It's thefirst weekof August and we're four months away from a new year. Exciting, right? If you answered no, it's because you haven't been maximizingyourdays. I bet those New Year's resolutions got thrown out the window a long time ago.

So, what is stopping you from getting the most out of this year? Probably yourself combined with a lack of motivation. Which is why you need to become yourownmotivation.

Do you really want to be in the same spot as you were last year or the year before?No!

Life is about leveling upandexcelling. If you want to reach higher heights, chances are you have tochangeyour mindset. Your lack of motivation isonlyholding you back from living your best life.

There are people out here who don't even have the skill set or talent, and they're getting the job YOU want. Whyisthat? It's because they'reconsistent, not prideful and have the drive.

So how do you become likethosepeople?Thosepeople are usually writing their goals consistentlyandworking towards them daily. They find solutions anddon'tdwell over the problem of not being fully qualified. They network their tails offandform valuable relationships.

You can't even hate onthosetypes of people, because they hustle to get everything they want.

The problemis, when we feel like our resume is solid, we forget to bring the hustle (aka motivation). If we combined our resume, talent and hustle we could be unstoppablewe could beBEYONC. It's funny, but it's true.

If you're in the process of looking for a job, hustle for 30 daysstraight. The first seven days, perfect your resume, personal website, LinkedIn and air-check (if applicable). For the following days, apply to jobs and email the manager in charge of the department you want to work for. What's the worst thing they can say besides they're not hiring? Join organizations that are in your field of work. Make those connections and prosper.

I always tell myself thateverything I want is attainable. I'm sure people look at me crazy, but it's true. If you want something bad enough, you'll find out how to get it.

Cheers to getting what you want, because youwork hard, hustle harder and deserve it even more!

Remember, sharing is caring.

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The Art Of Motivation: How To Reclaim Your Hustle In 30 Days - Blavity

We know that regular exercise and eating well are the foundation of a healthy life. Still, its tough to create a habit and even tougher to make it stick long term. Everyones got a solutionwork out now, work out later, join a gym, exercise at home, try yoga, try spin, try HIIT. How do you know which is going to work for you, without trying them all?

Knowing your tendencyhow you tend to respond to internal and external expectationsmay be the key to finding a workout style you actually want to do.

Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestsellingauthor of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and the forthcoming The Four Tendencies, believes that most people fall into one of four tendency categories, depending on what motivates them. (Plus, she created a free online quiz, so you can see where you fall.) For instance, if you never keep your New Years resolution but always hit deadlines for your boss, you might be an Obligerand probably need some outside accountability to be motivated to hit the gym.

Keep in mind that no tendencyor workout styleisbetterthan another. Rubin borrows wisdom from renowned author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton:If we make good use of what we have, if we make it serve our good desires, we can do better than another who merely serves his temperament instead of making it serve him.Heres how to use your temperament to get the most out of what youre made of.

The Questioner isnt inclined to do anything she considers arbitrary. Her motivation comes only from within herself. Shell push back against what she thinks is expected of her unless the answers to her questions meet her expectations.

The Questioner does best working out alone and being internally specific about her fitness goals. Is she looking to gain strength? Increase flexibility, endurance, or speed? Consistent personal evaluation of why she works out and whether her activity is achieving that goal will help her determine which type of exercise is right for her.Keeping a log of her progress toward this goal, whether on paper or with an app or device, may help get her moving and stay motivated.

The Obliger needs external accountability to thrive. She can make a promise to herself, but theres no guarantee shes going to keep itbut get someone else involved, and itsa whole different story. The majority of people fall into this category.

The Obliger should enroll in classes at the gym or a studio, hire a personal trainer, or sign up for a road race. Any of these outer expectations will provide someone or something else to challenge her to show up. Having a workout buddy may help her as well, but only if shes equally committed to her own health and fitness goals.

The Upholder typically has the easiest time forming habits because she holds herself accountable to both internal and external expectations.

If the Upholder makes a plan, shes going to stick to it. She knows whats expected of her, and she thrives in making it happen. This makes her the ideal workout buddy. Shes got her own goals in mind, but she also feels responsible to keep a promise. Because she doesnt want to disappoint herself or anyone else, theres little that can shake her. She will do best setting reasonable goals for herself so that she doesnt burn out or get injured. A steady, moderate regimen in any sort of exercise will help her achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The Rebelthe rarest of the four tendencieswill resist what shes asked to do, simply for the sake of resisting. She thrives on making her own choices and having something enjoyable to look forward to.

The Rebel is a lone rider, and shes prone to more unusual forms of exercise. Youre not likely to see her at a trendy barre or spin class. Instead, shell be training with kettlebells, rock climbing, doing acroyoga, or pounding her way through mud runs. She should go her own way by trying different types of exercises, working with different instructors, and staying attuned to her mood.Shell do even better if she knows theres a treat or tangible reward of some kind waiting for her at the enddid someone saymassage?

Shakespeare wrote,To thine own self be true.He wasnt writing about workouts, but the sentiment still applies. You can identify your tendency only if you are honest with yourself. Likewise, you will stick with your fitness plan only as long as it energizes you and complements your tendency. If youve already found a workout routine that works for you, great! Stick with it. If you havent yet, dont worry. Theres always time to try something new (though if youre a Rebel or Questioner, pretend I didnt say that!).

Photo Credit: Taylor McCutchan Photography

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A Smarter Way to Motivate Yourself to Work Out - Verily

The grief and sadness havent gone away for Milo Hall, but the University of Wyoming sophomore running back is doing a good job of dealing with tragedy and turning it into something positive.

On July 30, 2016, Halls older brother, Gailen Gator Armstrong, was fatally shot in the 1800 block of Market Street in lower downtown Denver. According to media reports, more than 100 rounds were fired in a parking lot where Armstrong was. The Denver Post reported it was gang members who fired the shots.

More than a year later, Hall and his family still dont have any answers to who killed Armstrong.

Were still trying to figure things out, Hall said. It definitely has been hard. Ive just been trying to work through that.

Hall, who turns 20 on Aug. 12, didnt miss a lot of fall camp after the tragedy, and his UW family helped him a lot once he returned to Laramie.

Hall played in four games last season, but didnt get any carries. The 5-foot-8, 190-pound back is quiet and reserved, but his play was anything but that during spring drills.

Fourth-year coach Craig Bohl described Halls play at times as electric, which earned him the starting job coming out of spring.

Hall is one of a handful of UW running backs competing for playing time after the departure of Brian Hill, the Cowboys career rushing leader who left after his junior season in 2016 and was drafted by the NFLs Atlanta Falcons.

Hall wore jersey No. 16 last season, but switched to No. 3 this season to honor his brother.

(Losing my brother) has been my biggest motivation. My whole demeanor on football and life has changed, Hall said. Im more focused and determined, and Im working harder than ever.

He always believed in me, and we talked pretty much every day. Even before he passed away, he told me to stay focused. Every time I play football, I hear that voice.

While most find what Hall has gone through in the past year unfathomable, it appears that motivation is paying off on the field.

But it also wasnt easy.

UW running backs coach Mike Bath said it wasnt until 6-8 weeks into the 2016 season that he saw the old Milo return, at least on a consistent basis. However, Bath has also seen a new Milo Hall emerge.

One thing Ive seen from him in the last year is him grow as a person and understanding the opportunities he has, Bath said.

He is coming to terms with what happened, and its forced him to grow up faster because of that. The Milo Hall from a year ago to now, and the growth hes had as a person, has been really fun to be a part of.

His teammates agree.

Junior starting quarterback Josh Allen has been Halls roommate for the past year, and described Hall as outstandingly strong, and like a brother to me.

Junior running back Nico Evans said the way Hall performed during the spring gave him a lot of confidence, and also opened him up in terms of communicating with other players.

He is talking to the younger guys and coaching them up. Thats something he didnt do in the past, Evans said.

After Wednesdays third practice of fall camp, Bohl said Hall has picked up a step and is more confident in the offense.

Hall isnt UWs most vocal player, and likely never will be. That isnt who he is personality-wise, and isnt necessarily what the Cowboys need from him.

My play on the field is my leadership, he said, and hopefully it shows other guys how to work hard.

And perseverance through tough times.

Practice update

The Cowboys practiced in shoulder pads for the first time during fall camp Wednesday morning after working out in shorts and helmets the previous two days.

I was pleased with our effort, but you could tell it had an impact on the offense. At times we were a little sloppy, Bohl said.

Bohl said true freshman Patrick Arnold is getting some reps at center with the No. 1 offense, and will compete with sophomore Gavin Rush at that spot. Bohl said he would like to settle on who will play center two weeks before the Cowboys season opener Sept. 2 at Iowa.

Senior starting fullback Drew Van Maanen didnt practice Wednesday due to a strained hamstring. Van Maanen suffered the injury Tuesday. The good news is that it is not a pulled hamstring. However, there is no timeframe for when Van Maanen will return to practice.

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UW's Milo Hall using loss of brother as motivation - WyoSports (subscription)

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One day, Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo, my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience. It is one of the ironies of intellectual history that the terms of the collision can best be seen in the rise of a discourse that Nietzsche, in all likelihood, would have despised.

* * *

In 1869, Nietzsche was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel University. Like most junior faculty, he was bedeviled by meager wages and bore major responsibilities, such as teaching fourteen hours a week, Monday through Friday, beginning at 7 am. He also sat on multiple committees and covered for senior colleagues who couldnt make their classes. He lectured to the public on behalf of the university. He dragged himself to dinner parties. Yet within three years he managed to complete The Birth of Tragedy, a minor masterwork of modern literature, which he dedicated to his close friend and sublime predecessor Richard Wagner.

One chapter, however, he withheld from publication. In 1872, Nietzsche was invited to spend the Christmas holidays with Wagner and his wife Cosima, but sensing a potential rift with the composer, he begged off and sent a gift instead. He bundled The Greek State with four other essays, slapped a title onto a cover page (Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books), and mailed the leather-bound text to Cosima as a birthday present. Richard was offended; Cosima, unimpressed. Prof. Nietzsches manuscript does not restore our spirits, she sniffed in her diary.

Though presented as a sop to a fraying friendship, The Greek State reflects the larger European crisis of war and revolution that had begun in 1789 and would come to an end only in 1945. More immediately, it bears the stamp of the Franco-Prussian War, which had broken out in 1870, and the Paris Commune, which was declared the following year.

Initially ambivalent about the war, Nietzsche quickly became a partisan of the German cause. Its about our culture! he wrote to his mother. And for that no sacrifice is too great! This damned French tiger. He signed up to serve as a medical orderly; Cosima tried to persuade him to stay put in Basel, recommending that he send cigarettes to the front instead. But Nietzsche was adamant. In August 1870, he left for Bavaria with his sister Elisabeth, riding the rails and singing songs. He got his training, headed to the battlefield, and in no time contracted dysentery and diphtheria. He lasted a month.

The war lasted for six. A half-million soldiers were killed or wounded, as were countless civilians. The preliminary peace treaty, signed in February 1871, favored the Germans and punished the French, particularly the citizens of Paris, who were forced to shoulder the burden of heavy indemnities to the Prussians. Enraged by its impositionsand a quarter-century of simmering discontent and broken promisesworkers and radicals in Paris rose up and took over the city in March. Nietzsche was scandalized, his horror at the revolt inversely proportional to his exaltation over the war. Fearing that the Communards had destroyed the Louvre (they hadnt), he wrote:

The reports of the past few days have been so awful that my state of mind is altogether intolerable. What does it mean to be a scholar in the face of such earthquakes of culture! It is the worst day of my life.

In the quicksilver transmutation of a conventional war between states into a civil war between classes, Nietzsche saw a terrible alchemy of the future: Over and above the struggle between nations the object of our terror was that international hydra-head, suddenly and so terrifyingly appearing as a sign of quite different struggles to come.

By May, the Commune had been ruthlessly put down at the cost of tens of thousands of livesmuch to the delight of the Parisian aesthete-aristocrat Edmond Goncourt:

All is well. There has been neither compromise nor conciliation. The solution has been brutal, imposed by sheer force of arms. The solution has saved everyone from the dangers of cowardly compromise. The solution has restored its self-confidence to the Army, which has learnt in the blood of the Communards that it was still capable of fightinga bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution by a whole conscription.

Of the man who wrote these words and the literary milieu of which he was a part, Nietzsche would later say: I know these gentlemen inside out, so well that I have really had enough of them already. One has to be more radical: fundamentally they all lack the main thingla force.

* * *

The clash of these competing worlds of war and work echoes throughout The Greek State. Nietzsche begins by announcing that the modern era is dedicated to the dignity of work. Committed to equal rights for all, democracy elevates the worker and the slave. Their demands for justice threaten to swamp all other ideas, to tear down the walls of culture. Modernity has made a monster in the working class: a created creator (shades of Marx and Mary Shelley), it has the temerity to see itself and its labor as a work of art. Even worse, it seeks to be recognized and publicly acknowledged as such.

The Greeks, by contrast, saw work as a disgrace, because the existence it servesthe finite life that each of us liveshas no inherent value. Existence can be redeemed only by art, but art too is premised on work. It is made, and its maker depends on the labor of others; they take care of him and his household, freeing him from the burdens of everyday life. Inevitably, his art bears the taint of their necessity. No matter how beautiful, art cannot escape the pall of its creation. It arouses shame, for in shame there lurks the unconscious recognition that these conditions of work are required for the actual goal of art to be achieved. For that reason, the Greeks properly kept labor and the laborer hidden from view.

Throughout his writing life, Nietzsche was plagued by the vision of workers massing on the public stagewhether in trade unions, socialist parties or communist leagues. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Basel, the First International descended on the city to hold its fourth congress. Nietzsche was petrified. There is nothing more terrible, he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, than a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations. Several years after the International had left Basel, Nietzsche convinced himself that it was slouching toward Bayreuth in order to ruin Wagners festival there. And just weeks before he went mad in 1888 and disappeared forever into his own head, he wrote, The cause of every stupidity todaylies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions.

One can hear in the opening passages of The Greek State the pounding march not only of European workers on the move but also of black slaves in revolt. Hegel was brooding on Haiti while he worked out the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Though generations of scholars have told us otherwise, perhaps Nietzsche had a similar engagement in mind when he wrote, Even if it were true that the Greeks were ruined because they kept slaves, the opposite is even more certain, that we will be destroyed because we fail to keep slaves. What theorist, after all, has ever pressed so urgentlynot just in this essay but in later works as wellthe claim that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture? What theorist ever had to? Before the eighteenth century, bonded labor was an accepted fact. Now it was the subject of a roiling debate, provoking revolutions and emancipations throughout the world. Serfdom had been eliminated in Russia only a decade beforeand in some German states, only a generation before Nietzsches birth in 1844while Brazil would soon become the last state in the Americas to abolish slavery. An edifice of the ages had been brought down by a mere centurys vibrations; is it so implausible that Nietzsche, attuned to the vectors and velocity of decay as he was, would pause to record the earthquake and insist on taking the full measure of its effects?

If slavery was one condition of great art, Nietzsche continued in The Greek State, war and high politics were another. Political men par excellence, the Greeks channeled their agonistic urges into bloody conflicts between cities and less bloody conflicts within them: healthy states were built on the repression and release of these impulses. The arena for conflict created by that regimen gave society time to germinate and turn green everywhere and allowed blossoms of genius periodically to sprout forth. Those blossoms were not only artistic but also political. Warfare sorted society into lower and higher ranks, and from that hierarchy rose the military genius, whose artistry was the state itself. The real dignity of man, Nietzsche insisted, lay not in his lowly self but in the artistic and political genius his life was meant to serve and on whose behalf it was to be expended.

Instead of the Greek state, however, Europe had the bourgeois state; instead of aspiring to a work of art, states let markets do their work. Politics, Nietzsche complained, had become an instrument of the stock exchange rather than the terrain of heroism and glory. With the specifically political impulses of Europe so weakenedeven his beloved Franco-Prussian War had not revived the spirit in the way that he had hopedNietzsche could only detect dangerous signs of atrophy in the political sphere, equally worrying for art and society. The age of aristocratic culture and high politics was at an end. All that remained was the detritus of the lower orders: the disgrace of the laborer, the paper chase of the bourgeoisie, the barreling threat of socialism. The Paris commune, Nietzsche would later write in his notebooks, was perhaps no more than minor indigestion compared to what is coming.

Nietzsche had little, concretely, to offer as a counter-volley to democracy, whether bourgeois or socialist. Despite his appreciation of the political impulse and his studious attention to political events in Germanyfrom the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of the early 1860s to the imperial push of the late 1880she remained leery of programs, movements and platforms. The best he could muster was a vague principle: that society is the continuing, painful birth of those exalted men of culture in whose service everything else has to consume itself, and the state a means of setting [that] process of society in motion and guaranteeing its unobstructed continuation. It was left to later generations to figure out what that could mean in practiceand where it might lead. Down one path might lay fascism; down another, the free market.

* * *

Around the timealmost to the yearthat Nietzsche was launching his revolution of metaphysics and morals, a trio of economists, working separately across three countries, were starting their own. It began with the publication in 1871 of Carl Mengers Principles of Economics and William Stanley Jevonss The Theory of Political Economy. Along with Lon Walrass Elements of Pure Economics, which appeared three years later, these were the European facesAustrian, English and French-Swissof what would come to be called the marginal revolution.

The marginalists focused less on supply and production than on the pulsing demand of consumption. The protagonist was not the landowner or the laborer, working his way through the farm, the factory or the firm; it was the universal man in the market whose signature act was to consume things. Thats how market man increased his utility: by consuming something until he reached the point where consuming one more increment of it gave him so little additional utility that he was better off consuming something else. Of such microscopic calculations at the periphery of our estate was the economy made.

Though the early marginalists helped transform economics from a humanistic branch of the moral sciences into a technical discipline of the social sciences, they were still able to command an audience and an influence all too rare in contemporary economics. Jevons spent his career as an independent scholar and professor in Manchester and London worrying about his lack of readers, but William Gladstone invited him over to discuss his work, and John Stuart Mill praised it on the floor of Parliament. Keynes tells us that for a period of half a century, practically all elementary students both of Logic and of Political Economy in Great Britain and also in India and the Dominions were brought up on Jevons.

According to Hayek, the immediate reception of Mengers Principles can hardly be called encouraging. Reviewers seemed not to understand it. Two students at the University of Vienna, however, did. One was Friedrich von Wieser, the other Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, and both became legendary educators and theoreticians. Their students included Hayek; Ludwig von Mises, who attracted a small but devoted following in the United States and elsewhere; and Joseph Schumpeter, dark poet of capitalisms forces of creative destruction. Through Bhm-Bawerk and Wieser, Mengers text became the groundwork of the Austrian school, whose reach, due in part to the efforts of Mises and Hayek, now extends across the globe.

The contributions of Jevons and Menger were multiple, yet each of them took aim at a central postulate of economics shared by everyone from Adam Smith to the socialist left: the notion that labor is aif not thesource of value. Though adumbrated in the idiom of prices and exchange, the labor theory of value evinced an almost primitive faith in the metaphysical objectivity of the economic spherea faith made all the more surprising by the fact that the objectivity of the rest of the social world (politics, religion and morals) had been subject to increasing scrutiny since the Renaissance. Commodities may have come wrapped in the pretty paper of the market, but inside, many believed, were the brute facts of nature: raw materials from the earth and the physical labor that turned those materials into goods. Because those materials were made useful, hence valuable, only by labor, labor was the source of value. That, and the fact that labor could be measured in some way (usually time), lent the world of work a kind of ontological statusand political authoritythat had been increasingly denied to the world of courts and kings, lands and lords, parishes and priests. As the rest of the world melted into air, labor was crystallizing as the one true solid.

By the time the marginalists came on the scene, the most politically threatening version of the labor theory of value was associated with the left. Though Marx would significantly revise and recast it in his mature writings, the simple notion that labor produces value remained associated with his nameand even more so with that of his competitor Ferdinand Lasalle, about whom Nietzsche read a fair amountas well as with the larger socialist and trade union movements of which he was a part. That association helped set the stage for the marginalists critique.

Admittedly, the relationship between marginalism and anti-socialism is complex. On the one hand, there is little evidence to suggest that the first-generation marginalists had heard of, much less read, Marx, at least not at this early stage of their careers. Much more than the threat of socialism underpinned the emergence of marginalist economics, which was as opposed to traditional defenses of the market as it was to the markets critics. By the twentieth century, moreover, many marginalists were on the left and used their ideas to help construct the institutions of social democracy; even Walras and Alfred Marshall, another early marginalist, were sympathetic to the claims of the left. And on some readings, the mature Marx shares more with the constructivist thrusts of marginalism than he does with the objectivism of the labor theory of value.

On the other hand, Jevons was a tireless polemicist against trade unions, which he identified as the best exampleof the evils and disasters attending the democratic age. Jevons saw marginalism as a critical antidote to the labor movement and insisted that its teachings be widely transmitted to the working classes. To avoid such a disaster, he argued, we must diffuse knowledge to the workersempowered as they were by the vote and the strikeand the kind of knowledge required is mainly that comprehended in the science of political economy.

Menger interrupted his abstract reflections on value to make the point that while it may appear deplorable to a lover of mankind that possession of capital or a piece of land often provides the owner a higher incomethan the income received by a laborer, the cause of this is not immoral. It was simply that the satisfaction of more important human needs depends upon the services of the given amount of capital or piece of land than upon the services of the laborer. Any attempt to get around that truth, he warned, would undoubtedly require a complete transformation of our social order.

Finally, there is no doubt that the marginalists of the Austrian school, who would later prove so influential on the American right, saw their project as primarily anti-Marxist and anti-socialist. The most momentous consequence of the theory, declared Wieser in 1891, is, I take it, that it is false, with the socialists, to impute to labor alone the entire productive return.

* * *

With its division of intellectual labor, the modern academy often separates economics from ethics and philosophy. Earlier economists and philosophers did not make that separation. Even Nietzsche recognized that economics rested on genuine moral and philosophical premises, many of which he found dubious, and that it had tremendous moral and political effects, all of which he detested. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche criticized our economists for having not yet wearied of scenting a similar unity in the word value and of searching after the original root-concept of the word. In his preliminary outline for the summa he hoped to publish on the will to power, he scored the nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and economics.

For that reason, Nietzsche saw in labors appearance more than an economic theory of goods: he saw a terrible diminution of the good. Morals must be understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy, he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil; every morality must be forced to bowbefore the order of rank. But like so many before them, including the Christian slave and the English utilitarian, the economist and the socialist promoted an inferior human typeand an inferior set of valuesas the driving agent of the world. Nietzsche saw in this elevation not only a transformation of values but also a loss of value and, potentially, the elimination of value altogether. Conservatives from Edmund Burke to Robert Bork have conflated the transformation of values with the end of value. Nietzsche, on occasion, did too: What does nihilism mean? he asked himself in 1887. That the highest values devaluate themselves. The nihilism consuming Europe was best understood as a democratic hatred against the order of rank.

Part of Nietzsches worry was philosophical: How was it possible in a godless world, naturalistically conceived, to deem anything of value? But his concern was also cultural and political. Because of democracy, which was Christianity made natural, the aristocracy had lost its naturalnessthat is, the traditional vindication of its power. How then might a hierarchy of excellence, aesthetic and political, re-establish itself, defend itself against the massparticularly a mass of workersand dominate that mass? As Nietzsche wrote in the late 1880s:

A reverse movement is neededthe production of a synthetic, summarizing, justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of being.He needs the opposition of the masses, of the leveled, a feeling of distance from them. [He] stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future.Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum of exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning.

Nietzsches response to that challenge was not to revert or resort to a more objective notion of value: that was neither possible nor desirable. Instead, he embraced one part of the modern understanding of valueits fabricated natureand turned it against its democratic and Smithian premises. Value was indeed a human creation, Nietzsche acknowledged, and as such could just as easily be conceived as a gift, an honorific bestowed by one man upon another. Through esteeming alone is there value, Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare; to esteem is to create. Value was not made with coarse and clumsy hands; it was enacted with an appraising gaze, a nod of the head signifying a matchless abundance of taste. It was, in short, aristocratic.

While slaves had once created value in the form of Christianity, they had achieved that feat not through their labor but through their censure and praise. They had also done it unwittingly, acting upon a deep and unconscious compulsion: a sense of inferiority, a rage against their powerlessness, and a desire for revenge against their betters. That combination of overt impotence and covert drive made them ill-suited to creating values of excellence. Nietzsche explained in Beyond Good and Evil that the self-conscious exercise and enjoyment of power made the noble type a better candidate for the creation of values in the modern world, for these were values that would have to break with the slave morality that had dominated for millennia. Only insofar as it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things can the noble type truly be value-creating.

Labor belonged to nature, which is not capable of generating value. Only the man who arrayed himself against naturethe artist, the general, the statesmancould claim that role. He alone had the necessary refinements, wrought by that pathos of distance which grows out of ingrained difference between strata, to appreciate and bestow value: upon men, practices and beliefs. Value was not a product of the prole; it was an imposition of peerless taste. In the words of The Gay Science:

Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its naturenature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a presentand it was we who gave and bestowed it.

That was in 1882. Just a decade earlier, Menger had written: Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being. Jevonss position was identical, and like Nietzsche, both Menger and Jevons thought value was instead a high or low estimation put by a man upon the things of life. But lest that desiring self be reduced to a simple creature of tabulated needs, Menger and Jevons took care to distinguish their positions from traditional theories of utility.

Jevons, for example, was prepared to follow Jeremy Bentham in his definition of utility as that property in an object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. He thought this perfectly expresses the meaning of the word Economy. But he also insisted on a critical rider: provided that the will or inclination of the person concerned is taken as the sole criterion, for the time, of what is good and desirable. Our expressed desires and aversions are not measures of our objective or underlying good; there is no such thing. Nor can we be assured that those desires or aversions will bring us pleasure or pain. What we want or dont want is merely a representation, a snapshot of the motions of our willthat black box of preference and partiality that so fascinated Nietzsche precisely because it seemed so groundless and yet so generative. Every mind is inscrutable to itself: we lack, said Jevons, the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. The inner life is inaccessible to our inspections; all we can know are its effects, the will it powers and the actions it propels. The will is our pendulum, declared Jevons, a representation of forces that cannot be seen but whose effects are nevertheless felt, and its oscillations are minutely registered in all the price lists of the markets.

Menger thought the value of any good was connected to our needs, but he was extraordinarily attuned to the complexityand contingencyof that relationship. Needs, wrote Menger, at least as concerns their origin, depend upon our wills or on our habits. Needs are more than the givens of our biology or psyche; they are the desideratum of our volitions and practices, which are idiosyncratic and arbitrary. Only when our needs finally come into existencethat is, only when we become aware of themcan we truly say that there is no further arbitrary element in the process of value formation.

Even then, needs must pass through a series of checkpoints before they can enter the land of value. Awareness of a need, says Menger, entails a comprehensive knowledge of how the need might be fulfilled by a particular good, how that good might contribute to our lives, and how (and whether) command of that good is necessary for the satisfaction of that need. That last bit of knowledge requires us to look at the external world: to ask how much of that good is available to us, to consider how many sacrifices we must bearhow many satisfactions we are willing to forgoin order to secure it. Only when we have answered these questions are we ready to speak of value, which Menger reminds us is the importance we attribute to the satisfaction of our needs. Value is thus a judgment that economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. It does not exist outside the consciousness of men. Even though previous economists had insisted on the objectification of the value of goods, Menger, like Jevons and Nietzsche, concludes that value is entirely subjective in nature.

* * *

In their war against socialism, the philosophers of capital faced two challenges. The first was that by the early twentieth century, socialism had cornered the market on morality. As Mises complained in his 1932 preface to the second edition of Socialism, Any advocate of socialistic measures is looked upon as the friend of the Good, the Noble, and the Moral, as a disinterested pioneer of necessary reforms, in short, as a man who unselfishly serves his own people and all humanity. Indeed, with the help of kindred notions such as social justice, socialism seemed to be the very definition of morality. Nietzsche had long been wise to this insinuation; one source of his discontent with religion was his sense that it had bequeathed to modernity an understanding of what morality entailed (selflessness, universality, equality) such that only socialism and democracy could be said to fulfill it. But where Nietzsches response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality.

Moralists traditionally viewed the pursuit of money and goods as negative or neutral; the Austrians claimed it embodies our deepest values and commitments. The provision of material goods, declared Mises, serves not only those ends which are usually termed economic, but also many other ends. All of us have ends or ultimate purposes in life: the cultivation of friendship, the contemplation of beauty, a lovers companionship. We enter the market for the sake of those ends. Economic action thus consists firstly in valuation of ends, and then in the valuation of the means leading to these ends. All economic activity depends, therefore, upon the existence of ends. Ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning. We simply cannot speak, writes Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, of purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life.

This claim, however, could just as easily be enlisted as an argument for socialism. In providing men and women with the means of lifehousing, food, healthcarethe socialist state frees them to pursue the ends of life: beauty, knowledge, wisdom. The Austrians went further, insisting that the very decision about what constitutes means and ends was itself a judgment of value. Any economic situation confronts us with the necessity of choice, of having to deploy our limited resourceswhether time, money or efforton behalf of some end. In making that choice, we reveal which of our ends matters most to us: which is higher, which is lower. Every man who, in the course of economic activity, chooses between the satisfaction of two needs, only one of which can be satisfied, makes judgments of value, says Mises.

For those choices to reveal our ends, our resources must be finiteunlimited time, for example, would obviate the need for choiceand our choice of ends unconstrained by external interference. The best, indeed only, method for guaranteeing such a situation is if money (or its equivalent in material goods) is the currency of choiceand not just of economic choice, but of all of our choices. As Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom:

So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy. A merely economic loss is thus one whose effect we can still make fall on our less important needs. Economic changes, in other words, usually affect only the fringe, the margin, of our needs. There are many things which are more important than anything which economic gains or losses are likely to affect, which for us stand high above the amenities and even above many of the necessities of life which are affected by the economic ups and downs.

Should the government decide which of our needs are merely economic, we would be deprived of the opportunity to decide whether these are higher or lower goods, the marginal or mandatory items of our flourishing. So vast is the gulf between each soul, so separate and unequal are we, that it is impossible to assume anything universal about the sources and conditions of human happiness, a point Nietzsche and Jevons would have found congenial. The judgment of what constitutes a means, what an end, must be left to the individual self. Hayek again:

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lowerin short what men should believe and strive for.

While the economic is, in one sense readily acknowledged by Hayek, the sphere of our lower needs, it is in another and altogether more important sense the anvil upon which we forge our notion of what is lower and higher in this world, our morality. Economic values, he writes, are less important to us than many things precisely because in economic matters we are free to decide what to us is more, and what less, important. But we can be free to make those choices only if they are left to us to makeand, paradoxically, if we are forced to make them. If we didnt have to choose, wed never have to value anything.

* * *

By imposing this drama of choice, the economy becomes a theater of self-disclosure, the stage upon which we discover and reveal our ultimate ends. It is not in the casual chatter of a seminar or the cloistered pews of a church that we determine our values; it is in the duressthe ordealof our lived lives, those moments when we are not only free to choose but forced to choose. Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, Hayek wrote, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created.

While progressives often view this discourse of choice as either dime-store morality or fabricated scarcity, the Austrians saw the economy as the disciplining agent of all ethical action, a moment ofand opportunity formoral artistry. Freud thought the compressions of the dream world made every man an artist; these other Austrians thought the compulsions of the economy made every man a moralist. It is only when we are navigating its narrow channelswhere every decision to expend some quantum of energy requires us to make a calculation about the desirability of its posited endthat we are brought face to face with ourselves and compelled to answer the questions: What do I believe? What do I want in this world? From this life?

While there are precedents for this argument in Mengers theory of value (the fewer opportunities there are for the satisfaction of our needs, Menger says, the more our choices will reveal which needs we value most), its true and full dimensions can best be understood in relation to Nietzsche. As much as Nietzsche railed against the repressive effect of laws and morals on the highest types, he also appreciated how much on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness was owed to these constraints. Confronted with a set of social strictures, the diverse and driving energies of the self were forced to draw upon unknown and untapped reserves of ingenuityeither to overcome these obstacles or to adapt to them with the minimum of sacrifice. The results were novel, value-creating.

Nietzsches point was primarily aesthetic. Contrary to the romantic notion of art being produced by a process of letting go, Nietzsche insisted that the artist strictly and subtlyobeys thousandfold laws. The language of inventionwhether poetry, music or speech itselfis bound by the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm. Such laws are capricious in their origin and tyrannical in their effect. That is the point: from that unforgiving soil of power and whimsy rises the most miraculous increase. Not just in the artsGoethe, say, or Beethovenbut in politics and ethics as well: Napoleon, Caesar, Nietzsche himself (Genuine philosophersare commanders and legislators: they say, thus it shall be!).

One school would find expression for these ideas in fascism. Writers like Ernst Jnger and Carl Schmitt imagined political artists of great novelty and originality forcing their way through or past the filtering constraints of everyday life. The leading legal theorist of the Third Reich, Schmitt looked to those extraordinary instances in politicswar, the decision, the exceptionwhen the power of real life, as he put it in Political Theology, breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. In that confrontation between mechanism and real life, the man of exception would find or make his moment: by taking an unauthorized decision, ordaining a new regime of law, or founding a political order. In each case, something was created out of nothingness.

It was the peculiarand, in the long run, more significantgenius of the Austrian school to look for these moments and experiences not in the political realm but in the marketplace. Money in a capitalist economy, Hayek came to realize, could best be understood and defended in Nietzschean terms: as the medium through which a forcethe selfs desire for power to achieve unspecified endsmakes itself felt.

* * *

The second challenge confronting the philosophers of capital was more daunting. While Nietzsches transvaluation of values gave pride of place to the highest types of humanityvalues were a gift, the philosopher their greatest sourcethe political implications of marginalism were more ambidextrous. If on one reading it was the capitalist who gave value to the worker, on another it was the workerin his capacity as consumerwho gave value to capital. Social democrats pursued the latter argument with great zeal. The result was the welfare state, with its emphasis on high wages and good benefitsas well as unionizationas the driving agent of mass demand and economic prosperity. More than a macroeconomic policy, social democracy (or liberalism, as it was called in America) reflected an ethos of the citizen-worker-consumer as the creator and center of the economy. Long after economists had retired the labor theory of value, the welfare state remained lit by its afterglow. The political economy of the welfare state may have been marginalist, but its moral economy was workerist.

The midcentury right was in desperate need of a response that, squaring Nietzsches circle, would clear a path for aristocratic action in the capitalist marketplace. It needed not simply an alternative economics but an answering vision of society. Schumpeter provided one, Hayek another.

Schumpeters entrepreneur is one of the more enigmatic characters of modern social theory. He is not inventive, heroic or charismatic. There is surely no trace of any mystic glamour about him, Schumpeter writes in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. His instincts and impulses are confined to the office and the counting table. Outside those environs, he cannot say boo to a goose. Yet it is this nothing, this great inscrutable blank, that will bend a nation to his willnot unlike the father figures of a Mann or Musil novel.

What the entrepreneur hasor, better, isare force and will. As Schumpeter explains in a 1927 essay, the entrepreneur possesses extraordinary physical and nervous energy. That energy gives him focus (the maniacal, almost brutal, ability to shut out what is inessential) and stamina. In those late hours when lesser beings have given way to a state of exhaustion, he retains his full force and originality. By originality, Schumpeter means something peculiar: receptivity to new facts. It is the entrepreneurs ability to recognize that sweet spot of novelty and occasion (an untried technology, a new method of production, a different way to market or distribute a product) that enables him to revolutionize the way business gets done. Part opportunist, part fanatic, he is a leading man, Schumpeter suggests in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, overcoming all resistance in order to create the new modes and orders of everyday life.

Schumpeter is careful to distinguish entrepreneurialism from politics as it is conventionally understood: the entrepreneurs power does not readily expandinto the leadership of nations; he wants to be left alone and to leave politics alone. Even so, the entrepreneur is best understood as neither an escape from nor an evasion of politics but as its sublimation, the relocation of politics in the economic sphere.

Rejecting the static models of other economistsequilibrium is death, he saysSchumpeter depicts the economy as a dramatic confrontation between rising and falling empires (firms). Like Machiavelli in The Prince, whose vision Nietzsche described as perfection in politics, Schumpeter identifies two types of agents struggling for position and permanence amid great flux: one is dynastic and lawful, the other upstart and intelligent. Both are engaged in a death dance, with the former in the potentially weaker position unless it can innovate and break with routine.

Schumpeter often resorts to political and military metaphors to describe this dance. Production is a history of revolutions. Competitors command and wield pieces of armor. Competition strikes at the foundations and very lives of firms; entrepreneurs in equilibrium find themselves in much the same situations as generals would in a society perfectly sure of permanent peace. In the same way that Schmitt imagines peace as the end of politics, Schumpeter sees equilibrium as the end of economics.

Against this backdrop of dramatic, even lethal, contest, the entrepreneur emerges as a legislator of values and new ways of being. The entrepreneur demonstrates a penchant for breaking with the routine tasks which everybody understands. He overcomes the multiple resistances of his worldfrom simple refusal either to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it.

To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type.

The entrepreneur, in other words, is a founder. As Schumpeter describes him in The Theory of Economic Development:

There is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such positions, but what may be attained by industrial and commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.

That may be why his inner life is so reminiscent of the Machiavellian prince, that other virtuoso of novelty. All of his energy and will, the entirety of his force and being, is focused outward, on the enterprise of creating a new order.

And yet even as he sketched the broad outline of this legislator of value, Schumpeter sensed that his days were numbered. Innovation was increasingly the work of departments, committees and specialists. The modern corporation socializes the bourgeois mind. In the same way that modern regiments had destroyed the very personal affair of medieval battle, so did the corporation eliminate the need for individual leadership acting by virtue of personal force and personal responsibility for success. The romance of earlier commercial adventure was rapidly wearing away. With the entrepreneurial function in terminal decline, Schumpeters experiment in economics as great politics seemed to be approaching an end.

* * *

Hayek offered an alternative account of the market as the proving ground of aristocratic action. Schumpeter had already hinted at it in a stray passage in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Taking aim at the notion of a rational chooser who knows what he wants, wants what is best (for him, at any rate) and works efficiently to get it, Schumpeter invoked a half-century of social thoughtLe Bon, Pareto and Freudto emphasize not only the importance of the extra-rational and irrational element in our behavior, but also the power of capital to shape the preferences of the consumer.

Consumers do not quite live up to the idea that the economic textbooks used to convey. On the one hand, their wants are nothing like as definite, and their actions upon those wants nothing like as rational and prompt. On the other hand, they are so amenable to the influence of advertising and other methods of persuasion that producers often seem to dictate to them instead of being directed by them.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek developed this notion into a full-blown theory of the wealthy and the well-born as an avant-garde of taste, as makers of new horizons of value from which the rest of humanity took its bearings. Instead of the market of consumers dictating the actions of capital, it would be capital that would determine the market of consumptionand beyond that, the deepest beliefs and aspirations of a people.

The distinction that Hayek draws between mass and elite has not received much attention from his critics or his defenders, bewildered or beguiled as they are by his repeated invocations of liberty. Yet a careful reading of Hayeks argument reveals that liberty for him is neither the highest good nor an intrinsic good. It is a contingent and instrumental good (a consequence of our ignorance and the condition of our progress), the purpose of which is to make possible the emergence of a heroic legislator of value.

Civilization and progress, Hayek argues, depend upon each of us deploying knowledge that is available for our use yet inaccessible to our reason. The computer on which I am typing is a repository of centuries of mathematics, science and engineering. I know how to use it, but I dont understand it. Most of our knowledge is like that: we know the how of thingshow to turn on the computer, how to call up our word-processing program and typewithout knowing the that of things: that electricity is the flow of electrons, that circuits operate through binary choices and so on. Others possess the latter kind of knowledge; not us. That combination of our know-how and their knowledge advances the cause of civilization. Because they have thought through how a computer can be optimally designed, we are free to ignore its transistors and microchips; instead, we can order clothes online, keep up with old friends as if they lived next door, and dive into previously inaccessible libraries and archives in order to produce a novel account of the Crimean War.

We can never know what serendipity of knowledge and know-how will produce the best results, which union of genius and basic ignorance will yield the greatest advance. For that reason, individualsall individualsmust be free to pursue their ends, to exploit the wisdom of others for their own purposes. Allowing for the uncertainties of progress is the greatest guarantor of progress. Hayeks argument for freedom rests less on what we know or want to know than on what we dont know, less on what we are morally entitled to as individuals than on the beneficial consequences of individual freedom for society as a whole.

In fact, Hayek continues, it is not really my freedom that I should be concerned about; nor is it the freedom of my friends and neighbors. It is the freedom of that unknown and untapped figure of invention to whose imagination and ingenuity my friends and I will later owe our greater happiness and flourishing: What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.

Deep inside Hayeks understanding of freedom, then, is the notion that the freedom of some is worth more than the freedom of others: The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use. Hayek cites approvingly this statement of a nineteenth-century philosopher: It may be of extreme importance that some should enjoy libertyalthough such liberty may be neither possible nor desirable for the great majority. That we dont grant freedom only to that individual is due solely to the happenstance of our ignorance: we cannot know in advance who he might be. If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.

* * *

As this reference to future wants and desires suggests, Hayek has much more in mind than producers responding to a pre-existing market of demand; hes talking about men who create new marketsand not just of wants or desires, but of basic tastes and beliefs. The freedom Hayek cares most about is the freedom of those legislators of value who shape and determine our ends.

The overwhelming majority of men and women, Hayek says, are simply not capable of breaking with settled patterns of thought and practice; given a choice, they would never opt for anything new, never do anything better than what they do now.

Action by collective agreement is limited to instances where previous efforts have already created a common view, where opinion about what is desirable has become settled, and where the problem is that of choosing between possibilities already generally recognized, not that of discovering new possibilities.

While some might claim that Hayeks argument here is driven less by a dim view of ordinary men and women than his dyspepsia about politics, he explicitly excludes the decision of some governing elite from the acid baths of his skepticism. Nor does he hide his misgivings about the individual abilities of wage laborers who comprise the great majority. The working stiff is a being of limited horizons. Unlike the employer or the independent, both of whom are dedicated to shaping and reshaping a plan of life, the workers orientation is largely a matter of fitting himself into a given framework. He lacks responsibility, initiative, curiosity and ambition. Though some of this is by necessitythe workplace does not countenance actions which cannot be prescribed or which are not conventionalHayek insists that this is not only the actual but the preferred position of the majority of the population. The great majority enjoy submitting to the workplace regime because it gives them what they mainly want: an assured fixed income available for current expenditure, more or less automatic raises, and provision for old age. They are thus relieved of some of the responsibilities of economic life. Simply put, these are people for whom taking orders from a superior is not only a welcome relief but a prerequisite of their fulfillment: To do the bidding of others is for the employed the condition of achieving his purpose.

It thus should come as no surprise that Hayek believes in an avant-garde of tastemakers, whose power and position give them a vantage from which they can not only see beyond the existing horizon but also catch a glimpse of new ones:

Only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and possibilities become visible, so that the selection of new goals and the effort toward their achievement will begin long before the majority can strive for them.

These horizons include everything from what we regard as good or beautiful, to the ambitions, goals and ends we pursue in our everyday lives, to the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion. On all of these fronts, it is the avant-garde that leads the way and sets our parameters.

More interesting is how explicit and insistent Hayek is about linking the legislation of new values to the possession of vast amounts of wealth and capital, evenor especiallywealth that has been inherited. Often, says Hayek, it is only the very rich who can afford new products or tastes. Lavishing money on these boutique items, they give producers the opportunity to experiment with better designs and more efficient methods of production. Thanks to their patronage, producers will find cheaper ways of making and delivering these productscheap enough, that is, for the majority to enjoy them. What was before a luxury of the idle richstockings, automobiles, piano lessons, the universityis now an item of mass consumption.

The most important contribution of great wealth, however, is that it frees its possessor from the pursuit of money so that he can pursue nonmaterial goals. Liberated from the workplace and the rat race, the idle richa phrase Hayek seeks to reclaim as a positive goodcan devote themselves to patronizing the arts, subsidizing worthy causes like abolition or penal reform, founding new philanthropies and cultural institutions. Those born to wealth are especially important: not only are they the beneficiaries of the higher culture and nobler values that have been transmitted across the generationsHayek insists that we will get a better elite if we allow parents to pass their fortunes on to their children; requiring a ruling class to start fresh with every generation is a recipe for stagnation, for having to reinvent the wheelbut they are immune to the petty lure of money. The grosser pleasures in which the newly rich often indulge have usually no attraction for those who have inherited wealth. (How Hayek reconciles this position with the agnosticism about value he expresses in The Road to Serfdom remains unclear.)

The men of capital, in other words, are best understood not as economic magnates but as cultural legislators: However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs. While this seems to be a universal truth for Hayek, it is especially true in societies where wage labor is the rule. The dominance of paid employment has terrible consequences for the imagination, which are most acutely felt by the producers of that imagination: There is something seriously lacking in a society in which all the intellectual, moral, and artistic leaders belong to the employed classes. Yet we are moving everywhere toward such a position.

When labor becomes the norm, in both senses of the term, culture doesnt stand a chance.

* * *

In a virtuoso analysis of what he calls The Intransigent Right, the British historian Perry Anderson identifies four figures of the twentieth-century conservative canon: Schmitt, Hayek, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Strauss and Schmitt come off best (the sharpest, most profound and far-seeing), Oakeshott the worst, and Hayek somewhere in between. This hierarchy of judgment is not completely surprising. Anderson has never taken seriously the political theory produced by a nation of shopkeepers, so the receptivity of the English to Oakeshott and Hayek, who became a British subject in 1938, renders them almost irresistible targets for his critique. Andersons cosmopolitan indifference to the indiscreet charms of the Anglo bourgeoisie usually makes him the most sure-footed of guides, but in Hayeks case it has led him astray. Like many on the left, Anderson is so taken with the bravura and brutality of Strausss and Schmitts self-styled realism that he cant grasp the far greater daring and profundity of Hayeks political theory of shopkeepinghis effort to locate great politics in the economic relations of capitalism.

What distinguishes the theoretical men of the right from their counterparts on the left, Anderson writes, is that their voices were heard in the chancelleries. Yet whose voice has been more listened to, across decades and continents, than Hayeks? Schmitt and Strauss have attracted readers from all points of the political spectrum as writers of dazzling if disturbing genius, but the two projects with which they are most associatedEuropean fascism and American neoconservatismhave never generated the global traction or gathering energy that neoliberalism has now sustained for more than four decades.

It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between the marginal children of Nietzschewith political man on one branch of the family tree, economic man on the other. Hayek, at times, could sound the most Schmittian notes. At the height of Augusto Pinochets power in Chile, Hayek told a Chilean interviewer that when any government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created. The sort of situation he had in mind was not anarchy or civil war but Allende-style social democracy, where the government pursues the mirage of social justice through administrative and increasingly discretionary means. Even in The Constitution of Liberty, an extended paean to the notion of a spontaneous order that slowly evolves over time, we get a brief glimpse of the lawgiver whose task it is to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself. (Of the modern German writings on the rule of law, Hayek also says, Schmitts are still among the most learned and perceptive.) Current events seemed to supply Hayek with an endless parade of candidates. Two years after its publication in 1960, he sent The Constitution of Liberty to Portuguese strongman Antnio Salazar, with a cover note professing his hope that it might assist the dictator in his endeavour to design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy. Pinochets Constitution of 1980 is named after the 1960 text.

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Nietzsches Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek | The Nation

Two books on philosophy give both a theoretical and practical view of where philosophy has taken us, and the direction in which it is leading us today.

The first is A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, by French philosopher Luc Ferry, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Ferry argues, should be what Epicurus termed it, medicine for the soul.

Its theoretical tasks, he maintains, are to help us gain a sense of the world we are in and to gain instruments for understanding it.

Its practical tasks are to teach us the ethics of living with others and to bring us salvation, or at least wisdom, in preparation for the demise that awaits us all.

All philosophy lies in two words: sustain and abstain, said the ancient philosopher Epictetus.

Ferry traces the paths down which several key philosophers have led us toward finding wisdom and salvation. He first notes how Stoics such as Zeno, Epictetus, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius suggested that we become at peace with the living cosmos and accept everything that happens with serenity; that we limit our attachments to people and things and live ethically, so that death and separation lose their sting.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Jesuss offer of eternal life upon our agreement to give love a chance wrested philosophical supremacy from the Stoics, who offered only a serene end to our existence. But the age of reason, enlightenment and humanism, ushered in by Descartes and Rousseau, declared that man is distinct from nature in that he can change, and that unlike the animals, his existence precedes his essence. Man was then free to set his own destiny based upon reason, not faith. The individual became an end in himself, in search of his own ethical philosophy unbridled by the philosophies and religions of the past.

This, Ferry observes, led to creating godless doctrines of salvation, i.e, Rousseaus French Revolution, the scientific revolution, Democracy, Marxs Socialism and Lenins Communist revolution.

Socrates was the buffoon who got himself heard, said Friedrich Nietzsche.

Ushering in post-modernity with his phrase God is dead, Nietzsche bemoaned the fact that the humanists had simply replaced God with false idols of their own republicanism, Communism and scientific rationalism, just as the Stoics falsely ascribed order to a chaotic universe. Previous philosophers were all reactive, Nietzsche declared, tearing down other philosophies only to erect more absurd constructs in their place, leaving humanity no signposts for the future. Nietzsche posited the true creative genius with his active vital forces the artist, or the creative leader of nations, living their lives intensely as the only ones with a chance to lead us out of the darkness.

His will to power, Ferry explains, was not a will to conquer, but to enjoy a maximum intensity of life, dispensing with guilt, and every morality based on religions and political philosophies that were no longer relevant. His theory of Eternal Recurrence simply meant the virtue of living ones life as if one had to repeat every moment again and again throughout eternity; the virtue of making each moment count.

Then came Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, Ferry notes, leaving a weary humanity enraptured with sciences brainchild- technology.

Todays philosophy, Ferry urges, must retake its place beside technology, and drag itself out of speculative academia, not to restore old questions, but to rethink them afresh, to give humanity more than mere technology offers. To offer them true wisdom to use their technology, and if at all possible, salvation from both the fear of death and a life bereft of ultimate meaning.

Author and history professor Arthur Herman yields another unique perspective on philosophy with his The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization.

His premise: that the Western world has gravitated back and forth between the teachings of Plato and Aristotle in deciding how life should best be lived. And he supports that theory with a wildly interesting approach.

For Plato, knowledge is the prerequisite of virtue, and grasping a standard of perfection, i.e., God, the Good, etc., through the dialectic approach, is how we transform ourselves into virtuous and happy people. Aristotle, the lisping doctors son and father of the scientific method, saw things differently. He trusted the evidence of the senses, not transcendental theories. He placed his faith not in Platos God, moral absolutism, or other abstractions, but in science, ethics and rational politics.

Ancient world scientists such as Strato, Galen, Ptolemy and Archimedes appeared to be taking the world in an Aristotlean direction, but the great Roman stoics, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius headed things back on a Platonic course.

All of this was prelude for what would follow throughout Western history.

Jesus Christs arrival, and the subsequent melding of Greco-Roman philosophy with Christianity by Augustine, led to 500 more years of Platonic supremacy in the Western mind.

This changed, Herman notes, at the end of the Dark Ages when those like Abelard (b. 1079) began rediscovering Aristotle logic from Arabic texts. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) attempted a synthesis of the two, arguing that faith and reason supported each other in their joint search for truth.

But the Western world would have none of that, and when the Renaissance (c. 1300) arrived, it grasped tightly to Aristotles reason and didnt let go until the High Renaissance of Michelangelo (b. 1475) Galileo and Leonardo brought the Platonic mystical vision of beauty equals truth back to the fore.

The Reformation brought an Aristotle resurgence that was supported with a vengeance by the rise of science in the age of Newton, and by the philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Locke and Jefferson. The tables turned once more with Rousseau and the Romantics, Wordworth, Blake, Byron and Shelley, et al., mystical visionaries in search of beauty, truth and a higher existence unknown to science and reason.

But the Romantics vision would ultimately fall to the more practical views of Hegel (German Idealism), Marx (Socialism) and John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism), who saw in the modern state the ultimate salvation of mankind. This was reminiscent of Platos vision in The Republic, where a philosopher king ruled for the greater benefit of all. Nietzsche, of course, raised a new voice against Plato deploring Platos god worship and Hegels state worship in equal measure.

So where does that leave us, according to Herman? He finds the present day Western mind in thrall to American Exceptionalism, an odd mixture of Platonic religious mysticism (Christianity) and Aristotlean worship of science and technology. Both are necessary for the fulfillment of the Western soul, Herman suggests, so long as the worst of Platos and Aristotles legacies (heartless governments and soulless technology) do not ultimately predominate.

But most interesting in Cave is how Herman draws so many of Europes artists, painters, political and religious leaders and scientists into the struggle between Plato and Aristotle.

Whether discussing their influence on Michelangelos paintings, Wordsworths poetry, or Lenins politics, Herman effectively demonstrates that, as with the Chinese and Confucius, we Westerners are never far from the sway these philosophical giants still hold over us today.

The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

704 pages; Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition, June 3, 2014, English

A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

304 pages; Harper Perennial; Original edition Dec. 27, 2011, English

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Philosophers answer the big question how should we live? - The Sun Herald

The Ubermensch is Friedrich Nietzsche's answer to the problem of Nihilism. Nietzsche begins his premise with the assumption that God does not exist, and if God does not exist, thus objective morality and inherent value are not possible since there is no ultimate being that exists to create morality and value in the first place.Nietzsche's Ubermensch will act as his own God, giving himself morality and value as he sees fit according to him alone. The Ubermensch is neither slave or master as he does not impose his will upon others. The Ubermensch is an independent individual who has the power to banish herd instincts from his mind and become a master of self discipline.

Above all, the Ubermensch is the next step in human evolution. Every human must deal with the question "What is the meaning of life"- some say God and Heaven, others say ultimate objective virtue, but the Ubermensch will give life value that is not based on superstition or mystical folly. The Ubermensch finds value in his life experience because it cannot be reasoned out through argument and logic. The Ubermensch would say that the meaning of life is that you die, so make it valuable.

The Ubermensch is the ultimate realization of the Will to Power, but no necessarily over others. His most valuable power is over himself. "He cannot rule himself will certainty be ruled by others"- Nietzsche

Read more:
Urban Dictionary: Ubermensch

How do other people do it? How do other people deal with the etiquette of hate?

Even as a kid, I've always seen the world as one big potential pen pal. I try to answer letters and emails from readers as swiftly as possible. So grateful am I for a response to my column, I reply even to those written with toothpicks and nail polish (I'm hoping it was nail polish; it was deep red).

Most days, I answer the angriest and most scathing notes immediately. I'm driven neither by virtue nor by discipline. I simply want to get the vitriol out of my head because some of the language my correspondents use makes Anthony Scaramucci sound like Captain Kangaroo.

Despite coming from a background strikingly similar to that of our short-lived White House communications director meaning that I am fluent in profanity I nevertheless try to answer messages from Enraged Readers with as much grace and honesty as possible.

I'm no lady, but I try to write like one when the occasion demands.

What tickles me pink is when Enraged Readers suddenly become Reasonable Adults, which is what often happens once folks realize there's an actual human being behind the column. Even the most passionate antagonists immediately withdraw their fangs (you can hear the clicking noise) and make cogent arguments in meaningful, respectful and compelling ways.

Although their opinions on whatever topic is under discussion women's rights, health care benefits, why major universities still need to have brick-and-mortar libraries and not only hot tubs will not have changed, their demeanor will have shifted.

The change in tone makes my day.

Their replies back to me usually begin with "I never expected to hear from you," followed by an apology for rough language. As my student Julia put it (because Julia is getting a good education at a university with a library), "They're a little bit like Nietzsche, thinking that they're simply shouting into the abyss without ever thinking that the abyss might not only shout back, but even more weirdly, reply immediately and cheerfully."

Very few people have ramped up the rage. Quite the opposite: Several exchanges that began on a harsh note have become, if not harmonious, then at least entertaining. Very often they're illuminating. I've come to enjoy these debates.

But what do you do when you get a note from somebody you've never met, or somebody you knew 35 years ago, or a friend of a friend who more or less demands a favor and then despises you if you dare to decline? That's a different kind of hate.

I'm far happier getting into a fierce argument over why the gender gap in wages is not only real but genuinely bad for all Americans than I am explaining why I can't read somebody's 1,079-page manuscript by the end of the month ("Just print it out and make suggestions in the margin before you mail it back!") or get them six tickets to the women's basketball games ("I haven't exactly read your stuff, but you gotta know coach Geno Auriemma, right?").

If I don't answer in the enthusiastic affirmative, I get replies that make me want to purchase Kevlar vests in a variety of charming colors.

Julia says that she stopped accepting every social media invitation to be "friends" in seventh grade and that I also need to be more discerning.

I did learn one lesson: I no longer let the whole world post stuff on my Facebook page. One actual friend explained that "your Facebook page is like your fridge door: You're the only one who gets to decide what stays up there."

Her analogy gave me the permission I needed to remove comments that are off-topic, annoying or belligerent. If, after repeated warnings, somebody doesn't get the hint, I put them on the list of those who are unwelcome in my virtual kitchen.

I did this last week, only to have one guy fume that I was assaulting his right to free speech by refusing to allow him to call me an idiot on my own Facebook page. I suggested that, as a personal favor, he read the Constitution to grasp more fully the First Amendment.

Let's see if he writes back.

Gina Barreca is an English professor at UConn and author of "If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?" and eight other books. She can be reached at ginabarreca.com.

Original post:
Gina Barreca: How I Handle Nastygrams - Hartford Courant

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence.

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, trans-humanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather, technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money...It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve god by becoming god. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neo-liberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes.

Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomas, PhD Candidate, University of East London.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Transhumanism: Can technology help mankind transcend its natural limitations? - Scroll.in

From left: Chris Conatser, Allison Page, Kevin Whittinghill, Zoltan Istvan and Allen Saakyan

Zoltan Istvan ran for President of the US as a "Transhumanist" with a campaign that called for massive government funding to eliminate human mortality. Donald Trump won with a much crazier campaign.

Earlier this week on the Eureka science show he talked about Transhumanism and his campaign to become California Governor in 2018.

The hosts Allen Saakyan and Kevin Whittinghill were joined by comedians Chris Conatser and Allison Page. The show uses comedy to educate its audience about important scientific issues.

No foodies...

You can tell by the expressions on their faces (photo above) that Istvan's description of Transhumanism and the chance to live hundreds of years wasn't very appealling. Especially the part when he said that we won't need sex or food in a future Transhumanist world.

Istvan looks like a TV presenter because he used to be one -- at National Geographic. And it was on assignment in Vietnam when he almost stepped on a landmine that he vowed to work on ending human mortality.

Excerpts from Istvan's talk:

- Initially we'll be able to extend our lifespans by 500 years or so. [Like Zeno's paradox we won't catch up with our mortality]

- Ageing will be treated and eliminated like any other chronic disease.

