 
"...compelling, fascinating, thought-provoking and illuminating, with novel and challenging insights. It is eminently readable and thoroughly researched." Dr Malcolm Venter, MA & PhD (English Linguistics), founding editor of _NAPTOSA INsight_ , the official journal the National Professional Teachers' Organisation of South Africa, National Chairperson of the SA Council for English Education, founder and National Academic Coordinator of the English Olympiad, and recipient of the English Academy Gold Medal Award (the Academy's highest award) for services to English.

"Mike very ably conveys the truth that the less humble we are the more likely we are to perpetrate an evil, and if so that evil is more likely to be both more grotesque and larger in scope. As he clearly shows, this is a vital insight that the ancient Hebrews grasped and increasingly, modern cognitive researchers, are confirming." Garth Zietsman, statistician, member of the Mega Society for those with an ultra high IQ.

"... very brilliant." Revd Dr Dave Pass B.A.., M.A., Ph.D, author, scholar, missionary.

Phoney Philosophers and the Authentic Author:

Exposing the Insidious Tyranny of the Unwise

Mike L Anderson

Published by Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Mike L Anderson

ISBN 9780463945650

Discover other titles by Mike L Anderson at Smashwords.com

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. This ebook is freeware and may not be sold. If you have paid for it, you have been humbugged.

Unless otherwise stated, quotations from the Bible are taken from Holy Bible: New International Version, Copyright © 1978 by the International Bible Society, New York.

Cover photograph: J. Griffin Stewart

To conserve trees, please try to avoid printing this document.

### Dedication

This book is dedicated to all my prayer and financial supporters.

### Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people, but wish to especially thank Professor Mark Leon for tutoring me in philosophy, Dr Malcolm Venter, Revd Dr David Pass and Garth Zietsman for their reviews and criticisms as well as my meticulous editors Dr Andrew Potts and Rachel West.

### Table of Contents

Insidious insects and ferocious wolves

The unhorsing of Shakespeare?

Horses teeth, the philosopher's nose and the parson's backside

How horses got the high and mighty to look like hicks

A fake with a heart of stone

A most mystificatory maestro of misery

The prophet and loss of selfishness

A most covertly calamitous crackpot

The Authentic Author

About Mike L Anderson

Other titles by Mike L Anderson

Notes

### Insidious insects and ferocious wolves

I once asked the curator of the Johannesburg zoo which animal he would least like to join in an enclosure. What would you have said? He didn't hesitate: "The polar bear." The animal is formidably ferocious, but it is not the most dangerous on the planet. Excluding humans, to which animal would you give this ignominious honour? The snake? The wolf? The hippopotamus? As tempting as these might be, they are far from the most dangerous. It is the mosquito. Mosquitoes currently kill ten times more people than snakes, but the term for fear of snakes (ophidophobia) comes up 300 times more often than the term for fear of mosquitoes (anopheliphobia) on Google. It has been estimated that one out of every two people th3at have ever lived has died from a mosquito. Scholars have argued that it is actually the mosquito that must get the credit for bringing down the Roman Empire and the conquests of Alexander the Great. During the world wars, mosquitoes were responsible for more casualties than combat. Mosquitoes, because they are tiny and do not come with obvious weapons, sharp teeth or claws, are only indirectly dangerous and therefore easily overlooked. While it is psychologically understandable that we are more fearful of overtly dangerous snakes and hippos, it is biologically naive. Even when I put our question to post-graduate students in the life sciences, almost half the class were mistaken. Now the mosquito does not actually do any killing. It is the Plasmodium parasite that it harbours that does. Mosquitoes are insidiously dangerous. They are supremely effective vectors of diseases such as malaria. Think of them as tiny, flying hypodermic syringes spreading a vast army of pathogens that can replicate themselves extremely quickly.

With the insect in mind, let's ask ourselves, "Who are the most dangerous humans of the last few centuries?" You may be thinking of a psychopathic serial killer, say Jack the Ripper. Or perhaps you are thinking of Dr Harold Shipman. Instead of upholding the Hippocratic oath, he has been estimated to have deliberately caused the death of at least 250 patients and is Britain's most prolific serial killer. Or perhaps you are thinking of Adolf Hitler. He is estimated to have been behind the deaths of 11 million non-combatants.

The disparity between character and intellect

This book argues that character and credentials are two very important criteria for evaluating how dangerous a person is. It should be stressed that expertise does not necessarily require formal education. For instance, one Robert Franklin Stroud had only three years of primary school and yet became a respected ornithologist and author of the 60,000-word treatise _Diseases of Canaries_. What establishes him as an authentic expert is not his formal education, but the recognition he received from his peers. Those in the field knew he knew his stuff.

Stroud also happened to have an IQ of 134. And he happened to be a psychopath who spent 56 years in prison for murder and assault. Of these, 41 years were spent in solitary confinement because he was too dangerous to be let loose among his fellow inmates. Evidently, credentials, however acquired, do not thereby produce character. We will see it happen time and time again that credentials and intelligence can so bedazzle people that deficiencies in character are overlooked. Many thousands of supporters that included veterinarians, bird breeders and poultry raisers campaigned to have him released, so this point was lost on them. This is a point that was not lost on Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguished between two kinds of human excellences, "excellences of thought and excellences of character." The story also illustrates that knowing birds does not translate into knowing people. Fortunately for society, the phoney experts in human character were unsuccessful.

If biological naiveté can lead us to misidentify the most dangerous animal on earth, perhaps naiveté about character and intellect can lead us to misidentify the most dangerous humans.

The distinction between character and intellect came very forcefully to Robert Coles, a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University. In a piece entitled _The disparity between intellect and character_ , he recounts the harrowing experience of one of his students. She had come to him, sobbing, over the sexual harassment by a bright, successful, straight A fellow student in a... wait for it... moral reasoning course! She left the university. Her description of the university town: "fancy, phony Cambridge." Coles was at a loss as to what to say to her. What is clear is that rationality is insufficient to produce character.

The effect phonies have on the world varies from illustrative to terribly destructive. You can imagine how dangerous a fake doctor could be on unsuspecting patients. Ferdinand Demara, the Great Imposter as he was known, stole the credentials of a friend and posed as a naval surgeon! A doctor with fake credentials and some genuine character is dangerous. I say some genuine character because while Demara confessed to being a rascal, he did have compassion on his patients. Just before he started operating through the night to save the lives of nineteen wounded sailors, he prayed, "Oh God, please help me now. I don't want to kill anyone." He didn't. Ironically, his very success lead to a story in the local press and the uncovering of his fraud.

In contrast to "Dr" Ferdinand Demara, Dr Harold Shipman was a doctor with genuine credentials and a much more amoral character. He was far more dangerous. Instead of upholding the Hippocratic oath, he has been estimated to have deliberately caused the death of at least 250 patients and is Britain's most prolific serial killer. As psychopathic as Shipman was, however, rather than inspiring others to perpetrate evil, he inspired them to recoil in horror. As tragic as Shipman's overt actions were for his patients, the scope of his devastation was relatively local in space and time.

Phoney philosophers have only destroyed the world indirectly

Perhaps the most dangerous people are not serial killers, psychopaths or even dictators. As dangerous as Hitler was, was not the one who inspired him and others even worse? The name of this relatively unheard-of phoney philosopher was Houston Chamberlain. If you Google his name, you get nothing like the 36 million hits that Hitler gets. You get a measly ten thousand. It was Chamberlain who developed the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the Jews that was such an inspiration to Hitler. His impact on World War II and the Holocaust was only indirect, so we do not take him seriously enough. He was not even a thief. He was a false teacher or phoney philosopher.

The world is awash with phonies and they destroy lives and cost money. Bernie Madoff is estimated to have cost investors between ten and twenty billion dollars, but this is small change compared to the most expensive phoney in recent history. We will meet the "maestro of misery," as he has been called, who is very largely responsible for wiping out seven trillion dollars in the 2008 global financial meltdown. Yet he was able to dupe the person listed in the "Guinness Book of Records" as having the world's highest recorded IQ. What hope is there, then, for the rest of us?! Our God-given intelligence, despite its necessity for a great many things, seems insufficient, on its own, to protect us from phonies. There is still hope, but we have to look elsewhere for it. As we will see, the wisdom of Jesus speaks most saliently into this matter.

As devastating as the maestro of misery has been, there is arguably, an even more destructive phoney behind him who remained relatively unnoticed. The maestro got his "moral" inspiration from one whose philosophy, it has been said, provided "virtually the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early twenty-first century" yet the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up the by U.S. congress did not mention that person's name even once. That person will be named here as well as the one behind her. This phoney philosopher has been the insidious and devastating force behind huge losses, not merely financial, but in countless human lives.

The phoney philosopher who inspired Vladimir Lenin remains as obscure as Houston Chamberlain. His name is Nikolay Chernyshevsky. It may seem very implausible that a mere philosopher, however phoney, who picked up no arms against no one and who wanted nothing but the best for his country-folk could be vastly more destructive than a serial killer. Didn't Karl Marx famously say, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it"? Marx was very naive. For, Chernyshevsky, his contemporary, who was a bad novelist and even worse philosopher, _did_ change the world. His "philosophy" would spawn such intellectual descendants as Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan and would culminate in such evils as the Red Terror and the global financial meltdown of the 21st century. Chernyshevsky only destroyed indirectly. This is the world of phoney philosophers. This is the insidious devastation of the unwise. Herman Melville in his _The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade_ perceptively allowed for two categories of phoney. There are "those who don the mask to conceal nefarious purposes and those who put on masks unconsciously and mistake them for their own true face. The degree of self-consciousness of the masquerade does not determine the extent of the evil wrought; for the most apparently innocent may perpetrate the greatest evil." How prescient he was. Bernie Madoff and Harold Shipman belong in the first category, Alan Greenspan and Nikolay Chernyshevsky in the second.

Philosophy means, literally, "love of wisdom." You do not have to be a professional philosopher to be a lover of wisdom. You could be a king. The biblical Solomon was such a philosopher. Phonies presume to have wisdom about a matter, but don't. They are pseudo-experts. Until quite recently scientists were called natural philosophers. A pseudo-scientist, then, is a phoney natural philosopher, but this is only one kind among very many varieties. Phoney philosophers can be novelists, physicists, surgeons, psychologists, humourists and yes, even on occasion, professional philosophers.

Can bad philosophy really be behind so much horror? Isn't philosophy, bad or otherwise, an arcane matter that happens in the ivory towers of university departments? Can it really affect so many people on the street? Jesus thought so. He said, "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves" (John 7:15). Can ideas really have such teeth?

Ideas have teeth

Ideas are powerful. A man and his young son are out for a drive. They have a terrible accident. Just before the motorist dies he says to the paramedics, "Please take good care of my son. He is the only blood relative I have." The boy is rushed to hospital with head injuries. The brain surgeon arrives in theatre, takes one look at the boy and says, "I cannot operate. This is my son." We have a conundrum. It seems that someone is lying. It may be unlikely, but perhaps the surgeon is a Shipman-like psychopath, is due on the golf course, and does not want to miss the game.

Now let us assume that the motorist is telling the truth. Can you logically conclude, then, that the brain surgeon is lying? Through the power of logic are you in a position to condemn the latter as a liar and worse than a liar? How sure are you? Would you be prepared to bet on it? Have you checked your premises? You have an option if you want to make very sure. The surgeon happens to have a daughter. The daughter is unfortunately feeble-minded, but you could ask her whether the boy is her brother. Take a moment. Have you decided?

The brain surgeon is telling the truth. She is the boy's mother! The daughter is from a previous marriage. I did not expressly say that the surgeon is male, but you may well have presumed it. Those who are sure that the surgeon is a liar and did not need help from her daughter, are being presumptuous. They are presuming they have all the requisite knowledge and reasoning ability to solve the puzzle on their own. Presumptions are very powerful things. They can influence the way we view the world and others and the way we act on what we think we know. If there is something missing in our philosophy, the impact, as we will see, can be very serious indeed.

Bad philosophy has consequences. Philosopher Mary Midgley uses the analogy of bad plumbing. "When the concepts we are living by work badly, they don't usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking. We often don't consciously notice this obscure malfunction, any more than we consciously notice the discomfort of an unvarying bad smell or of a cold that creeps on gradually."

In this book we will meet some phoney philosophers with outstanding intellectual abilities who presumed that they, individually, have or can acquire all the requisite knowledge to solve far more complex problems than our relatively simple conundrum. They believe that they do not really need help from anyone - not experts and least of all not from those they regard as less able-minded. They do not need help even from God himself. They have fallen into an intellectual egotism. It is an ideology of radical intellectual individualism. As we will see, the mindset is very prevalent and wreaks havoc on the world.

### The unhorsing of Shakespeare?

What do Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne have in common? Besides being great writers with superior intellects, all believed that William Shakespeare (see image) of Stratford-upon-Avon (or Shakspeare as it is sometimes written) did _not_ write King Richard's famous line, "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" or any other of the lines attributed to him. These so-called Anti-Stratfordians think this despite not having known the bard personally - all lived across the Atlantic centuries after the fact. We will also see that they have enlarged egos, vested interests and professional jealousy issues. Whitman, for instance, was conceited enough to call himself "the American bard." We will also see that on the Shakespeare authorship question they were all phoney philosophers.

Now mischief around the Shakespearean authorship question may not seem to have much import, except for poor ol' Will Shakespeare's reputation, but it is helpful to start unpacking wisdom principles using an ideologically neutral and relatively cut-and-dried case. When the wisdom principles that this colourful example illustrates are ignored in other contexts, the consequences can be very severe indeed. Imagine, to put it mildly, the tom-foolery that could be done on something as complex and as expansive as what are the better socio-economic systems for a country or the planet. Imagine, if you will, a Hollywood-trained scriptwriter, say, cleverly and successfully foisting a crackpot moral system on the citizenry of a superpower. We shall see that this is happening with very destructive consequences indeed!

Consider a student, taking an English literature examination, who is asked to explain that utterance of King Richard, "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" "He said that," she responds, "because that is what Shakespeare wrote." She would fail of course, not because she is wrong, but because this is a literature not a history exam. We shall see latter that her statement is perfectly correct _historically_. She just has trouble knowing where history ends and literature begins. As we shall also see, the Anti-Stratfordians have trouble in the reverse direction. The Shakespearean authorship question is a _historical_ one. Great writers of literature are not necessarily competent in history.

One problem these very educated Anti-Stratfordians have with William is that he wasn't. How could the son of a blue-collar worker (a glover) with a grammar-school education be the creator of such sublime prose? Emerson said of Shakespeare, "Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast." Mark Twain, who was born, Samuel Clemens, claimed, "So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life." Whitman wrote, "I am firm against Shaksper. I mean the Avon man, the actor." Henry James went so far as to say, "the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world."

There are many other Anti-Stratfordian luminaries such as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Astrophysicist Michael H. Hart is one of the so-called Oxfordians (the currently most favoured alternative view) who think that it was actually Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford who wrote the plays. Hart, in his book, _The 100_ _-_ _A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History_ gives pride of place to the Earl rather than William! De Vere was first proposed by the unfortunately named English teacher, J. Thomas Looney, in 1920. De Vere is only one of scores of pretenders to the Shakespearean throne including a Jewish woman and a learned pig!

Let us see what wisdom principles we can uncover in addressing the question of whether Shakespeare did indeed write the plays attributed to him. I am very much a layperson in Shakespeare authorship, yet I am very confident that all these eminent people are dead wrong. Here is why. The vital issue for the wise layperson is whether the "authority" represents the consensus position of the _appropriately_ qualified. Many kinds of experts are relevant to Shakespearean authorship attribution including literary historians, biographers, computational linguists, Will's wife (Anne Hathaway) and other contemporaries such as the Rev. Francis Meres. But writers of great literature, physicists and psychologists are not the first to consult. It is prudent to be very suspicious of less than appropriate experts especially those far removed in space and time. Biographer Jonathan Bate notes that, "No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or the first two hundred years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship." Emerson, Freud, Holmes and Hart may have deserved reputations within their field, but they do _not_ have the requisite education to make the call on whether the grammar-boy did eventually write the plays attributed to him. Oh, the irony!

Recall that appropriate expertise does _not_ necessarily require formal education. Dennis McCarthy, a self-taught Shakespeare scholar, has ascertained that Shakespeare was probably significantly inspired by a manuscript entitled "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels." It was written by a George North, who served as ambassador to Sweden under Queen Elizabeth.

William managed to write rather well without too much formal education and Anne had far more expertise on whether her husband wrote the plays than the most formally educated physicists. Unfortunately, her views are not recorded, but I imagine she had many conversations of the following sort:

Anne: "Thou wast writing feverishly at thou desk today, Will. Methinks all went well?"

Will: "Indeed. I began my new work entitled _Much ado about nothing_."

Anne: "That reminds me. When art thou going to do something about the leaking roof?"

Now Anne may not think much of her husband's plays. Bearing in mind that she was probably illiterate, she would not be best to make this call. This is where Emerson, Twain, Whitman, James and Hawthorne come in and they all give the writings attributed to him an unreserved thumbs-up - not that Will needs their approval. They certainly had expertise, but they needed to know where it stops and when to rely on others such as spouses, literary historians and biographers.

The overwhelming consensus among the _appropriately_ qualified is that while Shakespeare did collaborate with others, he is, in the main, the author of his works. That is enough me, the layman.

Clemens and scholarship - never the Twain shall meet

The non-historian Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, knew full well that historians were behind Will, but he had little more than disdain for their expertise, saying that they "suppose" and "infer" and feel "justified in believing." He compared the historian's reconstruction of Shakespeare's life to that of a Brontosaurus skeleton. Apparently, the non-palaeontologist Twain did not have a high regard for palaeontological expertise either. He wrote, "It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of plaster of paris. We ran short of plaster of paris, or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster."

