Category Archives: politics

Does owning guns make sense

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I’ve been watching videos with Americans discussing guns. You know the drill: they want to be armed in order to protect their life and liberty, blah blah.

My question is: what is your opponent going to use to shoot back?

Let’s imagine several scenarios where a gun might be useful.

The first scenario is home defense against a burglar. Someone breaks into your house, is possibly armed, will possibly take your family hostage or harm them in some other way. Maybe it’s a personal enemy who decided to take revenge, maybe it’s a drug addict trying to steal your things in order to sell them. In this scenario, a gun is very useful. You’re not a victim, you can fight back and since you’re fighting from your known territory, the chances are you’ll win. In this scenario, the advantages of having a gun are so compelling, it should actually be obligatory to own a gun, and of course keep it locked in a safe so that your children can’t shoot themselves by accident or stupidity. The pros of owning a gun and being trained and prepared to use it for home defense so heavily outweigh the cons, it’s not even an argument.

The second scenario is personal defense in a public space. You carry a gun on your person in the street, at work or in a bar. If you’re attacked, you are not limited to your physical strength, and for women and weaker men this is a difference between being humiliated and beaten up in every physical confrontation, and being able to preserve your dignity. This is a strong reason for always carrying a firearm. However, if we imagine a realistic scenario, you’re not the only one who will carry a gun. If carrying a gun becomes the norm, it will be like the Wild West, where everyone wore a revolver like they wore pants. Altercations were very likely to turn deadly, and the fact that they were armed didn’t necessarily make people more careful, and they in fact got drunk quite frequently. So the problem is, you’re imagining a situation where you’re facing an arrogant bully, and if you have a gun, you can prevent him from assaulting you. The problem is, in a gun-friendly society a bully will always carry a gun, and a bully will practice with a gun the most. So you will basically only have normalized the escalation of violence, where you won’t have a fistfight against a stronger bully, you’ll have gunfight against a better marksman with a faster draw. In both situations you will be humiliated, but if a situation includes firearms, you’ll also be killed. Also, since the possible confrontation isn’t taking place inside your home against an invader, but in open territory, your actions will be scrutinized by a court of law even if you win. If the situation wasn’t clear, you may end up in jail. So realistically, the cons actually outweigh the pros, which is probably why American society migrated away from the Wild West model. However, there’s one situation where it’s good to be armed, and that’s a terrorist attack, of the “active shooter” variety, where you have one or multiple shooters who are indiscriminately killing civilians. If everyone is armed, this will completely discourage this form of terrorism, because it will look like an attempt of robbing a doughnut shop filled with cops. Not the brightest idea. However, have in mind that drawing a gun in an active shooter scenario makes you the prime target for the terrorists, if you’re the only one with the gun. That’s where my original question comes into play: what is your opponent going to use to shoot back? The San Bernardino shooters used AR-15 rifles and 9mm pistols. The Paris attackers used AK-47 assault rifles, hand grenades and suicide vests. Realistically, you’re going to have a pistol with you. It’s better than not having anything if you know what you’re doing and you’re lucky enough not to be killed before you can do anything or while attempting to draw the weapon, but you are still likely to be killed. If everybody is armed, your odds improve, but in that situation the terrorists are more likely to simply use the element of surprise and detonate a bomb. The better armed the target, the more likely the terrorists are to use stronger force. The worse protected the target, the more likely the terrorists are to deploy an improvised attack with light firearms or even knives. So basically, being armed and careful will help, but it will not solve the problem, because then you won’t have an active shooter problem, you’ll have a suicide bomber problem.

The third scenario is a temporary collapse of civilization due to some disaster, like hurricane Katrina, where the city infrastructure collapses, help doesn’t come quickly enough, and there’s massive looting and unrest. All the looters can be assumed to carry a handgun. Yes, if you don’t have a weapon, you potentially have a problem. However, if you do have a weapon, you will be very likely to become a looter yourself, or be mistaken for one, and killed. Also, your main problem isn’t looting, it’s having access to clean water and food, maybe medications. When you think of survival gear, think of water purification tools, not guns. The most likely thing to get you killed is diarrhea from drinking impure water, or infection from cutting yourself on something nasty and not having access to antibiotics. Here, again, the important question is what are you actually fighting? It’s lack of infrastructure, lack of essential resources, poor hygiene and looters. It might be more important to think about ways of bartering for things you need to survive than to think of survival in terms of repelling physical threats, although it’s useful to have a weapon.

