On September 10, 2006, I was awakened at 6 am by a telephone call informing me that communication with our exploration camp in Peru had been cut off and it was feared that the 6-person geological team had been kidnapped. The date is well remembered because it was my birthday and it had started out very poorly.
For 12 hours, the geologists and one policeman were whipped and marched down the mountain to the village which the 300-armed kidnapper-farmers called home. During this 12-hour period, I had to sit down with the local Police General and convince him that he really ought to recover the kidnapped professionals irrespective of the fact that the exploration company would not provide the new flat screen television and carpeting that his office so desperately called for. It was, in short, a sometimes-surreal walk through a police system that was non-operative in any useful sense. In the coming months it was to be revealed that the justice system was in perhaps worse shape. In fact, I was told that there was no point in pursuing justice because, as the geologists and policeman were only gone for 12 hours, it was not a “real kidnapping”.
Our prima facia crime was to pollute a local stream feeding the coca leaf crops further down the mountain. In fact, we were mapping rock outcrops and doing nothing that impacted any water courses. Fortunately, within two hours of receiving my phone call we were able to reach the highest levels of the government and it was a timely phone call from his boss, the Minister of the Interior, which finally moved the Police General to recover the kidnap victims rather than shake me down for office furnishings.
At the end of all things, it was proven that a neighbouring mining company had “hired out” the kidnapping to frighten us off the property so that they could take it over and develop whatever mineral resources were to be found. By pretending to film a documentary on mining violence, we were able to get several local people on camera describing who was responsible and how the money and coca leaf they were paid was useful to the family economy. It is nice to be envied - but not at the working end of a pistol.
To finish the story, the reason I didn’t buy the flat screen tv and carpeting was the company had no money. None even to pay the overtime charges of the police units called out to recover our employees. When the police were not paid their overtime, they assumed that their commander had kept the money he had “received” from the mining company rather than pay the employees. The scandal became front page news in the local newspaper and I was getting very angry phone calls every four hours demanding the money. I was tempted to point out to the Police General that my office was in desperate need of some paint and new carpet. By making front page news, my new best friend was passed over for promotion that year. Karma is such a bitch. The money issue was eventually resolved but not before I had some very good laughs.
This is a story about freedom, its loss and how different worldviews accept that loss. Earlier I pointed out the foundational importance of history and philosophy to the development of worldview. History tells us who we are because of where we have been and hints at where we might be going. The problem with history, of course, is that in a postmodern context, it can be variable. Your history may not be mine. You might view the Golden Age of Greece as a nascent fount of foundational philosophy while I might see it is a homo-erotic interlude. To establish some ground rules about how to understand a Western perspective of history, I think these are important axioms:
There is only one path through history but getting to that path is sometimes difficult.
Western civilization started with Cyrus the Great, moved into ancient Greece, picked up some important philosophy from the ancient Near East and, over time, has resulted in the most productive and creative civilization known to history.
All mankind is made “in the image of God” and there are no intrinsic capacity differences between human beings in terms of creativity or moral expression. There are, however, significant differences in freedom.
To test these axioms, I hypothesized that if gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is a proxy for creativity then this measure might say something about the relative freedom offered by different worldviews. If I am free to be creative and I don’t abuse you and steal your freedom, then perhaps together we will be more creative/economically productive.
My worldview chart was created by taking the 2011 gross domestic product (GDP) and population data for countries of the world, subtracting the contribution to GDP from oil and gas production and dividing the resulting GDP of each country by the population of that country to arrive at a GDP per capita figure. The countries were then grouped according to dominant worldview (religious expression being a well recognized proxy for worldview). The average GDP per capita for each worldview grouping was then calculated by weighting the contribution of each country by its population. The result indicates that some worldviews clearly outperform others in aggregate creativity.
The underlying assumption that every human being has an approximately equal desire to be creative is important to my thesis. Ludwig von Mises states it bluntly; “All distinctions between men are only artificial, the product of social, human – that is to say – transitory – institutions. What is imperishable in man – his spirit – is undoubtedly the same in rich and poor, noble and commoner, white and coloured… This impulse cannot be eradicated; it is the motive power of all human action.”
There is lots of room for nuanced thinking even within worldviews. For example, why, given equal access to the same datasets, are some scientists completely convinced that:
the world is warming for anthropogenic reasons whereas others are completely convinced that climate change is ever present and unrelated to human activities?
the world is hopelessly overpopulated, and scarce resources will soon be completely consumed while others view those same resources as being essentially inexhaustible in a depopulating world?
the world and those who inhabit it are products of unexpected mutation and gradual development under the influence of blind, irrational forces while others see intelligent design in the uniquely complex organisms and systems of the world?
These differences in view are due to differences, not in the science being debated, but in the philosophical substrate that informs each person’s worldview. Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl understood this and said, “I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek were ultimately prepared, not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” Similarly, John Gresham Macham said, “What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”
If differing philosophies and their resultant worldviews underpinned the holocaust, might they not also underpin attitudes toward war, pandemics, education, marital harmony, childrearing, gender fluidity, abortion, artificial intelligence, and a host of other issues? Societies are the aggregation of millions of individual decisions each based on a worldview that gives honour to or ignores important moral considerations. Moses, given a metaphorical choice between life and death, was encouraged to “choose life that it go well with him”. If the dominant worldview causes those millions of decisions to lean toward life, then the culture will flourish. At least that is my argument.
But in this context, what is life? I argue that life comes from the promotion of freedom and honesty as the foundation upon which individual and corporate decisions are made. This life will result in families and cultures that are more creative and economically productive. The opposite of course is equally true. Cultures which relinquish their devotion to freedom and honesty will “die” through the loss of their creativity and economic strength. Instead they will be fussing over how to define “woman” and fighting over whether men can have babies. That is, when they are not parsing the differences between disinformation, misinformation and outright lies. Perhaps we are witness to this latter phenomenon in many nations today. If so, get ready for non-functioning police and justice systems.