Cute and clever, but scholarship has not been on Twain's side. Gibson says, "The Stratfordians can, however, legitimately claim that almost all the great Elizabethan scholars who _have_ interested themselves in the controversy have been on their side." Those in the know are rather derisive about the alternative claims. For instance literary scholar, Sir Brian Vickers, says, "Of course, the fact that de Vere died in 1604 has never diminished the Oxfordians' certainty that he had somehow written all of Shakespeare's plays, including those performed up to 1612." Shakespearean biographer, Jonathan Bate appears to demolish the Oxfordian view pretty much in a single paragraph, "Then there is Francis Meres. As we have already seen, he was close enough to Shakespeare to know that in the 1590s the dramatist circulated unpublished sonnets 'among his private friends'; he had no doubts about ascribing both the sonnets and the plays to Shakespeare. The sonnets were not intended for publication. A pseudonym to disguise the authorship of published works is one thing, but if a writer circulates a batch of his poems in manuscript among his personal friends and includes in one of those poems the phrase 'for my name is Will', one has to be something of a Looney to conclude that his name was in fact Edward (de Vere) or Francis (Bacon). In addition, proponents of de Vere's claim have long been embarrassed by the fact that Meres' list of contemporary dramatists includes the names of both Shakespeare and Edward, Earl of Oxford – if Oxford wrote plays under his own name, why did he also have to do so under Shakespeare's?" Concerning the linguistic evidence, Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza say, "In terms of quantifiable stylistic attributes, Oxford's verse and Shakespeare's verse are light years apart. The odds that either could have written the other's work are much lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning."

Mark Twain believed it was actually Francis Bacon that was author of Shakespeare's plays saying, "From away back toward the very beginning of the Shakspeare-Bacon controversy I have been on the Bacon side, and have wanted to see our majestic Shakspeare unhorsed." Shapiro points out that Twain came to the "conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical." To which, I can hear Will say from the grave in the words of Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth ... Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Twain was given to intellectual imperialism.

One problem with Shakespearean authorship is that there is a chasm between the apparent insignificance of Shakespeare's recorded life and the excellence of his plays. As Twain puts it, "His biographers did their best, I have to concede it, they took his attendance at the grammar-school; they took his holding of horses at sixpenny tips; they took his play-acting on the other side of the river; they took his picturesque deer-stealing; they took his diligent and profitable Stratford wool-staplings, they took his too-previous relations with his subsequent wife; they took his will -- that monumental will! -- with its solemnly comic second-best bed incident; they took his couple of reverently preserved and solely existent signatures in the which he revealed the fact that he didn't know how to spell his own name; they took his poor half-handful of inconsequential odds and ends, and spun it out, and economised it, and inflated it to bursting, and made a biography with a capital B out of it. It seemed incomprehensibly odd to me, that a man situated as Shakspeare apparently was, could live to be fifty-two years old and never a thing happen to him."

"It always seemed unaccountable to me that a man could be so prominent in Elizabeth's little London as historians and biographers claim that Shakspeare was, and yet leave behind him hardly an incident for people to remember him by; leave behind him nothing much but trivialities; leave behind him little or nothing but the happenings of an utterly commonplace life, happenings that could happen to the butcher and the grocer, the candlestick maker and the undertaker, and there an end -- deep, solemn, sepulchral silence. It always seemed to me that not even a distinguished horse could die and leave such biographical poverty behind him."

I don't really have an answer for Twain, but I don't need to give one. He needed to persuade scholars in the field. And they find this problem far from insurmountable. They can account for what he finds unaccountable. Apparently a dearth of biographical detail is not uncommon for writers from yesteryear.

Twain had a lot riding on his theory of fiction. He would rather unseat historians, biographers, Will's contemporaries and Will himself than give up on his pet theories. He did not stop with Shakespeare. He also claimed that John Bunyan did not write _The Pilgrim's Progress_! But that is another story.

The unhorsing of Dr Wilhelm Fleiss and Sigmund Freud

Little Hans was a boy with a phobia of horses. Who should his father consult over the ailment - Dr Wilhelm Fleiss the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist or his friend Sigmund Freud the psychologist? Dr Fleiss is more than qualified to look inside the boy's mouth, but perhaps his phobia is better left to the psychoanalyst? Now Fleiss claimed that psychological ailments have their source in nose infections! He believed that his own field was the key to understanding another, contriving thus to extend his intellectual kingdom. How is that for intellectual imperialism! Unsurprisingly, Fleiss and Freud had a falling out. Fortunately the father ignored Fleiss, approached Freud and the boy got over his phobia. Freud eventually used the boy's phobia of horses to develop his theory of psychosexual development.

But if you asked Freud who wrote Shakespeare's plays, he would say it was a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Pierre! 'Shakespeare,' you see, is a corruption of 'Jacques Pierre.' So Freud, too, was given to intellectual imperialism. James Shapiro recounts how Freud tried to co-opt Shakespeare's plays, particularly _Hamlet_ , to bolster his psychosocial theories. Freud was inspired by one, Georg Brandes, who found in Hamlet's experiences, all sorts of biographical details about Will particularly in their reaction to the death of their fathers. Freud started to psychoanalyse William via Hamlet. Doing this successfully hangs upon _Hamlet_ been written _after_ the death of Will's Father, but as a matter of historical fact, as Freud subsequently discovered, it was written _before_. What to do? One could give up the bogus edifice supporting one's theory or, one could conclude that Will did not write his plays after all. Apparently, not giving Shakespeare his due is a small price to pay to safeguard one's theory. It is prudent to check for vested interests in assessing the appropriateness of authorities!

Let us give Will the last word from his Sonnet 136.

"Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love,

Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.

...

Make but my name thy love, and love that still;

And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will."

### Horses teeth, the philosopher's nose and the parson's backside

The Shakespeare authorship question exposed many phonies. There is a pattern emerging. How capable humans are of deceiving themselves and others! The deceived had a common denominator and it wasn't stupidity. They had considerable expertise between them. The trouble was not with intelligence, but with their wisdom. To put it baldly, the brilliant within their own field can be rather boneheaded outside of it. Cognitive psychologist Robert Sternberg makes the point less disparagingly, "People who are very effective in some domains can prove to be foolish in others."28 "The physicist, the philosopher, the medical specialist, the psychoanalyst and the writers all had serious cases of intellectual imperialism and egotism. There are a great many mavericks who are afflicted. Within their fields they may be quite wise, but outside they are phonies. They failed to appreciate in the words of Sternberg that "the wise individual necessarily would have to know the limits of his or her own tacit knowledge."29 In the vast majority of matters we all are laypersons, the intelligent and unintelligent alike. Unless one happens to be God, one needs other minds, other eyes and other noses! Sternberg sees "foolishness as an imbalance that results from feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability." If we are taken in by phonies it is because we persist in thinking that intelligence is coupled to wisdom and virtue, whereas intelligence can very easily foster foolishness and evil. He points out that, "The large majority of behaviors that we refer to as stupid are not stupid as opposed to intelligent, but, rather, foolish as opposed to wise" and "an evil genius may be academically intelligent; he or she may be practically intelligent; he or she cannot be wise."

Horses' teeth

Bertrand Russell said, "Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."30 Is the venerable Aristotle being unwise? Russell is trying to imply that what was important for Aristotle was following his own philosophical nose rather than observation. What Aristotle (see image) actually said was, "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; _in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made_."31 Now Aristotle was mistaken about a great many things including teeth numbers. This is not because he thought observation was unimportant, but because he did not have the benefit of centuries of work by the professional observers we call scientists.

Don't look a gift horse, or you wife, in the mouth

And Aristotle was not being unwise in resorting to authorities. Someone must look into mouths, but does it have to be an Aristotle and is it always a good idea? You know, don't look a gift horse in the mouth! Definitively verifying teeth numbers seems more wisely left to zoologists since there happen to be animals with pseudo-teeth. Russell had four wives and many more mistresses. Did he examine their mouths? Robin Herbert uses Russell's own words against him, "While Russell castigates Aristotle for not counting his wives' teeth, it does not appear to have occurred to Russell to verify his own statement by going to the bookshelf and reading what Aristotle actually wrote."32 With respect to teeth counting, Russell was being a phoney philosopher. Would it not be wiser to leave teeth-counting to others and, as a philosopher, observing what Aristotle wrote more diligently? As someone who has been married for over thirty years I can tell you that an oral examination certainly would not put my wife in a romantic mood! I'm reminded of a Wizard of Id strip. Rodney is told, "Lady Gwen says you're more interested in your horse than her." Rodney replies, "It's her fault ... She won't let me examine her teeth."

Russell's intimation is hopelessly impractical and not just domestically. If someone told Aristotle that a millipede has a thousands legs (it doesn't), should he check that too? Definitively counting legs seems also more wisely left to zoologists since some animals have pseudo-legs. Pretty soon Aristotle would find himself with little time left for contemplation and making less of a name for himself in philosophy. It would be most unwise for Russell not to get his wife a birthday gift on the grounds that is is unable to verify her date of birth by direct observation! He relies on authorities after all. Perhaps Russell's very philosophical proficiency makes it difficult for him to play the part of a layman. Notice that an exceedingly accomplished philosopher is not thereby wise.

The philosopher's nose

So, Aristotle had a wise philosophical nose about the unavoidable need to depend on authorities. Russell must have had his nose out of joint over something. Perhaps he was let down by some authority - a cleric maybe. Since authorities are only human, they are going to disappoint us from time to time. There are no guarantees. Is this not especially so when it comes to wisdom? Robert Sternberg says, " I'm afraid that if we limited ourselves only to those who have always done the wise thing in their own lives, we would have a very short list of wise people. We might start with Jesus. I'm not sure who would come next."33 But in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of trusting others, intellectual egotists fall into the even bigger pitfall of trusting only one authority - oneself. Sternberg calls it the _omniscience fallacy_ , saying it happens because they believe "they knew much more than they did. They did not know what they did not know."34

When authorities disappoint, the wisest recourse, when one is outside one's expertise, is to choose better ones using sound criteria. Not been able to tell gold from iron pyrite only makes one ignorant of a particular matter. Being ignorant and preferring the evidence of one's senses over the judgment of a geologist makes one also foolish.

Examining the evidence directly for oneself _must_ be done by someone, but does it always have to be _me_? When others with the appropriate expertise do so they become authorities that I come to rely on. We shall see that that those who think that relying on authorities is somehow unscientific are extremely naive. C.S. Lewis said, "Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority—because the scientists say so."35

Philosopher Brian Leftow concurs saying, "It might seem odd to speak of philosophy as done subject to or within constraints dictated by or at the behest or inspiration of authorities. But this has analogues few philosophers today would question: few philosophers are physicists or evolutionary biologists, and all accept the dictates of physicists and evolutionary biologists as authoritative."36 He also says that Christian theology is not a sub-kingdom of philosophy. He speaks of "doctrines about God's nature and Christ's person that can't be supported by purely philosophical argument – things accepted ultimately on the basis of Christian authorities." Leftow is saying that theology and the natural sciences are not sub-kingdoms of his field of philosophy and is being wise and humble in saying so. To think otherwise is to be an intellectual imperialist. It is to presume that one's field provides multi-purpose expertise. There is a drone-fly that mimics a bee all the way down to flitting from flower to flower and having fake warning colouration (see image). The red PhD gown can function similarly. It can give one the suggestion of having an academic sting in a quite unrelated field. As Statistician Garth Zietsman puts it, "Specialisation is necessary for genius level performance but it backfires when those individuals trade on their reputation in their fields to pontificate outside their fields" and "They end up being superb in their closed worlds but worthless outside of it. A large fraction of hyper-educated experts are like that."37 We shall later see that intellectual imperialism, writ large, can have truly devastating consequences.

Philosophers of knowledge, or epistemologists as they are called, denote the disparaging of authority in favour of examining the evidence for oneself 'epistemic independence,' but the more general malaise is an intellectual egotism. The rejection of authority is, in the end, to accept only one authority - oneself. For intellectual egotists, Protagoras's "Man is the measure of all things" becomes, in time, "I have the measure of all things." They presume that their intellect is sufficient for all things. At their worst they presume that they alone establish what counts as genuine knowledge. It may appear to be an antidote against getting conned by suspect authorities, but as we have and will continue to see, intellectual egotism is a recipe for conning oneself.

And it is being refuted by cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald writes, "Human beings are cultural entities. We share mind. We construct cognitive collectivities called symbolic cultures. Raised in isolation from such collectivities, we have quite limited, nonsymbolic minds. Culturally isolated human beings are not much different from their large-brained anthropoid relatives. However, embedded in a cultural network from birth, human beings become something unique in the biological world: symbolizing intellects bonded to a community of minds."38

The point is echoed by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach in their book _The Knowledge Illusion_ , "Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people."39

There isn't space to go into it deeply here, but philosophers have identified intellectual egotism as one of less than positive trajectories of the Enlightenment. Lucian Goldman puts it very well, "At first glance rationalism and empiricism seem to be so opposed in their philosophical approach, and to give such opposite answers to every philosophical question, that one may well ask how they can possibly both be derived from the development of the bourgeoisie, and how most of the eighteenth-century writers of the Enlightenment in France managed without any special difficulty to adopt a position half-way between the two extremes. The answer seems to be that these two philosophies share the same fundamental concept: the treatment of the individual consciousness as the absolute origin of knowledge and action. Pure rationalism finds this origin in clear innate ideas existing independently of experience; pure empiricism, rejecting entirely the notion of innate ideas, finds the origin in sense-perceptions more or less mechanically organized into conscious thought."40

Similarly Mary Midgley says, "As plenty of people have pointed out, prolonged insistence on Enlightenment doctrines of social atomism—on the utter separateness of each individual—has systematically distorted, not just the way we think but the way we live. Egoistic individualism isn't what we need more of. But our philosophical language still tends to imprison us in it."41 There is an assiduous obliviousness to the insidiousness of intellectual egotism!

Intellectual self-reliance has been thoroughly debunked, but it is the current pop epistemology. Damian Thompson has to almost apologise for saying, "My answer is that I am doing something deeply unfashionable: I am taking the word of scientists on trust."42 Epistemologist C.A.J. Coady, would agree with that sentiment saying, "Any given scientist, even the most authoritative, will argue from, presuppose, and take for granted numerous observations and experiments that he has not performed for himself. That this is so is obscured by the elements of individualist ideology built into our image of science, the scientist being pictured as utterly self-reliant and self-sufficient, and by the way in which writers tend to refer to 'established' observational and experimental facts as though they themselves had done the observing or experimenting."43

Philosopher John Hardwig, also agrees, "I find myself believing all sorts of things for which I do not possess evidence: ... The list of things I believe, though I have no evidence for the truth of them, is, if not infinite, virtually endless." He goes on to say, "I believe too much; there is too much relevant evidence (much of it available only after extensive, specialized training); intellect is too small and life too short."44 He adds, "Modern knowers cannot be independent and self-reliant, not even in their own fields of specialization. In most disciplines, those who do not trust cannot know."45 Many think that the scientific attitude is, quintessentially, to think for oneself. But even within science, teamwork is essential. Hardwig mentions the case of a physics paper on elementary particles that had as many as 99 authors! Each author understood only a fraction of what was needed to be known to successfully conduct the experiment. The research effort was so huge that there was no university that could do it. It required multiple institutions with mutual dependence between theoreticians, experimentalists and technicians.

One problem with pop epistemology, is that it does not properly distinguish between what philosophers call "personal knowledge"46 of "persons, their thoughts, feelings, and intentions" and "objective knowledge" of the "impersonal objective world with which the natural sciences are largely concerned.47 The former is often considered inferior to the latter, but philosopher of science Michael Polanyi has argued compellingly that what we know in science is mediated through others and cannot be stated explicitly.48 A good rule of thumb is the _less_ expertise you have in a field, the _more_ skeptical you should be about the _person_ claiming to have authority and the l _ess_ concerned you should be about the _data_. The _more_ expertise you have in a field, the l _ess_ skeptical you should be about the _person_ claiming authority and the _more_ skeptical you should be about the _data_. This principle is important because in the first case, you are not informed enough in the field for your skepticism to have much value. You should, however, be able to evaluate the person's character and know whether he is accepted by his peers. In the second case, you are already informed about the data and can evaluate his claims irrespective of his character or his standing in the field. In any case, if he is a fraud, this will come out when his research is repeated. The second principle is important because of the existence of accomplished autodidacts such as Robert Stroud.

If science cannot work without trust, neither can the economy. As Herman Melville puts it through a character, "Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop."49

It is, then, no wonder that epistemologist Robert Audi says, "If our only sources of knowledge and justified belief were perception, consciousness, memory, and reason, we would be at best impoverished. We do not even learn to speak or think without the help of others, and much of what we know depends on what they tell us."

and

"Testimony-based beliefs are, then, source-dependent though not premise-dependent. As a source of knowledge and justification, testimony depends both epistemically and psychologically on other sources. This is entirely consistent, however, with its playing an incalculably important role in the normal development of our justification and knowledge."50

The parson's backside

In his inimitable cockiness Walt Whitman has written, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." If Whitman was so inclined he could have benefited from the wisdom of, by modern scientific standards, the relatively ignorant ancient Hebrews. For instance. King Solomon wrote, in contrast, "Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established" (Proverbs 15:22, KJV) and then there is "two are better than one" (Ecclesiastes 4:9). Whitman and the other anti-Stratfordians were all experts, but each presumed that their direct, specialist examination of the evidence was sufficient to settle the case. They had no real need for other experts, other minds and other eyes.

In God's economy, according to the Apostle Paul, people have been given different gifts for the benefit of all (1 Corinthians 12: 1-11). He explains God's wisdom using the analogy of the human body: "Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ ... Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be."" (1 Corinthians 12: 12-18).

Paul goes on to say, "... those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment." He does not specify what these less honourable and unpresentable body parts are, but I have little doubt that the backside had come to mind!

