The Failure of Economics

The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.



You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.



What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.



I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.



The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.



Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.



Communism bullshit.



First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.



Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.



"But that's not real communism."



Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.



"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."



No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.



"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.



Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.



What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.



Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.







And capitalism bullshit.



The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.



So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?



You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.



So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?

The Myth of "Education"

Education is bullshit. It's a bullshit feel-good panacea that educated people parade out because they've been programmed to believing that lie through the propaganda that is education. You spend enough money and get deep enough into debt purchasing a worthless education you're going to start thinking education is the solution to all the world's problems.



It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.



When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.



That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.



That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.



You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.



Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:



"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."



Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.



Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.



It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.



Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.



The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.



That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.



The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.



Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.

The Long, Slow Decline

How much computing power would be needed to simulate the Matrix? A whole lot more than every computer combined. Unless there's some quantum leap in computing it may even be impossible.



That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".



At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:



1. Declining rate of technological advancement.



We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.



At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.



There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.



We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.



2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".



The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.



It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.



3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.



Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.



The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.



And there doesn't seem to be a way out.



By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.



Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.



The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.



Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.



Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.



None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.



A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.



And that's very depressing if you think about it.





*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.

Post Economics

Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.

The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.

Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.

Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.

Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.

Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.

Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.

Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.

The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.

For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.

So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.

I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.

Is Peace on Earth Possible?

Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



Now, Kriyananda is not some up in the air "crazy wisdom" guru who uses religion to disguise socialism. He does not go out and promote hedonism under the guise of tantra, though he has made a number of gross errors in his life sexually. He has stated that government spending is responsible for collapsing the economy, he has built several successful communities around the world that have thrived for decades, he is not a cultural Marxist or an economic Marxist, but he does understand the value of community and working together rather than competing.



How can we get peace on Earth? The realist answer is that the old guard of super rich super greedy New World Order elite need to die out. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the Coca Cola Brothers and Mark Suckerface. People for whom there is not enough money in the universe. People who would sell their own mother for a penny and commit treason to get a no-bid contract. Then the younger people can learn from the example of Ananda and move toward communal living.

Plutarch On Love (Repost - 15 February 2008)

I was reading Plutarch's Dialogue on Love when I got to thinking. Daphnaeus, who plays the part of Plutarch, seems to have some very good things to say about sexuality, responsibility, and self-satisfaction.



The modern notions of human sexuality would be completely alien to the ancient Greeks as their notions are alien to people living today. People from Greece, today, complained about Oliver Stone's movie Alexander for portraying Alexander the Great as a homosexual, yet not only does the film not portray Alexander as homosexual (even considering the one minute deleted scene where Alexander and Bagoas are getting ready to have sex) but the concept didn't exist in his time that exists today. What happened between a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or a woman and a woman and a man (I don't need to go through all the combinations) was a seperate sphere of society as what happened at home to keep your duty to the state. People persued sexual liasons outside the home, with members of the same sex and the opposite sex and at the end of the day went home and (at least tried) to be good spouses and to have children and raise them right. Sex could be about individual physical pleasure but it also was a show of power and authority one person held over a subordinate. How would you show you are someone's superior -- through sexual acts.



The ancient Greeks made it clear: you are free to express yourself sexually any way you want, but society runs by order and every member of that society has a duty to fulfill (a dharma) to keep that order in place and assure everybody is happy and safe. And what is one of the primary duties a Greek citizen has to uphold the order? That would be to create and maintain a good home and to have children. What you do at home is for the children, not for you; what you do outside the home is for you, but at home you have a duty to your children because they are the future of the state and maintaining the order of the state is your duty. When you put it like that notions of homosexuals and heterosexuals seem unimportant. Marriage isn't about love, it's about children; it's about admitting there's something bigger and more important than your petty self-endulgence and your personal enjoyment. I think in our culture ruled by materialism we have forgotten this.



