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Neville Goddard (1905-1972) offered a compelling explanation of the human condition and an intriguing and empowering path of self-discovery. Join your host Ed to explore from the ground up this most essential mystery: the human imagination.
[edited for clarity]
This is episode 21: What Type of Society do you Desire?
To answer this question let’s first turn to Neville. Did he have any definite political or social views? Well in one lecture that I remember he confessed that he had no expertise in anything other than his knowledge of the Bible. He said he didn't know anything about, for example, economics. But still we can piece together a few remarks he made and surmise what his guidance might have been.
So we'll start with our best estimate of Neville's point of view, and then go to what I call a principled position, and then we'll end up with a long-form affirmation.
1. Neville's positive view
In several remarks Neville acknowledges the necessities of this life, which he characterized as the world of Caesar, of course taking that from the Bible. He did express his appreciation for freedom in one specific remark that I recall, where he said he was glad to be able to take the podium and express himself, without fear of being interfered with by the state.
He also related remarks by Robert Frost, the poet, who had written an article concerning the founding fathers in the US, saying that they used an imaginal act to create democracy – which was a great experiment. They believed it in.
Further in this connection Neville has made several remarks with regard to his family's business, and his own publishing activity, showing that he had an appreciation for entrepreneurship, a building of capital to supply the market with wanted goods.
2. Neville's transcendental view
I think it would be a mistake to characterize Neville's message as any kind of political message. That was not the essence of his thought; rather it was a transcendental view. For example, he agrees with Blake when it comes to all the misfortunes, all the horrors of the world, everything should be left just as it is. Everything is just as it should be, because we (God) created the whole plan for a specific purpose: to gain a life of experience; to put ourselves through the “furnaces of affliction."
Neville said that he was not a “joiner" – he would not join this party or that party. He would not approve of political action, in and of itself. He wouldn't necessarily discount action, but he would say that any action that is not preceded by appropriating the consciousness of the desired end would be just a futile readjustment of surfaces.
Neville embraces a total picture, where, on the one hand, economic and political freedoms are celebrated, they seem to be appreciated, at least on one level. While on the other hand, or perhaps at a higher level, all of the injustices and suffering are (not repudiated but) seen as necessary parts of a larger whole.
3. Neville asserting the power of the imagination
Yes, so further on this point… someone challenged Neville after his lecture on Job – you remember the story from the Bible.
Now in this lecture he emphasized a call for resignation, to resign oneself, to faith – to the necessity of going through these furnaces of affliction. In the question period, this was the complaint of a person in the audience. In response Neville said, no no by all means – use your imaginative power to overcome conditions of adversity; that's the whole point of the story!
All right so my conclusion from piecing together remarks that Neville made, to try to ascertain his viewpoint, is to say that he affirms the operant power in us to imagine; to believe in our imaginal creation; and then to remember that reality is rooted within the psyche of man.
His examples of altering events on a personal level seem to outnumber the large-scale imaginal acts. That’s why sometimes I find it difficult to gain inspiration from Neville on large-scale issues. But then again, if you pay close attention to his remarks, there doesn't seem to be an important difference caused by the scale of the imaginal act.
Two examples come to mind. One was the woman who was talking to her friend employed by the steel company. He was fearful that the 4000-member work force that had been laid off would permanently lose their jobs. So she used a technique which she had learned from Neville, to say “I remember when…" and sure enough, in the ensuing months there was a multi-million-dollar reinvestment in the steel plant, against all expectations, and they recalled all of the workers.
The second example was on a much larger scale, where he recalled his father having discussed things with ships’ stewards, speculating about the next Great War. They outlined the details of when it would occur, and who would be involved – and that's the way it turned out.
4. Principled position to inform our affirmations
I do appreciate Neville's transcendental view. That's what makes sense out of a seeming absurd existence. At the same time I can't resign myself to what we see happening before us. So if I'm honest I have to think that there are many things we’re living through that are unacceptable. To respond to them requires a principled position.
Now why don't we just forget about historical and social forces, and imagine what we want on a personal level? Wouldn't that work? Well the answer is the same thing as I gave in the last episode: the conviction and the weight of your desire will undoubtedly be energized by your understanding of what human society is actually capable of.
If it's simply left to the planners behind the scenes, who are perhaps using the imaginative technique, or if it's left to the lowest common denominator of human thought, which is simply a reflection of the controlled narrative, well then you may not like what you get.
