Author: Richard Melson

Then and Now Thinking: Facile Comparisons Lead to “Concept-Fraud”

The economist Arthur Laffer recently received an award from President Trump. Laffer wants to deceptively “cartoonize” reality by arguing that as taxes “go to 100%” (i.e., confiscation), output will go to zero and conversely as taxes “go to zero” output will go to “infinity.”

This is an example of playing with “bad infinities.”

This Laffer argument has been naively compared to David Hume’s economics:

“Back in the eighteenth century, the wise Scot David Hume anticipated David Hume in these 1756 words of sooth:

“‘Exorbitant taxes, like extreme necessity, destroy industry by producing despair; and even before they reach this pitch, they raise raise the wages of the laborer and manufacturer, and heighten the price of all commodities. An attentive disinterested legislature will observe the point where the emolument ceases and the prejudice begins.’”

(David Hume, Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein, Edinburgh, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1955, page 87)

(quoted in Greed is Not Enough: Reaganomics, Robert Lekachman, Pantheon Books, 1982, page 49)

Reaganomics and Laffer-nomics have nothing to do with David Hume and facile “then-and-now” comparisons, all of which are false since the “anarcho-capitalism” of Reagan/Thatcher views has noting to do with Hume. 

Thatcher said: “properly speaking, there is no such thing as society. There are only individuals.”

But Hume believes the exact opposite as a socially conscious brand of conservative:

“Hume cherished the structures that sustain our social life. He was in this respect deeply conservative, in the good sense of the conservationist of the shapes and forms which these institutions have taken.

“And of course he was deeply mistrustful of any scatterbrained project of doing better, by promoting anarchism or society without government or law, or dismantling the institutions of contract or private property. 

“He would have had absolutely no patience whatsoever with the contemporary takeover of social ideals by monetary and market values.

“When free-marketeers say that there is no such thing as society, they are denying the very arches needed to sustain contracts, law, government, and markets in the first place, and then knavery loses its stigma, and we may well expect the worst, as their practice becomes ‘answerable’  to their ‘speculation.’”

(quoted in How to Read Hume, Simon Blackburn, Granta, 2008, page 70)

Deceivers make duplicitous linkages between hallowed names and ideas of the past and the dangerously “tricky” present.

Thus, Hume-to-Laffer linkages and trajectories makes no sense whatsoever. This is an example of “then-and-now thinking” used for “concept-fraud.”

Towards a More Cosmopolitan Education

Harvard University Press published in 2017, Jottings under Lamplight, an anthology of Lu Xun’s (Chinese: 魯迅; died in 1936) essays.  Lu Xun was the father of modern Chinese literature.

One of them is “Lessons from the Movies” from 1933:

“But when I went to the movies in Shanghai, I found that I had become one of the ‘lowly Chinese.’  In the galleries above were the white people and the rich people, and downstairs sat rows of middle and lower-class ‘descendants of the Han,’ while on the screen white soldiers fought battles, white gentlemen made fortunes, white maidens got married and white heroes had adventures, all to the admiration, envy, and terror of the audience, who knew that they themselves could do none of these things.”

(“Lessons from the Movies” essay in Jottings under Lamplight, Lu Xun, edited by Eileen Cheng et al, 2017, page 271, Harvard University Press) [first published September 11, 1933].

Only white people seem to “do things” in the world and to have agency, plannable lives, rationality, historical roles, defined stories. This is of course unsustainable.

This Lu Xun essay reminds us of the classic work of the black leader and “prophet,” William E. B. Du Bois.

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois:

W.E.B. Du Bois said, on the launch of his groundbreaking 1903 treatise The Souls of Black Folk, “for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”—a prescient statement. Setting out to show to the reader “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century,” Du Bois explains the meaning of the emancipation, and its effect, and his views on the role of “the leaders of his race.”

Thus, Lu Xun and Du Bois agree, seeing the “color-line” where non-white people seem marginalized “forever” as a global apartheid that is not sustainable.

This will give the student a more wide-angle view of world history.

Knowledge Puzzles of “Far-Fetched Questions”

Heidegger (died in 1976), the German thinker (and Hannah Arendt‘s lifelong boyfriend) is walking along somewhere in France with Jean Beaufret, the French poet-philosopher, and wants to “delimit” what topics should be admitted and discussed and manage to dismiss other kinds of topics.  Heidegger says, “we do not need to ask what the connection is between Newton’s laws and the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’ or between Carnot’s Principle and the sign on the shop across the street, ‘This Store is Now Shuttered.’”

In Gulliver’s Travels, the satirical masterpiece, we find a scene where the Academy of Projectors (mad scientists profs.) are trying to make cucumbers out of moonbeams and have other crazy projects.  The Academy is described in the Laputa/Lagado “flying islands” section of the satire.  Again, we grin when we read these lines in Jonathan Swift and marvel at his inventive genius. It’s not quite as simple to pin down exactly why Heidegger’s or Swift’s examples of “crazy questions or projects” are so comically nutty.  Clearly, there are experiences we all agree on as being indicative of insanity or are at the outer limits, perhaps, of Quixotism (Don Quixote).  If a person tells you he or she plans to go to the roof and reach up and put the moon in their pocket and then go the county Registrar of Deeds and declare it their property, we see multiple impossibilities and figure the person is joking, drunk or insane.

On the other hand, many questions or projects that would seem silly at one point seem less silly now: an example is, say, bringing “dinosaurs” back via DNA “resurrections.”

Thus the “knowledge quest” and its parameters is evolving in strange ways, on top of all the other uncertainties.

The Heidegger/Beaufret dialogue, mentioned above, occurs in the following book:

Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy
Jean Beaufret
Series: Studies in Continental Thought
Publication date: 07/06/2006
ISBN: 978-0-253-34730-5

The View From Nowhere as an Additional Problem in “Thinking About Thinking”

The View From Nowhere is a book by philosopher Thomas Nagel.

Published by Oxford University Press in 1986, it contrasts passive and active points of view in how humanity interacts with the world, relying either on a subjective perspective that reflects a point of view or an objective perspective that takes a more detached perspective. Nagel describes the objective perspective as the “view from nowhere,” one where the only valuable ideas are ones derived independently.

Epistemology (what we can know and why) is puzzling to the max if you ponder it for a moment. Think of a painting in a Boston museum. If you walk up to it, you see only the little piece in front of your nose so you back up and try to get an “optimal grip.” (to use Prof. Merleau-Ponty’s language.) If you walk all the way to China and try to see it from there, you will see nothing of it, no matter what telescope you might use. This is sort of what we mean by “the view from nowhere.” You’re way too far.

This brings us to the problem of the “detached observer” (modern versions of which stem from Descartes, who wants to get a bird’s eye view of all other bird’s eye views.  This is tricky and elusive for the obvious reasons. When Richard Feynman or some other physicist theorizes, is he not achieving a view from nowhere or is he? No one will deny a place to theoretical “standpoints” and “viewpoints.” The theoretician is himself a person who breathes, and sneezes, and yawns, and gets hungry and has to stretch his or her legs after too much sitting. One can’t quite “move into one’s own mind” since all theory is “embodied.”

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: 

We can think about the world in terms that “transcend” our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel’s words, “nowhere in particular.”

The strange human situation is seen from the fact that this “view from nowhere,” this “detached observer” theoretical stance, includes the theorist himself, the detachment and the theory as part of the “bird’s eye view” without any particular concrete bird serving as your ambassador or proxy.

“The unifying theme, as Nagel puts it at the beginning, is the problem of how to combine the perspective of a particular person ‘inside the world’ with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.”

(Bernard Williams, 1986 book review, London Review of Books.)

We have already seen the problem of Husserl‘s (died in 1938) “rhomboid” or “matchbox” (i.e., you can’t see the entire matchbox all at once) or Ortega y Gasset‘s “orange” (i.e., you cannot see the back or obverse or reverse of a spherical orange unless you walk around it and lose the first view from the front) and all this “partial viewing” takes place on “Neurath’s boat.” (Where we’re like sailors on a knowledge ship and can’t go back to any origins and can’t discuss Platonism with Plato himself. The Harvard philosopher Quine, among others, mentions this problem.) The ship movies forward and the “matchbox/orange” are viewed in some cabin on the ship (i.e., your field, such as chemistry or history or biology).

Lastly: think of the opening line of Thomas Mann’s (died in 1955) great novel, Joseph and His Brothers: “Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”

In other words, there is no way for us as “knowledge detectives” to go back to the origins of ourselves or our history since that’s all unrecoverable and lost “in the mist of time.”

A student embarking on a “knowledge quest” (university education) should not dodge these puzzles and mysteries but look at them “unblinkingly.”  A deep education means all the dimensions of the quest are in front of the student and not wished away.  This includes the student’s own danger of being lost as “a leaf in the whirlwind of time.” (Hannah Arendt phrase we have already seen.). Career aside, there are multiple “Rubik’s Cubes” here if the student wants to experience the deep and the wide.

Then and Now Thinking

Historical thinking is a lifelong attempt to link something called “then” to something called “now.”  History as an academic field of study has a deep cleavage within it in that people like Foucault and Nietzsche think the links between then and now are often illusionary since history is mostly noise (i.e., disconnected chaos) and not “signal” (i.e., “cause and effect” chains of linear progress uncovered by “historian-detectives.”)

We explore this in this mini-essay by looking at the rise of what we call a service economy.

The great Russian thinker Alexander Herzen is traveling around Europe in the 1840s with Marx’s Manifesto appearing in 1848.  Herzen is amazed at the service sector in Paris:

“He was enchanted by the conveniences of Paris, especially the numbers of quick efficient services, from catering to house-cleaning, which made it unnecessary to employ private servants.”

(quoted in Revolutions of 1848:  A Social History. Priscilla Robertson, Princeton 1967, page 110 footnote)

In our own day, the leading economic historian, R.M. Hartwell, in his classic essay, “The Service Revolution:  The Growth of Services in Modern Economy 1700-1914” outlines a worldwide rise of services, and concludes his essay thus:  “The lesson of history is undoubtedly, that was has already happened in the United States, will happen elsewhere, and that the trend in employment towards the services in all developed and developing economies will result finally in a world-wide service revolution.”

(The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Industrial Revolution, Fontana/Collins, 1980, page 394)

Shall we then “fold Herzen/Paris 1848” into this larger picture, Hartwell’s 1700-1914 or is that a false linkage?

This is an example of then and now analysis which is key to education.

Let us continue the past two essays:

We then use this kind of interesting “home-made puzzle” (one we made-up ourselves and did not read anywhere) and follow it up by entering the academic subject:

  1. Read the classic Manias, Panics and Crashes, the Prof. Kindleberger (MIT) classic.
  2. Discover that the Prof. Niall Ferguson miniseries on PBS, The Ascent of Money, doesn’t elucidate our particular query.
  3. Read Kevin Phillips’s Bad Money to get an introduction to the dangers of “over financialization.” (“hyper financialization”).

The “New York Times” in a piece The New York Times, 12 November 1910, describes the bank run in England including the Westminster Bank.   The movie is set in 1910.

We then begin to think that the collapse of Barings Bank in recent years (Nick Leeson scandal) radiating out from Hong Kong office, is not disconnected from the Barings Bank scandals of 1890. Historical thinking wants to see an arc or trajectory or larger and wider process, and not as disconnected, episodic and completely random.

The Anglo-American financialization process has led to many anomalies.

You might legitimately date the modern beginnings of this mega-process from the 1873 classic by Walter Bagehot of The Economist in his book, Lombard Street, where London is described as the money machine that governs the world and its fluctuations.

Hank Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary and Ben Bernanke of the Fed, warned Congressmen in Washington, in September 2008, that the global financial system was on the brink of collapse and needed “infinite” bailout money by that Monday morning, after the weekend.

These problems have yet to be seriously addressed and we might be in a new “bubble” at the intersection of real estate and financial system pathologies (i.e., where the world economy tends to become a kind of “betting parlor”).

Movies as a “Backdoor Into Financial History”

“Financial history” (the Professor Niall Ferguson PBS miniseries, The Ascent of Money, of recent years tries to “flag” this domain) can be exciting and eye-opening if the student fins the kind of “backdoor” into it that makes it all enchanting and not a tiresome slog through opaque textbooks.  Movies are a good way to “parachute” into fields, domains, areas of study:

The 1963 movie Mary Poppins is partly about bank runs and the “Tuppence” song in the movie communicates the centrality of London finance in the world of 1910, the setting of the movie:

“You see, Michael, you’ll be part of railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile, fleets of ocean Greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea
All from tuppence, prudently fruitfully, frugally invested
In the, to be specific
In the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs
Fidelity fiduciary bank

Now Michael, when you deposit tuppence in a bank account
Soon you’ll see
That it blooms into credit of a generous amount
Semiannually
And you’ll achieve that sense of stature
As your influence expands
To the high financial strata
That established credit, now commands
You can purchase first and second trust deeds
Think of the foreclosures
Bonds! Chattels! Dividends! Shares
Bankruptcies! Debtor sales! Opportunities
All manner of private enterprise
Shipyards! The mercantile
Collieries! Tanneries
Incorporations! Amalgamations! Banks”

The current  U.S. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was a foreclosure king of the Great Recession of 2008.  An American movie on “bank runs” is of course the classic It’s a Wonderful Life (with James Stewart as the local banker.)

The 1910 world of London finance show in the movie Mary Poppins can be now contextualized by realizing all of this crashed down in August 1914 which represents the beginning of post-WW 1 “deglobalization.”  Thus, finance and globalization issues haunt the present.

Walter Bagehot’s masterpiece of 1873, Lombard Street, is a kind of anticipation of this syndrome and Charles Kindleberger‘s (MIT) Manias, Panics and Crashes gives the sense of the underlying instability.

Kevin Phillips’s book Bad Money of 2008 outlines the dangers of “over financialization.”

The movie and the fun song can help a student find his or her way in to these areas and domains.

Movies as a “Parachute” or Backdoor Into the Field of Economics

Here’s a second example of using movies to “sneak up on” a field such as economics.

Think of the movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from 1948, a Humphrey Bogart classic:

In 1925, in the Mexican oil-town of Tampico, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two unemployed American drifters, survive by bumming for spare change. They are recruited by an American labor contractor, Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), as roughnecks to construct oil rigs for $8 a day.  When the project is completed, McCormick skips out without paying the men.

Returning to Tampico, the two vagrants encounter the grizzled prospector Howard (Walter Huston) in a flophouse. The loquacious and penniless ex-miner holds forth on the virtues of gold prospecting and the perils of striking it rich. The two younger men feel the lure of gold and contemplate its risks. Dobbs and Curtin run into McCormick at a cantina, and after a desperate bar fight, they collect their back wages in cash. When Dobbs wins a small jackpot in the lottery, he pools his funds with Curtin and Howard to finance a gold prospecting journey to the Mexican interior.

The flophouse mentioned above (“Oso negro”) has a quick scene which is a marvelous “parachute” into economics:  a group of men begin to reflect on why gold is so expensive while the basics of life like water or air are not.  Howard (their “cracker barrel philosopher-sage,” played by Walter Huston) explains that a thousand men set out to find gold.  999 of the men fail to find any, one finds some.  The price of gold has to reflect the costs of finding it (i.e., men, equipment, time, effort, opportunity costs, risks, danger, etc.) by all thousand and include the 999 failures and not just the one success.  This is an example, albeit primitive, of something like the labor-theory of value explored by Ricardo and then Marx:

Labor theory of value

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a heterodox theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it. … Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a “labor theory of value.”

Again, using this movie as a charming or enchanting “jumping off place,” you would begin to “dive into” those pages of the textbook that are relevant, much as you’d use a dictionary to look up some words. You then read towards the front and the back of the textbook, coming at it your own way, mindful of these questions of yours which begin to give the field a “shape.” You could do the “standard slog” through the textbook, none of which you remember three days after the course because nothing was based on your own “enchanted” searching and exploring.

Lastly, the author of the original 1927 novel, on which the movie is based, B. Traven was a German anarchist and he may have analyzed the world and its prices and costs (i.e., economics) like Howard in the movie.  This too is itself another “pathway” into economics, a biographical one.

Movies as a Backdoor Into Economics

We argue that one can only “parachute” in and out of a knowledge field by means of an “enchanting backdoor” and not by grim wrestling with a gigantic textbook alone. A textbook should be seen as a “dictionary” or reference book for a field and you dip into when needed as opposed to being oppressed by it.