- Our organs will be replaced with fresh ones grown from our own cells so there is no rejection and no lifetime medications.

- Machines of various types and sizes will be embedded in our bodies to protect, heal and augment our senses.

- A bionic eye will replace one of our natural eyes and allow us to see beyond the tiny 1% of the light spectrum so that we can see things like carbon monoxide gas - useful for avoiding pollution.

- CRISPR will allow people to change their DNA to look like the people in the Star Wars bar scene - with tails and fur. [Costume shops - the disruption is coming.]

- Sex won't be anything like as we know it and might not even require other people.

- Eating and food won't be the same. Some Transhumanists want skin with chlorophyll. Lunchtime won't require a sandwich -- slip your shirt off and take a walk in the sun.

- Life extending technologies will come down in price and trickle down to the poorest of the poor.

I asked Istvan what will we be doing during our extra 500 years of life especially since our prime motivators of food and sex won't be present. He said this is the million dollar question, "We don't know."

I rephrased it and asked how will you spend the time? He said he would head back to school and pick up four doctorates and also learn how to play a bunch of musical instruments. That leaves 470 years to go...

Life is cheap...

As the last people were leaving the event a 42 year old man was shot dead outside the club. Transhumanism needs to address morality as well as mortality.

What an ironic commentary: we talk about the need for expensive transhumanist technologies to extend a person's life -- but a bullet bought for pennies has the final say. Stopping gun violence extends lives.

- - -

More info:

http://www.zoltanistvan.com/

600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself

Eureka show

Eureka Youtube channel

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Salvation in Transhumanism: Humanity merges with machines and lives for ever - ZDNet

Super humans created by design will be a reality in the near future.

Imagine if we could create the perfect President Trump by simply upgrading him a little from a "Of the people, for the people" ethical point of view. Throw in an anti-collusion, Don Jr. malware system and weve already got ourselves a better America.

This is not fake news, so saddle up: It's called Transhumanism. If you're thinking, "Wow, this sounds like a new culture whose goal is to evolve humans physically and intellectually in order to create life extension through genetic engineering with eternal life at the core," then you are correct. Good job!

Tranhumanistic thinking means you believe that you can upgrade yourself with a little help from nanotech, which honestly sounds good to meI already bought the headphones! (I wouldn't frown at a little time management and decision making skills improvements. I freely admit I have a list of complaints for my brain's manufacturer. I'm ready for some upgrades.)

The MetroSpiritual: Does your DNA code prove youre part alien?

The general public believes we are a good 100 years away from this type of technology, but surprisewe are already there. They can already genetically create superior human beings.

One way, but not the only way, is by using CRISPR Cas- 9 kits. It is a fairly inexpensive, already available system for genome editing. The bare-bones for beginners explanation: It targets and modifies gene sequences and can be used for cloning and reproducing preferred traits as well as reprogramming our current DNA to seek out and destroy traits we don't like.

Transhumanism manipulates energy waves, which is what we and everything and anything at its core is made up of, the entire universe included. For example, running weak electrical currents through certain areas of the brain speeds up reaction time. It's called transcranial direct current stimulation, or TDCS, and is already used by the U.S. military to train snipers.

As a Metro-Spiritual, there's a layered but unique perspective that comes to mind. What if higher beings are already using a form of Transhumanism on millions of humans already and have been for some time?

The MetroSpiritual: Make meditation part of your daily journey

Scientists from the Human Genome project say that our DNA was not written on this planet and is a complex mathematical code. What if we have the ability to upgrade, but haven't in a while because we didn't know that we even could?

Without updating the How to be Human software, life would be more confusing and run much slower, don't you think? Perhaps many of us were born with semi- superhuman abilities by virtue of our past but still can't warp our minds around the system upgrades. Stay with me

If advanced entities and let's face it, there are smarter ones then us in this galaxy and universe have already encoded our DNA to allow for upgrades, unarguably this seems like a good anti- corruption software program.

But if available technology for human advancement is just a matter of simple software, is humanity better or worse off? There is likely a built-in level of accountability that is necessary for spiritual growth. I assume expecting anything less always needs to be updated.

The MetroSpiritual: 10 ways to stay spiritually balanced in 2017

Curiously, in the oldest of texts, extraterrestrials have had this Transhumanism thing down since forever ago. Biblical texts even talk about ancient Abraham having his first child when he was 80 years old, because humans supposedly lived for upwards of 200 years way back then. Eternal life might just be sophisticated technology which history, and now science, supports.

Erich von Dniken, who wrote Chariots of the Gods, was one of the first to talk about the ancient alien theory. His research and studies state that thousands of years ago space travelers from other planets visited Earth and taught humans about technology, and influenced their beliefs on religion.

The late Zecharia Sitchin was the first to decode the most ancient texts from the Sumerians. According to his translations, a race of extraterrestrials called the Anunnaki, which means those who are from heaven, came to Earth from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. They have been here long before humans and are the ones responsible for creating the human race. Or so they say

The Greeks, Indians, Mayans, Romans the list goes on all believed in gods who visited Earth and advanced humanity. Their recorded history supports the ancient alien theory. (Are those who learned how to live forever considered gods? Lord help us!)

The MetroSpiritual: How to connect with extraterrestrials

Perhaps the Anunnaki were space travelers. Some believe their home planet was destroyed and their race was dying and so they began to interbreed with humans way, way back then ago. Some believe they created humans. Biblical texts support all this. There are cave drawings dating back more than 5,000 years of alien beings with tall bodies, big heads and big hands interacting with humans. An unnamed source says one looks just like Trump too. Fake news?

Ancient texts talk about the Lyrian Wars and today you can see actual NASA footage of modern day space wars on the internet. Perhaps times don't change that much when it comes to history repeating itself.

Let's skip thousands of years ahead and go to the 1930s to the 1980s. UFO sightings were at an all-time high. The scoop was hundreds of everyday common folk being abducted by aliens. Roswell helped top it off with a cherry.

Scientific evidence from notable cases where taken seriously by the general public and for the first time in ages, the taboo subject began to regain acceptance. Abductees usually described little grey humanoids with skinny bodies and big heads with bug-looking eyes. Sound familiar? They seemed to be most interested in the human reproductive organs.

The MetroSpiritual: Why finding your true soulmate is so hard

Biblical texts do talk about the fallen angels always mating with female humans. Even Enoch, Noah's great grandfather, talked about being abducted by higher beings, but he said that it was spectacular.

But that was then and this is now, and you don't really hear about those scary abduction stories anymore, right? It's more of an Enoch connection these days. So why?

Did they complete interbreeding their DNA with ours? Are they back with upgraded models of their creations, aka, us? Help from ETs is not a new thing, but it seems to be back on a familiar rise these days.

Maybe the little grey aliens we always here about are the result of robotic Transhumanism from eons ago, and humans will make similar versions in the future. We are well on our way, if not already there. Maybe the result of yesterdays abductions are the currently updated versions of human hybrid star-seeds, and maybe you are one of them!

Humanitys advancement might be included in our DNA. It does not mean you will be richer or smarter, it only means you can download universal information, once you figure it out. Maybe that will lead to your desires, but there is always a catch!

Many of the ETs are currently described as looking like us and not like the grey, bug-eyed beings described in the past. So is the future now? Time seems all messed up these days. It might be due to the modern day form of Transhumanism from the past that some of us are currently experiencing.

Downloading our brains into a computer and growing body parts for replacement is happening today in all sorts of forms. Google it! To live forever is in the works, but do we want everyone to live forever? What about the mean people?

Maybe higher intelligences are a step ahead of us, using ET-made natural selection via DNA. You can only upgrade if you get it and are worthy. Personally, I might have some cosmic figuring out to do.

If we could live forever how would most people even react? If you can get around to doing anything tomorrow, luxury nap facilities would certainly become popular establishments: the anti-Starbucks!

Then again, even forever would eventually become a race against time. Who will get there first? I doubt me. I'll be too busy daydreaming about where the finish line is at one of the many napping facilities I hopefully have some stock in.

Maija Polsley began having otherworldly experiences at a young age and began attending metaphysics classes with her mother at age 12. She has since been dedicated to finding the truth and has not stopped exploring. Co-producer of the ghost investigation web series "Paranormal Pursuit" and founder of TheMetroSpiritual.com, Maija is a natural-born, city-dwelling, soul-seeking, independent former teen mom and single woman who is also a dimensionally educated, spiritually empathic writer, actor, poet, standup comic, tarot card reader, Earth lover and quintessential MetroSpiritual.

For more DAILY VIEWS, The News' contributor network, click here. nydailynews.com/tags/daily-views

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The MetroSpiritual: Creating super-humans through Transhumanism is becoming a reality - New York Daily News