To mangle the analogy a bit, we could say that the eye is an expert at being an eye, the nose at being a nose, and the backside at being a backside. Communities need different kinds of experts. As we will see, we need the scientist's eye, the philosopher's nose and the parson's backside to name just a few. Since aptitude in human behinds does not carry over into car behinds, if we have car exhaust problems we do not consult a doctor no matter how good a proctologist he is! A proctologist is not the be all and end all! In such a practical matter we commonly have the wisdom to recognise when one expert's expertise ends and another's begins! Why should we relax our standards in such an important matter as moral philosophy? The wisest recourse in large issues is to consult a multitude of counsellors _within_ their respective expertise.

Now God Incarnate was a professional saviour, not a professional philosopher, yet is there a better place to see this wisdom personified? The Apostle Paul called him the "Wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24), but Martin Luther, in thesis 20 of his Heidelberg Disputation, called him on the cross the hind parts of God!51 He did this based on a prophecy in the Old Testament. Moses had asked God to show him his glory. God replies to Moses, "You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." Instead, God says, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you" and "When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen" (Exodus 33: 19-23). For early Christian commentators such as Augustine, the 'back' of God was commonly understood to pre-figure the Lord Jesus Christ. For Bernard of Clairvaux, the 'back' of God is his gentle love shown on the cross - it is God's lowliness or shadow.

God Incarnate comes, not in omniscience and glory, because then we would have died in the dazzling light. Instead he comes in lowliness with limited expertise. He comes as the "backside" of God! With wisdom and humility he admits that he does not know the date of his Second Coming, leaving that to his Father and saying, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Matthew 24:36). Since the Son of God had limited himself in space and time, he could not be everywhere, could not know all things or do everything. He left omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence to his Father. Jesus knew exactly who he was, but was prepared to consult with uneducated fisherman over what others thought of him asking, "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" In contrast, phoney philosophers feel no need to consult with others least of all those they regard as uneducated. Furthermore, Jesus did not take on authority, ecclesiastical or otherwise, that were outside of his appointment. When someone from the crowd said, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me" Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" (Luke 12:14). In so doing he acknowledged the value of peer appraisal and was prepared to allow others to take on the role of lawyer. And this comes from the one who "will sit on his glorious throne" when he "comes in his glory " (Matthew 25:31). He accepted that it was not his role to judge those who rejected him, but left that role for Another saying, "For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it" (John 12:47-48). Not even God the Father could die for our sins. It was his Son that did that. There is a division of labour in the Trinity that expresses their holiness. How much more should there be a division of labour among his mere creatures?

Jesus is the very model of intellectual modesty. It is striking that God-incarnate never claimed to be a self-made man or intellectually self-sufficient. He was prepared to consult with others and he did so wisely. To gauge public opinion on his identity, he did not go to religious leaders but, as we saw earlier, to uneducated fisherman on the street (Matthew 16:13). In theological matters, too, he did not claim to be self-sufficient, instead depending upon the highest authority. "Everything I have is a gift from the Father," he said (John 17:7). Elsewhere he says, "For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak. I know that His commandment is eternal life; therefore the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me." (John 12:49-50). Since Jesus can leave certain things to the uneducated and certain things to his Father, perhaps none of us have to try to be omniscient. Perhaps he can rescue us from egotism!

In a Wizard of Id cartoon Gwen sidles up to Rodney.

Gwen (fluttering her eyelashes): "Look into my eyes, Rodney ... tell me what you see."

Rodney replies, again in a spirit worthy of a Bertrand Russell, "The conjunctiva, the cornea, the iris, the sclerotic, the anterior aqueous chamber, the..."

Gwen: "Forget it."

Rodney is extracting more from Gwen's eyes than she intended to convey. She signalled romance; he observed anatomy. He has co-opted her eyes into servicing his pseudo-scientific intellectual egotism.

Some try to do something similar with the words of Jesus even those in his Sermon on the Mount! "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23).

Physician David Demick correctly recognises that these verses are a warning against selfishness and greed, but then he goes on to say that this moral instruction depends on a natural phenomenon. " ... the higher truth has no meaning unless the natural truth is also sound. Jesus' words specifically mention light in the eyes "filling" the whole body, implying a systemic physiologic effect for light perceived through the eyes ... developments in neurophysiology have shown that light sensation in the eye is indeed important for the healthy functioning of the entire body."52 Demick does not merely see the simple but profound words of a humble carpenter; he sees the discourse of a physician-scientist. The sermon of the Nazarene becomes the lecture of a physiology professor.

And by trying to extract more scientifically, he ends up with less theologically. The words of Jesus are no longer allowed to stand alone, independent. Instead, they must be undergirded by neurophysiology. He distracts the eyes of faith from a focus on Jesus towards a focus on a contemporary scientific field. Neurophysiology is a fascinating and successful field, but what a benighted place to look for light for the soul!

It is worse than this. Demick goes so far as to make Jesus into a type of Rodney: "Jesus Christ with the all-seeing eyes of the Creator, knew centuries in advance of modern science the incredible microtechnology that is involved in the mere opening of a flower, and the formation and coloring of its petals. Thus, he was able to say with truth and confidence concerning the flowers that "even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." He imperialistically thinks that one needs scientific knowledge to properly appreciate the beauty of a flower, but that fortunately, Jesus, being omniscient, had oodles of it. Demick may be cognisant in physiology, but he needs to yield to biblical scholarship. Commenting on the Matthew text Dale Allison says, "The picture is not of light going in but of light going out. This accords with the common pre-modern understanding of vision, according to which the eyes have their own light (so e.g. Plato and Augustine)."53

Demick has glimpsed not so much Jesus, but a projection onto him of his own intellectually egotistical foibles. What is remarkable about Jesus is how unlike Rodney he is. Indeed, he "... did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing" (Philippians 2:6-7). Christologists find this self-emptying of God-incarnate so important that they have a formal term for it, kenosis, from the Greek.54 Jesus is striking in how he did not parade his knowledge about. He spoke "in parables, so that, though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand" (Luke 8:9-10). He thus reserved the secrets of the kingdom of God for His disciples and was cautious to keep things from his disciples when they were not yet ready to bear it (John 16:12).

Jesus was not a scientist and as indicated earlier, neither was he a philosopher, contrary to what George W. Bush thought.55 In an anthology entitled _Jesus and Philosophy_ , philosopher Brian Leftow says, "Jesus did not teach metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophical theology."56 Philosopher - theologian William Abraham points out that, "Jesus came to save the world and baptize us in the Holy Spirit; he did not come to resolve our epistemological worries. To turn Jesus into a philosopher is to misread his ministry and mission; it is to reach for an inflated and pseudo-pious vision of his real work. He did not come to be a judge over our epistemological theories any more than he was a judge over our domestic disputes about inheritance."57 Isn't making Jesus into a philosopher trying to co-opt him into the service of intellectual egotism? And in doing so, isn't there a danger of detracting from his real mission to be our saviour? And isn't the big need of the hour that we be saved from our intellectual egotism? How we need Christian leaders who are prepared to model the wisdom, the humility and in particular the intellectual modesty of Jesus. How the world needs the parson's backside!

How horses got the high and mighty to look like hicks

The need for the wisdom principles we have just discussed are very evident in the following famous and fascinating historical case-study. We will see how horses beguiled and then became inadvertently instrumental exposing several intellectual egotists.

Hans was a remarkable horse. He was apparently trained to do arithmetic by a retired mathematics school teacher, Wilhelm von Osten, beginning in the late 19th century. If Hans, for instance, was asked in German, "What is two plus three?" he tapped the ground five times. He could apparently also do multiplication, division and even fractions! Hans quickly became an international celebrity.

Broadly, two groups formed in reaction to Hans - the believers and the skeptics. The believers in Hans included many eminent naturalists, who saw in Hans a confirmation of human's mental continuity with the animals. The skeptics, who were mostly animal trainers, saw a hoax - they believed that von Osten was fraudulently sending signals to Hans. Many that were initially skeptical became convinced after seeing a demonstration. Bear in mind that as Stumpf put it, "Thousands of spectators, horse-fanciers, trick-trainers of first rank, and not one of them during the course of many months' observations [were] able to discover any kind of regular signal."58 Those that remained skeptical believed that von Osten was varying his signals.

It took a multidisciplinary team and psychologists Carl Stumpf and his student Oskar Pfungst, to uncover the truth. _Both_ the believers and the skeptical were mistaken. Hans did have remarkable abilities, but in powers of observation not arithmetic. His trainer, who did not charge for any of the performances, was not sending him intentional signals, but unintentional ones. Researchers started realising this was happening when Hans failed to correctly answer questions that the examiner did not know the answer to. It turns out that when von Osten and other examiners asked a question, they stooped (imperceptibly to humans, but not to Hans). And when the horse tapped up to the correct answer they straightened equally slightly. Hans knew it was now time to stop. Horses are far more visually sensitive to movement than humans. Hans had learnt how to respond to micro-signals to gain a food reward. Neither Hans nor von Osten had been trying to dupe anyone. The humans had all deceived themselves.

Notice that both the believers and the skeptical had grounds for their views (they were not just gullible).We can be sure that von Osten, the patient, dedicated, ex-mathematics teacher made sure that Hans tapped out the correct answers. It was quite understandable for naturalists to see antecedents of human features in animals. This approach was proving to be fruitful for evolutionary biology. The trainers, on the other hand, knew how readily they could get horses to respond to signals. Everyone involved with Hans was clever and had skills, knowledge and expertise in their own right. It is just that they, like Hans, had their limits - limits they did not fully appreciate. The trouble was that each party tended to read too much into their own arguments and skills. They tended to think that their angle on things was sufficient. However, skill in one field, far from giving experts an advantage in other fields, actually puts them at a disadvantage. The zoologist's skill is in observing _animals,_ not in the psychologist's skill of observing the (human) trainers. The circus trainer's skill is in getting animals to respond to _intentional_ signals, not in observing unintentional signals in humans.

Earlier, I divided the humans around Clever Hans into believers and skeptics. However, everyone believed something and was skeptical of something. The skeptics incorrectly believed that von Osten was a fraud. The believers were correctly skeptical about the trainer using intentional signals. In an important sense, both groups were believers - _believers in_ their own intellectual sufficiency _._ They were intellectual egotists. Both groups believed that they had all that took to correctly appraise the Clever Hans phenomenon.

It is very easy to react to the victims of duping by calling them gullible (whereas I am not, of course) and rolling my eyes. This reaction is far too superficial and would be gullible itself because it presumes that it is possible to have some infallible intellectual toolkit! The Clever Hans story suggests that this toolkit does not exist, and that believing that I have it actually sets me up for deceiving myself. People fall victim to deception for many reasons, one of which may be gullibility.

Perhaps God is reminding me through Hans to know my creaturely limits and to leave infallibility to him. The point is a general one. It applies to the naturalist and the circus trainer alike, to the learned just as much as to the layperson. Whatever a person's skill, knowledge, expertise or rationality, human strengths produce weaknesses.

Clever Hans was no longer a sensation, but he left us a valuable lesson. Human strengths create weaknesses. Perhaps this principle also applies even more generally. Perhaps it applies to other experts - say biologists, neurologists, psychologists, jewellers and Nobel Prize laureates? There is a follow-up to the story that suggests that it does. This is the story of the Elberfeld horses. A wealthy jeweller, Karl Krall, inherited Hans, acquired several more horses and started training them in earnest. These surpassed Hans, even solving square roots and learning both German and French! Furthermore, as Vezzani reports, "the horses worked well even when Krall and the grooms were not present, and this seemed conclusive evidence."59 Unintentional signalling now appeared to have been ruled out.

Many investigated the Elberfeld horses and many eminent academics such as biologist Ernst Haeckel, neurologist Ludwig Edinger, and Nobel Prize laureate Maurice Maeterlinck became convinced of the arithmetical ability of the animals. Haeckel wrote to Krall, "Your careful, critical experiments convincingly prove the existence of reason in animals, something I have never doubted."60

Reason does exist in certain animals, but it was not Krall that established it. A critical class of expert was missing - someone who could pick up the _intentional_ signals of a _cheat_. That expert is a conjuror. Only after the professional conjuror Faustinus Edelberg was finally commissioned to investigate, did the truth come out. One of the grooms, Albert, had been signalling to the horses from a distance. Horses tend to be more farsighted than humans.61

After Krall discovered that Edelberg was a conjuror, he forbade him further access to horses, saying that he had been tricked and that he always gave access without exception if he did not doubt the scientific integrity of the researchers. How does being a successful jeweller grant one competence in evaluating scientific integrity? After Edelberg reported his findings, the zoologist Heinrich Ziegler wrote that it "was surprising that more credit was given to the "conjuror and fortune-teller" Faustinus than to all the scientists who had most accurately observed the horses and had testified that there was no signalling involved." No doubt, they had, but it was the _groom_ that also needed accurate observing and it was Faustinus that was the better qualified for this job. Zoologists are better suited for spotting humbugs of the humming variety.

Right up until his death von Osten believed that Hans had arithmetical ability. He attributed the horse's failures to stubbornness, not realising that Hans was ironically exposing his trainer's. The horse did become unmanageable towards the end, even biting his examiners. Perhaps this is quite understandable considering the relatively meagre rewards it got for all the tedious tapping!

The story of Clever Hans and the Elberfeld horses reveals it was not the horses that were practicing to deceive. How capable humans are of deceiving themselves! The deceived had a common denominator and it wasn't stupidity. They had considerably expertise between them. The trouble was with a failure to integrate expertise - to know where one's expertise ends and another's begins. This story illustrates that the more specialised you are, the greater your need for the other specialists. Of all intellectual egotists, the most specialised are potentially the most dangerous because of their credibility.

### A fake with a heart of stone

"His heart is as hard as a stone, even as hard as a lower millstone" (Job 41:24). The Bible was speaking of the enigmatic Leviathan, but this is an apt description of a certain beguiling statue known as the Cardiff Giant (see image). The description equally fits the mastermind behind the sculpture, one George Hull. His actions led to the suicide of a publicly humiliated dupe and the bilking of a great deal of money from the susceptible who thought the statue was a petrified human body or an ancient artefact. It was neither. You would be excused for thinking that those conned by the statue must have been soft in the head, but the problem lay elsewhere. The Giant was effectively fake exhibition-art aided and abetted by a veritable syndicate of con-artists. Hull was a genuine scoundrel who exposed many phoney philosophers. The Giant exposed the character, or lack of it, in Hull and his accomplices, the questionable credentials of many so-called experts - phoney philosophers all, a common foolish mindset, and the improper faith foundations of many Christian believers. In so doing it illustrates that the intellectual egotism we saw among the anti-Stratfordians is not some isolated case, but is deeply indicative of the human condition. Let us take the wisdom principles we unpacked earlier and apply them to another very illustrative case.

Hull was a petty crook, accomplished card shark and tobacconist before he decided to go big. The giant stood over three metres and would net him many thousands of dollars. He commissioned a sculptor to make it from gypsum and arranged with William "Stub" Newell to have it buried on Newell's farm in Cardiff near New York. Newell got some unsuspecting labourers to dig at the site under the pretext that he needed a well. Unlike the so-called experts he would come to dupe, Hull did not have a formal education. But he was wily and unscrupulous. He knew people and he knew when an opportunity came begging.

Colossal belief in oneself

That opportunity came through the features of the age. One feature can be described in the words of one of its spokesmen who, unsurprisingly, was duped by the Giant. He is the author, Ralph Waldo Emerson (see image) who wrote in his essay Self-Reliance, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, that is genius."62 Emerson, a Transcendentalist, belonged to the Romantic school of Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, when interest in the Cardiff Giant began to flag, its owners cunningly chose Boston, the centre of American Romanticism to be the destination for its swan song. In populist versions of the philosophy at least, the views of authorities, be they scientists or Bible scholars, count for very little. What counts is _my_ personal experience of the evidence or _my_ reading of the biblical text. Emerson was an icon of this intellectual egotism, much as Arthur Conan Doyle was for the United Kingdom. All you need is superior intelligence and an unspecified education to be able to definitely assess anything you choose. A contemporary expression of this philosophy goes, "An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style." It is a philosophy that has held great sway. Historian Scott Tribble in his book, _A Colossal Hoax The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America,_ notes that most "paid little heed to scientists and experts more generally, largely dismissing these men as buffoons and deeming themselves the best judges of science and history."63

You might think that Hull would have an uphill battle convincing Emerson and other luminaries of his fraud. The suitably qualified had already made rather telling points against its antiquity. For instance, a twenty-four year old mining engineer, Fillmore Smith, explained that a gypsum statute would quickly dissolve in water-logged farm ground. "We are thus reduced," he wrote "to the necessity of believing that the statue has been placed there within a very recent period — say one or two years."64 Similarly, the thirty-four year old palaeontologist O.C. Marsh said it was "of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug."65 He noticed that merely the surface of the statue had the appearance of age; the material deeper in the crevices looked recent. But what are the then obscure youngish men of stone next to the renowned sixty-six year old man of letters? Paper beats rock doesn't it? The former may be more relevantly qualified, but it was the latter who had more intellectual appeal at the time.

Rocks in his head

Emerson was one of a prominent group of intellectuals and scientists invited to a special viewing of the giant. The group knew full well that it had already been considered a hoax. In adulatory tones Emerson was described as walking "around and around the Giant in his rapt manner, but with keen eyes scrutinizing every point in the mysterious object. With a microscope he repeated his inspection, and made himself so far as he could, master of every feature and detail of the Giant." Just as Emerson presumed he had the measure of Shakespeare, he presumed he had the measure of the giant's age. When asked his assessment, Emerson replied that it was "very wonderful and undoubtedly ancient."66 The group concurred. They were not alone in their wonderment. Someone wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, "As I have looked upon this wonderful object, I will give you my first impressions, which I believe, are those of nine-tenths of the people who look upon him, viz: that the object before me was once a living human being."67 Now I have never set eyes on the Cardiff Giant and cannot tell gypsum from rock salt. Yet, I am reasonably sure that it is a fake. Why? Because I trust the most suitably qualified and their verdict.

