While outlining for Final Exams, I reduced my notes from this class into either cryptic or nonsense phrases. The problem is, I can't distinguish the two. Please identify the nonsense phrases, and I will integrate and/or refactor your comments. -- AndrewGradman - 31 Mar 2008

(I will save my less idiosyncratic paper idea for that third exercise, in which the school encourages us to pretend not to be ourselves -- that exercise about which, as in sibling rivalries and pissing contests,

Each peer has long learned
He'd be ranked by uniform
Not in spite of it.

---

2. The "Big Bang" Theory of Western Civilization

• • Young Sigmund: Socrates, why are you attracted to young boys?
  • Socrates: The truth is just the opposite -- I'm satisfying my desires with precisely those people that I find UNATTRACTIVE!
  • Sigmund: Why?
  • Socrates: ... so that I can be SURE that what attracted me to them, was not their great beauty, but their great sense of justice. I'm controlling a variable.
  • Sigmund: Which variable?
  • Socrates: Here's the truth: I'm controlling beauty, in order to figure out justice. Girls are Beautiful and Boys are Just; therefore, justice is a function of the boy I happen to be having a ... dialogue with.
  • Sigmund: Is that a dialogue in your pocket, Socrates?
  • Socrates: Yes, I got it last night while thinking about the Muse. We could read it together, if you'd like ...
  • Sigmund: Help, help! Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!

---

3. Surgeon : body :: "first do no harm" : organs :::: lawyer : society :: "first do no harm" : bodies

If lawyers took the Hippocratic oath, what would that make Alan Dershowitz (who, by defending unpopular plaintiffs in the public eye and making their narratives symbolic of social malaise, acts for the good of society) -- compliant, or anti-compliant?

---

4. Rousseau’s lawmaker = anyone who is observed

(Acts are only externalities; but how do we distinguish (good from bad) / (long from short term) / (worth punishment or not) / (education, marketing, campaigning, trust, map-writing from propaganda, exploitation, enslavement, lies, art)?

How does an Objectivist distinguish his choice to help another, from another's successful suggestion that he hurt himself?

We're living in a hearsay society -- oaths on bibles are the very evidence we seek to "weigh".

---

6. a. Jacques-Louis David's The Death Of Socrates: Did David want us to imagine Plato as physically present, or to imagine Plato's texts as "constructions" ("lies")? It dissatisfies me -- and rouses me to action -- to think that I cannot "learn" whether Plato was merely a faithful journalist (stenographer), or was the ultimate Jayson Blair. Just as we cannot tell prophets from normal men. Power from justice. Strict liability from negligence. Self-degradation from prosperity. Rousseau from Adam Smith. The young bearded man touching Plato's knee, from the old bearded man in white.

6. b.
Division of labor, customer's perspective = being surrounded by people whose acts look, to us, like MAGIC.
Division of labor, expert's perspective =

• How to intend to leave a cave: First ask yourself some general questions, e.g. "How do you get out of a maze? How do you know when you're outside the maze? Under what conditions is it IMPOSSIBLE for a maze to be exited?" The cave-leavings are the most mellifluous answers: e.g. human existence is a maze that can never be known to be exited, b/c "the maze has no exits; it was built around us precisely when we were built" / "the maze is vertical; we cannot reverse ancient falls"

---

7. [salvaged from a failed cover letter:] I believe that the corporation is the best cost structure for marketing and innovating visions of justice. My market research suggests that there is a customer for an antidepressant that relieves anxiety produced when impersonal, publicly traded corporations move into one’s neighborhood: the voter and churchgoer; the unionized employee and her manager; and the senior on Medicare, Columbia law professor, and nostalgic former Marxist (reference available on request). That antidepressant will be consumed ocularly, i.e. as books, essays and editorials. My business plan is to obtain tenure at a university, so that my factory will never be overwhelmed by costs. My challenge is believing that such a product exists. I don’t even know whether publicly traded companies believe in it—whether, for example, pharmaceutical companies agree what degree of external regulation the industry should invite upon itself, in order for its members to maximize their sum and share of short-term and long-term social value. I do not know how much of a socialist my books should portray me as. That is why I want to work for Bristol-Myers Squibb: I trust their opinion, more than I trust the opinion of a private nonprofit with a private agenda, because it is the function of a publicly traded corporation to answer this question correctly. * Is Die Gedanken Sind Frei the name for this antidepressant?

---

8.
* I have a nightmare, that in my lifetime technology will continue to improve. And as the menu of possible breads and circuses grows more complex, Americans will think these are different; and, being Englishmen, they will lose faith in anyone’s ability to provide them the RIGHT bread and circuses. They will call their confusion Pluralism, and their agosticism Science: and they will replace legislatures with bureaucrats, and bureaucracies with corporations; elections with marketing, and monetize all Value; Senates with Boards of Directors, Presidents with CEOs ... The publicly-held corporation will assume the function of the democratic state ... but our language will continue to contrast the two.
* I have a dream, that one day Boards of Directors will stop firing CEOs who don’t brainwash the species into “voluntary” servitude. That business schools will require the Hippocratic oath, and Rousseau, and Marcuse. That the osmosity of the barrier between church and state will explode.

---

9. Grading methods (TBD)