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Opiate of the Masses

Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses. Nonsense I say. The true opiate of the masses is prosperity, not religion. The United States has experienced decades of unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, most people have lived their whole lives accustomed to what is actually a historically rare era of unusual affluence. Now, the 2008 […]

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Nov 4, 2011 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Autobiographical Tagged With: addiction, civilization, pleasure v pain, prosperity, wall street

Democracy as Myth

All social species need their ‘alpha-male’ for governance even if that’s the queen of a beehive. Being a more complex than bees, human governance is multi-layered and hierarchical to varying degrees. Indeed, the more sophisticated the culture/civilization, the more layers—the more hierarchical. Conversely, our ancestor hunter-gatherers had few, if any, layers — no courts, parliaments, […]

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Mar 13, 2011 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Observations Tagged With: civilization, freedom, government, hunter gatherer, power, understanding, wall street

I understand, but do I know?

What is the difference between understanding and knowing? Perhaps chapter 70 alludes to this… My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice. Our cleverness at understanding far exceeds our ability to know intuitively what we […]

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Nov 4, 2009 by Carl Abbott
Filed Under: Autobiographical Tagged With: gardening, knowing, understanding, wall street

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