and identity of this most supreme act of understanding with the primary Truth, the simple One, the Lovable Good, and the uncreated Light.
Which is the better principle of government? – The freedom of worship and speech, and the right to private property for the sake of one’s self-development, as stated in Centesimus Annus, or the totalitarian tyranny, closed-mindedness, controlled media, oppression and labor camps of a socialist-communist government? Re Centisumus Annus click here, and re the perils of Marxism click here.
… the materialist is condemned by his own principles to be no more that a manipulator. He will apply to human beings the stick-and-carrot treatment that the Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner advocates under the name reinforcement. He will maintain with Marx that cultural attitudes are the byproduct of material conditions, and so he will bestow upon those subjected to communist power the salutary conditions of a closed frontier, clear and firm indoctrination, controlled media of information, a vigilant secret police, and the terrifying threat of labor camps. [CWL 15, 104]
Re higher compensation being a reward for invention, installation, and maintenance of higher systems which benefit all persons:
(CWL 3, 266/291-92) … we have noted the aesthetic liberation of human experience from the confinement of the biological pattern and the further practical liberation of human living that is brought about inasmuch as man grasps possible schemes of recurrence and fulfills by his own action the conditions for their realization. Now we must proceed to the root of these liberations. They rest on two facts. On the one hand, inquiry and insight are not so much a higher system as a perennial source of higher systems, so that human living has as its basic task in reflecting on systems and judging them, deliberating on their implementation and choosing between possibilities. On the other hand, there can be in man a perennial source of higher systems because the materials of such systematization are not built in his constitution. For an animal to begin a new mode of living, there would be needed not only a new sensibility, but also a new organism. An animal species is a solution to the problem of living, so that a new solution would be a new species; for an animal to begin to live in quite a new fashion, there would be required not only a modification of its sensibility but also a modification of the organism that the sensibility systematizes. But in man a new department of mathematics, a new viewpoint in science, a new civilization, a new philosophy, has its basis, not in a new sensibility but simply in a new manner of attending to data and of forming combinations of combinations of data. Seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling, imagining and feeling, are events with a corresponding neural basis; but inquiring and understanding have their basis, not in a neural structure, but in a structure of psychic contents. Sensation supposes sense organs; but understanding is not another type of sensation with another sense organ; it operates with respect to the content of sensation and imagination; it represents a still further degree of freedom. … Intelligence is the source of a sequence of systems that unify and relate otherwise coincidental aggregates of sensible contents. Just as the famous experiments on sea urchins reveal the immanent direction of the aggregation of aggregates of aggregates, so the constructive and repressive censorship exercised preconsciously by intelligence reveals a still higher immanent direction that controls the sensible and imaginative contents that are to emerge into consciousness. ¶ Man, then, is at once explanatory genus and explanatory species. He is explanatory genus, for he represents a higher system beyond sensibility. But that genus is coincident with species, for it is not just a higher system but a source of higher systems. In man there occurs the transition from the intelligible to the intelligent. (CWL 3, 266/291-92)
The Learning Lonergan Brought to Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics