Following Wally Klinck’s suggestion, I have visited the ALOR site and carefully read Eric Butler’s 45-page essay, “Releasing Reality”.
As a consequence I now understand several things that have been vaguely puzzling to me. 1. Bill Ryan’s suspicion that Louis Kelso borrowed his best ideas from Douglas without attribution; 2. The belief in both systems that life need not be contingent on enslavement to toil; 3. The link of ecological movements to Social Credit; 4. The inclination to conspiracy theories manifested in Social Crediters I have encountered over the years; 5. But most of all, the source of difficulty in spreading the economic analysis and its implied policies. A favorite phrase to encapsulate Social Credit is that it is “the policy of a philosophy”. On the presumption that Butler has done a creditable job at expounding the philosophy, I can see that the economic and financial policies being batted around in this forum do have some consistency with the philosophy. I am less certain that the philosophy is an inevitable component of the policies or of the economic analysis on which they appear to be based. I hope that that is the case, for otherwise the endeavor to promote Social Credit is doomed. The philosophy outlined in Butler’s essay is more accurately described as the romantic worldview and intellectual appetite of a crank. To be accorded the label of philosophy, a worldview should reflect continual effort by its proponents to adjust it to truth. Like the most enthusiastic proponents of “binary economics”, Butler’s criterion of truth seems to be strength of conviction and the volume by which the belief is asserted. His essay is riddled with anthropological notions that were already long obsolete by 1979. The values reflected in Butler’s philosophy are mostly ones that are embraced by all of the world’s great religious and moral traditions. It therefore seems quite unnecessary to take the sectarian view that Social Credit can only be forwarded by Christians. Efforts to clean up Douglas’ economic theories to make them palatable or interesting to mainstream economists will not take the policies very far unless at the same time there is a rigorous scouring of the “philosophy”. This discussion needs a serious anthropologist and a front-rank Jewish philosopher. ===== Please address return mail to me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@mail-archive.com EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html ==^================================================================
