Murray Rothbard Is The Ray Peat Of Economics

[Hugh Johnson]

The thing about the libertarian system, and any evaluation of it (including yours), is that there is no consideration of the role of culture and other humanistic elements. Such an act (child selling) most would find morally reprehensible, and they would prevent it if it was in their power. It's funny because you bought the libertarian premise that humans can become homo economicus and will ignore any sense of what is fair, just, or beautiful. Even Rothbard and other libertarians don't truly believe humans are computing automatons, because they will almost always bring subjective value and personal preference into discussions about markets. Is this inconsistent? Yes.

All ideologies stemming from the stunted version of the Enlightenment incorporated as the English ideology are inconsistent (I talked about the Enlightenment and English Ideology in my response to Ashoka). I term ideologies in this fashion Platonic or Western. These ideologies exist and develop by stealing ideas from thinkers working in the Aristotelian or Eastern fashion, and installing them in their models.

The first episode of the Quax podcast introduced me to the binary of the Rationalists and Empirics. The Rationalists (Platonic, Western) must steal from the Empirics (Aristotelian, Eastern). This is the only way for the Rationalist ideology to survive and and continue, they must feed on the new facts generated by the Empirics. They can't generate their own discoveries, because it would disrupt their models. The models are the authority; anything contradicting the accepted model is expurgated and isn't granted full status as scientific fact. The Rationalist system is actually a dialectic. Each cycle of the dialectic integrates the current model with problematic data, and this yields a synthesis of the new model.

Ray has covered how poorly the prevailing paradigm of "pumps, membranes, and receptors" reflects reality and they've had to retrofit and refine their theses and experimental methods to match. For example:

"After the electron microscope began making pictures of cells, it took some time to find the stain that would produce any membrane at all, and then it took about thirty years to learn to produce a “membrane” image that had a thickness that seemed appropriate for the theory."​

They are constantly bolting on caveats and provisos to the elegant exterior of the current engine of understanding. Until a new paradigm is created, and we get a beautiful new machine to work with.

Perhaps it could be said that the Empirics borrow models from the Rationalists, but I need to explore that idea further.

I never bóught their argument, you clearly have not read my posts. I have said that their writings are nothing more than cover for predatory capitalism. It would clearly not work and that rhetoric is simply used by the intelligent psychopaths on top to convince the stupid psychopaths on the bottom that they too will get to prey on other people freely in the coming utopia. I have used their words, because even according to them, it would be a tyranny where kids are sold as slaves.

IRL obviously it won't work and was never meant to. But even their utopia is horrifying.

 

[Steven Bussinger]

I never bóught their argument, you clearly have not read my posts. I have said that their writings are nothing more than cover for predatory capitalism. It would clearly not work and that rhetoric is simply used by the intelligent psychopaths on top to convince the stupid psychopaths on the bottom that they too will get to prey on other people freely in the coming utopia. I have used their words, because even according to them, it would be a tyranny where kids are sold as slaves.

IRL obviously it won't work and was never meant to. But even their utopia is horrifying.

If it will never work, why be concerned?

I agree that libertarianism is basically a farm team and incubator so that the "useful idiots" can generate more rationales and theories that deify property so that the ruling class can solidify its hold on the world by turning everything into property. (Yeah, that's a run-on; I'm too tired to fix it now.)

Had you begun with that, I think our clash would've been more of a nudge.

Why bother with bringing up child selling? If you can negate libertarianism with the context we just agreed on, child selling is also negated as part of the package of libetarianism. Why argue about a tree if the forest is the problem?

 

[Hugh Johnson]

If it will never work, why be concerned?

I agree that libertarianism is basically a farm team and incubator so that the "useful idiots" can generate more rationales and theories that deify property so that the ruling class can solidify its hold on the world by turning everything into property. (Yeah, that's a run-on; I'm too tired to fix it now.)

Had you begun with that, I think our clash would've been more of a nudge.

Why bother with bringing up child selling? If you can negate libertarianism with the context we just agreed on, child selling is also negated as part of the package of libetarianism. Why argue about a tree if the forest is the problem?

