The path to bondage is well under way

David Goldman is a London School trained economist who has specialized in China and the East for decades. I have corresponded with him occasionally over the years. (He was the economist who set George Soros on the path to wealth, actually, which David has said didn't turn out to be a good thing.)

David writes for Asia Times under the pen name Spengler. It is relevant to the content here that David is Jewish, for this column nests nicely with how the Jews, Jesus and Paul (well, they were all Jews) defined true human freedom. A key excerpt from "Pseudo-science, the Bible and human freedom":

People who feel they have no control over their lives believe that some force must have control over their lives, and in their fear and despair will believe in every sort of nonsense. There is a bitter irony in the predicament of Generation X, which has been told that it is free to follow its impulses, up to and including forms of sexuality that until quite recently were held to be aberrant. The more readily people indulge their impulses, the less control they have over their lives, and the more inclined they are to believe that some cosmic power – the constellations, random mutation of DNA, artificial intelligence, or whatever – actually is in control.

That is one side of the old pagan worldview, which saw human beings as the helpless playthings of nature and its personification in the gods. But the gods were more than a personification of nature: They were avatars for earthly elites who acted like gods on Earth.

The last sentence is telling, considering our present political scene (although David does no go there, but to the hazards of making artificial intelligence our gods). What did we hear in the debates last night but 10 people running for president who said quite clearly, "We are going to control your lives down to the smallest detail." But there is no freedom there, either political or spiritual.