The trouble with Emerson, the prominent group and the nine-tenths is not with their intellect or their eyes, but with their egos. They failed to recognise the limits to their personal experience and expertise. What we see depends very largely on what we know. As the philosopher of science, Norwood Russell Hanson famously put it, "there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball."68 A myopic palaeontologist would have better luck with ascertaining the statue's real age than a philosopher with 20/20 vision! Emerson may have worthwhile things to say in the field of ideas, but when it comes to objects found in a field, he is a phoney. You could be excused for thinking he had rocks in his head. Fellow American and author of _Moby Dick_ , Herman Melville, described Emerson as "more than a brilliant fellow." But Melville was not taken in by his persona. Melville, recall, had written _The Confidence-man - his Masquerade_ in which he parodies Emerson and others. In the story, the confidence-man wanders about a steamer, engaging the passengers. But don't be fooled by the title. The con-man is actually exposing the masquerades of the passengers such as one "Mark Winsome" who is a very thinly veiled Emerson. Melville wrote in the margins of one of Emerson's books that his "gross and astonishing errors & illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name."69 Elsewhere he writes that Emerson "is a humbug — then is he no common humbug."70 As we saw earlier, brilliance and bone-headedness can go together.

A fishy farmer

One problem with placing the weight heavily on personal examination of the evidence rather than on deference to authorities is that you end up paying too little attention to the credentials of the authorities relative to their domain. While Emerson's group did contain experts of some relevance - a geologist, anatomists, sculptors - it also contained ones less obviously relevant such as Emerson himself, the jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a humourist. Holmes could have played an important role, but he was looking in the wrong direction. Instead of examining the statue, he should have used his expertise to evaluate the characters and circumstances around the giant. He could have pointed out that farmer William Newell's sworn statement to the effect that "if the giant was proved to be a fake within three months, he would return all of the money given to him and forfeit the money still owed" had no legal standing because it wasn't done in a court of law.

While one newspaper praised Newell for "His good character" the lawyer, James Lawrence, made some telling points in favour of the opposite view. Lawrence was described as hard-nosed and experienced - no doubt with shady characters. He wanted to know why Newell needed a second well when the first one was working just fine and the farm had only two cows and a horse. He was also suspicious about all the fanfare around digging the well. The precise spot and depth were picked out with many labourers present as witnesses.

A second feature of the age that we can see here, and another legacy of the Enlightenment that Hull capitalized on, was an emerging _scientism_. This is the idea that it is to science and only science we must look for true knowledge of anything. Those who buy into scientism are more easily misdirected away from the crucial matter of the _moral disposition of the persons_ involved. If the Cardiff Giant is merely a matter of science there is no need to look closely at Newell or Hull. But it really needed a team of experts both in and outside of science and each carefully working _within_ their domains to discern whether the Giant _and_ its owners were humbugs. The surgeon can tell whether the giant's structure is consistent with human anatomy, but its antiquity is better left to a geologist. The palaeontologist can tell whether the giant was ever living, but the character of its owners is much better left to a pastor. One newspaper editor who had been duped and disappointed by the experts he had trusted came to acknowledge bitterly, "We of course understand that the eminent professors, geologists, antiquarians, and authorities on art and anatomy who vouched for the authenticity of the statue, are 'not up to small deceit or any sinful games.'" He learnt the hard way that evaluating persons requires very different expertise to evaluating objects. A scientist may be proficient at identifying a fish while being hopeless at identifying a fishy farmer. Even the humourist can have a role to play once posterity establishes where the buffoonery lies, but it is best that he does not weigh in too early.

Out-conning the con-artists

George Hull was motivated partly by money. He sold shares of the Giant property to a group of businessmen for $37,500. The great showman P.T. Barnum offered $60, 000 to purchase the giant, but was declined. Not easily outdone, Barnum had a replica made. In a great showdown, at the same time the original was being displayed in New York City, Barnum exhibited his as "the genuine Cardiff Giant" while calling the other a fraud. It was actually the replica that attracted the crowds! The businessmen were outraged. They sued Barnum, unsuccessfully, for calling the original a fake. Knowing that the truth would eventually come out and having already made his money, Hull testified under oath in a lawsuit on 2nd February 1870 that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax. The court's ruling was that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake a fake. It is often misattributed to Barnum, but according to historians, it was one of the duped businessmen that quipped, ''there's a sucker born every minute.''71 A lot of conning went on with Barnum out-conning them all!

Fleecing the faithful

Hull had other motivations. He was vehemently atheistic and wanted to embarrass Christians. He had had a run in with a physician and itinerant preacher by the name of Henry B. Turk. Turk believed on the basis of biblical texts such as Genesis 6:4 and Deuteronomy 3:11 that giants existed in the past that were over four metres tall. Hull found this preposterous. The scientistic spirit of age fostered the idea among biblical literalists that the Bible needed to be defended scientifically. Many believers were becoming defensive, digging in their heels against the rising success of higher criticism. Bible scholars and theologians had been making discoveries that were upending long held and cherished assumptions about the Bible's authorship and dates. Hull figured that many would latch onto the Giant as confirmation of these biblical texts and they did. One minister commented, "Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?"72 The minister was being a phoney philosopher too. Having eyes of faith does not grant one special abilities in scientific observation. Hull must have had a smirk on his face as he fleeced the faithful!

A broken heart

You could say that higher criticism left many believers somewhat in the dark. Yearning for light is quite understandable, but the prophet Isaiah has a very sobering warning to those who would look for it in the wrong direction.

"Who among you fears the Lord

and obeys the word of his servant?

Let the one who walks in the dark,

who has no light,

Trust in the name of the Lord

and rely on their God.

But now, all you who light fires

and provide yourselves with flaming torches,

go, walk in the light of your fires

and of the torches you have set ablaze.

This is what you shall receive from my hand:

You will lie down in torment" (Isaiah 50:10-11)

The King James Version has 'sparks' for 'flaming torches.' It is a pathetic image. Hull had succeeded in directing the susceptible away from the true object of their faith - God Himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson had largely given up on the Christian faith of his youth and he was no biblical literalist. Yet his intellectual sophistication did not keep him from being duped either. Scientistic and egotistical inclinations and a common criminal got the duped focusing their eyes on an object rather than a Person. If they needed solace from something buried, why not the broken heart of the crucified and buried Christ over a heart of stone?

### A most mystificatory maestro of misery

The lead essay of the proceedings of a symposium organised to honour him said "he has a legitimate claim to being the greatest central banker who ever lived."73 A few years later he was called a "classic con man." His fawning biographer Bob Woodward called him "a maestro,"74 but he was later "defrocked as the "maestro" of misery."75 His name is Alan Greenspan (see image). Unlike most crackpots, he was widely lauded by his peers. He also managed to dupe the most intelligent of persons. The economist and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Robert D. McTeer, mentions a conversation he had with Marilyn vos Savant who is listed in the _Guinness Book of Records_ as having the world's highest recorded IQ. He told her, "I think economics is a good major for smart students, but if they are really, really smart, I'd rather they become doctors so they could do somebody some good." She replied, "Yes, but doctors help people one at a time, while an Alan Greenspan can help millions of people at a time." McTeer continued, "She has a point. Mr. Greenspan is an excellent example of someone making a big difference by applying good economics."76

Making a big negative difference

He made a big difference alright, negatively, to the tune of seven trillion dollars in the 2008 global financial meltdown. There are many factors behind the meltdown, but the U.S. congress established the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) to find out the cause of the meltdown and specifically fingered one individual, Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve for almost two decades, as largely responsible.77 What he did, in short, was to feather his own nest and that of his wealthy cronies. Someone had to lose, and it was the poor that became even worse off.

If Greenspan can dupe fellow economists and a Marilyn vos Savant, what hope is there for the rest of us? How can we avoid being taken in by a Greenspan? Perhaps, like me, you cannot tell the debit from the credit side of a profit and loss statement. This does not mean we have to be at their mercy. Reading a personal bank statement is one thing. Reading a banker's personal statement is quite another. Recall the principle, "The less expertise one has in a field, the more skeptical one should be about the person claiming to have authority and the less concerned one should be about the _data_." Perhaps we can learn to distinguish angels from devils through a layman who had great wisdom without economic expertise – a certain skeptical prophet from Nazareth.

Reading a personal statement

For Jesus, having _credentials_ is never enough; _character_ is vital. In a world that is preoccupied so often with mere _performance_ , he put critical focus on the _person_. Jesus said some very sobering words about those who would justify themselves by their impeccable religious performance, "Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Matthew 7:22-23). It is not that performance is unimportant, because elsewhere Jesus says, "I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me" (John 5:36). It is the _combination_ of character and credentials that is crucial. For philosopher Graeme McLean, it is unwise to avail oneself of the services of a person _merely_ on the basis of their Christian character. It is all well and good if a dentist is a lovely, respected Christian man, but the question remains, "is he a good dentist?"78

Jesus taught us to be skeptical about character, saying to his disciples "be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves"precisely because he was sending them out as "sheep among wolves"(Matthew 10: 16). He said, "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves" (Matthew 7: 15). His warning was so vital because he knew he was sending them out to be among phonies.

Jesus used _personal_ criteria in his evaluation saying, "By their fruit you will recognize them" (Matthew 7:16). Those who know him will produce such fruit of the Spirit as love, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23.).

There is a maxim that is popular in skeptical circles. It goes, "An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof."79 Trying to apply this principle as a layperson would be extraordinarily naive. Evaluating evidence particularly in the field of economics, can be a very big matter indeed - not something you can get you head around in your spare time. Evaluating character as we saw Jesus doing earlier is much more practical. If we applied his wisdom, wouldn't the maxim be, "extraordinary claims on power require extraordinary proofs of character?" Would we not make a point of reading the _expert_ while humbly leaving the ledger to others? It is not only the statements on paper that count.

Greenspan's personal statement

In eyeing the Federal Reserve, Greenspan made extraordinary claims on influencing the world through its largest economy. So, it is entirely appropriate to evaluate his person. Nixon and Reagan, economic laypersons both, were so dazzled by the economist's words and numbers that they failed to read the person. There were red flags from the beginning. For instance, one clue to his character - or lack of it - is that two years before Reagan appointed him as chairman of the Federal Reserve, he was a shill for the infamous Charles Keating. For $40,000, Keating hired Greenspan "to write letters and walk around Washington, DC, with him, telling regulators about his good character and solid business methods." Keating was a swindler on a grand scale and caused the then "most expensive financial-institution failure in U.S. history, costing more than $3 billion."80 The Superior Court Judge, in giving him the maximum 10-year prison sentence, quoted Woody Guthrie, "More people have suffered from the point of a fountain pen than from a gun."81 You will know them by their fruits indeed! If trusting Greenspan with big things led to great loss, wouldn't trusting him with even bigger things lead to even greater loss?

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported, "More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe."82

William Black, a former financial regulator says "The three most recent financial crises in U.S. history were driven by a special type of fraud called "control fraud" — cases where the officers who control what look like legitimate entities use them as "weapons" to commit crimes. Each time, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, played a catastrophic role. First, his policies created the fraud-friendly (criminogenic) environment that produces epidemics of control fraud, then he failed to identify those epidemics and incipient crises, and finally, he failed to counter them."83 Greenspan now partially admits to "a mistake." It is as if he dismissed the possibility of the evil of fraud as an illusion.

So much loss was partly precipitated by Greenspan's disregard for the importance of moral character. Consider his statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." Zizek says this statements reveals that Greenspan's "mistake concerned not the facts, the objective economic data or mechanisms; it concerned rather the ethical attitudes generated by market speculation – in particular the premise that market processes will generate responsibility and trust." How naïve to think that profits will inspire character!

It matters of high finance it may seem off-base discussing character. From the perspective of wisdom, it is very relevant indeed. Greenspan is not just an economist, not just an intellect. He is a person with character or lack of it. Take a selfish but brilliant phoney, put him in a position of unparalleled economic influence and should we be that surprised that there are losses in the trillions of dollars?

The dazzle behind the diddle

One reason Greenspan managed to dupe so many of the best and brightest for almost twenty years is that he used the classic con trick of misdirection. He got people to focus away from the vital issue of the authenticity of his character towards his affected academic aura. It is almost as if he had been groomed by a consultant from Hollywood on how to successfully brand himself. Indeed, vos Savant had a point when she said, "Yes, but doctors help people one at a time, while an Alan Greenspan can help millions of people at a time." But, there is the crucial proviso that by "an Alan Greenspan" she means a good person who is a good economist. The actual Greenspan is a good economist in the sense that he knows how to play the game to suit his own selfish purposes and that of his cronies.

Greenspan honed a public image of himself as a formidable intellect who, alone, could understand the complexities of the economic world. In 1974 he received this praise from _The New Yorker_ , "economists of all persuasions (with the exception of Alan Greenspan ... who heads the President's Council of Economic Advisers) admit to being baffled by today's problems, the answers to which are not to be found in textbooks or in historical precedents."84 Don't be misled by Greenspan's diffident demeanour. Behind it is a huge ego. Centerbery says of him, "There is no contradiction in Alan Greenspan's faith in the gold standard, business deregulation and self-belief. As a practical matter, Greenspan understands that countries will not go back on the gold standard ... What, then, is the next best thing? It is for Alan Greenspan to manage the world's money supply and interest rates without interference. That is to say, once in power Greenspan considers his judgment to be the new gold standard."85

How did Greenspan pull off such sublime con-artistry as to remain immune to criticism from even the brightest and most qualified? His trick was a veritable avalanche of verbiage to obscure the unsoundness of his pronouncements. He became a master of mystification. Financial manager Susan Webber says, "Wall Street took comfort from his Wizard of Oz act: great and mysterious power, mastery of arcane information, and generally impenetrable pronouncements."86 Since economics is often called the dismal science, you could call Greenspan's tactic blinding with dismal science.

Here is an excerpt from a Federal release under Greenspan, "Although the timing and extent of that improvement remain uncertain, the Committee perceives that over the next few quarters the upside and downside risks to the attainment of sustainable growth are roughly equal. In contrast, over the same period, the probability of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation, though minor, exceeds that of a pickup in inflation from its already low level. The Committee believes that, taken together, the balance of risks to achieving its goals is weighted toward weakness over the foreseeable future."87

Economist Robert Auerbach comments that the "The muddled announcement contained contradictory statements: "over time" things should get better, "over the next few quarters" things should stay about the same, and for the "foreseeable future" things should get worse.""88 Centerbery says it well, "In a world of two-handed economists ("on the other hand"), Greenspan is an octopus."89 The maneuver works because as Auerbach says, "A bit of deception, contradiction, or falsehood in a well-written announcement might draw some criticism, but if the entire message is a big garblement, it may well go unquestioned. It is difficult to dispute an entire message that is total nonsense, especially if it is decorated with erudite jargon."90 Greenspan has given a new word to the English language - Greenspan-speak.

So it is no wonder that newspapers reported opposite announcements as coming from Greenspan. One observer recorded the following four headlines from a banking conference in 2000:

"Greenspan Sees Chance of Recession," New York Times

"Recession Is Unlikely, Greenspan Concludes," Washington Post

"Recession Risk Up, Greenspan Concludes," Baltimore Sun

"Fed Chairman Doesn't See Recession on the Horizon," Wall Street

Journal "91

Greenspan's ploys worked - on virtually everyone. Chartered Financial Analyst Sheehan says, "The most charitable interpretation of Americans' love affair with Greenspan would acknowledge people's mental laxity. It is not too strong a description to say that many Americans worshipped Greenspan. At the very least, most Americans who listened to Greenspan took him at his word—even though they did not know what he was saying. This included the Washington politicians, Washington-oriented economists, and Wall Street strategists."92 Is he including Marilyn vos Savant in this assessment? Laxity of the moral kind is much more fundamental than the mental. The problem was a preoccupation with the persona and his figures rather than the person and his fidelity. After hearing Greenspan on economics, Richard Nixon commented, "That's a very intelligent man" (How intelligent of him to notice). Gerald Ford appointed Greenspan to serve on the Council of Economic Advisers. Ronald Reagan, an admirer of Rand, appointed him as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. He would go on to serve five terms culminating in the Great Recession.

There is another wisdom principle of Jesus that is very relevant to evaluating a Greenspan. It is to look at his sources of inspiration. Who are his prophets? Jesus didn't mince words with his religious detractors saying, "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44.). They got their inspiration from the father of false prophets. Christ's wisdom is very relevant to a concept often used in sociology and public health. Imagine people drowning in a river. It is very good and right to pull drowning people out. Even better, though, is to go upstream and see what is causing them to fall into the river in the first place. Upstream thinking is needed to understand societal ills properly so that we can act more effectively.

The prophet and loss of selfishness

So, let us go upstream and ask from where did Greenspan get his moral inspiration? It was from the Russian-American novelist, Ayn Rand (see image), whose philosophy, it has been said, provided "virtually the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early twenty-first century"93 Philosopher Mary Midgley called her a "contemporary American prophet of extreme egoistic individualism."94 Historian Adam Weiner's book recounting it is entitled _How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis_. The novels that were so destructive are _Atlas Shrugged_ and _The Fountainhead_. Yet, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up the U.S. congress did not mention her name even once. Greenspan said of her, "Not only was I a strong supporter ... You could say that I was of the inner circle of the group ... And I wouldn't change anything. I still think she was right, and I have learned a great deal from her."95 She was one of very few guests invited to his Oval Office swearing-in ceremony as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. She also happens to have inspired Satanist Anton Lavey, who said that his religion is just her "philosophy with ceremony and rituals added."96

Alan shrugged

Alan Greenspan so imbibed Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ , "that one of his biographies is entitled _Alan Shrugged_. Shrugging was essentially his response when grilled in Congress over his role in making the super-rich even wealthier and the poor even poorer. He wrote, " _Atlas Shrugged_ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."97

If Greenspan was the overt cause of the 2008 global financial meltdown, Rand was the covert one. She provided the "philosophical" underpinning for his economic program. Rand was a novelist with an agenda. It was put to her during an interview in 1959, "You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?" Her reply: "Yes." She also said, "I am the creator of a new code of morality."98 And what was this new code? It is essentially that of rational or ethical egoism as the recipe for utopia.