The fourth scenario is one of the commonly mentioned ones, and it’s civil war against tyrannical government. Americans like to imagine it as a scenario from their war of independence, where some tyrannical force will take over, and some George Washington will assemble the freedom-loving gun owners who will start a guerrilla war against them and eventually prevail, because freedom supposedly always prevails. However, let me illustrate my point with some images.

This is Vukovar after its fall, in 1991. The Serbs are parading the streets of the fallen city, singing about their leader needing to send some salad because there’ll be meat, they’ll slaughter the Croats. All men of fighting age were either immediately shot or transported to concentration camps in Serbia where they were tortured, killed or exchanged for Serbs. The freedom loving men took up arms against the evil force, and they lost.

This is Grozny, Chechnya, 1995. The country was taken over by separatists who declared independence from Russia. The Russians were in a difficult situation, realizing that if they allow the Chechens to secede, their country might disintegrate. The Russians decided to win at all cost and, with a lot of help from pro-Russian Chechen forces, they won.

In American civil war, the South declared independence and tried to secede from the Union. After more than a million casualties and a country destroyed, the South surrendered.

If a civil war breaks out after totalitarian government takeover, there will be two realistic scenarios. Either you will be part of a small band of “terrorists” who will have little or no resources at their disposal and little or no support in the apathetic population, or you will be a part of a massive rebellion that will include a serious part of the armed forces, police and the national guard. In first case, you’re dealing with a Ruby Ridge or Waco scenario. You’ll be killed, regardless of how many guns you have. In the second case, you’re dealing with the American civil war scenario. You may win or lose, but having a gun of your own is of limited importance because if a wing of the military is on your side, you’ll be recruited into the armed forces of the rebels and you’ll be issued a rifle and other military equipment.

However, if you think you’ll be dealing with a George Washington kind of rebellion, that’s out of the question, that’s completely unrealistic. If a tyrannical government is in charge, the first thing they’ll do is create propaganda according to which owning guns is dangerous, and owning guns that are useful for military purposes is criminal, something only terrorists have a need for. They will have lists of guns and their owners, and they will send a SWAT team to your house to confiscate your weapons. You will be alone, facing an overwhelming force, and unless you run to the forest in time and become a fugitive from the law, you will be either disarmed or killed for resisting the law. The law will be what the fascists in power decide to make it. Nobody will ask you. The general population will obey the law, as always. They obeyed the Nazis in Germany not because they loved them, but because that’s was the law and that was the government. Most Americans will do the same.

I’ll tell you what the Yugoslav government did in Croatia as part of the preparation for Serbian takeover. They confiscated the weapons of the territorial defense, the guns that were supposed to be at the disposal of the people in case of war. Essentially, Croatia was disarmed. Then they began the process of the political takeover where all the power would be centralized in Serbia and dissent wouldn’t be tolerated. Nevertheless, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence and one of the first things we did was to capture the army barracks on our territory, with the little small arms that we had. We also bought weapons on the international black market. Essentially, we had to act like terrorists because the Serbs had complete control of the military. The police forces, however, changed sides, as well as some important military officers of Croatian nationality. We had to build an army almost from scratch; in the meantime, the enemy had everything from tanks to airplanes and warships. We were disarmed, but we had the advantage of every person being able to handle weapons, in Yugoslavia it was taught in schools as part of the normal curriculum, so the entire male population was able to fight as soon as they were issued a weapon. The fact that we were disarmed was a problem, but only initially. Very quickly, that problem was overcome and we crushed the Serbs militarily. So basically, it’s better to allow yourself to be disarmed initially, then bide your time, organize with a few friends, steal weapons so that they can’t be traced to you and form or join opposition forces. The initial attack at your freedom will succeed; your enemy will know what he’s doing and you won’t. He will come at you with overwhelming force. If you resist, you will lose. However, being armed isn’t the same as being prepared. If you’re prepared, you can allow yourself to be disarmed and still retain initiative and strike back later, when opportunity presents itself. Getting yourself killed in the initial power grab doesn’t help anyone but your enemy, so essentially, all those AR-15s that you Americans have at home because you’re “prepared”, be prepared to give them up, without a fight, peacefully. However, also be prepared to lay a siege on a police station later, steal the weapons and organize an armed resistance cell. That’s what civil war looks like, and forget being seen as a hero. You’ll be seen as a home-grown Bin Laden, and the general population will hate you. If this dissent manages to get support from a significant wing of the military, you have a chance.

So basically, that’s my take on owning guns with a purpose of being prepared. It sometimes helps, that’s true, but it’s perfectly useless against being dominated by a tyrannical government, because any such government will know perfectly well how to pull your fangs out. Again, ask yourself what will come for you. If it’s a burglar, no problem. If it’s a heavily armed SWAT team or a platoon of regular soldiers, what will your AR-15 accomplish beside making you a legitimate target and your death perfectly justifiable?

