피해(被害)와 자해(自害)
펀드빌더(조갑제닷컴 회원)
한때 700억 달러 규모까지 달했던 한일통화스와프 협정은 연장처리 되지 못하고 종료된 상태다. 최근, 적정 외환보유고를 확보하고도 IMF行을 피할 수 없게 된 아르헨티나는, 글로벌 시장에 '상식파괴'의 사례로 간주된다. 중남미에서 브라질, 멕시코 다음으로 경제규모가 큰 아르헨티나는, 재정상태가 빠르게 개선되는 중이었고, 2017년 재정 적자는 GDP 대비 3%대까지 줄었으며, 2018년의 경우 2.5%의 GDP 성장까지 기대되는 상황이었는데도 IMF를 의지하게 되었기 때문이다. 이론상의 적정 외환보유고 수준에 상관없이, 최대한 외환(달러, 유로, 엔화 등)을 확보해 두어야만 제대로 된 대비가 가능하다는 교훈을 준다. 특히 가계부채 문제가 심각한 한국의 경우, 가계부채가 최악의 경우 어떤 방향으로 위기의 단초를 제공하게 될지 아무도 모르는 상황이므로 적정 외환보유고 상관 없이 철저한 대비가 필요한 상황이다. 이러한 측면에서 제대로 된 기축통화(달러, 유로, 엔화 등)와의 통화스와프가 全無한 지금의 한국의 입장에서는, 속히 달러나 엔화 통화스와프를 체결해놓아야 할 필요성은 크다고 볼 수 있다.
그런데, 이와 같은 일본인 관광객과 투자 격감으로 인한 손실이나, 한일어업협정 지연에 따른 어민 손해, 통화스와프 연장 실패에 따른 리스크 등은, 엄밀히 따져, 피해(被害)라고 볼 수 없는 측면이 있다.
결론적으로, 중국으로 인한 손실(관광객, 롯데마트 등)은 명백한 '被害'에 해당하지만, 일본으로 인한 손실(관광객, 투자, 어업, 통화스와프 등)은 사실상 스스로가 초래한 측면이 강하므로 '自害' 성격에 가깝다. (발췌)
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Maybe Trump and Xi Both Benefit from a Trade War
출처: 포천
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철학자 존 그레이와의 인터뷰
Laurie Taylor's interviews: Going nowhere: Laurie Taylor interviews John Gray
Progress is an illusion and liberal humanists are adolescent romantics. John Gray tells Laurie Taylor why he believes we're all deluded
– By Laurie Taylor –
Originally published in 2006
Portrait of John GrayMy first encounter with the political philosopher John Gray was at the Institue of Contemporary Art shortly after the publication in 2002 of Straw Dogs, his powerful and provocative assault upon the central values of liberal humanism. On that occasion my modest task had been to chair a session at which Gray would outline and develop some of his ideas and then take questions from the audience. I was interested in the nature of those questions. For Gray's book was not only attacking values that I regarded as my own but was (rather more alarmingly) doing so with a verve and wit that had elicited a chorus of admiration from a high-powered bunch of writers and commentators. The visionary novelist, JG Ballard, for example, had described Straw Dogs as "a powerful and brilliant book" and "an essential guide to the new millennium", while Will Self in the Independent thought it to be "a remarkable new work of philosophy... devoid of jargon, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world we live in."
After that sort of critical reception it was not surprising to find that the ICA room was packed. It looked like being quite an evening. But as Gray began to outline his ideas there was a puzzling lack of reaction to his assertions. There were no interruptions or expressions of disagreement or even whispered asides, and when it came to question time nobody asked for anything much more than a clarification of a few specific points.
I decided to raise the stakes by asking if everyone in the audience knew exactly what Gray was asserting? What, for example, did they make of this passage? "To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given to us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody today, but it is groundless." Or perhaps this passage: "Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth - and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals."
This did at least engender a mild skirmish about the impossibility of reconciling ideas of progress with evolutionary theory, but otherwise there were no more discussions or questions and I brought the evening to an end and drifted downstairs with John for an amiable drink at the bar.