Individually, it produces predatory people. Politically it supports predatory capitalism. Socially it destroys the social contract. I bring up child slavery, because I want people to understand what the right libertarians are selling and what kind of people they are. Besides, if they get what they actually want, the destruction of all democratic checks on the power of the rich, there will be child selling. In collapsed societies like the Soviet Union or Syria recently exactly that happens. Not quite as openly as the right libertarians desire, but kids are still kidnapped, enslaved and sold. To a lesser extend child slavery happens in the highly unequal countries, there are apparently countries in Asia where French intellectuals go to **** kids. If the forest is the problem, well it consists of individual trees.

 

[Ashoka]

That's a fair response.

My original point and why I commented was that I found it disturbing that the Sultan wanted to shut down discussion of Rothbard's ideas. I used the rhetorical trope of "knee-jerk response" because it's something you so often hear from neoliberal media. I also considered "dog whistle". It was meant to be satirical.

I'm really not sure how to not do a knee-jerk response... do I wait for some period of time like 3 days or for 3 other posters? What makes a response knee-jerk?

Explaining how the form of Enlightenment that we have been bequeathed is bad is extremely involved. Luckily, I can draw from an essay that should hopefully elucidate my point.

In place of Aristotle, Newton adopted the physics of Descartes, which divided the world into matter, the res extensa, and thought, the res cogitans. The res extensa was all of one piece. The entire physical universe was one fabric or one fluid composed of atoms, and motion occurred when one atom bumped into another and conveyed to that second atom its motion in much the same way that a locomotive conveys motion to a string of boxcars. Leibniz and Huygens were smart enough to realize that in the Cartesian material universe which Newton ostensibly espoused, there was no possibility of action at a distance. And that meant that there could be no such thing as gravity.

White tells us that Leibniz

was suspicious of Newton’s entire concept of gravity, referring to it mockingly as “the rebirth in England of a theology that is more than papist and a philosophy entirely scholastic since Mr. Newton and his partisans have revived the occult qualities of the school with the idea of attraction.” [Gottfried von Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften Vol. 3, pp. 328-9]​

Well, Newton was certainly no papist. Where then did the idea of gravity come from? Leibniz got it right when he claimed that Newton smuggled “gravity” into his system. But he got the source wrong. Leibniz knew there was something “occult” about Newton’s idea of gravity, but he thought the source of Newton’s cosmology was scholasticism, when in reality the source was alchemy. Newton wasn’t a closet scholastic; Newton was an alchemist.
...

Aristotle’s understanding of natural objects was more sophisticated than the views of the atomists. Instead a world made up of little indivisible balls bumping into each other, Aristotle believed that “As forms are to matter, so also is Soul to Body.
...

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is another example of the English Ideology, derived from Newton, which also claims that strife—or as Darwin would say, natural selection—is the fundamental principle of the universe. Darwin, like Newton, “frames no hypotheses.” He looks at nature and discovers that “strife” is its fundamental law.
...

Just as Darwin and Malthus projected the English Capitalism of their day onto the world of biology, so Newton projected the Capitalism of his day onto the universe when he said that its most fundamental principle was inertia or strife.
...

Newton’s cosmology was a rationalization, in just about every sense of the word, of force. Motion was redefined. It no longer bespoke a telos or goal, as it had in the Aristotelian system. Motion was now extrinsic to the bodies in motion, and another world for that extrinsic motion was force. Once Whig magnates digested the lesson of the Principia with the help of propagandists like Locke, they learned that all motion was caused, not by entelechy leading them to their proper end or telos, but by external force, which was in some sense of the word, totally arbitrary and in that sense much like the force (William of Orange) which put James II in motion and drove him from his rightful position (now associated with the outmoded concept of entelechy or telos) on the throne of England. There was no longer any proper end to motion. Every motion was arbitrary and a function of force
...

All of the lessons Newton learned as a child were economic. Newton’s father died when he was a child. When he was three years old his mother married a 63-year-old widower, who was also an Anglican priest, out of purely financial considerations. As part of the prenuptial agreement, Newton’s mother had to agree to leave three-year-old Isaac behind to be raised by his grandparents. The Rev. Smith lived longer than Hannah expected. When she finally moved back to live with Isaac she brought three half-siblings with her. The bond between mother and child was irrevocably broken, and Isaac had been permanently scarred by the experience. The universe was a different place now. It was ruled by unseen forces that moved bodies in inexplicable ways, ways that a child of undeniable genius would attempt to explain in later life.
...

