"The Peanut and the Philosopher"
by Joel Bowman
“Whom the gods love dies young.”
~ Herodotus (c. 445 B.C.) ...
and also Billy Joel, from "The Stranger" (1977)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Last night, beneath somber heavens, we laid to rest a source of laughter, light and love in our little family. Peanut, dear daughter’s Syrian hamster, is finally liberated from her wheel, with which she had such a complicated, love-hate relationship. Enshrouded in one of dad’s old undershirts, she was buried with a leather scarab beetle, “an homage to the Egyptians,” in a friend’s backyard, her initial’s “PB” embroidered with love and care. And inscribed on her humble cardboard coffin, in duly devoted cursive, an epitaph which brought a tear to your author’s eye:
Here lies the picture of purity and sublimity, returned to the earth.
R.I.P. Peanut (June, 2024 ~ July, 2026)
Yes, dear reader, a lot has happened since we last wrote you. Life and death... peace and war... love and loss. But still the world turns, and so we are left to make sense of the incomprehensible nature of what remains on it.
Last week we offered a few theories (not our own) on how to interpret the past... so that we might better understand where we are all headed. What is the engine of history, we puzzled? What drives a civilization forward? And how will we know if we ever “get there”? Many are the theories, hunches and hypotheses regarding the big questions; few are the truly valuable insights. As H.L. Mencken once wrote: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
Anti-Social Existence: At the tippy-top of the Wrong Heap, as near as we can tell, sits Karl Marx. Having “successfully” inverted Hegel’s dialectic, Marx began his analysis of history from the idea that it was man’s material conditions which determined his ability to think and act, not the other way around. As he (and Engels) wrote in "The German Ideology": “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” And from this one sentence springs forth one of the most dangerous theories in all human history: historical materialism.
The key lies in the phrase “social existence.” For Marx, human beings are inextricably bound to their material circumstances. Our ideas, values, and understanding of the world arise not independently of our economic lives, but largely as a direct result of them.
Little surprise, then, that everywhere Marx looked in the vast expanse of the cold, material world, he saw conflict... master and slave... bourgeoisie and proletariat... capital and labor, and so on. Society, reckoned he, is divided into a dominant class that controls the means of production (wealth and property) and a subordinate class that provides the labor.
As for cooperation... collaboration... mutually beneficial exchange... Marx saw only forced exploitation, the reductionist “people over profits” slogans you might find scrawled on a placard at a Zohran Mamdani rally for so-called “studies” students and other socialist soap-dodgers.
Only the Good Die Young: A moocher... an adulterer... a wastrel with other people’s money... an absent father... an arrogant hypocrite of bourgeois pomp and habit... Marx was many things. But a man of subtlety and nuance he was not. Unable to see the individual for the crowd, one person’s unique skill held little value for him. A unit of labor was a unit of labor, plain and simple. Which is undoubtedly why, for instance, his “labor theory of value” is so plainly and simply wrong.
Marx claimed a product’s value derived from the labor units that went into manufacturing it, an intellectually digestible concept reserved for only the most cerebrally lax. Your editor might sit at his piano a hundred lifetimes and not compose a tune like (his namesake) Billy Joel’s classic Only the Good Die Young, from his 1977 album, The Stranger.
By Marx’s calculation, the respective products of our labor – Billy’s and Joel’s – remain equal so long as we spend the same time tinkering at the keys, a proposition only the foolish, the deaf or the dishonest could possibly countenance. As dear readers well know, beauty resides as much in the ear of the listener as it does the eye of the beholder. So too for value.
It was the Austrian School economist, Carl Menger, who first proposed a workable alternative to Marx’s specious claptrap. Rejecting the “cost-base” (labor) value theories of the classical economists, Marx last among them, Menger posited a new perspective entirely: Man as the measure of all things. Goods are valuable, he asserted, because they serve various uses whose importance differs with regards to individual preference.
The Eye of the Beholder: Menger’s insights influenced many subsequent thinkers, including Ludwig von Mises, who perhaps set the record straight in clearer terms. Value, as Mises described it, was not determined by the nature of objects in a humanless vacuum, Marx’s purely “material world,” as some elemental component within the thing itself. “Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things,” he argued in Human Action. “It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.”
In this manner, one good has value over another not because it is intrinsically bestowed… but because we afford it value through our interaction with – and appreciation for – its various properties. Who among men, dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, would not trade all the riches in the world for a drop of life-sustaining water?
We understand intuitively that, depending on the moment in time and the particular circumstances attending it, an ounce of gold can be a blessing (as in times of hyperinflation or political uncertainty) or a curse (as it was for the ill-fated King Midas). In the end, we find that life is not so easily reduced to units of labor or hours at the office, much less on the proverbial hamster wheel... but in the love and joy and value we bring to others along the way. In this way can a Peanut outshine a philosopher.
Of course, Marx was not the only man with a boneheaded theory of the way the world worked. We’ll take a look at a few of his contemporaries next time ‘round. As always, stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
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