About Donald Trump’s campaign

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The cornerstone argument of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is that open borders, and especially free trade agreements, are harming America and weakening its economic position.

When a country that has dominant economic position, in a sense that it has internal markets sufficiently big as to reduce the costs of manufacturing goods to the point where no other power can compete with it fairly because they can’t produce goods cheaply enough to make a profit selling them competitively, this country will benefit from advocating open borders and free trade agreements, because open borders mean that their industry will destroy the weaker countries’ industries, and opening borders to the free flow of people, goods and services only benefits them because they will get the best migrant workers from abroad (because, since the free market industry is competitive, there simply isn’t room for anyone who isn’t up to par), and foreign products cannot compete with theirs on either price or quality, so that isn’t a danger either.

A weaker country needs to close its borders to imported goods and services because a stronger country will always be able to leverage its greater markets in order to reduce manufacturing costs and will always be able to destroy economies of weaker countries and essentially turn them into colonies that need to import everything and finance it with debt.

You can recognize a strong country by the fact that it doesn’t need to introduce tariffs on imported goods, that it advocates open borders and that it issues credit to others in order for them to be able to buy imported goods.

usa_federal_debt

If we take a look at the general trends of American economy, it has been financing its expenditures by debt, it’s been artificially inflating its GDP by issuing cheap credit to the venture capital firms who have been investing heavily into technology startups and inflating their market value far beyond any reality, and the purpose of that is to use the inflated GDP as backing for printing its fractional reserve currency. This means the Dollar is overstretched and maintained by artificial means. Also, the debt has been growing out of control. Debt to GDP ratio has exceeded 1, which would be worrying by itself, but since debt is real and GDP is artificially inflated, this is especially bad.

What it all actually shows is that America has been consistently spending more than it was making, and that’s been going on for the last few decades. In fact, since the debt graph looks like a good approximation of the exponential curve, the causes seem to be systemic.

But the greatest indicator, to me, is that a candidate advocating against free international trade seems to be winning the elections. So far, all CIA policy recommendations that advocated open borders and free trade came with a disclaimer which stated that such recommendations rest upon the assumption that America is the world’s strongest economy.

More than anything, Trump’s stated policy, its validity in the current state of the global economy, and its support by the disenfranchised citizens of USA, show that this implicit assumption is no longer valid.

Let’s assume that Trump does indeed win the presidency. Let’s assume that he implements his stated policies; he closes the borders, he stops immigration, he imposes obstacles to imports of goods and services into the USA. The USA companies are forced to concentrate on the domestic markets.

My quick-and-dirty simulation of the effects indicates that this will deflate the stock market bubble that maintains the fiction of the huge GDP. This will collapse the Dollar. USA will default on its debts since they are unserviceable in any case, and the entire economy will collapse into a stable state that reflects the actual market conditions. And this doesn’t even attempt to deal with the international fallout of such a huge disruption.

But this has nothing to do with Trump. If anything, he might actually make the transition more abrupt, but eventually less destructive. The current policies, that attempt to create some kind of a soft landing for America, are doomed and are only making the problem worse. In both cases, America will collapse. The indicators for that are overwhelming. However, with Trump America actually has a chance of achieving a stable state as an industrial, free-market country. With the socialists in power, it will achieve a stable state as a military dictatorship. People who see Trump as Hitler are wrong. Hitler was someone who was nothing without the power of the state behind him. As a free entrepreneur, he was nothing. Trump is the opposite of that. His entire power stems from his success in the free market. He doesn’t need the state to attain power, and is therefore not likely to start relying on the state as an end-all solution to all problems, as Hitler did. He’s going to rely on the real economy, on the healthy tissue. Hitler relied on the megalomaniacal fantasies of the state to compensate for his personal failures. Essentially, they are the opposites, and all similarities are actually fabrications designed by the socialist media in order to slander him, because they cannot stand his reality-based thinking.