This is how Michael Gerson, Former Assistant to the President for Policy and Strategic Planning described it, "Rand's novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible."99 Or, if you want to hear her philosophy from the horse's mouth, when challenged to state her philosophy while standing on one leg, as Rabbi Hillel had done for the Torah, she replied,

_Metaphysics:_ Objective reality—reality is what it is, no matter your wish or whim. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

_Epistemology:_ Reason—the non-contradictory identification of the facts. "You can't have your cake and eat it too."

Ethics: Self-interest—the pursuit of happiness. "Man is an end in himself."

_Politics:_ Laissez-faire capitalism—Government's purpose is to protect the right to life, liberty, and property. "Give me liberty or give me death.""100

Rabbi Hillel's moral philosophy was the antithesis of Rand's. He replied, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!"101

You could say that Rand was Greenspan's intellectual hero in the field of moral philosophy. She was certainly extremely intelligent and brilliantly successful, having 30 million of her novels sold. Her _Atlas Shrugged_ became a runaway bestseller – for a time second only to the Bible in sales in the U.S.A. In 2012, The Library of Congress named _Atlas Shrugged_ one of 88 books that has shaped America.102 In the year of that Great Recession in which she played such an insidiously pivotal role, her books sold more than 800, 000 copies.

Rand's fans regard her as the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. For instance, Yaron Brook who has a PhD in Finance says, "I think she's one of the greatest people of all time. Ultimately, in philosophy, she's going to be one of the giants. I mean, she'll be up there with Plato and Aristotle." He dismisses Kant as "bad," "corrupt" and "evil," Hegel as "nonsensical," and Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre and Wittgenstein as "garbage."103 This isn't his call. It's like a PhD in Philosophy saying, "Bernie Madoff one of the greatest people of all time. Ultimately, in finance, he's going to be one of the giants."

Philosophers shrugged

Unlike her fans, moral philosophers respond to Rand much as Greenspan responded to the poor. They shrug. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, "Whereas Rand's ideas and mode of presentation make Rand popular with many non-academics, they lead to the opposite outcome with academics " and "It is not surprising, then, that she is either mentioned in passing, or not mentioned at all, in the entries that discuss current philosophical thought about virtue ethics, egoism, rights, libertarianism, or markets."104 Even her sympathiser Sciabarra admits that she received scant attention from academics during her lifetime.105 Foremost contemporary moral philosophers such as John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Singer, Stephen Toulmin, Martin Buber, Philippa Foot, Mary Warnock and Lawrence Kohlberg completely ignore her. Bernard Williams does not mention Rand by name, but dispenses with egoism by pointing out "the obvious fact that all economic systems depend on people in society having dispositions that extend beyond self-interest."106 The very few philosophers who have bothered to comment on her ideas dismiss them. For instance, Robert Audi finds her dichotomy between individual self‐interest and altruism untenable.107 Robert Nozick says that her published works do not establish her conclusions108 and James Rachels demonstrates that her defense of Ethical Egoism is arbitrary.109 Lajos Brons says, "Ethical Egoism is the moral theory that claims that the only moral obligation one has is to further one's own (objective, long term) interests. Although this theory is the de facto ethics of the hegemony of psychopathy and is very popular among the semi-literate fans of Ayn Rand, it is very hard to defend, and for that reason a very uncommon position among moral philosophers."110 Making a novelist, however good, the definitive source of one's moral philosophy, as Greenspan did, is a little like making an engineer one's main source on evolutionary biology.

Rand shrugged

Rand's response to philosophers was to shrug. She did not have much need for their minds. "I inherit nothing," she said, "I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."111 She presumed her brain housed multitudes including pretty much all the philosophers she ever needed, claiming "The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle."112 And there was an epidemiologist in there too. When challenged over the dangers of smoking, "she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence."113 A novelist waxing lyrical about biostatistics - how is that for rampant intellectual egotism! Daniel J Flynn, summed it up, "Ayn Rand was too smart for her own good. If you think you know it all, learning is a waste of time. Rand possessed incredible brilliance but lacked any passion for reading."114

While she recognised Aristotle, she kept putting words in his mouth. This is like getting all your theology from Moses but ignoring Jesus, the psalmists, the prophets, the apostles and perhaps Moses too. "She was," as philosopher Dustin J. Byrd points out, "notorious for never having read most of the works of philosophy she criticized, but relied on her university students to feed her the gist of their arguments."115 Her disciple Nathaniel Branden commented that Rand "was not a conscientious scholar of the history of philosophy. Far from it; in the eighteen years of our relationship, I cannot recall a single book on philosophy that she read from cover to cover. She skimmed."

Rand's disdain for philosophers shows in her grasp of philosophy. She was either oblivious to or rejected fundamental distinctions that philosophers hold dear such as between the validity and soundness of an argument. Sidney Hook points out, "The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests that she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can test only consistency. They cannot establish truth . . . . Swearing fidelity to Aristotle, Miss Rand claims to deduce not only matters of fact from logic but, with as little warrant, ethical rules and economic truths as well. As she understands them, the laws of logic license her in proclaiming that "existence exists," which is very much like saying that the law of gravitation is heavy and the formula of sugar sweet."116 Logic can only establish the consistency of an argument, not the truth of its conclusions. If you are not familiar with the distinction, let me just say that her view is on a par with thinking that redemption is by good works and for grace rather than the other way around.

Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart gives an apt summary of her "philosophy."

"And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn't so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is "rational" or "objective" or "real." Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an "-ism." Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like "existence is identity" and "consciousness is identification," all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error. "117 It is no wonder that Gene H. Bell-Villada calls her a "pop-philosophaster-to-be."118

What Rand lacked in philosophy she made up for in ego. "There are very few guideposts to find, she said, " _The Fountainhead_ is one of them."119 She considered herself the "the most creative thinker alive." There is truth in this in the same sense as one gets creative accountancy. Byrd says, "She was clearly one of the most skilled sophists I had ever studied."120

In short, Rand was neither an expert in philosophy nor in morality, but in intellectual posturing. She was a phoney philosopher and makeshift moralist, but a consummate con-artist among the young and philosophically uninitiated. Rand loved to tell her acolytes "check your premises." But much more fundamental than that is to check your presumptions. As we saw in the introduction, it is too easy to falsely presume that one has all the requisite knowledge to evaluate the truth of one's premises.

That Greenspan was duped by her shows that while he may be very proficient with profit and loss statements, he is evidently hopeless with a prophet and loss statement. He was indifferent or incapable of anticipating the effect of her selfish ideology on society. That they duped the world so resoundly reveals _our_ preoccupation with intelligence and success over wisdom and character. It took the Great Recession for Greenspan to begin to realise that there was a flaw in Rand's philosophy. This is how he expressed it under questioning before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms .... That's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

To understand Rand one must keep in mind that she spent her formative years not in methodical contemplation at a university or seminary, but learning to spin a yarn and cultivate an image at Hollywood. As Corey Robin put it, she was "Apprenticed in Hollywood rather than Athens" and was a "melodramatist of the moral life."121 She began as an extra in a film before becoming a scriptwriter under Cecil B. DeMille. So yes, Greenspan _did_ have a consultant from Hollywood on how to successfully brand himself.

Literary experts shrugged

Literary experts do not think much of her as a novelist either. Even her gushing biographer, Jennifer Burns admitted "the nearly universal consensus among literary critics that she is a bad writer."122 English Professor Harold Bloom, for instance, writes, "Ayn Rand was a writer of no value whatsoever, whether aesthetic or intellectual ... We are threatened these days by vicious mindlessness and this is one of its manifestations."123 American editor Whittaker Chambers found _Atlas Shrugged_ to be "a remarkably silly book." He wrote, "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal... _Atlas Shrugged_ can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.124 Dorothy Parker said of _Atlas Shrugged_ , "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." Gene H. Bell-Villada says that "as an artist ... her contribution is nil."125 Corey Robin writes, "Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both."126 Flannery O'Connor's view was, "She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."127 Rand, on the other hand thought that Spillane was superior to Shakespeare!128

The public fawned

As we have seen, this has not prevented Rand from becoming extremely successful as a pop pseudo-philosopher in morality and thereby so destructive. An indication of the contrast between public admiration and professional disdain of her can be seen from the number of hits she gets from a Google Scholar search versus a Google search relative to recognised moral philosophers. John Rawls and Bernard Williams, for instance, get 15 and seven times more hits than her respectively in Google Scholar compared to one and a half-times and 0.8 hits in Google.129

Rand managed to mold much of American culture into her twisted fantasy. Ayn Rand was even worse than Greenspan. The latter's impact was financial, the former's spiritual and the former produced the latter and more. Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine says, " I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: "My ex-husband wasn't a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him."130 The financial cost exacted by Rand through Greenspan can be measured; who can ascertain the enormous psychological toll on the nation?

Corey Robin notes that Rand was far worse than some small-time hustler and so he asks, "How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?"131 Understandably expecting some resistance to her moral code, Rand was cunning in the way she sold it. How effective would she have been with mere assertion among the seasoned in a peer-reviewed journal of moral philosophy? Instead, she let characters in novels be her mouthpiece. She gave her heroes very superficial resemblances to Christ, but made them opposites in the depths of their character. Their resemblance is closest to Friedrich Nietzsche's Superman132 and Ludwig Feuerbach's Man-god (although their approaches were far more nuanced than Rand's). Feuerbach taught that "man had surrendered his own godhead to some mythical creature beyond the skies, whereas man himself was god ( _homo homini deus_ ) and should assume his true status."133 Nietzsche and Rand were of one mind on selfishness. His _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , acclaimed selfishness:, "selfishness blessed, the sound, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul."134 Indeed, Gene Bell-Villada and Dustin Byrd135 point out that she was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, quoting him in the original of her first novel, _We the Living_ , though these were omitted in latter editions.

In just what might appeal to an impressionable adolescent, they are handsome, intellectual and oozing confidence and charisma. She has the inventive John Galt say in _Atlas Shrugged_ , "Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None-except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality."136 John Galt tell a buckling Atlas what to do about the plight of the world: "Shrug." She has Howard Roark say in _The Fountainhead_ , "Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others." Rand approvingly says of her hero, "he was born without the ability to consider others." Galt is an engineer with the same certitude and intellectual egotism on moral philosophy as his creator. One of her collective began a question, "In his speech, Galt contends that . . ." As her disciple Nathaniel Brand recounts, "He never got any further because Ayn exploded. "Galt does not contend," she shouted. "If you have read Atlas Shrugged, if you profess to be an admirer of mine, then you should know that Galt does not 'strive,' 'debate,' 'argue,' or 'contend.'""137

Galt is a sermoniser of biblical proportions without any biblical merit. Gore Vidal says that "...attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the "freedom is slavery" sort.138 Greenspan-speak is of a piece with Galt-speak. He learnt from the best. I'll spare you Galt's tortuous seventy-page soliloquy extolling egoism. Here is just an excerpt: "Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking-that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action-that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise-that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality-that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind-that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness."139

Nature shrugged

Rand practiced what Roark and Galt preached. And because she did so, her life demonstrates the loss that comes from rejecting the laws that God has built into nature. You will know them by their fruit indeed! Rand began a two-decade long affair with her impressionable disciple, Nathaniel Branden, even though they were both married, he was nineteen years old and she forty-four. Then Branden in turn began an affair with a young actress named Patrecia Scott. Philosopher A. C. Grayling writes, "As the Branden affair shows, Rand's life was indeed exemplary of her thought. It was, in line with her avowed principles, an entirely selfish life, to which she sacrificed her family, her good-natured husband Frank O'Connor, her friends, and all but the last of her devoted followers, Leonard Peikoff."140

When Rand found out about the affair, she banished Branden and his wife for "violation of objectivist principles." At this stage did it dawn on the Brandens that Randian Objectivism really means Rand's objectives? Rand and Greenspan signed the excommunication decree that read "Because Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, in a series of actions, have betrayed fundamental principles of Objectivism, we condemn and repudiate these two persons irrevocably."141

If case you doubt that Objectivism had essentially but one principle - serve Rand's whims - consider this: She "abhorred facial hair and regarded anyone with a beard or mustache as inherently immoral."142 She did not champion individualism so much as one individual - namely herself. A.C. Grayling writes, "Biographies of her confirm what one surmises from her novels and essays themselves: that she was a brilliant but repulsive person, who inveighed against tyranny but was a tyrant, and who demanded loyalty from the disciples of her philosophy of individualism and independence, oblivious to the stark paradox involved. The members of her inner circle called themselves 'the Collective' as a joke; some of them came to realise too late just how ironic the label was, for Rand in effect organised her devotees into a cult from whose teachings any deviation – least of all into the individual independence she vaunted – was regarded as an unforgivable crime."143 She was very successful in replicating herself. Some of her followers, disparagingly called Randroids, even took to feigning a Russian accent.

In case you think Rand was merely quirky, bear in mind that she did not live by principles, but by one principal, namely herself. "After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn't mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused."144 She was a vehement opponent of the welfare state, yet was happy to begin receiving Social Security benefits shortly after the surgery. She was perfectly happy to receive handouts from people and then would deny that she ever did saying, "No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone's duty to help me." Bell-Villada notes the enormous amount of help Rand received from her mother (those jewels), her Chicago relatives (free room and board, money, a train ticket, a letter of reference), the Studio Club in Hollywood (subsidized housing), Cecil B. DeMille (that fateful ride), her husband Frank (green card and much more), her courageous editor at Bobbs-Merrill (who stuck his neck out for her). And that's just for starters. At the Studio Club, where she lived three years, she often got behind in rent payments but was never kicked out. In the '30s, when times were tough, moreover, a friend named Albert Mannheimer lent her $500. The list goes on and on"145

When she died her body was laid to rest next to the symbol she had adopted as her own - a two metre high dollar sign.

In case you doubt the decrepitude of Rand's moral character, consider this: Rand admired the boastful psychopathic kidnapper and murderer of twelve-year-old Marion Parker. After receiving the ransom, he flung the victim's body parts in front of her anguished father. Under interrogation he admitted that he thought she was still alive when he cut off her arms and legs. Rand fawningly said of the perpetrator that he had, "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'" This should sound familiar because it exactly describes her hero-character Howard Roark who we met earlier. Rand called the perpetrator's motto, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard." The motto? "I am like the state: what is good for me is right."146

His words echo those of Rand, "I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I.""147 A false prophet indeed! The true prophet, Isaiah, said, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight" (Isaiah 5: 20-21). The difference between the murderer and Rand is that the latter is more philosophical than pragmatic and probably more squeamish.

Evolution shrugged

Ayn Rand was very skeptical about human evolution. I suspect that she found it too debasing. But evolution helps to explain her success in branding herself. We have seen that Rand promoted the image of herself as self-made (and you can be so too). How did she manage to foist such an outrageous lie on so many? As I have pointed out elsewhere, "we are evolutionarily adapted to the environment of our forebears living in small groups." Reading people up close comes naturally to most of us because that is what we needed to do for millions of years of our history ( _Homo_ has been around for circa five million years). This is why it hard to brand yourself among those who are close to you. As Jesus puts it, "A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household" (Mark 6:4) It is noteworthy in this context, that James, the brother of Jesus, was a believer in him and that Jesus could say to his people without fear of contradiction, "Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?" (John 8:46).

Evolutionary speaking, reading people at a distance is a very, very recent phenomenon (less than ten thousand years). Reading people at a distance has become increasingly necessary in the modern world (e.g. voting for an emperor or president we have never met). So when the Pharisees and Herodians try to trap Jesus by asking him, " Is it lawful to pay a poll-tax to Caesar, or not?" (Mark 12:14) The coin they show him has an image of Tiberius along with the inscription "Son of the Divine Augustus."148 With the invention of writing, Tiberius can brand himself and it can travel far and wide. His subjects have the impression that they have met something of Caesar, even if it is only a depiction and some text, and come away reassured. Reading people at distance does not come naturally to us, and so branding takes advantage of our prehistoric minds. You could say that evolution shrugs at the peculiar challenges of the modern world. If Marilyn vos Savant, despite her intelligence, was no match for Greenspan's branding, should we be surprised that so many can fall for Rand's?

Who is John Galt?

What is most remarkable is that so many of Rand's fans are professing Christians, such as Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and CEO of Tyco International, Dennis Kozlowski. The former two actually urged their staff to read A _tlas Shrugged_.149 One Christian fan, who teaches graduate economics, goes so far as to say, "The ideal man that Ayn Rand both created and desired bears an uncanny resemblance to Jesus Christ."150 Evidently he knows economics better than he knows Jesus. This is about as morally stupid as finding an uncanny resemblance between Superman and the Lord.151 The American atheist and essayist, Gore Vidal, wasn't fooled, saying more than half a century ago with evident foreboding, "Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society... She has declared war... on Christ... I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed."152 How prescient was Vidal. A nation supposedly under God may have a Christian veneer, but is becoming as Levine put it, "one nation under Galt." It's citizens are increasingly becoming devotees of themselves in the image of Galt.

Ted Turner once put up thousands of billboards with the question, "Who is John Galt?" (see image153). The answer is that he is Ayn Rand and her now countless intellectual egotist descendents and mammon followers including the worst culprit behind the 2008 financial crisis.

