With the completion of this Journal, I will have written and published more than 76,000 words on this website over the past nine months. This sum is undoubtedly more than what was required of me over the course of my entire undergraduate career. This colossal feat, which even someone as prolific as I can be very proud of, along with the fact that the end of the year is bearing down on me with increasing speed, leads me to consider what the rest of the year and the end of this project will look like for me. I have enough base material, I believe, to support a final product, and I have barely enough time, I believe, to complete one if I start right now. So, I want this journal to serve as a look ahead and as a way for me to think through the path ahead of me.
First, I want to list out the limitations on my time that will inhibit my efforts to create a final product. Looking at my law school obligations, I have a number of big research papers (essentially academic journal articles) due this semester, one related to the Court of Appeals, one about Higher Education Law, and one about Judicial Language and Environmentalism. If I sit down and just do them, they shouldn’t take a tremendous amount of time, but it will take some time to find such opportunities. You see, I work best with large blocks of time. So, I could probably bang out the Court of Appeals paper in two 12-hour sessions. But if I only get 3-hour blocks in which to work, it would probably take me far more than eight of them to do the same work. So, for all these papers, and for my final product, I will need some large swaths of free time. This means that whenever these opportunities arise, there will be a lot of competition for them. Additionally, I’m working as a Research Assistant this semester to Professor Bonventre, and so I’ll need to find time to subedit and redline two of his papers this semester, too. It feels like a tremendous amount of work ahead of me, and it is, but I know from experience that it is possible. Still, in considering my plans for the end of the year, these other obligations must be kept in mind if I want to be at all realistic.
Second, I want to explain where I see the rest of my project going for the rest of the year. Because while I’m working on this final product, I still have 16 more journals to write, as well as my supplementary postings (two supplements for every three journals). The EMC2 kids are required to write 50 journals for their projects. Technically, this will be my 57th posting, but only my 34th journal. I’ve relaxed the standardized curriculum for at least my own students, and I’ve taken advantage of this flexibility to pretty much stop doing SDAs in my own project, but journals have always been my own feature of the course, and I would be remiss if I didn’t meet the magic number. Now, I think that the core of my theory has already been sketched out in my 76,000 words, especially since my topic change and the more focused journals which have accompanied it. Reading some of my most recent journals about morality and education, which were so long as to necessarily brush upon numerous other topics, I caught glimpses of an integrated theory present. Which tells me that my Theory of Being Human does exist, but I think it needs a lot of refinement and elucidation and extrapolation. This will be a task for my final product. But, my point is that the core of my theory exists, and therefore work on the final product can begin. But there must be, and is, other issues that can be addressed in my remaining journals. Thus far, my project has focused pretty heavily on reason and economics and the glories of the human mind. I think that, for the remainder of my project, I want to explore the darker, more primal, elements of humanity. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Love is not an entirely rational phenomenon, I think [in the strict sense of the word rational]. And yet it is one the defining experiences of the human life and something that almost everyone strives after. It deserves to be addressed, I think. But yesterday was also a day during which yet another school shooting occurred. For all this talk of reason and man’s ability to build a better world, it is undeniable that we still live in a very troubled world, and that man can easily tend towards depravity as well as sublimity. This, too, must be addressed by any proper theory of being human.
I have written before, in my Journal on Hurricanes and the Function of Prices, of the depression that can often accompany an understanding of economic problems. I wrote there that I have, for the most part, escaped this depression. This is not entirely true. I have not escaped so much as I every day fight it off. Because I, too, better even then my already-cynical economics students, see how society is sweeping towards the abyss. The layman believes that society is engaged in constant, assured, progressive advancement. It is left to the discerning economist (or historian or philosopher) to see the truth: that there is progress, and everywhere a rejection of it. There is Uber, and anti-Uber legislation. There is cryptocurrency, and calls for its banning. There is a right to free speech, and riots on college campuses that make dialogue impossible. There are scientific and philosophic advancements in books and articles published daily, and a shocking lack of interest in them. This is an interesting problem. It’s not exactly that society is finding it difficult to progress; society is blatantly hostile to progress. The reason for this is not all that mysterious, to the discerning economist. I see it, I know how it could be fixed, but I find myself powerless to do so. And I know I’m not alone in this. Mises, in his memoirs, wrote about the hopelessness that overcame so many of the great minds in Europe before World War I as they foresaw the calamity that was coming. Mises himself experienced this despair: “From time to time I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical fruit and point policy in the right direction….I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.”