This brings to mind something Mark Twain said. He was talking about the conventional view of heaven we learned about in the churches. He said one thing is for sure: there's not a scrap of intellect anywhere to be found in this so-called heaven. Kind of a wake-up call to say: if you want heaven on Earth, you're going to have to bring something to the table.
To return to this question: why don't we just imagine something on a personal level and forget about having to worry about historical and social forces? The other part of the answer is: it's possible to imagine what on the surface seems to be the good thing or the right thing and be self-deceived. For example, if you could wish for money, without addressing the monetary system. So you can have lots of money, but it might be worth what it was worth in Germany in 1922 -- in other words a whole wheelbarrow full to buy a loaf of bread.
Let's say you had a vision for government to somehow take care of everyone in society -- I know people who think this way -- to make sure that there was perfect equality. Well this is what's being proposed now, with the government subsidy to be paid (of course paid for by the taxpayer) to give everyone a guaranteed amount. It sounds noble on the surface, because you seem to be aspiring to freedom for everyone. But of course it's based on a destructive view of economics. You would be unwittingly invoking slavery.
5. The imperative of liberty and its economic and political arrangement
Here's a quote from a publication by Ludwig von Mises. He was the principal figure in what they call the Austrian School of Economics, which is a very interesting alternative account of what economics and politics are all about -- something that you won't hear about in the mainstream:
“The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and repression -- the state. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western Civilization were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.”
He goes on to say that the order of things that is most conducive to individual liberty is a certain economic arrangement, namely, conditions where a person is free to contribute in the manner he or she wishes to an interactive system of voluntary exchange -- in other words, a free market -- coupled with private property, and a sound monetary system.
These are the conditions that should be safeguarded by a minimal government, and these were the conditions that were achieved, at least in rough outline, through the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, that enabled the historic rise in living standards in the west.
This is connected, too, with some of the videos on the Academy of Ideas series that I had pointed out in the last episode, where they talk about spontaneous order.
6. Our system
Well our governments, of course, are not minimal, they’re overbearing. A very telling analysis of society is to divide it into two distinct groups: one is the net taxpayers, and the other is the net tax recipients -- that is, the recipients of tax payments in all of its various forms of distribution. The latter group is growing, and in the US is almost equal to half the population.
Another important axiom -- and this is something that's not understood by the younger generation -- is that wealth can only be produced by entrepreneurs taking risk to invest their saved capital and offer something on the market. Government, despite popular notions, cannot produce wealth, it can only confiscate it and redistribute it. Well these are the sort of truisms that are brought to our attention by the Austrian School of Economics. They are intuitively correct, and yet the discussion that should be happening with regard to economics is always overshadowed by the false agendas, the alarmist distractions and diversions, and the active repression of information that challenges the official narrative.
With regard to the monetary system: do we have a sound monetary system? Many people are unaware that the money system, the global network of central banks, is a private cartel. That's old news. One could argue that this cartel should know what they're doing. Well I agree, in fact they do you know exactly what they're doing. John Maynard Keynes was the man responsible for the policy of flooding the market with government fiat currency, driving up debt to astronomical proportions, which will never be paid. A person who is not versed in any sort of alternative history will say: “well, don't they have our best interests at heart? Aren't they part of the system?” One of the Austrian school by the name of Rothbard discovered the fact that Keynes was actually member of a secret society. These secret societies exact loyalty from their members above any other affiliation in public life, and they have long-term secret aims. This is the subject of study by legitimate, mainstream, serious scholars -- like Antony C. Sutton, for example.
Advocates of a sound money system do discuss the possibilities of repudiating the “public debt” which I put in quotation marks, because it's yet another false and controlled narrative. The whole thing is a fraud. People discuss transitioning to a market-determined standard, free from private ownership and manipulation. All this is entirely possible.
7. Why socialism always fails its people but benefits its leaders
Again this is old news. Going back as far as 1922, Mises set house the whole argument showing that a socialist system cannot operate, essentially because of the complexity of the economic calculation. Central planners delude themselves into thinking that they can do the economic calculation that is necessary to set prices, to set wages, to allocate productive forces to produce this good or that good, to use this distribution channel or that one, etc. Mises is now vindicated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the Communist world, yet the very same policies are being implemented in the socialist democracies, at an accelerated pace.
