Contents

Act One: Philosophical Misadventures

Man is not a Rational Animal
What Happens When We Reason
The Fallibility of Human Logic
The Sherlock Holmes Fallacy
The Use of the Word “Universal” is not Universal: The Naive Human Belief in Universality
Aristotle’s Sillygism
The Fallacy of the Prisoners’ Dilemma
Losing Your Mind: The Problem with the Concept of Mind
The Colossal Cartesian Blunder
What Does a Bee Look Like to a Bee? The Perceptual Multiverse
Does Dark Matter Really Exist?
God is Not a Quantum-Uncertainty Hoarder
The Cloud Cuckoo Land of False Ideas
To See Patterns Where None Exist
The Fallacy of Round Numbers
Debunking Philosophy: The Foolish Quest for Infallibility
What is Real?
The Primary Failure of Modern Education

Act Two: Free-Market Folly: Why Economics is not a Science
Scene One: Financial Speculation and Corporations

How to Spot a Revolutionary: A Revolutionary by Any Other Name Would Smell as Foul
A Modest Proposal to Settle a Difference of Opinion
The Creation of Wealth
What is a Thing Worth? Determining the Values of Things
How Much Wealth Does One Person Need? Money Does Not Make the World Go Round
Greed is Bad
All that Glitters is not Gold: Not All that is Called Investment is Investment
Speculation Fever: The Alchemy of Making Money from Money
Financial Speculation is a Form of Gambling
Greed is the Root of All Speculation
Predatory Investment: The Rise of Financial Piracy
Speculative versus Real Growth: How to Reform the Stock Market
The Very Strange Nature of Corporate Ownership: An Alternative to the Rumpelstiltskin Model of Raising Funds
The Separation of Corporate Interests
The Financial Equivalent of Snake Oil
Gold, Money, and Invented Currencies

Act Two, Scene Two: The Fallacy of Free Trade

Worship Not the GDP
Free Trade Means Less Life and More Death: When the Free Market Becomes the Blind Market
What You See is What You Know: How to Overcome the Grave Dangers of Human Myopia
The Free Market is not Free: The Grave Inefficiency of the Price Mechanism
Capitalism’s Greatest Defect
Comparative Advantage for Whom? The Rise of Corporate Tyranny
No to “Autarky”
The Myth of the Trickle-Down Effect

Act Two, Scene Three: Some Social Considerations

The Myth of Individualism
The Breakdown of the Social Bond: The Important Difference between Small, Stable Communities and Large, Anonymous Cities
The Destruction of Community
To Deny Cooperation is a Form of Tyranny
Rousseau was Wrong about our Origins and the Origin of Inequality
The Flaws of Meritocracy
The Inclusive Society: Switching from Competition to Mutually-Beneficial Cooperation
What is Work?
Single-Use versus Multi-Use: Managed or Cooperative Capitalism

Act Two, Scene Four: Personal Matters, Liberty, and Poverty

The Folly of Anarchy: The Important Difference between Freedom and License
The Need for Regulations
The Pursuit of Happiness
The US Political System is Absurd: The Founding Vampires
All Roads Lead Back to Reagan: The Pestilence of Preposterous Pay
Manufactured Demand
The Formation of Taste
The Curse of Plenty and How to Solve It
A Few Simple Eating Rules
The Debilitating Effects of Cars and Other Labour-Saving Devices
The Exploitation of Illegal Workers in the United States: The Horrors of Unbridled Price Competition
The Idol of Profit: The Barbaric Practice of Human Sacrifice
Golden Rice is Not the Answer
A Message to the Poor Farmers of the World
Foreign Aid

Act Two, Scene Five: The Economists’ Tragic Myopia

The Best of All Possible Economic Worlds
The Three Deadly Sins: The Pseudo-Nobel Economics Prize
The Wrong Model
The Dismal State of Economics
Economics is not Precise
The Economists’ Brazen Effrontery: The Scylla and Charybdis of Economics
The Historical Context of Books
Rationality and Economics
Marginal Utility is a Highly Marginal Concept
Happiness is not the Same as Utility: Maximizing One’s Utility is not the Best Model
Fear and Economic Demand
The Capitalism Myth: The True Causes of the Great Depression
The Betrayal of the Olympic Ideal
War by Any Other Name is Still War: The Many Harmful Effects of Unbridled Competition
Competition Shall Not Set You Free: The Mirage of Competition and Freedom
The Myth of the Invisible Hand: Why We Need the Guiding Hand of Government
The Lies of Objectivism: The Subjectivism of Ayn Rand
The Due but Difficult Death of a Dangerous Dogma: The Folly of All Utopias
Who Will Judge the Judges?
Corporate Serfdom: The Tyrannical Nature of Corporations
The Imperative Need to Democratize Corporations

Act Three: The Glorious Miracle of Life

The Tyrant King
The Race of Life: The Tortoise and the Hare Revisited
The Earth is the Only Home we have in the Universe: The Impenetrable Interstellar Moat
The Road Not Taken
A Common Misconception about the Second Law of Thermodynamics
The Lion and the Lamb
Darwin’s Blunder
A Case of Mistaken Attribution
The Selfish Gene Does Not Exist
The Evolutionary Conundrum of Human Behaviour
Natural Selection Does not Tell the Whole Story
The Limitations of Natural Selection
The Randomness Principle
Why do Honeybees have Barbed Stingers? The Law of Balance
The Immense Folly of the Scientific Enterprise
The World Does Not Need More Scientists
Science is not always Sensible
The True Cause of Soil Erosion
A New Way to Publish Books
How to Turn a Pest into a Source of Food
The Protective Balance Provided by Microbes
An Alternative to the Farmers’ Market
The Spurious Case for Biological Patent Infringement
Natural versus Organic Farming: The Wise Simplicity of Masanobu Fukuoka
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
The Biological Function of War: To Save Every Human Child
The Important Difference between Success and Longevity: The True Malthusian Catastrophe
The Great Fecundity of Human Barrenness: From Human Barrenness Arises Bounty and Fertility
The Law of Balance and the Grave Dangers of Imbalance
Narcissus’ Plight
The Mona Lisa is Dead
Nietzschean Nonsense and the Nazis
Man, the Measure of his Great Folly
Natural versus Human Intelligence
The Eternal Mystery of Life

Act Four: Our Relationship with God

Why Does Life Continue to Exist?
The Science Myth: The Humanity Experiment
The Many Things that Chance Cannot Beget: The Hamburger Argument and the Conception Fallacy
The Life Project: Pascal’s Wager Writ Large
The Very Silly Problem of Consciousness: The Many Things We Cannot Know
God is Not Dead
God the Divine Programmer
How God Designs Things
How Does God Perceive the Universe? The Spurious Problem of Evil
Our Failure to Understand the Conditions of Life
The Grave Violation of Nature’s Balance
You Are Not God’s Chosen: The Foolish Belief in Divine Inspiration
God Never Asked to be Worshipped: We Have Made God in our Image
The True Nature of God

Act Five: The Only Way Forward is the Way Back

The True Meaning of the Story of the Garden of Eden
The Futile Human Search for Permanence: The Impermanence of All Things Human
Art is Deception
The Myth of Progress: The Paradox of Increased Production
The No-Tech, Low-Tech Revolution
We Must Step Backwards if the Human Race is to Survive
Why Should the First Person to do Something Matter? How New Media Influence Our Idea of Celebrity and the Things We Want to Do
Television is a Brain-Control Device: The Buddha was Right about Human Desire
Life is Worth Living
Go Gently into the Good Night
The Continuum of Life