The heart of this economics is the idea of force, which, as Professor Mirowski has explained, is another word for money. Economic force (or money) alone explains the motion of heavenly bodies, like that of his mother. Money is the secret force that determines motion. There is no plenum or fullness to nature. There are only lonely atoms in a void moved by force, which is another word for money. As Westfall tells us, “After deploying the standard arguments against a plenum, Newton opted for atoms,” which is to say, a cosmology based on his life as an abandoned child and a lonely scholar.[27] Like Darwin, Newton projected English capitalism on to the universe. Unlike Darwin, the pampered scion of the English ruling class, Newton projected capitalism as he saw it and lived it, the rejected outcast who was determined to make his way by usury and political patronage. The ultimate source of Newton’s cosmology wasn’t mathematics; it wasn’t disinterested observation eschewing “hypotheses” (“hypothesi not fingo,” was the famous explanation or non-explanation Newton added to the second edition of the Principia); it wasn’t even alchemy, from which he derived the concepts of inertia and gravity. No, the ultimate source of Newton’s cosmology was Capitalism viewed through the lens of his relationship with his mother.​

These are excerpts from an article written by Michael E. Jones, a Catholic scholar. Hopefully the value of his writing is not now nullified by his personal beliefs or associations.

Personally, I think Ray would make similar arguments as the author here. You can see how he analyzes a person's personal ideology and how it influences and permeates through all of their work when he discusses Konrad Lorenz, especially. Though he never discusses personal history much.

My point in providing these excerpts is to show how Newton's system is cold and economical, ruled by force and populated by separate bodies which only interact through force like the cars of a train. Newton is a demi-god in the deterministic, materialistic, hyper-rational scientific system. If there was a Mount Rushmore of this ideology, he would be on it. This is the dominant ideology that Ray and others like Sheldrake argue against, what Jones has termed the English Ideology.

Presumably, you don't care for this view of the universe, either. It is very suitable for the ruling class, since humans are simply automatons with no dignity, natural resources to be utilized. And this is fine, because the universe is arbitrary, there is no telos or end-purpose. It simply exists.

Well, interesting stuff about Newton and this so-called English ideology. I think to focus on a thinker’s personal life (in this case Newton’s) too strongly may miss the boat a little bit. I think the Enlightenment created a serious tension, which they struggled to overcome in theory, but which they always intended to overcome in practice. Some like the Marquis de Sade took this type of theoretical philosophy at face value and developed a self-serving, sociopathic world view from it. And so he would not be considered an actual adherent of Enlightenment values, but simply utilizing similar method and assumptions.

When I think of the period, it’s Kant, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Lessing that come to mind first.

That’s why I was saying, in a sense, to take a step back and see the totality of the movement in the form of a general ethos. This argument is from Reclaiming the Enlightenment.

“Democratic society was initially understood as an experiment that developed hand in hand with the liberation of the critical spirit. But the belief still persists that Enlightenment thinkers were preoccupied with finding a single absolute truth that explains all of reality.”

“Probably no group of intellectuals, in fact, was more aware of the contributions offered by different cultures than the philosophes...”

“Just as the philosophes saw science not merely as an ordering device but as a self-critical method that could be used in the fight for liberation from outdated prejudices and dogmas, their view of aesthetics called upon individuals to expand their realm of experience.”

“The philosophes were not colorless academics or puritanical reformers, but individuals who gloried in their eccentricities and who sought not merely to educate their minds, but also to educate their sentiments and sensibilities.”

“It means viewing the democratic revolutions in England, the United States, Europe, and beyond as part of a single undertaking. This requires a shift in interpretive perspective. Especially when the salience of the Enlightenment can no longer be taken for granted, when its values have come under attack from both the right and the left, more is necessary than analyzing a few thinkers or some abstract philosophical propositions about history, nature, and ‘man.’ It is a matter of presenting the Enlightenment as an overarching political enterprise and a living tradition - not merely in its ideas but in the action it inspires.”