Since that ICA date I've read much more of Gray's work: his account of the war against terror, Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern, his analysis of the delusions of global capitalism, False Dawn, and the collection of his New Statesman essays on politics and the illusion of progress called, with a typically iconoclastic flourish, Heresies. It is all wonderfully readable and consistently provocative. But it is also unremittingly pessimistic. Gray is literally proposing that we should do nothing to try to change our world. We might be able to make modest adjustments here and there to some local social and political arrangements, but even these modest changes are likely to be quickly reversed by the next cycle of history. In such circumstances our best bet might be quiescence.
However vividly expressed, these are still alarming opinions. Should we not take issue with an author who lauds such immobility, who sees it as nothing more than a welcome and long overdue acknowledgement of human impotence? And, at a time when religious fundamentalism is on the rise alongside a host of new religions and superstitions, should we not be arguing vigorously with an academic who sees such developments as merely the inevitable return of the repressed, evidence that humans cannot live without illusions?
These were the type of nagging questions which led me to seek out Gray for an extended interview. We met in his room at the London School of Economics and I began by suggesting that he was facing his own worst nightmare: he was looking at a self-confessed liberal humanist. His first reaction was to question my certainty: How well had I examined the premises upon which my beliefs rested? "My experience is that liberal humanists fall into one of two categories. Some hold to a set of conventional beliefs that don't have much depth. They're the sort who almost seem to be relieved when I ventilate the doubts, the forebodings that they have long had. The other type of liberal humanist is the body-armoured rigid type who illustrates a certain kind of innocence. Unlike members of most religions in the world, they don't interrogate their own myths. They don't even think that their beliefs might be myths."
There didn't seem to be much room in this bi-modal distribution for my own ambivalences so I decided to let it lie and move on to what Gray regards as the the central 'myth' of liberal humanism, the idea of human progress. I knew he regarded this particular myth as a derivative, an alternative version of the Christian religious idea of progress and finality. "That's right. A great many religions saw history as a cycle, not as a narrative of progress. And that's also true for the philosophies of Egypt and ancient Greece. Most ways of giving meaning to human life have not involved the idea of betterment and improvement. But when I put this forward, the naiveté and the innocence - and I might almost say the parochialism - of most liberal humanists, leads them to say, 'Well, if I believed what you believe then I wouldn't get up in the morning'. To which my response is, 'Well, maybe, you shouldn't. Maybe the world would be better off, maybe you would better off, if you had a time of quiet reflection.' It doesn't occur to them that people have throughout history been living lives with varying degrees of happiness without having a kind of Prozac-like belief that the future can be better than the past has ever been."
But what was the mechanism by which liberal humanists came to adopt the Christian notion of progress and make it central to their own beliefs? Were they so strongly influenced by their childhood religiosity that they necessarily imported ideas of progress and betterment into their secular and humanist visions? Or was the mechanism more unconscious? A Freudian return of the repressed?
"Absolutely. Freud says if you suppress sex it doesn't just go away. It's part of us, so if you repress it, it comes out in more bizarre and morbid and ridiculous forms. And I think that is true of religion. Liberal humanism now has all the mood-enhancing, meaning-conferring functions that Christianity had in the past."
Wasn't this playing rather fast and loose with Freud? The founder of psychoanalysis may have spent his life demoting the centrality of consciousness and promoting the power of the irrational, but surely his work did not provide any license for Gray's suggestion that liberal humanism could be seen as the return of repressed religion. Secularism for Freud represented an advance on religious thinking. It was recognition of the illusory nature of religion.