And what did Plutarch say? Protogenes is going on for hours about how women are incapable of feeling love and that the only true love that can exist is betwen two men (actually between a man and a boy), and that it is only begrudgingly he fulfills the lawful requirement of having kids with his wife. After courteously letting him talk for a long time Daphnaeus chuckles and retorts something to the effect of "well, Protogenes, you say that you cannot know love except the love that exists between two men but we all know what happens between you and your wife when you get home, and you certainly don't seem to be reluctant or antipathetic about it."

Ken Wilber and Weed

Ken Wilber is naive and believes politicians tell the truth. He also supports "rude boy" cultist Andrew Cohen (pictured above).



If weed were legalized the government could collect $400 billion a year in taxes and pay off both wars in a few years.





The Other Wiki's page on Cohen, the man who supposedly gained complete and final enlightenment in two and a half weeks.



The Other Wiki's page on Cohen's guru, H. W. L. Poonja. He pronounced Cohen's enlightenment after two and a half weeks.



Be Scofield's "Integral Abuse" article on Cohen and evolutionary enlightenment. He asks the brilliant question about Cohen's "rude boy" enlightenment: "But I must ask, if Cohen's tactics are so revolutionary and 'crazy wisdom' is needed to become enlightened, why haven't any of his students become enlightened? And why are these tactics so necessary when neither Cohen or Wilber attribute their awakenings to these sorts of experiences?"



WHAT enlightenment??! - a site where former Cohen devotees vent. May be true, may be lies, I don't know, I didn't read it.



The Urban Mystic versus The Shirtless Spiritual



Geoffrey D. Falk, a man with no kind words to say to anyone (except maybe Ramana Maharshi), has a site that demonstrates that all gurus, no matter how great, are still human, even if they are divine. Warning: Goeff does believe in the Randi prize, even though there is good evidence to suggest it is a fraud and even though so called "skeptics" say that winning the prize would prove nothing. Goeff might be skeptical of gurus but he sure isn't skeptical of his own skepticism. He quotes Randi several times and believes fully the sexual incidents involving Sai Baba, even though every single court case involving Baba was thrown. In one the so called "victims" were brought in and said they had never heard of the man who brought the case to court, had never met him, and had never claimed Baba molested them. The man, a disillusioned Western devotee, made the whole thing up to get back at Baba for giving him a ring with a zircon instead of a real diamond, even though he said it was a "die-mind" ring, not a "diamond" ring (meaning the death of the ego). He also says videos of Baba's miracles reveal sleight of hand when a magician interviewed for Haraldsson's book says the videos are all too poor quality to come to any honest conclusions. He also supports the view of scholars who find spurious homoeroticism in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna, based on bad translations of Bengali into English (Narasingha Sil and Jeffrey Kripal who mistranslate Bengali to English, misunderstand Tantra, and misuse psychoanalysis to do things it was never meant to do). Goeff also seems to have a thing for stories about gurus and blonds (both men and women). Gentlemen may or may not prefer blonds, but according to Goeff all gurus do. Virtually all of the sexual stories involve blonds from exotic lands like the band mates from ABBA. He also quotes Joe Nickell, another skep-dick phony paranormal investigator, and Indian "rationalists" who call themselves "rationalists" even though they are materialists who believe sense perception is the only means of true knowledge, and the original rationalists were people who believed the senses are unreliable and only reason can be used to gain true knowledge, like Descartes and Kant.



In fact, there's a caveat to his book, listed on his website that reads:



The inclusion of any particular individual in Stripping the Gurus is not meant to suggest or imply that he or she represents him- or herself as a guru, nor is it meant to suggest or imply that he or she has indulged in sex, violence, the abuse of others, or any other illegal or immoral activities.



So it all could be false. Most of it probably is.



He is a disillusioned spiritual believer, much like Michael Shermer, which would explain why he's so angry and full of vitriol. He also decorates his site with the anti-religious/secular humanist/utopianist "A" symbol, meaning he's a utopianist/secular humanist/anti-religious do away with others freedom of thought because they're too stupid kind of guy FakeSagan warned about.