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In Defense of Chaos

Book Review of: In Defense of Chaos

The Chaology of Politics, Economics, and Human Action

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Review of In Defense of Chaos, by L.K. Samuels (Hardcover, 2013)

(You can print this review in landscape mode, if you want a hardcopy)

Reviewer:

This is a serious work that every person registered to vote should consider not just required reading, but required study. If you've been a victim of the left-wing/right-wing distraction from reality, this book will help you get on course. If you want to be an informed person with a solid understanding of how we got to where we are (and where we are headed), this book is for you. This may well be the work that brings sanity into the public discourse, enabling the restoration of lawful government and civil liberty.

The quality of this book would indicate a price about ten times what it sells for. It's on par with a graduate level text, except it's written in a more clear and understandable way. The work holds to the highest standards of scholarly research, yet is written to be accessible to the ordinary citizen. At the end of this review, I discuss a couple of weaknesses (they are fairly trivial).

Every chapter is followed by a bibliography for that chapter. Most of the chapters have a bibliography larger than what you'll find for entire books about this size. I took a close look at the sources. Most are impeccable. But I didn't need to look at the bibliographies to know that the author had done his homework. I wasn't far into Chapter One before it dawned on me that this book was the product of deep and methodical research. That chapter, like the others, provides the reader with a plethora of interesting, useful, relevant facts. Delightful!

Samuels explains concepts of government in terms of chaos theory (which he also explains, along with other relevant areas of knowledge). His basic premise is that the more a government suppresses societal and economic choices, the worse things become. The more power a government exerts, the more lawless that government becomes. He uses many examples from history to illustrate how this works. Of course, here in the USA we have our own gangsta government that operates outside the law.

Some background: the criminal oligarchy

Between 2008 and 2012, the nonFederal nonReserve gave to the big banksters $49 trillion (that's 12 zeroes) of money it counterfeited just for that purpose. Think about the implications. Think about how well that illustrates what a criminal regime occupies the District of Corruption and how blatantly it plunders us. No mafia family ever came close to stealing this much money.

It amazes me that relatively few Americans understand that the current criminal regime spent decades vying for power since our nation's founding days. It's an old regime. If you doubt this, look up the name "Biddle." Same family, same oligarchy. There was a bankster Biddle who fought against Andrew Jackson (and lost), and there was a bankster Biddle involved in the 2008 financial "crisis" (it was really a vast transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the banksters, and was abetted by the "Too Big to Jail" bailouts).

This same oligarchy gave us our bloodiest war ever (the war between the states, which was not a civil war). Following the "Chinese problem" in the 1880s, these people merged the two political parties into the single, dominant party we have today. That party has two wings, each of which pretends to be opposed but which really work together to steal. It's simple enough to see this; nothing has changed when either wing "controls" the House, Senate, and Executive or is otherwise presumably in power. The rampant crime just continues. Clearly, they are cooperating and colluding. The participants in this fake political system are rewarded handsomely, seeing their wealth grow 15% during the same period in which the average American's wealth declined by 4%.

Why does it happen and other questions

The preceding information on the oligarchy is something I knew before reading this book (I don't recall that Samuels even discussed it, but he's no doubt aware of it). What I didn't understand is why this type of scenario plays out again and again. And:

  • Why is it that nearly every federal program achieves the opposite of what its stated goal is?
  • Why do federal regulations nearly always increase, rather than decrease, the incidences of the very problems they are supposed to solve?
  • How can a country be conquered by criminals and turned into a state in which civil rights are routinely violated, civil "servants" routinely ignore the laws, and the most wicked profit at the great expense of the rest of us?
  • Why has the "War on Drugs" made so many drug lords so breathtakingly wealthy?
  • How is it that ants, bees, and other swarming creatures have such an orderly society despite having no jails, code of federal regulations, or "representatives" playing solitaire while pretending to debate upon a bill they are about to vote on?
  • Why are soap bubbles round? (yes, that's relevant)

You'll find the answers to these and other questions in this book. But I think the most important "take away" from this book is a clear and detailed understanding of why a statist government is really no government at all. It's a law-scoffing, predatory, dysfunctional system that no civilized society should tolerate. Without exception, every deeply statist country has been characterized by economic and social ruin.

For citizens of the USA, understanding this is important. Yes, ours is a failed state characterized by economic and social ruin.

  • When the USA separated itself from its constitutional basis during the Wilson misadministration, we began down that path to economic and social ruin.
    Since Wilson signed the nonFederal nonReserve Act, the banksters have stolen about 98% of the value of the dollar via counterfeiting. There's your economic ruin.
    Also, our total national debt exceeds three times the GDP of all countries in the world combined--ouch! Last year alone, our spender in chief added another $6 trillion to this debt hole (source: GAO). Meanwhile, we have the second highest child poverty rate of all industrialized nations but spend as much on military as all other nations combined and have the highest taxes in the world (we pay 128 taxes on a single loaf of bread).
     
  • Social ruin is a bit harder to sum up, but compare the USA to other industrialized nations: we have by far the highest obesity rate, hold half the world's prisoners in our prisons, and are near the bottom for literacy, numeracy, and infant mortality rate. There are more data indicting us here, but my goal is to inform rather than depress.

If you can understand the chaology of politics, economics, and human action, you can understand how this sorry "state" of affairs came to be. And that understanding is the basis from which meaningful change can arise. If we, as individuals, continue to "buy the big lie" that more of what caused the problem is somehow the solution, then there is no hope for change. There is only despair. That's why Samuels' book is such an important addition to the literature. And why it's critical you read it, if you participate in any way in our political system (such that it is).

This book consists of 14 chapters occupying 385 pages (there are some blank pages between chapters). Three sample titles of chapters are: System Failure: The Boomerang Effect; Social Chaology and Strong Structures; Paradoxes and Inconsistencies.

Weaknesses

These weaknesses are fairly trivial, and I still love the book.

The vast majority of Samuels' arguments (and he presents many) are thoroughly presented, based on validated facts, and constructed using infallible logic. But a few of the arguments are weak. They aren't false arguments; it's just that the conclusion doesn't come from the argument as presented. This is mitigated by several factors, such as:

  • They are tangential conclusions. Interesting stuff, but not the core of the book's message.
  • IMO, they are things that informed people should already know and understand.
  • There was only so much space. This was a long book already, so devoting additional space to properly proving "you should already realize this" conclusions doesn't make sense.
  • The conclusions are true, even though the proof isn't fully developed. It's just a bit jarring to go from Samuels' normally rigorous discussions to something that seems almost off-handed.

Another weakness is that I found a few copyediting errors. They stood out to me simply because the rest of the book was unusually perfect in its execution. I guess this is a backhanded way of congratulating Samuels and his copyeditor on a job well done. Note that we're talking an error rate of less than 1/10th of 1% of the sentences in the book. Compare that to what the Government Accounting Office documented about the IRS; fully 97% of the notices sent out by that useless, toxic agency have errors (imagine IRS and health care). Worse, they are errors of fact rather than mere typos. I did not find any errors of fact in this book.

 


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