"Sort of. But when Freud talks about illusion he doesn't mean an error. Illusions aren't errors that can be corrected by an increase in intellectual ability or understanding. Illusions are beliefs we have because we need to have them in some way. And he says that we cannot imagine a world where the mass of humankind - I would say 'anybody' - can manage without illusion. Freud didn't go along with the classical freethinkers of the Enlightenment who worked on the assumption that human life could be exorcised of superstition, fantasy, and illusion. He cannot conceive of humanity without illusions. So this leads me to the conclusion, which I don't think Freud would have made, that if we are going to have fantasies and illusions in one way or another, we should seek ones which are dignified, aesthetic, attractive, tolerant. In other words our criteria for judging religions shouldn't be truth or falsehood, it should be like judging poetry or art. We should adopt ones which are the most beautiful."
So truth doesn't come into religion? "Yes, it does. In the following way. The myths or illusions of traditional religions are often ciphers for unchanging features of human life, in other words the truths about human life. Look at the Genesis myth. Once you have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge you can't go back. It suggests that power can enslave and that knowledge can enslave as well. That's very profound. But the trouble with the myths of liberal humanism is that essentially - and I almost don't want to say this, it sounds too harsh - they are the myths of adolescence. They deny or repress or somehow forget permanent features of human life. The key example in liberal humanism is the idea that knowledge liberates. I think that knowledge normally simply enhances human power."
I had the sense at this point that the interview was beginning to get a little too comfortable. It was early evening and already dark outside the windows of Gray's small second floor office at the LSE, and there was something distinctly cosy and nicely old-fashioned about sitting there with a distinguished and cultured professor and exchanging ideas about the meaning of life. I sat up a little straighter and went in hard on his Genesis example. "But isn't Genesis also a warning about intellectual presumption? Adam and Eve have dared to try and possess the knowledge that is supposed to be God's preserve and that presumption is punished. They are rebelling against authority, claiming the right to think for themselves, the very right that was demanded by the liberal humanists of the Enlightenment."
"Well, that might been have a useful demand in the 17th and 18th centuries when the predominant form of established wisdom was religion. But now the predominant form of established opinion is liberal humanism. So thinking for yourself now involves exactly what I am trying to do, which is question those liberal humanist ideas. And particularly the view of history as being potentially meaningful and with a happy ending."
But where exactly were all these millennarian humanists? I knew a great many liberal humanists, spent my time hanging around offices and sitting in bars with them, but I'd be hard pushed to think of one who subscribed to anything which resembled a grand narrative of progress?
"Let me try and be more precise. I don't deny that some states of human history are better than other states. Europe in 1990 was better than Europe in 1940. I don't deny that. And I don't deny that some programmes of reform have enhanced the lot of human beings to a considerable extent. And peace is better than war, freedom is better than anarchy, prosperity is better than poverty, pleasure is better than pain, beauty is better than ugliness. But there is a another very specific belief that I would guess you subscribe to: the belief that advances in ethics or politics can in principle become like advances in science in the sense of being cumulative. This is the belief that there is nothing inherent in human life or human nature to prevent cumulative improvement. We'll get to the point where there is no poverty in the world, where there is no anarchy in the world. My view is that all gains in ethics and politics are real but they are all also reversible and all will be reversed and often reversed very easily. For example, I know many liberal humanists myself and I know that when I said two and a half years ago that torture would come back, they were incredulous. That doesn't tell me they are stupid. That tells me they are in the grip of a belief that makes such a thing unthinkable. They have a narrative, a notion of stages. But when I look at history I don't see any kind of thread, however tenuous, however sometimes broken. What I see is cyclical change, cyclical transformation."
A certain pantomimic aspect was beginning to become apparent in our conversation. Whenever Gray said that liberal humanists believed in X, I would counter by say 'oh no, they don't'. But I still couldn't let him get away with liberal humanists who believed in a 'notion of stages'. This was surely a 19th century development which derived its impetus from the illegitimate application of biological theories of evolution to ethics and politics. I didn't detect any such theories of immanence in contemporary liberal humanism or indeed in the writings of the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers who were credited with its foundation.
Some Enlightenment figures certainly looked forward to the expansion of knowledge and its extension to wider and wider circles but they were far more united by their insistence upon freeing people from traditional modes of authority such as the church and the monarchy and the restrictions these institutions placed upon free speech.