Here’s a simple illustration of this:

There’s a classic British movie, The Stars Look Down from the forties starring Michael Redgrave. The movie tells the story of a poor boy from a Northern depressed coal-mining town who survives the downward drag of his bleak circumstances and winds up at a university based on his intelligence.

One scene in the movie shows him at a university debate where resources are a point of contention. He mentions the classic book by Jevons called The Coal Question (how much coal is there geologically and economically, given costs and prices). Jevons was a great 19th century mathematical economist. A would-be “parachutist” in economics reads this and then wonders how it might be applied to oil today factoring all costs, including ecological costs, costs of oil spills (i.e., the Exxon Valdez, etc.) and then looks up relevant pages if any in the textbook. This gives economics a context, a time, a place, a question, a “shape.” The student studies up on Jevons, say, using all this as a “backdoor” into both field and textbook.

William Stanley Jevons FRS (1835-1882) was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons’s book, A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862), as the start of the mathematical method in economics.

The Jevons Paradox

The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines is a book that economist William Stanley Jevons wrote in 1865 to explore the implications of Britain’s reliance on coal.

There’s more to be uncovered:

In the classic book on urban economics, Triumph of the City, by Glaeser of Harvard, the author says:

“The nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons noted that more-fuel efficient steam engines didn’t lead to less coal consumption. Better engines made energy use effectively less expensive, and helped move the world to an industrial era powered by coal. The term, Jevons paradox, has come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption—one reason why fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas. Jevons paradox applied to information processing means that as we acquire more efficient means of transmitting information, like e-mail or Skype, we spend more, not less, time in transmitting information.”

(Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, Penguin Books, 2011, page 37)

Adding more roads to a road system can add to the congestion one expected to relive by attracting even more cars, a Jevons-type phenomenon.

It’s only by “going off” on a direction originating from outside the field (from movies to classic names and analyses to traffic other “congestion” phenomena, can one then “charge up the hill” of a field like economics, where you start with a kind of sense of enchantment and harbor such questions as raised by the movie, The Stars Look Down.

One “sneaks up on” a field one’s own way and sooner or later goes beyond the field asking how does this kind of thinking relate to other parts of a university…enchantment and more holism carry the student forward. Without these “twin engines,”” one is being processed by the grim “the knowledge factory” as opposed to becoming a processor and not just a processee.

The Language Phenomenon in Education

Wittgenstein (1889–1951) identifies language as the principal “confusion-machine” within philosophy:

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

“What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

Education if deep and meaningful would put language itself in front of a student to understand the “bewitchment” and to perhaps “escape from the fly-bottle.” The fly-bottle is roughly “the captive mind syndrome” described by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet-thinker.

There are various aspects of this language-watching:

Hans-Georg Gadamer (Heidegger’s successor, who died in 2002) writes:

“It is not that scientific methods are mistaken, but ‘this does not mean that people would be able to solve the problems that face us, peaceful coexistence of peoples and the preservation of the balance of nature, with science as such. It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of civilization.’”

(German Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2000, pages 122/123)

This is readily seeable. Imagine Einstein and Kurt Gödel walking near the Princeton campus. They speak to each other in German, their native tongue which they both “inhabit.” Gödel communicates the limits to logic and Einstein the limits to modern physics such as quantum mechanics. They bring in Bohr and Heisenberg and the “Copenhagen Interpretation” as a counter-view. They refer to equations and experiments and conjectures and puzzles, current papers and conferences.

They take “communicative action” by use of speech using German as a means.

There are two levels here that are always confused: the ontological (i.e., all the why-questions people ask using language) and the ontic level, all the how-questions people pose using mathematics and laboratory results (e.g., Higgs boson).

Gödel once made the observation that if you look at language as a kind of logical system, it’s absolutely puzzling that people can communicate at all since language is so utterly ambiguous and “polyvalent.”

Take the sentence: “Men now count.” Out of context, does it mean count as in the sense of numeracy, one, two, three apples in front of me or do you mean perhaps that men in a certain country were given the right to vote and now “count” politically. Without the context and the ability to contextualize, no sentence by itself makes certain sense at all.

This is partly why Wittgenstein sees philosophy problems as “language games.”