### A most covertly calamitous crackpot

Isaac Newton said in 1675, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." When Rand said, "I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one,"154 she lied. Though Rand became America's chief promoter of intellectual egotism, she did not invent the pop epistemology. She never acknowledged him, but the writer of _Atlas Shrugged_ stood on the shoulders of a revolutionary giant and moral midget. Her inspiration may have been ultimately diabolical, but proximately it came from a second-rate novelist. His name is Nikolay Chernyshevsky (see image). Rational egoism was his idea. Both Greenspan and Rand got their "morality" from novelists come phoney philosophers. Historian Adam Weiner has both novelists in mind when he refers, in his book, to bad writing destroying the world.

Chernyshevsky is arguably the most devastatingly influential phoney on the 20th century and beyond. Not only was he the inspiration behind Rand and through her to Greenspan, but also behind the Red Terror. Joseph Franks says, "If one were to ask for the title of the nineteenth-century Russian novel that has had the greatest influence on Russian society, it is likely that a non-Russian would choose among the books of the mighty triumvirate—Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. Fathers and Sons? War and Peace? Crime and Punishment? These would certainly be among the suggested answers; but . . . the novel that can claim this honor with most justice is N. G. Chernyshevsky's _What Is to Be Done?_ ," a book few Western readers have ever heard of and fewer still have read. Yet no work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, can compete with _What Is to Be Done?_ in its effect on human lives and its power to make history. For Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution."155 Karl Marx learnt Russian so that he could read _What Is to Be Done?_ in its original language. Irina Paperno Irina says that Chernyshevsky "has had the greatest impact on human lives in the history of Russian literature."156 This phoney philosopher provided the ethical theory of "enlightened egoistic utilitarianism." What was "moral" under rational egoism was the pursuit of self-interest unencumbered by Divine Law. _What Is to Be Done?_ comes complete with a hero-character, one Rakhmetov, who mysteriously appears and disappears from the story and is clearly a literary incarnation of Chernyshevsky. Rakhmetov is the very personification of selfishness. He flouts the moral law and comes off scott free. At one point the character says, "I did what was best for me. I'm not the sort of person who makes sacrifices. No one is. It's a fallacious concept. Sacrifice is all stuff and nonsense."

The fabrication of a crackpot

Chernyshevsky's egoism emerged from a "peculiar russian mixture of the atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the materialism and rationalism of eighteenth-century French thought, and the English Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham."157 Wiener traces Chernyshevsky's thinking to the European Enlightenment.158 It was also nihilistic, meaning "a radical rejection of all established authorities, the determination to recognize nothing [ _nihil_ ] that could not be justified by rational argument."159 It is small wonder what began as "What can be done?" became in the words of Dmitry Pisarev, "What can be smashed should be smashed."160

Serendipity, thy name is Chernyshevsky

Yet Chernyshevsky appears the unlikeliest prospect for a destroyer of global extent. The odds seemed stacked against him ever becoming a significant destructive influence.

Chernyshevsky hardly came across as an overt threat. Nabokov describes, in his book, _The Gift,_ that he was a frail, despairing human being who took up arms against no-one. But evil can come quietly. "Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good" (Ecclesiastes 9: 18). Chernyshevsky did not appear to have the aptitude to become a influential intellectual force. The Russian philosopher Isaiah Berlin notes that he was not a man of original ideas. He did not possess the depth, the imagination, or the brilliant intellect and literary talent of Herzen; nor the eloquence, the boldness, the temperament or the reasoning power of Bakunin, nor the moral genius and unique social insight of Belinsky. But he was a man of unswerving integrity, immense industry, and a capacity rare among Russians for concentration upon concrete detail."161 He retained too much Christian moral residue from his upbringing to "summon Russia to the axe" - his father was a priest. Unlike Rand, who was contemptuous of the masses, Chernyshevsky had nothing but compassion for his country-folk. He genuinely wanted the best for them. Chernyshevsky was no psychopath a la Shipman and Stroud, but would bequeath to his intellectual descendants something that would leave far greater human loss. Chernyshevsky had a moral disposition. It was his moral philosophy that was deficient. He was a moral midget not so much in his character, but in his philosophy. Such is the insidious power of bad ideas! He was a covertly calamitous crackpot! He would provide the intellectual inspiration and moral underpinning for those who would summon and pick up the axe in droves. He merely wielded his pen on the world, yet would become the unseen force behind boundless terror. He provided a philosophy that would be used to morally justify all manner of evils.

Also working against Chernyshevsky becoming a harbinger of any note was that his novel was cringeworthily dreadful. Weiner says it was received with "astonished disgust by the Russian intelligentsia" with one critic calling it "the most atrocious work of Russian literature." Isaiah Berlin called it ''grotesque as a work of art."162 The novelist, Ivan Turgenev, a contemporary, rejected it both for its art and alleged philosophy, saying, ''I could hardly get through Chernyshevsky. His style arouses physical revulsion in me. . . . If this—I do not even say art or beauty—but if this is intelligence . . . then all I can do is to crawl under a bench somewhere."163 Amis writes, "To read this book once in five summers would defeat most of us." How, then, could Vladimir Lenin finish reading it let alone possibly find revolutionary inspiration in it? Yet Amis says, "It fills you with extraordinary torpor to learn that Lenin read Nikolai's insuperably talentless novel _What Is To Be Done?_ (1863) five times in one summer." Amis continues, "'It completely reshaped me,' he [Lenin] said in 1904. 'This is a book that changes one for a whole lifetime.' Its greatest merit, he stressed, was that it showed you 'what a revolutionary must be like'. Humiliating though it may feel, we are obliged to conclude that _What Is To Be Done?_ is the most influential novel of all time."164

And then, as the subversive novel was written in prison in Czarist Russia, it seemed unlikely that it would ever be published. Chernyshevsky, who in the words of Adam Weiner had "the tyrannical will to control humanity and shape its destiny"165 had no power over its publication. The censorship, who did have the power, were completely opposed to its call to revolution. How it eventually happened is an exercise in itself in the foolhardy and the serendipitous. Nabokov explains that, "The censorship permitted it to be published... reckoning on the fact that a novel which was "something in the highest degree anti-artistic" would be certain to overthrow Chernyshevski's authority, that he would simply be laughed at for it."166 They may have had proficiency as readers of "literature," but as readers of the masses, they were amateurs. The Russian people were very understandably desperate. Historian Oren Harman gives a glimpse of the wretched conditions under Czarist Russia, "... the old man who had gone gray in his master's service and chose to hang himself under his master's window, the cruel laying waste of entire villages when a loaf of bread went missing, the young girl who found her only salvation from a landlord-arranged marriage in drowning herself." When circumstances are so atrocious, perhaps the devil you don't know appears more attractive than the one that you do.

And then, as if Providence had decreed that the book's publication be made even more remote, the only two existing manuscripts were lost in the snow. As Nabokov recounts, the Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov had had them in his possession while travelling on a sleigh. When the sleigh turned sharply, the manuscripts slid off. Their loss was reported in the St Petersburg Police Gazette. Again as if Providence was overseeing, a clerk found them. "'Destroy it!' begged a hopeless voice : in vain," writes Nabokov as if pleading for history to be reversed. Some may want to murmur heavenward, "Is it too difficult for you to have kept the manuscripts from being found?" We will return to this question later. They were returned for the reward - double the number of pieces of silver paid to betray Jesus Christ.

Do everything intellectual yourself

There is something even more fundamental than malaise in moral philosophy that might seem to work against Chernyshevsky producing a successful novel. Weiner calls it "intellectual sloth," but I think it goes deeper than that. Chernyshevsky's yardstick for evaluating any intellectual endeavour whatsoever was his own experience and common sense. Anything he did not understand or thought irreconcilable with his ideology was rejected as either false or unimportant. This amounted to rather a lot. To him, "a pair of boots is something more important than all the plays of Shakespeare."167 To him, Russian verbless poetry was a joke, Charles Darwin was puerile, Alfred Wallace was inept and he dismissed the geographical distribution of the camel as too specialised.168 All this is rich coming from someone who could name only one wild flower - the Siberian rose! Whereas almost all Russian intellectuals welcomed Darwin's theory of evolution by the 1860's, Chernyshevsky published a full attack on both Darwin and his theory in a paper in 1888, questioning Darwin's abilities as a scientist and saying that he, "has not the scientific preparation for the understanding of the laws of life..."169 Here is how historian of science, Alexander Vucinich, described his paper: "Chernyshevskii's argumentation was more an exercise in logic than an exhibition of scientific erudition. His paper presented an orderly sequence of tight arguments relying on personal judgment... ."170

He similarly gave the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean Geometry short shrift. Simon Gindikin writes of the field and reaction to it, "However, what was understood by only a few mathematicians was absolutely inaccessible to nonprofessionals. They measured the claims of hyperbolic geometry with the Euclidean ruler of their own geometric intuition—and came up with an inexhaustible source for their wit. Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote to his sons from exile that the entire city of Kazan was laughing at Lobachevsky: "What is the 'curvature of a ray' or 'curved space'? What is geometry without the axiom of parallel lines?" He compared this to"squaring a boot"and "extracting the roots of a boot-top ..."171 Intellectually at least, Chernyshevsky's answer to _What is to be done?,_ is to do everything yourself. It is no wonder that he entertained crackpot notions about perpetual motion machines.

Chernyshevsky's intellectual imperialism would be comical if it wasn't so egregious. Following Ludwig Feuerbach, theology becomes for him a sub-discipline of anthropology. Aesthetics becomes for him a sub-discipline of socio-politics. Any art that did not serve the revolutionary cause was de facto invalid. In case you have any doubts about him being a phoney philosopher, with his scientism he rejected an entire branch of philosophy, namely, metaphysics.172

What Chernyshevsky lacked in knowledge and understanding he made up for in an attitude of overweening certitude. He presumed he had the same capacity to see the world as a naturalist, physicist or anyone else and all this, ironically, with defective eyesight! He does not provide any philosophical arguments for his view. He just presumes the truth of it. He said, "The world around us is exactly what everyone sees. Thus if you look into the eye of a person observing a tree, you will see reflected in that eye the very same image of the tree that you yourself see in reality."173 To an epistemologist this is breathtakingly naive. The same reflection of the tree would also be seen in the eye of a monkey. Would he really want to argue that the monkey sees the world in the same way that he does? In short, Chernyshevsky is a raving intellectual egotist.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that the monkey's perception of the world is inferior to that of Chernyshevsky's. It is _different_. In the jungle, the monkey would see more that is relevant to his survival. In an urban environment, Chernyshevsky, would see more - as long as he had his glasses on. In the world of values, a moral philosopher would see more than both. At sea, Ralph Waldo Emerson could wax lyrical, "The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of June."174 The actual sailor, Herman Melville, saw storms differently, responding, "To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff all this is."175

Invent your own morality and theology

If Chernyshevsky can be such a phoney in such relatively cut and dried matters of biology and physics, (cut and dried, that is, for actual scientists) why should we trust him with moral philosophy and the immensely difficult matter of ascertaining what utopia should look like? It was his intellectual egotism that set the stage for the development of this moral maverick and unforeseeing utopian. Chernyshevsky has rightly been taken to task for his moral philosophy, but his intellectual egotism is more fundamental. With it he can blithely invent his very own biology, physics, philosophy, morality, blueprint for utopia and godless theology willy nilly. The historian Andrzej Walicki says that his theology "underwent a process of secularization: from concluding, after Feuerbach, that the secret of theology was anthropology, it was an easy step to interpreting the Kingdom of God on earth as a kingdom of emancipated human beings in full control of their fate."176 It has been claimed that he gave "Russian society the alternative of a system of profoundly Christian values, secularized and arrayed in the positivist garb of his time."177 In _What is to be Done?_ he uses language reminiscent of the New Testament. "New creation," for instance, becomes "new men," but it is a language devoid of any theological content.

Literary historian Irina Paperno remarks that the very title of Chernyshevsky's novel, recalls the episode of the baptism in Luke (3:10–14) and the question that "the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him" asked of John: "What shall we do?" ... The new men—"men of goodness and strength, justice and ability," as they are introduced to the reader—are seen as the apostles of a new creed, a new and improved Christianity. "You are the salt of the salt of the earth," the author says of them, reinforcing the words that Christ addressed to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount."178

Chernyshevsky was well aware that there was a great deal wrong with the established church. Well if the Church is ineffectual it needs more of Christ, not less. Without Christ, any system of Christian values can only exist on paper. Jesus is adamant. "If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). In real life, egotists can have, at best, a Christian veneer. Chernyshevsky represents a transition. He is not Christian enough to abide in Jesus, but not secular enough to abandon Christian morality altogether. His is a Christian fervour without Christ. Christianity is revolutionary; without Christ it is ravaging. This is aptly illustrated by Chernyshevsky's contemporary, Sergey Nechayev, who went from being a teacher of divinity to a terrorist. In his book, _The Catechism of a Revolutionary_ , he defended the use of murder and blackmail to further the cause of revolution.179 Vladimir Lenin and Ayn Rand just took Chernyshevsky's rational egoism to its logical, Christless conclusion. The Red Terror and the global financial meltdown is what you get when humans try passionately to fix the world without God.

His is a utopia without God. In the end Chernyshevsky not only had no need for the minds of Shakespeare, Darwin and Lobachevsky, he also had no need for the mind of God. Now that is intellectual egotism indeed! It is coupled with remarkable credulity over what human nature coupled with machines can achieve. The nihilists derisively rejected the Kingdom of God as irrational pie in the sky when you die by and by. Yet their substitute was a utopia wrought through selfishness - in the words of Jeremy Bentham, "golden conduct out of leaden motives."180

Chernyshevsky fueled Ayn Rand's obsession with utopia wrought by machines. In _Atlas Shrugged_ John Galt invents an amazing motor, that if built, would mean, "About ten years added to the life of every person in this country—if you consider how many things it would have made easier and cheaper to produce, how many hours of human labor it would have released for other work, and how much more anyone's work would have brought him." The weak link, of course, is the selfish humans that operate them. The irony is that the tobacco industry with the automotive process of their factories, subtracts on average, ten years of life from the users of their products!181

It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad that a mere character thought he could invent his own morality. It is like inventing one's own physical laws. It is like decreeing that cannonballs, when painted red, should float. This is intellectual egotism at its most ridiculous. It may be easier to see that he was a crank with respect to the perpetual motion machine, but he was just as much one with respect to morality. Chernyshevsky thought he knew better than the Author how he wrote the story. Surely it is not for us to evaluate Creation, but to understand and submit to it.

A most pretentious protagonist

And with his intellectual egotism he can create in his novel his own insipid utopian world with one dimensional characters that are a far cry from real people. They are idealized propaganda vehicles with their choices ushering in make-believe consequences. It is all a masquerade that he has the temerity to call truth! He tediously and irritatingly interjects into his novel, as if from on high, such things as, "But now that I've warned you that I have no talent whatever, you know that any merit to be found in my tale is due entirely to its truthfulness." For truthfulness he uses the Russian word _istina_ which has a connotation, "holy truth."182

We saw earlier Rakhmetov's radical selfishness. But even more fundamental than the selfishness of Chernyshevsky's ideal man is his intellectual egotism. Thus Valerii Serdiuchenko writes that Rakhmetov "is impressive primarily in terms of his intellectual prowess. By the age of seventeen, he was already more learned than Lopukhov and Kirsanov (the two medical students who figure large in the life of Vera Pavlovna _...)._ He is a brilliantly percipient reader: his first acquaintance with serious literature lasted an unbroken eighty-two hours and ended only when he collapsed into a fifteen-hour semi-sleep, semi-swoon. By his twenty-second year, Rakhmetov had mastered all the doctrines of past and present sociopolitical thought. His closest comrades-in-arms and fellow thinkers recognize him as an unquestioned authority, a kind of guru. He is an acute psychoanalyst... ."183 Rakhmetov's certitude about what is to be done to usher in utopia mirrored Chernyshevsky's.

Rakhmetov may seem to be too comical to be taken seriously. He has much in common with the King in Brant Parker and Johnny Hart's Wizard of Id cartoon. In one scene, the wizard is peering through a telescope while the king approaches.

King: "What are you doing Wiz?"

Wizard: "I'm looking for the centre of the universe."

King: "Speaking."

Rakhmetov and the King are both egocentric and both tyrants in their own ways. The difference, of course, is that the King of Id is a joke, whereas Chernyshevsky is serious about Rakhmetov as an exemplar and sage. Despite the title, Rakhmetov does not actually do anything in the novel and so cannot be an overt tyrant. He is held up as a hero to inspire others, both literary and real. It is this that makes him so effective as a covert tyrant. Rakhmetov taught Lenin and Rand a great deal. John Galt and Howard Roark have much in common with him. Ayn Rand also learnt much from Vera Pavlovna. Historian Victoria Frede comments that "Vera does not even need books to tell her that egoism is the proper basis for decision making. She seems to grasp this, too, instinctively."184 Supermen and superwomen just know. Is it any wonder that Chernyshevsky's intellectual disciple, Ayn Rand, so resembles his characters?

Adam Weiner gives this advice, "Come to think of it, when "checking your premises," the first premise to check is that of selfhood: is it really you in there, or have you allowed yourself to become "the slave of some defunct economist," a "sleeper cell," the embodiment of a character in a [bad] novel? If it is you, it is probably safe to proceed to the next premise. If not, no logic can save you."185

Perhaps the success of Chernyshevsky's novel, for a time, is not so surprising after all. It is just the blueprint for young, desperate, impressionable, reckless intelligentsia who have decided to give up on God and be the masters of their own destiny.

Chernyshevsky it not merely the author of phoney characters. He managed to inspire, through them, the emergence of real people who were phoney philosophers with enormous destructive influence, namely Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan. The rest, as they say, is history. Rakhmetov could well be the most cartoonish yet calamitous character in all the novels that have ever been written.