“They recognized that religion rested on revealed claims and that the aristocracy justified its privileges by invoking a mythical past. Acceptance of such beliefs no less than social evils now became understood less as the result of original sin than ignorance and prejudice or those assumptions and opinions, customs, and traditions, preserved from critical reflection. With this change in the causation of misery and the new emphasis on reason came, quite logically, the desire to better the condition of humanity. In the first instance, this meant throwing off the veils of stupidity imposed by centuries of ideological oppression. The Magic Flute indeed expressed this fundamental assumption that no ‘dialectic’ would ever fully ruin:

The rays of the sun
Drive away the night;
Destroyed is the hypocrite’s
Hidden Might
“

“Advocates of the Enlightenment instead sought to foster the moral autonomy of the individual over established traditions and the critical use of rationality against what Ernst Cassirer termed ’mytho-poetical’ thinking.”

“The respect accorded ‘reason’ by the Enlightenment was intertwined with a belief in the need to cultivate common decency and a sense of compassion, what Voltaire termed a ‘softening’ of the worst customs, prejudices, and instincts: there is indeed something legitimate about the claim that he and many of his friends were ‘more inspired by a hatred of cruelty than a love of truth.’”

Honestly I could keep quoting from Bronner’s book because it just gets more interesting, but then I would actually be typing a book out. I pulled these small passages out without much care. But it’s sufficient to say the Enlightenment portrayed merely as a mechanistic, universalizing worldview is critically and historically flawed and misses the action.

 

[thomas00]

"Peat recommended Murray Bookchin’s work to me. I haven't read any of his books yet.

Has anyone here?"

probably better to read a thorough critique of him to save time

Anarchy after Leftism

 

[Steven Bussinger]

Individually, it produces predatory people. Politically it supports predatory capitalism. Socially it destroys the social contract. I bring up child slavery, because I want people to understand what the right libertarians are selling and what kind of people they are. Besides, if they get what they actually want, the destruction of all democratic checks on the power of the rich, there will be child selling. In collapsed societies like the Soviet Union or Syria recently exactly that happens. Not quite as openly as the right libertarians desire, but kids are still kidnapped, enslaved and sold. To a lesser extend child slavery happens in the highly unequal countries, there are apparently countries in Asia where French intellectuals go to **** kids. If the forest is the problem, well it consists of individual trees.

Social contract theory is a rationalization of how society is currently organized. Once divinity was removed, we had a vacuum of moral legitimacy, and social contract theory is attempt to create a new system of moral legitimacy. "Okay, so we don't have God or any divine duties now, so how do ensure that people, in particular those with power, still behave appropriately? We need an agreement that what we have is good." Unfortunately, it's just an agreement and people can and do disagree without any consequence.

It's a premise. A premise that I have rights, rights that I can give away to a governing power. But I don't really have any rights, they're fictional, so I can't really give them to anybody. Rights were created to provide a currency for legitimacy once we removed divinity. They're fiction, but they are in effect real so long as everyone believes in them, just like how paper money and digital ledgers are now accepted as forms of wealth. So long as everyone believes that rights are real, the ruling class can use the social contract as a shroud of moral legitimacy.

The real world examples of child selling that you described happened because of impoverishment, not libertarian ideals. Economic freedom grants us the power to realize all other forms of freedom. The libertarian system of property where its possible to accumulate property at the expense of others will most likely lead to widespread and severe economic disparity, and yes, your child selling.

Well, interesting stuff about Newton and this so-called English ideology. I think to focus on a thinker’s personal life (in this case Newton’s) too strongly may miss the boat a little bit. I think the Enlightenment created a serious tension, which they struggled to overcome in theory, but which they always intended to overcome in practice. Some like the Marquis de Sade took this type of theoretical philosophy at face value and developed a self-serving, sociopathic world view from it. And so he would not be considered an actual adherent of Enlightenment values, but simply utilizing similar method and assumptions.

Interesting, so we could say that the Enlightenment created a dialectic, or a super-position.

I'm not sure how beneficial the Enlightenment was if we are still stuck playing the same games. It seems as if the "meta" of the game has only gotten more complex and nuanced.

