The Acid Test? The 2 types of people.

In my emerging scheme to organise the world that I do not understand there seem to be two types of people. There are those who are rather unkindly by some called "sheep" in that they follow herd mentalities. They view things in "relative" terms, are satisfied with realitive wealth (i.e. status symbols), and seek personal identity relatively through status and power over other people in the herd. I am not one of these so it has taken me a long time to understand this mentality (I am not criticising it). If everyone things that something is gold, then it may as well be gold.

The other mentality is skeptical. A lot of philosophers, religious people and scientists are like - or should be - like this. Proof is required and while it may be illusive, there is faith in a Truth or an Absolute. It does not matter what others think - The Truth is out there for each of us to find for ourselves. All people are equal in their ability to perceive truth and all people are measured equally by The Absolute. This is what I have referred to before as The Law. Thus in this view all of society and all people may be wrong so the herd has no value. Wealth and value is not determined by what people think. If people say it is gold, the skeptic is not interested until it has been placed in acid and shown not to react.

I am the skeptic so this blog has been an expression of that point of view, and a gradual realisation of its opposite. Both points of view exist in the world and most people are an blend of the two. But, I am gradually presenting an extreme view in this blog that the "sheep" mentality has no place in this world. We need look no further than the stock markets where the sheep have made a lot of money following trends, only to be "suprised" that what they thought was gold was actually pyrites and fizzes away in acid. Since no one tested CDOs and AAA rated investments why is anyone suprised? I am a gold-bug to the extent that (assuming ETF allocations are honest) I actually own acid-tested gold (Au) - I know what I have bought.

What is worse is that there is a variety of person who is a wolf. They prey on sheep. Ramp up the markets, ramp up the houseprices. Drive sheep into investments with dreams of unproven returns. Then when the herd is all packed tight you can take your pickings. In a way I have sadly been doing this in gold as I explained - it seems the stock market does not operate on fundamentals but on the way the herd of sheep sees the fundamentals. But really I'm part of the herd, because the real wolves are walking out of this mess with tidy pensions and bonuses etc.

But all of that is just financial markets. Imagine how much of the junk in our heads is just CDOs! Most of us have had rubbish dumped into our heads from our parents, collegues, schools, religions, politicians, books, blogs ;-) etc. How much has been given the acid test?

Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see. (Dinah Mulock Craik definitely quoted before in this blog).

In a post-modern world the very "idea" of an acid-test has been threatened. Everything says the Structuralist is a product of language. But apply the self-reference hypothesis (shall I call is SRH until the day it might become the SR theorem) and how can a language make such a statement about itself and it be meaningful? If everything is constructed by language then it is a construct of language that everything is constructed by language - this is vacuous, the words have no meaning.

What it means to say that something is constructed by language is that everything can be represented by a construct in "language". And this presupposes that we know what language is before we start. We are in a hermaneutic circle where we have a "given" phenomenology which while it can be analysed (deconstructed) into language structures is a "given" independent of its analysis. Whatever "form" we want to consider this world of phenomena in, one thing we can be certain of is that it cannot be language!

The idea that there is no world outside language is falacious. To confuse matters however the idea that there "is a world outside language" is also falacious - since you can't construct it in language. But it is a logical necessity (in Kantian terms) deducible from the SRH - I suppose a kind of "differance" if I get my Derrida right.

So it is useless to claim that the acid-test for gold itself hasn't been acid tested. This would be the Structuralist tom-foolery of a trickster who sort to sell you fools-gold. As Nietzsche would argue, we may disagree on the details of the test - but you do accept that there is an acid-test! And it would be foolish to believe in a particular acid just because it said acid on the bottle. Add pyrites to water and no bubbles - yet it isn't gold - for it isn't the acid test. And it would be foolish to believe in the acid-test just because you were told it. Maybe the same trickster might spread disinformation that the true test is that real gold is lighter than fake gold. Like Descartes where do you start? Well that is the divine madness that sets each man on his destiny. Eventually we will find that it matters not where you start but where you end: which it turns out is, for each of us, the same end.

And I see as I write that there is a resolution to my opening distinction of types of people. Gold you see has no absolute value. It is only because the herd seeks it that we seek it. Acid-test or no acid-test does it matter if it is gold or pyrites? If it were an apple however and we were hungry then here lies a more fundamental acid-test. Can we really start with human life as I have tried in this blog? I believe Gotama Buddha did when he realised the middle-path. Not to indulge nor starve the body - feed it what it "needs" is all we need to be concerned with. Liberation is not about the attainments of being full or hungry but the freedom from either extreme. Lent begins soon in which Jesus took the demanding path of ignoring the physical. I don't believe he sort to starve to death, just to be rid of the daily annoyance of attending to the body. What Worlds lie there when we no longer have the endless childcare of our own body to fill our days?

If you extract the Librae (£ stands for L) from Gold you have God.

Maybe alchemy, but the removal of the measure from the world leaves us God. Protagoras proclaimed that the measure was Man. But this is the source of all evils as men start to become laws unto themselves and we rapidly have a billion laws - like redundent staff left penniless and disgraced banking bosses with huge payouts (at least 2 laws at work here). A Structuralist is just a more subtle Protagoras. The measure of all things can only be G-d. And he who takes a name for G-d or a language in which to write it or think it doesn't understand what this means! God is your measure, and the measure of what you write, read and think. God is even the measure of yourself. It is because of G-d that we are each ourselves, our friend and our enemy - at once, individually and together as One. G-d is in each of us and between each of us. God makes the distance between us and the closeness. God is each and all. God is the acid-test.