### The Authentic Author

Chernyshevsky had a countryman, a fellow novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, (see image) who acknowledged another Author and the Novel that he is writing. He was an author that deferred to the wisdom of God. As an artist he was an imitator of the Creator and his work in creation. In consequence, Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ has that ring of truth about it. Dostoevsky did not need to narrate intrusively into his story. There is a coherence to the unfolding of the story so that what needs to be said at the level of the story is said _by_ the story _within_ the story and is done so seamlessly. Thus he does not contrive, does not irritate and produces sublime literature. Great art speaks volumes without an interjecting narrator. This was understood as long ago as Aristotle. To him, the action of a play should be coherent if it is to be successful. The story, as we say, must hang together. It has to have a consistent "Law of the Story."

The Law of the Story

Dostoevsky keenly understood, as did Shakespeare for that matter, and as Dorothy Sayers lucidly explains in _The Mind of the Maker,_ that the universal moral law cannot actually be broken. This is because it is a divinely created fact not a code. The Law of the Story is like the Law of Gravity is like the Universal Moral Law. Something may break if we try to defy the law of gravity, but it won't be the law of gravity. It could be a limb. Sayers says, "There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian Church calls "the natural law." The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behavior; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called "judgments of God." The universal moral law (or natural law of humanity) is discoverable, like any other law of nature, by experience. It cannot be promulgated, it can only be ascertained, because it is a question not of opinion but of fact."186 When we say "justice is part legal and part natural" we are getting at the distinction between the moral code and the natural law. It should be stressed that the universal moral law is not some Christian invention. It is more primordial than that. The Apostle Paul implies that it originated with our creation. He writes, "Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them"(Romans 2:14-15). And Cicero, in the first century before Christ had already said, "The law of nature is that which is not born of opinion, but implanted in us by a kind of innate instinct."187

It is not always realised that Dostoevsky's timeless novels, such as _Crime and Punishment_ , _The Brothers Karamazov_ and _Notes from the Underground_ were written in critical reply to Chernyshevsky's _What is to be done?_ Raskolnikov is a law student in _Crime and Punishment_ who believes that "extraordinary individuals" can justifiably commit crimes in order to create better laws and a better society. There is an old pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, who he feels is no good for society. He murders her along with her sister, Lizaveta, an innocent witness. His soul then descends into an interminable, living hell. The question he agonisingly keeps churning over is not "What is to be done?," but "What have I done?" He keeps reading into circumstances not "How could things be made better?," but "Are the police onto me?" His attempts at justifying his behaviour are pathetic: "I killed a vile, pernicious louse, a little old money-lending crone who was of no use to anyone, to kill whom is worth forty sins forgiven, who sucked the life-sap from the poor—is that a crime?" It is his life that breaks. The universal moral law remains.

It is similar in Shakespeare's _King Richard III_. Far from making glorious summer as he surmises, the "sun" of York, in villainously plotting to dispose of his enemies, begins to usher in the winter of discontent that he thought he had left behind. The universal moral law has always stayed with him. Neither the Duke of Gloucester nor Raskolnikov are really masters of their destiny. They are not the measure of all things and certainly not the measure of the moral law. In the end, the universal moral law has the measure of them. Raskolnikov believed that his individual freedom in making moral choices was paramount, but Dostoevsky understood what happens when human choice is placed above responsibility towards God. In the words of one of his characters, Shigalov, "Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism."

As mere characters, neither the Duke of Gloucester nor Raskolnikov can really defy the Law of the Story that the authors decreed for their literary worlds. They just illustrate it. And in doing so they reveal what authentically consummate authors Shakespeare and Dostoevsky were.

Fake characters and fake plots

In contrast, the fake consequences to the choices of Chernyshevsky's characters reveal what a fake author he is. In _What is to be Done?_ Kirsanov takes his friend Lopukhov's wife, the heroine Vera Pavlovna, to be his own. How does Lopukhov repond? With perfect acquiescence! He even goes so far as to fake his own death to free his wife to marry Kirsanov. This is where we roll our eyes and do a facepalm. We know that this is not how real humans respond in such circumstances. A more plausible scenario is that Lopukhov causes the real death of his now rival and ex-friend and makes it look like she did it! Try as she might, the real human, Barbara Branden, could not submit to sharing her husband with her cult leader, Ayn Rand. She got a divorce. Try as he might, Rand's husband, Frank O'Conner, could not get his psyche to accept the situation either. He took to drink. The universal moral law stayed with them all. Chernyshevsky's violation of the Law of the Story exposes him for the fake artist and phoney philosopher of the world he is. Rand really should have got her moral philosophy from a better source. And Greenspan should have got his moral philosophy from a better source than her.

Jesus used some of his strongest language against those who hurt little children (Luke 17:2). We saw earlier the actions of the psychopath Hickman on a young girl. As directly brutal as they were, the horror was local. The horror that Chernyshevsky perpetrated on children was insidious and vast. One of the greatest fears children have is abandonment. Chernyshevsky triggered that fear for countless children using fake characters and fake plots. His character, the "heroine" Vera Pavlovna, inspired many Russian women to ignore the biological fact of parental care in _Homo sapiens_ to the extent of abandoning their children.188 How is that for dispensing with natural law? Child abandonment became so serious in the Soviet Union that special laws were promulgated to try to combat the problem.189 How relevant is Scripture's admonition, "As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor" (Ecclesiastes 10:1).

Rakhmetov, Kirsanov, Pavlovna and Lopukhov are implausible propaganda pieces also exposing Chernyshevsky for being the phoney author that he is. They are, in the words of philosopher James Scanlan, "sham egoists with their contrived goodness."190 They all sound so much the same that his _What is to be Done?_ becomes, to use philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's term, "monological." It just does not work. "For," as Sayers says, "if a character becomes merely a mouthpiece of the author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living creation."191 The "merely" is important. Characters _may_ represent the author, but must remain true to themselves to satisfy the Law of the Story.192

In contrast to Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky resists the temptation to make Raskolnikov merely a type of his nemesis. Neither does he let any one character represent himself. His characters are rich, varied and polyphonous. Dostoevsky was wise in his choice of the ultimate authority. Mikhail Bakhtin insightfully says that "it is not a world of objects illuminated and ordered by his monological thinking that unrolls before Dostoevsky, but... a world of coupled philosophical orientations. He searches among them for the highest, most authoritative orientation, and he thinks of it not as his own true thought, but as another true person and his word. The image of the ideal, man or the image of Christ represents for him the solution of ideological quests."193

The Law of the Story has the measure of Chernyshevsky

Chernyshevsky rejected the Ultimate Authority, but in the end the universal moral law had the measure of him. A mere character cannot display the height of intellectual egotism towards the Author without consequence. Following Nabokov, Brian Boyd describes the last chapters of the life of Chernyshevsky. Boyd calls it fate, but we can also call it, in Dorothy Sayers's terms, "tragic irony" or the unfolding of the Law of the Story. Boyd notes that "Chernyshevsky's life continually undermines his own philosophy, as if fate took revenge on him for his beliefs. Chernyshevsky is a materialist, but almost blind and deaf to the material world: short sighted, living in abstractions and books, unable to tell beer from Madeira, Siberian flora from European, a horsefly from a wasp. A lover of mass audiences, he ends in the near-solitude of exile, where the few around him pay him no heed. A believer in common sense, he is surrounded by madmen, a neurotic wife, a psychotic son. A champion of at least a certain kind of freedom, he wins for himself only imprisonment and leaves behind a legacy of censorship. Grimmest irony of all, perhaps, he had aspired to invent a perpetual motion machine as the first step to a material solution to the problems of life, and instead in his last years becomes such a machine himself, translating "with machine-like steadiness volume after volume of Georg Weber's Universal History" in order to support his family, thereby turning his brain "into a forced labor factory" that represents "the greatest mockery of human thought.""194 Vicissitude, thy name is Chernyshevsky!

Chernyshevsky may have seen himself as an inventive moral genius, but he deceived himself. The Author exposed him for the phoney he was. "God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows" (Galatians 6:7). Moral philosophers have spoken against rational egoism, but the Creator had always been speaking against it through "the natural law."

If Providence seems unduly harsh towards Chernyshevsky, we need to remember that God remains true to the Law of _his Story_. If he didn't he would be as capricious as Chernyshevsky. The Law of his Story must have its way. We can now return to our earlier question. Why did God not keep the _What is to be done?_ manuscripts hidden in the snow? Is it not because he is too authentic an Author to do that? He allows his creatures, even a Chernyshevsky, full sway to express themselves. Does he not turn his nose up at censorship? He has a better way; he raises up a Dostoevsky. (And in response to a Ralph Waldo Emerson he raises up a Herman Melville). God's creation is polyphonous. It contains true prophets and phonies - and all categories in between. God even allows naysayers to call his Son illegitimate (John 8:41) and possessed by Beelzebul (Mark 3:22)! This gives Scripture that ring of truth. Polyphony does not guarantee anything. Dostoevsky failed to prevent a Lenin and his Red Terror, an Ayn Rand and her Galt and an Alan Greenspan and his global financial meltdown. But Dostoevsky said what needed to be said. For those who are prepared to hear, there are characters in God's story through whom he speaks.

Dorothy Sayers says, "Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name. The itch for personally knowing authors torments most of us; we feel that if we could somehow get at the man himself, we should obtain more help and satisfaction from him than from his chosen self-revelation."195 If this is true for Shakespeare, how much more is it so for the Creator himself!

The Authentic Author's Literary Incarnation

But we do not need to speculate. The Novel that this Author has written also came complete with a Literary Incarnation and God has spoken most acutely through him. Let us be very clear. When Jesus said, "I and the Father are one"(John 10:30) and "Very truly I tell you... before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58), he is being even more ravingly egomaniacal than Rakhmetov and the King of Id. Unless, that is, his claims are true. From the crowd's reaction, "At this, they picked up stones to stone him," (John 8:59) it is clear they understood him to be asserting equality with God. Jesus is saying in effect, "I am not a mere character in this story, but its Author!" Is Jesus authentic or is he a phoney? And he is being no less egomaniacal when he says, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). He is claiming for himself the very highest professional capacity for himself in being both Author and saviour.

We saw earlier that for Jesus, performance was not enough, the person has to be trustworthy. Jesus supplied the criteria of credentials, moral character, and peer review to be used in combination in the evaluation of persons. If there was any need for anyone to meet those criteria, it is Jesus himself. There is so much at stake. Let us apply the wisdom of Jesus _to_ Jesus. How does he measure up?

One clue that he has credentials as the Author is that he had an unusual entrance into and exit out of the story. He comes into the story from outside so to speak. The virgin birth (Matthew 1:18-25) and ascension (Acts 1:9-11) vindicate his claims to authorship. Another clue is that he can rewrite the plot. We call them miracles. He doesn't do this willy nilly, because that would be capriciously violating the Law of his story. When he does so it is in fulfillment of prophecy and to demonstrate that he had credentials and moral character. It is this _combination_ that testifies to his Authorship.

There is a problem. None of us are really up to being a peer of Jesus Christ. We require an endorsement from none other than God the Father. And he has via the fulfillment of prophecy. Only the Author could know ahead of time how his story will unfold, so that the fulfillment of prophecy is equivalent to the Father's testifying on the Son's behalf. This is why Jesus does not merely perform miracles, he does so in fulfillment of prophecy. The problems with miracles on their own, as systematic theologian Colin Brown points out, is that "Satan too could perform wonders" which is why "the Christian faith is not based on the stupendous alone."196 The importance of the combination of miracles and fulfillment of prophecy was pointed out as long ago as Origen, "Greater evidential value than that of the miracles then performed attaches to the comparison which we now make between these miracles and the prophecy of them; this makes it impossible for the student to cast any doubt on the former."197 So when John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?" (Matthew 11:3), Jesus replies by pointing to "Scriptures that testify about me." He says, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor" (Matthew 11:4-5). But his reply is in the language of Isaiah's prophecy, "The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners ..." (Isaiah 61:1). Jesus has authentic credentials. He was appointed by the Sovereign Lord. And the Holy Spirit confirms this in our hearts. When Simon Peter says to Jesus, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" Jesus replies, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:16-17).

Similarly, it is _combination_ of the miracles of Jesus and his moral character that establishes his trustworthiness as a person and this has been known for some time. Colin Brown summarises it well, "For Calvin, following the injunctions of Deuteronomy 13, it was more important to test the teaching of the wonder-worker than to be impressed by his feats. For Origen one of the marks that clearly distinguished the miracles of Jesus from the works of magicians was Christ's concern for righteousness. For Calvin true miracles bring glory to God, whereas pseudomiracles may be recognized by the way that they promote the glory of man."198

Thus, for instance, Jesus restores the blind man's sight to heal _and to_ demonstrate that he speaks the truth when he says, "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). He makes the loaves and fish to feed the hungry _and to_ demonstrate that he speaks the truth when he says, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). He raises Lazarus from the dead to restore him to life _and to_ demonstrate that he speaks the truth when he says, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die" (John 11:25). Not only does Jesus have peer-review from the highest possible quarter, but has genuine credentials and sublime character.

The searching ordeal of incarnation

Sayers says, "Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation."199 And nobody but a fake could fail so dismally as Rakhmetov's creator. The contrast between Jesus and Rakhmetov with his contrived credentials and hollow character is most striking. Rakhmetov lies on a bed of nails to prove that he is above the trivialities of comfort; Jesus allows his wrists to be pierced through with nails to prove his love for us. Rakhmetov is preoccupied with self as one desperately trying to convey that he is self-assured; Jesus is the self-assured one who is preoccupied with others. Like Rakhmetov, Jesus wants the best for the people, but he promises tribulation not utopia. If not even God Incarnate can be gung ho about the prospects of utopia, what the heck is a mere human creature being so? But despite tribulation, Jesus promises the abundant life for those who are in him. Like Rakhmetov, Jesus comes with knowledge, but he doesn't try to grasp at omniscience (Philippians 2:6).

If intellectual egotism fails in earthly matters, how it collapses with heavenly matters! No human can have direct experience of God and live. None of us are suitably qualified to evaluate him. A mere character presuming to evaluate the Author is intellectual egotism indeed? What is to be done? Nothing! He has done it all. Through Christ, God has made himself accessible to all. He has provided us his Son to evaluate. He is not calling us to a credulous trust. On the contrary, through the cross he provided the most acute examination of a person's character.

The searching ordeal of the crucifixion

So, let us test the character of Jesus under the most excruciating of circumstances. Let us check for authenticity while he is dying agonisingly on the cross. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" In that desperate cry of dereliction it looked to all the world _and_ to the personal experience of God Incarnate that the Father had abandoned him. In the words of philosopher Jason Wirth, "The Man of Sorrows who experiences the agony of mortality is not an image of the self-evidence of the objects that command our confidence."200 But the Authentic Author was remaining true to the Law of _his_ Story. He allows the wicked full sway to the extent of letting them put his own Son to an agonising death. And there was much more going on here than the physical pain, suffering and death. We can all die in the loving embrace of the Father, but the Son of God didn't.

From the human point of view we could understand the Son of Man relying on his sense experience and summoning those legions of angels to take him off the cross. He had the authority to do so (Matthew 26:53), but it would have meant the breaking of the Law of _his_ Story. Jesus was being true to the story of life. Philosopher-theologian Nancey Murphy says, " ... the secret of life is that it is a passion play. Things perish in tragedy."201 When political egos and religious egos brushed up against the Exposer of egos, something had to give. God Incarnate chose to take the give to keep that Law intact. They go much further, but this point is emphasised by Nancey Murphy and cosmologist George Ellis in their _On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics_. They write, "God appears to work in concert with nature, never overriding or violating the very processes that God has created This account of the character of divine action as refusal to do violence to creation, whatever the cost to God, has direct implications for human morality; it implies a "kenotic" or self-renunciatory ethic, according to which one must renounce self-interest for the sake of the other, no matter what the cost to oneself."202 Jesus chose to obey his Father and he chose not to defy the wicked political or religious forces, allowing himself to be broken. He was silent as he was led away to be executed. He did not shrug as he buckled under the weight of the world's sin. He did not call on divine government to bail him out even though he was innocent. He who flung the stars into space let this world crush him to death. He went to the cross in a plan decided from the beginning of time. The ransom was paid as his anguished Father looked on. He went into the red so that we could go into the black. Here is the prophet of _other_ ishness. At the cross, the Prophet taught us that evil is real and so character is crucial. Jesus models what is to be done. When humans come into expertise, as we have seen, they frequently stray into areas outside their domain. It is not so with God Incarnate. Jesus was no intellectual egotist. The Holy One remains true to his calling to save the world rather than judge it, praying, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34 ). Jesus did his thing and left judgment to his Father. This is intellectual humility. This is authenticity. This is deference to Another's greater authority and omniscience. And the Father deferred to the Son. His omniscience and omnipotence makes it difficult for him to be accessible to us. When he comes in his knowledge and power, he is inscrutable and tends to scare us away (Moses was being reckless in asking to see his glory). This is why he needed the human mind of Jesus. Even the Father defers to another mind. And this why he needed the human death of Jesus.

But notice that Jesus still referred to his Father as "My God." Jesus forwent omniscience, but that does not mean he forwent knowledge. Even in dying this ignominious death he does not have the false humility to say, "I don't know anything anymore." He had set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem and predicted his death, let us be clear about that. The phoney, Judas Iscariot, had not duped him. Jesus knew what he knew within his domain. He knew that he was the saviour of the world. He was a professional saviour.