The problem with Trump is that he relies too much on brute strength in solving problems. His attitude regarding torture and encryption shows that: Apple should yield to state authority and agree to break the encryption wall that protects its customers, torture should be used to extract data because America is in the position of strength there, and should use it in order to attain its goals. The problem is, the primary goal of America isn’t being strong. The primary goal of America is to be America. The primary goal is liberty and freedom and possibility, the primary goal is to abolish tyranny. The primary goal is to have a country in which those in power cannot imprison you without a trial and a due process, the primary goal is to limit the authority of the state over an individual, to make one’s property sacrosanct, to enable the individual to use force to defend his own, even against the state, because a state can become tyrannical. So the problem with making America great by Trump’s means is that it will no longer be America if it tramples on all the precepts set by its founders. Not using all means to achieve its ends, and not using the power of the state to pressure companies and individuals is what made America different from tyrannical superpowers like the Soviet Union or the Third Reich. What made America better than the Third Reich wasn’t technological supremacy. In fact, the Nazis had that. What made America better is that it was a place worth living in, as an individual. It had habeas corpus, it had The Bill of Rights, it had prohibition against unlawful detention, it had prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and it didn’t have the all-powerful state police.

So, what Trump should learn is that wielding a big stick can be a problem if you stumble and poke your eye out with it. Big sticks are not only a danger to others. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of making America great again, as long as you remember what made it America, and what made it great.

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

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When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

Leftist approach to reason and evidence

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It’s interesting how some people, usually on the left political and intellectual spectrum, recommend that we all disregard our prejudice and make up our minds based on reason and evidence, and yet, when people do just that, and based on reason and evidence come up with conclusions different from theirs, they go absolutely fucking nuts.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you say that I should reject prejudice, I will do exactly that. I will reject the prejudice that people are equal and see the evidence. I will look into the statistics, I will look at the results, and I will make up my mind. If I don’t come to the same conclusion as you doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. Maybe it’s you who are not following your advice. Maybe it’s you who are prejudiced, only your prejudice is that of equality.

If you say that people should reject religious dogma and make up your own mind about the existence of God based on the available evidence, and I do exactly that and conclude that God indeed exists, and that religions are just a primitive way of dealing with that truth in an inept and clumsy way, similar to the ways in which cavemen dealt with subdural hematoma. They actually invented trepanation, removal of a part of the skull in order to let the brain expand and relieve intracranial pressure, and it was widely ridiculed in medical circles until quite recently the modern neurosurgeons discovered that craniotomy is the best way of dealing with that exact problem. So yeah, the cavemen were the stupid dumbasses who bored holes in people’s skulls to let the evil spirits out, except that the modern doctors also bore holes in people’s skulls in order to… what? So yeah, we follow the evidence. But I will also make up my own mind on what I consider to be evidence. If I’m to make up my own mind, I’ll be damned if I’ll allow someone else to dictate what I’m to do with this freedom. I will see for myself. So, if God exists, are there people who can attest to that? There are. Are they credible? Yes. Are there multiple testimonies that can be correlated? Yes. Do I have personal experiences that confirm that God exists? I do. So well, there you have it. I followed the evidence, I approached those things rationally, and I made up my own mind.

The fact that my mind didn’t turn out into a replica of yours should not surprise you, since you profess your support for “multiculturalism” and accepting differences. But that isn’t really the case, isn’t it? It’s only a pose. You only accept different opinions if they are the same as yours. You only say we should follow the evidence and reason and reject prejudice because you think you can order people around and dictate what the prejudice are, what the evidence is and what is the reasonable conclusion. Essentially, you have a playbook you want to impose on everyone, and the story about freedom and reason and evidence is just a collection of nice words that are supposed to cloud one’s judgement and blind him to the ugliness of what’s actually going on.

Bad ideas that refuse to die

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I was thinking about socialism and how wrong ideas never seem to die, regardless of how harmful or useless they proved to be. For instance, at one point more than half the world tried to implement socialism in one form or another, and it invariably produced widespread human misery. It simply does that by design, with its “eat the rich” paradigm. It eats the rich and then everybody is poor, there’s nobody to blame, and then the infighting begins, millions die, everybody is poor, and eventually people completely give up on the system and adopt some form of social Darwinism, which works excellently, produces enormous wealth and prosperity, but, of course, not everybody succeeds and then some fucking idiot re-introduces socialist ideas, like, how about redistributing that wealth so that those few poor people don’t get excluded from the widespread prosperity, so taxes are increased, the state bureaucracy is increased, free market is stressed by taxation, the worthless people get welfare and reproduce exponentially (because they are rewarded with more welfare for reproducing and failing at everything) while contributing exactly jack shit, the state goes into debt, scientific and high-tech programmes are curtailed because the socialist politicians think that all money must go to social programmes because socialism, and if there are problems, blame the evil black beast of capitalism and ask for more state control and socialism as a solution. The problem is with the concept that the poor possess virtue, that God is on their side, and that people are equal and therefore deserve the same outcomes regardless of their actual abilities and choices.