I have striven, in my academic work, to always maintain a positive attitude. I present the truth, as I see it. I don’t really discuss the theories of others. I operate under certain assumptions that not all of my readers may agree with because I don’t want to muddy my work with quarreling or give my opponents too much space in my own papers. I do answer their claims, of course, but always indirectly, through a positive presentation of my own arguments or a clarification of the issue. Additionally, while it is no secret that I am an anarchist and a student of the Austrian School of Economics, I’ve never tried to explicitly convert any of my students to my view of things. I answer questions honestly, and that can quickly reveal some of my more unpopular views, but I don’t present these views for the purpose of making them my audience’s. I remain committed to always presenting the truth, but in my students and colleagues I only encourage an ability to recognize error. It is my hope that truth will speak for itself, if people can recognize it. It is not my job to obnoxiously force my views on everyone else, much less the people I have influence over.
I don’t know if this positive attitude is right or wrong, effective or ineffective. I suppose there is still some part of me that believes that people can be good and rational and that there is hope for humanity. Other parts of me believe the opposite. But I don’t know that I could have operated any other way. I made a choice, very explicitly, many years ago, to be positive. I don’t want to spend my time refuting old fallacies and arguing with people. I want to build something better and think progressively. Yes, I, like every other economist, have offered my own refutation of the minimum wage. But, for the most part, I don’t see my work as contributing to a debate, but as contributing to a climb towards something better. And I think that, if it was anything else, I wouldn’t be nearly as prolific and clear-thinking and effective and influential as I am. I think that if I succumbed to the temptation to brawl in the mud with everyone else, I would never make any theoretical advancements. But, more than that, I don’t know that I would be able to escape the intellectual’s depression, discussed above, if every day I dealt only with the ignorance and errors of others.
So, for the most part, I prefer to talk about the market rather than the government. I prefer to talk about education, rather than schools. I prefer to talk about reason rather than violence. I prefer to talk about ideas rather than the messiness of real life. This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the government, the schools, the violence, or the messiness, that I don’t recognize their significance and see how they influence the issues I’m addressing. I am fully cognizant of the fact that there's always another side to the coin, and I'm often just as familiar with that other side. I just can’t bring myself to talk about evil all day long instead of good. I think this tendency of mine has been evident throughout my project. And I think that, if I’m going to address the darker parts of humanity, I need to change this habit. I need to consider and discuss the evils of society explicitly. And I’m not exactly looking forward to that, to be honest. But I hope to find a way to do so that manages to maintain some semblance of a positive attitude, or at least keeps me from crying myself to sleep every night. However, I can’t choose positivity over truth. So dark journals lay ahead.
Finally, what will my final product actually be? It’s going to be a writing piece, obviously. I’m actually going to be working on two pieces simultaneously. One I’ve already started, on education. This has been a key issue for me for a very long time, and I’ve done a lot of reading and writing on the subject. EMC2 itself a product of this thinking of mine, and being more involved with the program this year, as well as Jonah’s project, has inspired me to fully elucidate my full philosophy of education. And, depending on if I have time, I’ll try to integrate this philosophy into a narrative of my experience with EMC2. That will be a pretty significant piece. The other piece will, of course, be my theory of being human. As I said above, I believe the core of the theory has already been fleshed out, to be supplemented by the remaining journals, but it requires much refinement and integration. I want this piece to serve as the first part of a book that I might put together over the summer or next year, wherein I apply the theory to various issues and topics. The book might be called Purpose: A Theory of Being Human. Together, I expect the two pieces to exceed 30,000 words, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a way to put the two together into a grander project. I had a flash of insight that this might be possible, but the thought was gone as soon as it came, so I’ll have to wait and see if it returns while I work on the two. Regardless, both of these pieces are extremely important to me, and I hope I can do them justice.
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