Richard Salsman begins by telling the audience that he will take them on an imaginative “nature walk,” and begins enumerating the various objects in the room, the natural materials that made them, and the men who first harnessed those materials. The steel in their seats and the air ducts for instance, and Carnegie.
The luxuries of civilized living are a derivative of nature, as are the men capable of manipulating and exploiting that nature. Man’s creations are perfectly natural and preferable. It is man’s nature to create and better his own existence, and the conveniences around the room (seats, walls, clothing, cushions, etc) are a direct result of man’s nature, not an abdication of it.
But students today are taught not to appreciate man, and in fact see his existence as opposed to nature. As if man is some alien thrust into a strange land, rather than the product of natural processes, as he actually is.
Productivity, man’s natural means of survival, is condemned as well, as it is the process of shaping matter to fit one’s purpose.
Homo Sapien is Latin for “wise man,” or as Aristotle defined him, a “rational animal.”
Salsman then goes on to show, through history, how they mind of man has been treated, and what consequences that lead to.
Ancient Egyptians: polytheistic mystics and slave drivers, Egyptians leave only the pyramids behind, which are little more than monuments built out of coercion to consecrate strange gods and deified tyrants. Twenty year life expectancy.
Greek culture brought about a love of knowledge (the first philosophers) and man’s mind. Life expectancy doubled.
But monotheistic cults began to take hold, and out of this sprang Christianity. Sweeping Europe, this doctrine denounced wealth, health and the physical world. Man is seen as evil; the supernatural is embraced while the mind is condemned. The consequence, as we know, was 500 years of theocracy: the Dark Ages.
Then followed the rebirth of reason: a renaissance. Aristotle is rediscovered, and men once again devote their minds to the betterment of their lives. Medicine, commerce, science and art progress by leaps and bounds, while religion attempts to snuff it out. But the enlightenment took hold, and reason led to the heroes of individual liberty, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
America entered its Industrial Revolution, showing just what the unfettered mind was capable of. The last 200 years account for only 4% of man’s recorded history, but in that little time he accomplished great things. For instance:
Population Growth-
1800 – 1 billion people inhabit the earth
1900 – 2 billion
Today – 6 billion
Twenty percent of those who ever lived, lived in the last 200 years.
Division of Labor:
1800 – 80% of the population is employed in farming the land
1900 – 35%
Today – 2%
The US, while making up only 5% of the world’s population, produces 50% of the world’s goods. Food consumption per person has increased dramatically, with no major increase in farmed lands thanks to technological advances in farming methods and food preservation.
Working Age:
1800 – The average age that a child started working was five
1950 – 17
Today – 19
And only in the past few decades have men actually retired, meaning that their wealth was so much that they could stop working a decade or more before their death and continue to live. Up until about 1920, men simply worked until they died.
Salsman marks the causes of this incredible growth with the 3 P’s:
Private Property
Prices
Profit Motive
Private property allowed men to take new ventures, thus creating new and better industries. The market pricing of goods caused a correlation of supply and demand, and higher prices of some goods meant innovation to combat those increases. And the profit motive meant that men could seek their own personal gain, and doing so meant satisfying the market’s needs and creating ever better goods and services.
At this point Salsman gets into the new enemy of freedom and the mind of man: environmentalist. But I admit that I didn’t take notes past this point, because I got really interested and listened instead. A mistake on my part, since I can hardly remember anything I heard just an hour ago, whereas the sparse notes I took beforehand are enough for near total recall… But you can take my word that environmentalist is bad!
No, don’t take my word. Check out these links instead from Capitalism Magazine.
Ideas