I paused in my monologue. Was I getting my point across? I decided to change the line of my attack.
"You know, I always get incensed when I read you on the 18th century Enlightenment. When you indict the people you see as the founders of liberal humanism. I think that you are dishonouring these people. When Hume criticised religion he did it only 40 or 50 years after they executed someone in his hometown of Edinburgh for blasphemy. These were difficult and dangerous times. And he and other brave writers were prepared to come out in favour of people being able to express their opinions openly without hindrance from authoritarian figures. And that is an emancipation. A liberation. You and I have spent our lives being able to say what we like. We revel in being able to say what we like. What Hume was talking about was extending that privilege, that right, to more and more people. He didn't have a stage theory of progress. How could someone with such scepticism about traditional notions of causality possible have any explanation of progress?"
John Gray happily admitted to a fondness for Hume and his extreme scepticism. But he was far less ready to exempt such other Enlightenment figures as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau, from the charge of believing that as larger and larger numbers of people acquired knowledge so the world would inevitably improve. Even Hume, he argued, for all his strengths, never got around to explaining where religion came from, the origins of this 'monstrous religious beast'. "But the part of the Enlightenment that I like is the part before reason was turned into a religion itself. Most of the humanists I've talked to get worked up into a frenzy when I point out that in the 20th century the worst and largest crimes against humanity were created by secular regimes. That's just a fact. These totalitarian regimes didn't come from nowhere and they can't be explained by specific traditions like Russian despotism or Chinese traditions because these regimes were in very different places but were all very similar. They were similar because despite their huge historical differences they were pursuing a version of a progressive European revolutionary project which when pursued logically by a government with power always has such results. But no one needs to have this belief in progress. I get the impression with a lot of people - not just the humanists but also the self-professed Christians - that they cling on like grim death to some sort of belief in progress because they really feel that if they give that up life's not worth living and chaos will break loose. And what I want to say is that this is an unnecessary fear. Epicurus was very cheerful; he was even cheerful when he was dying. You can have a philosophy or view of human life which is positive and cheerful but contains no trace of a belief in human progress."
As I found in the hour and a half that I spent with him, it's extraordinarily difficult to knock Gray off this particular perch.
He is absolutely convinced that liberal humanists have made the fundamental mistake of believing that the cumulative developmental nature of science is paralleled by a cumulative development in human well-being and ethical behaviour. He is equally insistent that religion can only be temporarily vanquished because its special access to basic truths about human life means that it will always reassert itself in one form or another. Above all he is thoroughly sceptical about attempts to better the human condition. He'll just about go along with a little of what Popper once called 'bit and piece social engineering' but anything more ambitious is certain to founder at some time in the future. History is cyclical not progressive. Reversible not linear. In such circumstances many of us might be better off staying quietly at home and minding our own business than rushing out to the latest set of barricades.
It's an intellectual stance which can lead to some unproductive trading with historical examples. Will torture ever again be used by western democracies? 'Of course not', said the liberal humanists three years ago. 'Well', Gray would argue, 'look what's happening now in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. I told you so'. But is this really solid evidence of history's reversibility? Might we not also point to the widespread condemnation of these latest examples of torture as evidence that our ethical distaste for such practices is still alive and well?
Gray's characterisation of liberal humanists as believers in inevitable progress also tends to lean heavily on somewhat sweeping generalisations about the character of 18th century Enlightenment thinkers and upon the dubious assertion that humanists share something with the 19th century positivists and their absurd notions about a religion of humanity.
Neither is there much clarity about the status of his much cited cyclical view of history. Is this merely another way of formulating the common fatalistic sentiment that what goes around comes around, or is there a hypothesis here which might lend itself to some other test than a list of recent policy failures?
There's a final concern. Does not Gray's insistence upon the futility of most attempts to better the lives of others rather chime with our times than run counter to them? When I look around I don't find my immediate world is populated by crusading liberal humanists with millenarian projects.