If you try to introduce some alternative to socialism or use common sense, you’re immediately attacked and “de-platformed”, as it is called – you’re a x-ist and x-phobe and all the tolerant multicultural people want to kill you. Somehow, there’s an implication that they are good, that they are progressive, despite the fact that what they are proposing was actually all tried in Stalinist Russia, and is by definition regressive because it’s a step backwards in history, and despite the fact that their socialism is probably the only political system that was scientifically tested and tried, and proved not to work, so basically if someone wants to benefit mankind, socialism is the only system he should never attempt to use because it’s worse than useless.

There are, of course, other ideas that are a disaster; determinism, for instance, which basically states that whatever you do, the end result will be the same because it’s determined by outside forces, be it God, destiny, karma or societal circumstances. By adopting such attitude you are guaranteed to fail, and this is the main reason why Catholic countries are economically usually worse off than the Protestant countries, because the Protestant countries are closer to the Jewish belief that God will reward the righteous people with wealth, while those who are not in his favour will be poor. The Catholics believe that God doesn’t work like that, and that wealth can actually be a hindrance or a temptation. Be it as it may, beliefs of this sort influence people’s work ethics and attitude, and if they believe that wealth is a reward from God, they will try to attain it, and see their success or lack thereof as feedback. I actually see the Catholic position as a contamination with Cathari beliefs that were semi-officially canonized together with St. Francis and St. Claire, where worldly possessions are seen as a spiritual burden and avoided altogether. How useful that is in a spiritual sense, it’s difficult to tell, but as an influence to economy it’s a disaster, because the wealthy and successful individuals are shunned in favour of ragged demagogues. If the wealthy aren’t respected and admired, the end result will be social apathy and widespread misery. But determinism causes an even worse problem: those who actually invest effort in order to change their situation are seen as “not having faith” or “not accepting the will of God”. This gives apathy and despondency an aura of spirituality and elevates it to the position of almost-holiness.

I understand that such negative attitudes about wealth might have been the result of unity of church and state, and that the church was so preoccupied with amassing wealth and power that it neglected its spiritual role, and that those who preached poverty might have played a constructive role of redressing an imbalance at one point, but such ideas are actively harmful from the position of economy. If you see wealth as a snare of Satan, well, nobody wants to be ensnared by Satan. I personally believe that poverty is a snare of Satan and that wealth means freedom to pursue forms of spirituality that are not pre-determined by the shackles of poverty, but I’m the enfant terrible of spirituality and nobody really listens to what I have to say.

The problem isn’t social injustice. The problem are the bad ideas that produce misery, suffering and death wherever they are implemented, but somehow still get to wear a halo of sainthood.

And regarding sainthood, it might be a very good showcase of all the widespread misconceptions and illusions which hinder spiritual and personal growth of individuals, because when you think of it, sainthood seems to be defined by poverty, self-denial, extreme compassion, self-sacrifice, detachment from all worldly issues, celibacy and, essentially, removal of oneself from all practical matters of society.

Wanna hear my definition of sainthood? A saint is a person who has a first-person realization of God, and attained success at harmonizing his/her entire life with the nature and character of God.

Which means that for me, an ideal saint is Krishna, the warrior-king who lived a life of first-person godhead and who fought, had sex, fooled around with his best friend, and inspired holy scriptures of the highest order. He wasn’t poor, he wasn’t celibate, he wasn’t self-denying, he wasn’t dedicated to “fighting his ego” or “controlling his thoughts and desires”, and to whom yoga was the art of correct action, not denial of action or removal from the world. To me, St. Francis and St. Claire are worthless examples and worthless people, because they did exactly jack shit to improve anything in the world, and if one tries to emulate their lifestyle it will be a personal disaster. The thing is, Bhagavad-gita wasn’t a result of two renunciate monks discussing haute spirituality in some cave. Bhagavata-purana wasn’t inspired by the life of Shuka the renunciate. It’s about Shuka the renunciate praising the life of Krishna the warrior king as the perfect example of what God looks like when he comes into this world.

So yeah, being a saint isn’t about being poor and naked and celibate and “controlling your ego”. It’s about being in the flesh what God is in His pure spiritual nature, and while we’re at that, we should have in mind that the probable reason why all the renunciate sages fail to understand true spirituality is that they fail to take notice of the fact that Vishnu is married to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune. So the next time you think of how spiritual some poor person is, or how spiritual you must be because you’re poor, or how spiritual you are because you are ignorant of worldly affairs, remember that that the perfect image of God in this world fucked the goddess of fortune (who looks like a billion dollars BTW) while not otherwise preoccupied with waging wars, manipulating politics and inspiring holy scriptures. And the barefoot sages, they merely wrote it all down while trying to figure out what the fuck they were missing in the entire picture.