The issue, now, is our response to God. Are we going to defer to him or seek another way? God has built into us a thirst for the abundant life. If we do not seek it through the Way, the Truth and the Life, we will seek it elsewhere. And the Law of the Story, far from being invalidated, will be accentuated by Christ. After him we can no longer be satisfied with the status quo. When the baby Jesus is presented by Joseph and Mary in the temple, Simeon, moved by the Spirit arrives, picks him up and says, "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed" (Luke 2:34). Simeon saw prophetically the spiritual dynamic that Jesus changes everything for the better _and_ the worse depending on our response to _him_. Jesus is not exposed by those that respond negatively to him, they and their hearts are. Jesus does not negate the universal moral law; he exacerbates it. Those that contradict Christ will discover their own lives contradicting them. For he cannot abide us not abiding in him. He will not give us the option of having just a little bit of him - a Christian veneer. He forces a choice. So he says, "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth"(Revelation 15-16) He would rather let us fall so that we genuinely come to him. So he says, "Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place" (Revelation 2:5).

The definitive measure of character

The apostle John said "many false prophets have gone out into the world," and provided a simple test to spot them – whether they acknowledged Jesus Christ (1 John 4:1-3). Jesus is always the best yardstick for measuring character. How we react to him reflects not on him, but on us. He is not on trial; we are. When the Marquis de Sade called Jesus a scoundrel, Jesus was not exposed. The term 'sadist' is derived from the name of the one who was. A story is told of man visiting the Louvre in Paris and looking at the most valuable collection of paintings. Try as he might, they didn't mean anything to him. "These paintings aren't anything special," he said. The guide turned to him and said, "These paintings are not on trial. You are!"

This analogy is closer to home than it appears at first blush since Ayn Rand disliked Shakespeare203 and Rembrandt; Mozart and Bach were "pre-musical", Brahms was "worthless".204 And what was her take on Christ? She said, "... according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the non-ideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice."205 Can there be any doubt that her inspiration has a diabolical source? She had her prophet, the liar and thief who came to steal and destroy, and he surely has. She was indeed the prophet of selfishness.

If the Law of Story seems harsh in judgement, it is also wondrous in grace. Dostoevsky experienced this spiritual dynamic in his own life. He was far from being a saint, as he freely admits. For a time he distanced himself from Christ, but then he returned to grace. His novel could equally justifiably be entitled _Judgement and Grace_. Judgement and grace are never far away from Raskolnikov.

And so that spiritual dynamic also unfolds in Raskolnikov's life. He sees the plight of the poor and wants a better life for them. Instead of pursuing it in God's way, he believes he can justifiably commit crimes to create a better society. The moral order does not apply to him. He believes himself to be an "extraordinary man" so reminiscent of Chernyshevsky's "new men." He is a man like Napoleon. But Raskolnikov fails to change society for the better and his own life contradicts him. He keeps resisting, but his inner torment, the consequence of judgement or the Law of the Story keeps prompting him to repent. He talks to his friend Sonya about the murders. She has a copy of the New Testament. He asks her where she obtained it. She replies, "Lizaveta." Recall that Lizaveta is the sister of the pawnbroker, Alyona, and one of his murder victims. The Hound of Heaven is calling him to repent yet again. Raskolnikov eventually confides to Sonya that it was he that murdered them. She recoils in horror but continues to love him. As if in response both to Raskolnikov and Chernyshevsky, she exclaims, ""What to do!"... Go now, this minute, stand in the crossroads, bow down, and first kiss the earth you've defiled, then bow to the whole world, on all four sides, and say aloud to everyone: 'I have killed!' Then God will send you life again." Sonya is representing both the author and the Author.

Dostoevesky saw that without Christ, no one and no system can find the abundant life. Napoleon could not do it and Chernyshevsky could not do it. How prescient he was! Neither democratic nor fascist nor communist systems have been able to do it. The Third Reich was immediately preceded by the corrupt Weimar Republic. Communism brought the Red Terror. Neither socialism nor capitalism have been able to do it. Adam Weiner notes the irony that whereas Rand was the arch-capitalist, Chernyshevsky was the arch-socialist. The clever, godless, egoist can take advantage of any system. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith quipped, "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."206 Elaborate socio-political systems do not solve the human condition of selfishness, but may well foster dystopia; they are elaborate devices honed by the clever in exploiting the masses. The phonies will tell us otherwise, but the Jesus taught us that we have a critical need for divine grace and is the embodiment of that grace. It is a grace that was both bought for us on the cross and modelled there. Jesus is both the power and the light to keep us from the insidiously destructive curse of intellectual egotism. Abiding in the Authentic Author "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"(Colossians 2:3) is sensible indeed!

At the end of _Crime and Punishment_ , Dostoevsky hints that Raskolnikov, who is in prison and sentenced to hard labour, has begun a journey towards redemption and a new life in Christ: "Under his pillow lay the Gospels. He took the book out mechanically. It belonged to her, it was the same one from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus... But here begins a new account, the account of a man's gradual renewal, the account of his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality. It might make the subject of a new story—but our present story is ended."

And so is this book.

About Mike L Anderson

Mike has a PhD in the philosophy of evolutionary biology from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has taught philosophy of science at Wits and taught evolution and coordinated a graduate course in religion and science at the University of Cape Town. He is a writer and educational software developer and plays Starcraft.

Email address:

Other titles by Mike L Anderson

Microbes and the Master: How God uses the brainless to expose human folly

Double-crossing the Cross?: The intel on intelligent design

The Creator on the cross: Science in the light of Christ and him crucified

A Horde of Humbugs

Bee Wise

According to Jesus?

Is Jesus an Evolutionist?

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mikelanderson

Notes

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51 Quoted in Forde, G.O. (1997) _On being a theologian of the cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation_ , 1518. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, p. 78.

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60 Quoted in Vezzani(2013) ibid.

61 Hill, C. (2006) How to Think Like A Horse: The Essential Handbook for Understanding Why Horses Do What They Do. Story Publishing, Massachusetts.

62 Emerson, R.W. (1950) _The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson_. Random House, Inc., New York. p. 145.

63 Quoted in Tribble, S. (2009) _A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America_. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham, p. xi. To be fair, scientific disciplines were still in early development so that the distinction between expert and novice was not as clear cut as it is today. They have much more excuse than we do.

64 Murphy, J. (2012) _The Giant and how he Humbugged America_. Scholastic Press, New York. p. 71.

65 Quoted in Tribble, S. (2009) p. 156.

66 Quoted in Tribble, S. (2009) p. 184.

67 Murphy, J. (2012) _The Giant and how he Humbugged America_. Scholastic Press, New York. p. 50.

68 Hanson, N.R (1965) _Patterns of Discovery_ , The University Press, Cambridge, p. 7.

69 Melville, H. (1987) _Melville's Marginalia_. W. Cowen (Ed.). Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, p. 525.

70 Melville, H. (1993) _Correspondence._ L. Horth (Ed). Northwestern University Press, Chicago, p. 121.

71 Murphy, J. (2012) p. 104.

72 Tribble, S. (2009) p. 91.

73 Quoted in Koppl, R. (2017) Shocked Disbelief. In F.A. Doria (Ed.) _The Limits Of Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences: The Significance of Godel's Incompleteness Phenomenon,_ World Scientific Publishing, London, p. 134.

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76 Mankiw, N.G (2007 ) _Principles of Economics_. Thomson South-Western, Mason, p.35.

77 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011) _The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report Of The National Commission On The Causes Of The Financial And Economic Crisis In The United States_ , January 2011.

78 McLean, G. ( 2017) Christians and the Academic Task. _St. Mark's review: a journal of Christian thought and opinion_ 241(3): 60 - 81.

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81 Stevenson, R.W. (1992) Keating Is Sentenced to 10 Years For Defrauding S.& L. Customers _New York Times_. 11 April p. 43.

82 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011). p. xviii

83 http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/bill-black-how-elite-economic-hucksters-drive-americas-biggest-fraud-epidemics.html

84 Quoted in Sheehan, F.J. (2010) _Panderer to power: The untold story of how Alan Greenspan enriched Wall Street and left a legacy of recession_. McGraw Hill, New York, p. 53.

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86 Yves Smith, Y. (2010) _Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism._ Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p.224. Yves Smith is a pseudonym.

87 Quoted in Auerbach, R.D. (2008) _Deception and abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan's Bank._ University of Texas Press, p. 51.

88 Auerbach, R.D. (2008) pp. 51.

89Centerbery E.R. (2006) p. 38.

90 Auerbach, R.D. (2008) pp. 50 - 51.

91 Auerbach, R.D. (2008) p. 53.

92 Sheehan, F.J. (2010) p.104.

93 Taibbi, M. (2010) _Griftopia: The story of bankers, politicians, and the most audacious power grab in American history_. p. 38.

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97 Tucille, J. (2002) p. 71.

98 Sapp, E. (2011) Why Democrats Must Read Ayn Rand https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-sapp/ayn-rand-democrats_b_855797.html

99 Gerson, M. (2011) Ayn Rand's adult-onset adolescence. The Washington Post, 21 April.

100 Quoted in Grayling, A.C. (2015) _The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times._ Bloomsbury, London, p. 89.

101 Quoted in Cochran, R. F. (2017) Jesus, Agape and Law. In _Agape, Justice, and Law_

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102 Merrill R.E. and Enright, M. F. (2013) _Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party_. Open Court, Chicago, p. 11.

103 Gurley, G. (2012) Jump on the Rand Wagon! How Ryan Resurrected Ayn. https://observer.com/2012/08/paul-ryan-ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged/2/

104 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/

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109 Rachels, J. (2012) _The Elements of Moral Philosophy_. McGraw-Hill, New York, p.81.

110 Brons, L.L. (2017) _The Hegemony of Psychopathy_. Brainstorm Books, Santa Barbara, California, p. 58.

111 Rand, A. (1971) _The Fountainhead_. Signet Books, New York, p. 25.

112 Rand (1992) Atlas Shrugged Signet, New York, p. 1070.

113 Levine, B. (2011) How Ayn Rand Seduced Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. into an Uncaring Nation http://brucelevine.net/how-ayn-rand-seduced-young-men-and-helped-make-the-u-s-into-an-uncaring-nation/

114 Flynn, D.J. ()Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

115 J. Byrd, D.J. (2015) A Critique of Ayn Rand's Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to Galt. Lexington Books, Maryland, pp. xi-xii.

116 Quoted in Robin, C. (2011) _The Reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.84.

117 Hart, D.B. (2016) _A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays._ William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pp. 113-114.

118 Bell-Villada, G.H. (2004) Who Was Ayn Rand? _Salmagundi_ , No. 141/142: 227-242.

119 Rand (1968) _The Fountainhead_ Introduction to the 25th Edition. New American Library, New York, p. xi.

120 J. Byrd, D.J. (2015) A Critique of Ayn Rand's Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to Galt. Lexington Books, Maryland, p. xii.

121 Robin, C. (2011) _The Reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 85.

122 Burns, J. (2009) Goddess Of The Market - Ayn Rand And The American Right. Oxford University Press, p. 2.

123 Quoted by Martens, P. (2012) Ayn Rand: the Tea Party's Miscast Matriarch. _Counterpunch_. https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/ayn-rand-the-tea-partys-miscast-matriarch/

124 Chambers, W. (1957) Big Sister Is Watching You. _National Review_ , December 28th. https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/

125 Bell-Villada, G.H. (2004) Who Was Ayn Rand? Salmagundi, No. 141/142: 227-242.

126 Robin, C. (2011) _The Reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 76.

127 O'Connor, F. (1979) _The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor_. Random House, Inc., New York, p. 398.

128 Flynn, D.J. (2004) _Intellectual morons: how ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas_. Crown Forum, p. 204.

129 Conducted on 13 October 2018.

130 Levine, B.E. (2014) One nation under Galt: How Ayn Rand's toxic philosophy permanently transformed America. https://www.salon.com/2014/12/15/one_nation_under_galt_how_ayn_rands_toxic_philosophy_permanently_transformed_america_partner/

131 Robin, C. (2011) _The Reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 95.

132 Rand wrote, "Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen—and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman." Harriman, D. Ed. (1997) _The Journals of Ayn Rand_. Dutton Books., p. 285.

133 Leatherbarrow, W.J. and D. Olford (2010) _A History of Russian Though_ t. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 117.

134 Nietzsche, F. (2006) _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.152.

135 J. Byrd, D.J. (2015) A Critique of Ayn Rand's Philosophy of Religion: The Gospel According to Galt. Lexington Books, Maryland, pp. 51-68.

136 Rand, A. (1957) _Atlas shrugged_. Random House, New York, p. 1022.

137 Branden, N. (1999) _My Years with Ayn Rand_. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, New Jersey, p.213.

138 Vidal, G. (1961) Comment. _Esquire_ July, p. 26.

139 Rand, A. (1957) p. 1018.

140 Grayling, A.C. (2015) _The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times._ Bloomsbury, London, p. 92.

141 Tucille, J. (2002) _Alan shrugged: The life and times of the world's most powerful banker._ John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p. 88.

142 Tucille, J. (2002) p. 52.

143 Grayling, A.C. (2015) _The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times._ Bloomsbury, London, p. 91.

144 Quoted in Baker, S.W. (2011) Ayn Rand Was a Hypocritical Monster _. Friends of the middle Newsletter_ #38, 20 December.

145 Bell-Villada, G.H. (2004) Who Was Ayn Rand? _Salmagundi_ , No. 141/142: 227-242.

146 Harriman, D. Ed. (1997) _The Journals of Ayn Rand_. Dutton Books., p. 27.

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148 Niswonger, R. L. (1992) _New Testament History_. Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, p. 164

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152 Vidal, G. (1961) Comment. _Esquire_ July, p. 26.

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166 Nabokov, V. (1923) _The Gift_. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, p.262.

167 Quoted in Berlin, I. (1959) _Karl Marx: His Life and Environment_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 255.

168 Nabokov, V. (1923) pp. 229- 230.

169 Rogers, J.A. (1963) The Russian Populists' Response to Darwin. _Slavic Review_ 22(3): 456-468.

170 Vucinich, A. (1988) _Darwin in Russian Thought_. University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 147.

171 Gindikin,S. (2007) _Tales of Mathematicians and Physicists_. Springer Science+Business Media LLC, New York, p.32.

172 Leatherbarrow, W.J. (1992) _Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 7.

173 Leatherbarrow, W.J. and D. Olford (2010) _A History of Russian Though_ t. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 118.

174 Emerson, R.W. (1950) The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Random House, Inc., New York, p. 246.

175 Quoted in Reeve, F.D. (1989) The white monk: an essay on Dostoevsky and Melville. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, p. 24.

176 Walicki, A. (2015) _The flow of ideas: Russian thought from the enlightenment to the religious-philosophical renaissance_. Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt, p. 283.

177 Kantor, Vladimir (2015) The Man of Golgotha Versus Barabbas: Chernyshevsky and Herzen Squaring off over Russia. _Russian Studies in Literature_. 51(2): 66–100.

178 Paperno, I. (1988) _Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism._ Stanford University Press, Stanford, p. 207.

179 Gray, J. (2014) A Point of View: The writer who foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30129713

180 Gibson, A. B. (1973 ) _The Religion of Dostoevsky_. Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, p.80.

181 Jha P. (2012) Avoidable deaths from smoking: a global perspective. _Public Health Reviews_. 33:569-600.

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183 Serdiuchenko, V. ( 2002) The Futurology of Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky. _Russian Studies in Literature_. 38(4): 58-76.

184 Frede, V. (2011) _Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia_. University of Wisconsin Press,Wisconsin, p. 147.

185 Weiner, A. (2016) _How Bad Writing Destroyed the World - Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis._ Bloomsbury Academic, New York, p. 20.

186 Sayers, D.L. (1941) T _he Mind of the Maker._ Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, p. 7.

187 Quoted in Cunningham, S. B. (1967) Albertus Magnus on Natural Law. _Journal of the History of Ideas_ 28(4): 479 - 502.

188 Walder, D. (1995) _The Realist Novel: Approaching Literature_. Routledge, New York, p. 188.

189 Lewis Siegelbaum, L. and A. Sokolov (2000) _Stalinism as a Way of_

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190 Scanlan, J.P. (1999) The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground." _Journal of the History of Ideas_ , 60(3): 549-567.

191 Sayers, D.L. (1941) T _he Mind of the Maker._ Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, p. 41.

192 What then of Jesus who said, "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me"(John 8:28)?But the Father is not an Author with respect to to Jesus - authentic or otherwise. Jesus never was a living creation. He is not a creature; he is the Creator. He is not a character; he is the Author. Nevertheless, Jesus had his own will. In going to the cross he _chose_ to defer to his Father. He said, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will" (Matthew 26:39).

193 Bakhtin, M. (2005) The Idea in Dostoevsky's Works. In Fyodor Dostoevsky: Blooms BioCritiques. Chelsea House Publishers, Langhorne, p. 135.

194 Boyd, B, (1990) _Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years_. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, p. 457.

195 Sayers, D.L. (1941) _The Mind of the Maker_. Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, pp. 44-45.

196 Brown, C. (1984) _Miracles and the Critical Mind_. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapid, Michigan, p. 18.

197 Quoted in Brown, C. (1984) p. 6.

198 Brown, C. (1984) p. 18.

199 Sayers, D.L. (1941) _The Mind of the Maker_. Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, p. 74.

200 Wirth, J. M. (2018) The Self without Character: Melville's The Confidence-Man and Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. _Humanities_ 7: 1-12.

201 Murphy, N.C. (1999) God's non-violent direct action. In _Reading the universe through science, religion and ethics: The evolving science and religion debate_. C.W. du Toit (Ed.). Proceedings of the sixth seminar of the South African Science and Religion Forum (SASRF) of the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, Unisa, Pretoria.

202 Murphy, N.C. and G. F. R. Ellis (1996) _On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics_. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p. xv.

203 Merrill R.E. and Enright, M. F. (2013) Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party. Open Court, Chicago, p. 20.

204 Heller, A. C. (2009) _Ayn Rand and the World She Made_. Doubleday, New York, p. 399.

205 Quoted in Mark Dever, M. and T. M. Lawrence (2010 _) It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement_. Crossway Books, Wheaton, p. 77.

206 Quoted in Chang, H. (2008) _Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity_ , RH Business Books, p. 102.