You can't receive anything from government unless it first picks your pocket, in order to have the thing to give back to you. It's only redistribution -- and it doesn't result in social justice. Where is the social justice among all of the socialist systems that exist now or have ever existed? On the contrary, their citizens died by the tens of millions. So going forward, I think it's well to realize that the market -- the free market -- is the only mechanism that has been demonstrated to have the necessary complexity, scope, depth and granularity to allow for the proper (what they call) discovery of prices, which reflect the actual wants of a vast population of consumers. This free-market principle should be extended to all aspects of life.
Some people argue: “Well, you know, communism has never been implemented the way it should be implemented.” What such people don't realize is that any possible improvement in the material standard of living achieved by the communist or socialist systems was done purely as a result of Western entrepreneurial efforts. The scholar that I mentioned, Anthony Sutton, proved by going through the archives at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University that Lenin's five-year plans -- these famous plans under the Communist system with all the factories and equipment -- were designed, built and supplied by Western firms, like Ford Motor Company General Electric.
Both Sutton and Mises make the point that a socialist system, in fact any government bureaucracy, cannot innovate. So the support for socialist systems by international bankers (who create opposing forces and then fund both sides in their conflicts) shows clearly that the whole socialist experiment is hypocritically conceived and cynically executed, for the benefit of the top echelon.
8. Socialism cannot be partially implemented
I've had political candidates come to my door and say things like: “Well, you know, we have to take care of grandma, and that's why we need a socialist system.” No, in a free market system, grandma and her family would be so prosperous that she would already be taken care of. And in cases where you've got people who are incapacitated, who are not able to look out for themselves... well in a free-market system they would, first of all, be much fewer in number because they would not be subject to iatrogenesis (death at the hands of the medical cartel).
According to author RJ Rommel, government is the number one cause of death -- democide -- the top three offenders being socialist regimes. Add to that the fact that the charitable sector was much larger and much more active back in the era when there was a quasi free-market.
Mises makes the point that you cannot partially implement socialism. You might think that it's possible to have a middle-of-the-road system, with some of the policies in place. But no -- the problem is that these violations of basic principles continue to multiply, and eventually ruin society.
Well another false argument is when people say: “We need a central authority to protect us from objective threats!” The answer is, first of all, we don't have a free market in information to be able to determine whether a so-called objective threat is genuine. Independent investigation shows that so many of them were contrived, to the point where anyone who has his eyes open can now see that in most cases the whole thing is transparent -- a cheap facade of propaganda.
The scholar that I mentioned, Anthony Sutton, summarized his findings by saying that it comes down to the individual versus the state. He said, in the end the individual will win, because the individual is alive whereas the state is dead.
9. An objectively correct position
So you might well ask at this point: have I hijacked the stated mission of this podcast by launching into political argument, when I promised originally to look at Neville's ideas on the human imagination?
Well, there's one further point that ties together the effects of socialism upon the imperative for liberty and the mental freedom that we're all aspiring to -- and that is that under a socialist system it is not just a matter of economic efficiencies, but a matter of a profound stagnation of the human spirit. Now that's a point made by Mises.
I can attest to this. I lived under a socialist system in another country doing field work as a grad student for 5 months. So I did a considerable amount of touring interviewing and living with people and I can attest that good, competent people experience extreme levels of frustration and depression, because the state stifles every possible creative impulse and controls your life, as they told me, “right down to your fingertips”.
So all of the foregoing leads me to think that human creativity and the freedom to imagine are consistent with political liberty and antithetical to socialism, which always, in the end, aims to kill out creativity and enforce a dull uniformity of thought.
10. Affirmation
So to end, here's an affirmation that I created which intends a flowering of creativity:
I live in a free society, enacting a spontaneous order. A huge tsunami of truth, joy and freedom has inundated us; the consciousness of freedom and individual rights has reformed the whole political agenda.
The political system now serves the people. Broad masses of society, the vast majority, intuitively understand, embrace, defend and live by God-given, unalienable rights:
- the right of private property and personal financial sovereignty;
- the right to think and express oneself without censure;
- the right to medical treatment only by informed consent;
- the right to associate and gather for all the noble purposes of a free society;
- the right to travel freely anywhere in the world;
- the right to enter public spaces without restriction and controls;
- the right to privacy;
- the right to carry on prosperous businesses by offering value in a free market;
What is the coordinating principle? It is based on the golden rule and respect for others.