What I do see are very large numbers of people who have become so obsessed with the endless elaboration of their individuality through the services and commodities offered by consumer culture that they are in danger of losing their compassion for fellow human beings. They simply don't have the time or the inclination to think of others. Gray, however unintentionally, may be providing an intellectual licence for their bedazzled inactivity. And that after all may have been the reason for the peculiar lack of debate at the ICA. It was not a silence of incomprehension. It was a silence of approval.
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과연 김정은이 제재를 못견뎌 나온 것인가?
조갑제
https://youtu.be/XXk6JMlDbmc
김정은이 회담에 나온 것은, 제재에 굴복한 것이 아니라, 자신감의 표현이라는 주장.
나 역시 김정은이 핵을 포기한다면, 그건 한국의 좌파 정부와 합세해 한국을 접수할 수 있다는 자신감의 표현이라고 주장했다.
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국회 의원들은 국민을 대표한다고 하는데, 이해가 서로 다른 수 천, 수 만 명의 주민들의 이해를 어떻게 대표할 수 있을까? 선거구를 대표하는 것은 힘든 일이 아니라 불가능한 일이다.
대의 정부라 불리는 것은 사실은 관직을 차지하기 위한 정당들의 경쟁이다.
대의민주제에서 두 가지 분명한 진실은, 1. 그것은 민주제가 아니며, 2, 그것은 대의제가 아니다.
In What Way Are Political Representatives Representative?
•Gerard N. Casey
[Excerpt from Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy Against the State, chap. 6: Deligitimizing the State.]
What does it mean for one person to represent another? Under normal circumstances those who represent us do so at our bidding and cease to do so at our bidding. They act on our instructions within the boundaries of a certain remit and we are responsible for what they do as our agents. The central characteristic of representation by agency is that the agent is responsible to his principal and is bound to act in the principal's interest. Is this the situation with my so-called political representatives? Political representatives are not (usually) legally answerable to those whom they allegedly represent. In fact, in modern democratic states, the majority of a representative's putative principals are in fact unknown to him. Can a political representative be the agent of a multitude? This also seems unlikely. What if there are multiple principals and they have interests that diverge from each other? A political representative must then of necessity cease to represent one or more of his principals. The best that can be done in these circumstances is for the politician to serve the many and betray the few.1 In this very normal political scenario, it is not that it is difficult to represent a constituency — it is rather that it is impossible.2 There is no interest common to the constituency as a whole, or, if there is, it is so rare as to be practically non-existent. That being the case, there is nothing that can be represented.
Some may take issue with the notion of representation presented here and argue that we are dealing with a considerably more complex phenomenon, that political representation is just one instance of a variety of types of representation, that representation can be symbolic,3 formal, religious4 or iconic. Firstly, while my remarks apply primarily to representation-as-agency, similar considerations can be brought to bear on representation as trustee, deputy or commissioner and so on. Once again, as with our desert island drama, the basic conceptual point can be grasped from the single example of representation-as-agency — there is little to be gained, except a soothing tedium, from a rehearsal of the inapplicability of the other paradigmatic types to political representation.
Having exhaustively examined the various instances of unproblematic representation — agent, trustee, deputy, commissioner and so on — Pitkin regretfully concludes that none of them seems capable of carrying the burden that political representation must carry if it is to be adequately robust. The political representative 'is neither agent nor trustee nor deputy nor commissioner; he acts for a group of people without a single interest, most of whom seem incapable of forming an explicit will on political questions'.5 It is difficult to see how this point could be made more clearly. One might perhaps think that such a state of conceptual confusion would lead one to give up any idea of discovering a coherent or consistent account of political representation but Pitkin ploughs on. She wonders if we should abandon the very idea of political representation and considers the possibility that 'representation in politics is only a fiction, a myth forming part of the folklore of our society'.6 Even more radically, she wonders whether we should not 'simply accept the fact that what we have been calling representative government is in reality just party competition for office'.7
One is tempted to say — Yes! Yes! Alas, Pitkin says — No! No! She thinks that perhaps it is 'a mistake to approach political representation too directly from the various individual representation analogies — agent and trustee and deputy'8 at one stroke abandoning her working assumption of a common semantic core lying at the heart of the notion of representation. Having abandoned the common core idea, she proceeds to suggest a kind of institutional or systemic account.