Marquis de Sade used Enlightenment philosophy badly, so he's "no true Scotsman". The Enlightenment purports to be a system where truth can precipitated out through use of reason. Yet Marquis de Sade used these Enlightenment tools to do things which do not adhere to the spirit of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is capable of being subverted by its own creation. Nothing has been settled, we are still labeling things with personal preferences -- our own internal senses and intuition. In order to guard against bad things and not let the Enlightenment be subverted, we must transcend argumentation and make unilateral decisions.

Finally, as a response to both Ashoka and Sultan, libertarianism is the Enlightenment taken to its logical conclusion. Individuals and private entities conducting business independently under a benign global government.

 

[ecstatichamster]

Rothbard is a good read too.

It's interesting to learn about the history of capitalism. He has a 3 volume set, the 3rd volume published posthumously. Fantastic, and is a great writer.

Syndicalism, or chartalism, is the state issuing money that depreciates over time. It is a crank theory. In fact Marxism is a crank theory too.

Capitalism has brought the best that we have. Even with all its flaws, and the fact that historically the rich and powerful ran the government to favor their own positions. The 19th century USA was the growth story of human civilization, perhaps only equaled by the Chinese who pretend to be communists but are really capitalists in many ways.

"An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" is fantastic.

 

[Steven Bussinger]

probably better to read a thorough critique of him to save time

Anarchy after Leftism

Thanks for the link.

 

[Marvel]

I think you can be libertarian in general and recognise that child labour is undesirable.

This being said - if you’ve got a smartphone, child labour probably contributed to its existence, somewhere along the way. Cobolt mines being a particularly heinous abuse of children.

 

[sladerunner69]

Dr. Peat probably hates him but he is incredibly brilliant in his domain of history and economics the way Dr. Peat is on health.

I love him and you can find a lot of his lectures, like this:


Fantastic.

I study quantitative economics and am quite fond of the Austrian school myself. They have accurately predicted all major recessions and are the only perspective to have a cogent explanation of the boom/bust cycle.

That said, there are a couple of hang ups I have: 1) Austrians rejection of all forms of mathematics in the practice of economics 2) rejection of empirical data as useful in development of theories (they rely instead on praxeology)]

I am sure Peat would take great argument with point #2

 

[ecstatichamster]

I study quantitative economics and am quite fond of the Austrian school myself. They have accurately predicted all major recessions and are the only perspective to have a cogent explanation of the boom/bust cycle.

That said, there are a couple of hang ups I have: 1) Austrians rejection of all forms of mathematics in the practice of economics 2) rejection of empirical data as useful in development of theories (they rely instead on praxeology)]

I am sure Peat would take great argument with point #2

their argument is that it is impossible to get good information through mathematics, and I would say that using logic serves much better indeed. Did you read Human Action? Mises learned to write in English late in life after fleeing the Nazis, first to Switzerland then to New York City, and was never given any official academic post congruent with his brilliance. Fortunately many supporters helped him financially, and he had an unpaid position, if I'm not mistaken.

I have never found anything positive with mathematics applied to economics.

Rothbard was a brilliant writer, and researcher, and he "popularized" Mises in a way.

 

[ecstatichamster]

I think you can be libertarian in general and recognise that child labour is undesirable.

This being said - if you’ve got a smartphone, child labour probably contributed to its existence, somewhere along the way. Cobolt mines being a particularly heinous abuse of children.

I don't see anything wrong with child labor. When people are very poor, the entire family has to work if they are not going to starve. That's reality.

I was incredibly frustrated when I needed a "work permit" from school to get a job. I was 15 and I wanted to work.

 

[Steven Bussinger]

I study quantitative economics and am quite fond of the Austrian school myself. They have accurately predicted all major recessions and are the only perspective to have a cogent explanation of the boom/bust cycle.

That said, there are a couple of hang ups I have: 1) Austrians rejection of all forms of mathematics in the practice of economics 2) rejection of empirical data as useful in development of theories (they rely instead on praxeology)]

I am sure Peat would take great argument with point #2

I'm not sure if Peat has ever voiced a rejection of the utility of mathematics in applied science, but I imagine it would be something like this: applying mathematics in order to understand real world phenomena requires the use of models, which are subject to biases. The "empirical data" in economics is for applying these models.