Heidegger coming from “being-in-the-world” as foundational, and calls language “the house of being.”

You inhabit a native language the way you “inhabit” a family home or a home town. You flow through.

When a child of ten plays marbles (as analyzed by Piaget) and his native language (say French) comes pouring out of him in a spontaneous gusher, how can we really explain it since the child doesn’t look up syntactical rules and grammatical definitions when he speaks. The words flow.

Heidegger retorts that language speaks you in other words, you’re channeling the language in a way a songwriter explains how a song comes to him. In the end, it’s something spontaneous and not propositional like grammar is.

A moment’s reflection shows you how “slippery” language is: 

A man driving to New York says to you, “the car died on me halfway there.”  He does not mean the car was “on” him physically. To die on doesn’t really mean perish forever, it means, on average, stopped to function in a way that usually can be fixed in the garage.  It means this reparable conking out of the car gave him a big headache and aggravation as he waited for the Triple A people to get there and do the paperwork. You visualize all these layers and twists.

Again, without a human context, the sentence “the car died on me” makes little sense. Without a human context, “the sky is blue” makes incomplete sense too. Does a camel or cricket see a blue sky?

A full education would explore these dimensions of language and this has nothing to do with bringing back Latin or Greek or studying a foreign language to meet a Ph.D. requirement.  Formal linguistics à la Chomsky, Fodor, Katz, etc. is not what’s being discussed, as interesting as all that might be.

It also is not about language genes such as FAP-2 or how vocal cords work since these questions are ontic (i.e., how does it work?) and not ontological (i.e., what does something mean or imply?). Thinking about language in an engineering sense with the human mouth as a “buccal cavity” is quite legitimate and a voice coach might do well to do that.  We are talking about something else:  the centrality of language in human self-understanding, functioning and the making of meaning.

What We Mean by “Epochal Waters”

We sometimes use the phrase “epochal waters” to refer to the deepest layers of the past which we “swimmers” at the surface of the ocean don’t see or know. “Epochal waters” are latent, currents are closer to the surface.

There’s a similar idea from the French philosopher Michel Foucault who died in 1984. In his The Order of Things, classic from 1966, he talks about the “episteme” (as in epistemology) that frames everything from deep down. (The Greeks distinguished between “techne” (arts, crafts, practical skills and “episteme” (theory, overview).

“In essence, Les mots et les choses (Foucault’s The Order of Things) maintains that every period is characterized by an underground configuration that delineates its culture, a grid of knowledge making possible every scientific discourse, every production of statements. Foucault designates this historical a priori as an episteme, deeply basic to defining and limiting what any period can—or cannot—think.

Each science develops within the framework of an episteme, and therefore is linked in part with other sciences contemporary with it.

(Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Harvard University Press,  1991, page 158)

Take a simple example. A discussion comes up about what man is or does or thinks or knows. In today’s episteme or pre-definition, one thinks immediately not of man in terms of language or the invention of gods, but in terms of computational genomics, big data, bipedalism (walking upright on two legs). Its assumed in advance via an invisible episteme, that science and technology. physics, genetics, big data, chemistry and biology hold the answer and the rest is sort of outdated. This feeling is automatic and reflexive like breathing and might be called “mental breathing.”

One’s thoughts are immediately sent in certain directions or grooves, a process  that is automatic and more like a “mental reflex” than a freely chosen “analytical frame.” The thinker has been “trained” in advance and the episteme pre-decides what is thinkable and what is not.

There are deep episteme that underlie all analyses: for example, in the Anglo-American tradition of looking at things, the phrase “human nature” inevitably comes in as a deus ex machina (i.e., sudden way of clinching an argument, the “magic factor” that has been there all along). If you ask why are you suddenly “importing” the concept of “human nature,” the person who uses the phrase has no idea. It’s in the “epochal water” or Foucault’s episteme, and it suddenly swims up from below at the sea floor.

Another quick example: In the Anglo-American mind, there’s a belief from “way down and far away” that failure in life is mostly about individual behavior (laziness, alcoholism, etc.) and personal “stances” while “circum-stances” are an excuse. This way of sequencing acceptable explanations is deeply pre-established in a way that is itself hard to explain. It serves to “frame the picture” in advance. These are all “epochal water“ or episteme phenomena.