Political representation is primarily a public, institutionalized arrangement involving many people and groups, and operating in the complex ways of large-scale social arrangements. What makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, but the over-all structure and functioning of the system, the patterns emerging from the multiple activities of many people. It is representation if the people (or a constituency) are present in governmental action, even though they do not literally act for themselves.9
Given what she has been urging up to this point, this recommendation is a counsel of despair. It comes to this. None of the paradigmatic uses of the term 'representation', as instanced by the various examples Pitkin considers (deputy, agent and so on) suffices to make sense of the idea of political representation so Pitkin invents a whole new unsubstantiated stipulative systemic account of representation that has no roots in our ordinary use of that term. Instead of individuals representing, we instead have an entire system that represents. We are to forget that we have been unable to make any sense of individual political representation; we can kick the problem upstairs by ignoring the individual and having the system itself be representative, albeit in a somewhat mysterious and yet-to-be explained way. Let us risk committing the fallacy of composition and assert that if the idea of explicating political representation by means of the analysis of individual acts of agency, trusteeship and so on is unrealizable, the problem is hardly solved by simply positing 'the system' as the super agent of representation. I would go further: the systemic account is not only unhelpful it is obfuscatory, appearing to explain when in fact it simply sweeps the problem under a pseudo-explanatory carpet in a manner reminiscent of the postulation of 'dormitive power' by the doctor in Moliere's Le Malade lmaginaire as an explanation of the soporific qualities of opium. This, of course, is to explain the obscure by the more obscure; it is also a striking example of what Alfred North Whitehead called 'The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.'
If it is to be tenable, representative or indirect democracy requires a clear, robust and defensible conception of representation. No such conception has been forthcoming and it is doubtful if any ever will be forthcoming. It used to be said that only three things were definitely true of the Holy Roman Empire: it wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman and it wasn't an empire. Similarly, two things are definitely true of representative democracy: it is not democracy and it is not representative. In the end, representation is a fig leaf that is insufficient to cover the naked and brutal fact that even in our sophisticated modern states, however elegant the rhetoric and however persuasive the propaganda, some rule and others are ruled. The only question is, as Humpty-Dumpty noted in Through the Looking-Glass, '... which is to be master — that's all'.10
1. [Note: footnote numbers have been renumbered for consistency in this Mises Wire.] I acknowledge here my obvious debt here to the thought of Lysander Spooner.
2. H.F. Pitkin, The Concept of Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 215; pp. 219–20.
3. An instance of symbolic representation occurs when Elrond is choosing the Company of the Ring in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. He says: 'For the rest, they shall represent the other Free Peoples of the World: Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Legolas shall be for the Elves; and Gimli, son of Gloin for the Dwarves. ... For men you have shall have Aragorn ...' J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (London: Harper Collins, 1969), p. 362.
4. An instance of religious representation can be seen when a Catholic priest is said to represent Christ in the sacrament of confession when he says, 'ego te absolvo ...'.
5. Pitkin, The Concept of Democracy, p. 221.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., pp. 221–22. She picks up this idea again when she says '... when we speak of political representation, we are almost always speaking of individuals acting in an institutionalized representative system, and it is against the background of that system as a whole that their action constitute representation, if they do'. (p. 225)
10. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (London: Hart-Davis, MacGib, [1871] 1972), p. 81.
Gerard Casey is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin and an Associated Scholar at the Mises Institute. He is author of Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State and Murray Rothbard (Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers).
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이러한 작품들을 '앞단면 그림(fore-edge painting)'이라고 하는데,
1650년대쯤 시작된 것
[출처] 200년 전의 책 속에 숨겨진 비밀 gif / 알배
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