 

[Ashoka]

Social contract theory is a rationalization of how society is currently organized. Once divinity was removed, we had a vacuum of moral legitimacy, and social contract theory is attempt to create a new system of moral legitimacy. "Okay, so we don't have God or any divine duties now, so how do ensure that people, in particular those with power, still behave appropriately? We need an agreement that what we have is good." Unfortunately, it's just an agreement and people can and do disagree without any consequence.

It's a premise. A premise that I have rights, rights that I can give away to a governing power. But I don't really have any rights, they're fictional, so I can't really give them to anybody. Rights were created to provide a currency for legitimacy once we removed divinity. They're fiction, but they are in effect real so long as everyone believes in them, just like how paper money and digital ledgers are now accepted as forms of wealth. So long as everyone believes that rights are real, the ruling class can use the social contract as a shroud of moral legitimacy.

The real world examples of child selling that you described happened because of impoverishment, not libertarian ideals. Economic freedom grants us the power to realize all other forms of freedom. The libertarian system of property where its possible to accumulate property at the expense of others will most likely lead to widespread and severe economic disparity, and yes, your child selling.



Interesting, so we could say that the Enlightenment created a dialectic, or a super-position.

I'm not sure how beneficial the Enlightenment was if we are still stuck playing the same games. It seems as if the "meta" of the game has only gotten more complex and nuanced.

Marquis de Sade used Enlightenment philosophy badly, so he's "no true Scotsman". The Enlightenment purports to be a system where truth can precipitated out through use of reason. Yet Marquis de Sade used these Enlightenment tools to do things which do not adhere to the spirit of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is capable of being subverted by its own creation. Nothing has been settled, we are still labeling things with personal preferences -- our own internal senses and intuition. In order to guard against bad things and not let the Enlightenment be subverted, we must transcend argumentation and make unilateral decisions.

Finally, as a response to both Ashoka and Sultan, libertarianism is the Enlightenment taken to its logical conclusion. Individuals and private entities conducting business independently under a benign global government.

I’m not really sure I understood you. What games are we playing? There’s no such “logical conclusion” that occurs, nor is the reflected in the quotes I sent you.

The point is de Sade didn’t embody the spirit of the time. He didn’t use “Enlightenment philosophy”. He is an Enlightenment-era philosopher, but he doesn’t reflect the Enlightenment ethos, and that’s just true. He antagonized mostly everyone with his views and spent most of his adult life in jail.

 

[Pistachio]

That's a fair response.

My original point and why I commented was that I found it disturbing that the Sultan wanted to shut down discussion of Rothbard's ideas. I used the rhetorical trope of "knee-jerk response" because it's something you so often hear from neoliberal media. I also considered "dog whistle". It was meant to be satirical.

I'm really not sure how to not do a knee-jerk response... do I wait for some period of time like 3 days or for 3 other posters? What makes a response knee-jerk?

Explaining how the form of Enlightenment that we have been bequeathed is bad is extremely involved. Luckily, I can draw from an essay that should hopefully elucidate my point.

In place of Aristotle, Newton adopted the physics of Descartes, which divided the world into matter, the res extensa, and thought, the res cogitans. The res extensa was all of one piece. The entire physical universe was one fabric or one fluid composed of atoms, and motion occurred when one atom bumped into another and conveyed to that second atom its motion in much the same way that a locomotive conveys motion to a string of boxcars. Leibniz and Huygens were smart enough to realize that in the Cartesian material universe which Newton ostensibly espoused, there was no possibility of action at a distance. And that meant that there could be no such thing as gravity.​

​

White tells us that Leibniz​

was suspicious of Newtons entire concept of gravity, referring to it mockingly as the rebirth in England of a theology that is more than papist and a philosophy entirely scholastic since Mr. Newton and his partisans have revived the occult qualities of the school with the idea of attraction. [Gottfried von Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften Vol. 3, pp. 328-9]​

Well, Newton was certainly no papist. Where then did the idea of gravity come from? Leibniz got it right when he claimed that Newton smuggled gravity into his system. But he got the source wrong. Leibniz knew there was something occult about Newtons idea of gravity, but he thought the source of Newtons cosmology was scholasticism, when in reality the source was alchemy. Newton wasnt a closet scholastic; Newton was an alchemist.​

...​

​

Aristotles understanding of natural objects was more sophisticated than the views of the atomists. Instead a world made up of little indivisible balls bumping into each other, Aristotle believed that As forms are to matter, so also is Soul to Body.​

...​

​

Charles Darwins theory of evolution is another example of the English Ideology, derived from Newton, which also claims that strifeor as Darwin would say, natural selectionis the fundamental principle of the universe. Darwin, like Newton, frames no hypotheses. He looks at nature and discovers that strife is its fundamental law. ​

...​

​

Just as Darwin and Malthus projected the English Capitalism of their day onto the world of biology, so Newton projected the Capitalism of his day onto the universe when he said that its most fundamental principle was inertia or strife.​

...​

​

Newtons cosmology was a rationalization, in just about every sense of the word, of force. Motion was redefined. It no longer bespoke a telos or goal, as it had in the Aristotelian system. Motion was now extrinsic to the bodies in motion, and another world for that extrinsic motion was force. Once Whig magnates digested the lesson of the Principia with the help of propagandists like Locke, they learned that all motion was caused, not by entelechy leading them to their proper end or telos, but by external force, which was in some sense of the word, totally arbitrary and in that sense much like the force (William of Orange) which put James II in motion and drove him from his rightful position (now associated with the outmoded concept of entelechy or telos) on the throne of England. There was no longer any proper end to motion. Every motion was arbitrary and a function of force​

...​

​

All of the lessons Newton learned as a child were economic. Newtons father died when he was a child. When he was three years old his mother married a 63-year-old widower, who was also an Anglican priest, out of purely financial considerations. As part of the prenuptial agreement, Newtons mother had to agree to leave three-year-old Isaac behind to be raised by his grandparents. The Rev. Smith lived longer than Hannah expected. When she finally moved back to live with Isaac she brought three half-siblings with her. The bond between mother and child was irrevocably broken, and Isaac had been permanently scarred by the experience. The universe was a different place now. It was ruled by unseen forces that moved bodies in inexplicable ways, ways that a child of undeniable genius would attempt to explain in later life.​

...​

​

The heart of this economics is the idea of force, which, as Professor Mirowski has explained, is another word for money. Economic force (or money) alone explains the motion of heavenly bodies, like that of his mother. Money is the secret force that determines motion. There is no plenum or fullness to nature. There are only lonely atoms in a void moved by force, which is another word for money. As Westfall tells us, After deploying the standard arguments against a plenum, Newton opted for atoms, which is to say, a cosmology based on his life as an abandoned child and a lonely scholar.[27] Like Darwin, Newton projected English capitalism on to the universe. Unlike Darwin, the pampered scion of the English ruling class, Newton projected capitalism as he saw it and lived it, the rejected outcast who was determined to make his way by usury and political patronage. The ultimate source of Newtons cosmology wasnt mathematics; it wasnt disinterested observation eschewing hypotheses (hypothesi not fingo, was the famous explanation or non-explanation Newton added to the second edition of the Principia); it wasnt even alchemy, from which he derived the concepts of inertia and gravity. No, the ultimate source of Newtons cosmology was Capitalism viewed through the lens of his relationship with his mother.​

These are excerpts from an article written by Michael E. Jones, a Catholic scholar. Hopefully the value of his writing is not now nullified by his personal beliefs or associations.

Personally, I think Ray would make similar arguments as the author here. You can see how he analyzes a person's personal ideology and how it influences and permeates through all of their work when he discusses Konrad Lorenz, especially. Though he never discusses personal history much.

My point in providing these excerpts is to show how Newton's system is cold and economical, ruled by force and populated by separate bodies which only interact through force like the cars of a train. Newton is a demi-god in the deterministic, materialistic, hyper-rational scientific system. If there was a Mount Rushmore of this ideology, he would be on it. This is the dominant ideology that Ray and others like Sheldrake argue against, what Jones has termed the English Ideology.

Presumably, you don't care for this view of the universe, either. It is very suitable for the ruling class, since humans are simply automatons with no dignity, natural resources to be utilized. And this is fine, because the universe is arbitrary, there is no telos or end-purpose. It simply exists.

Unfortunately, E. Michael Jones appears to be compromised.