Cortez conquered the Aztec Empire, in August 1521 (490 years ago, next
month). When the war was over, the Spanish began to investigate the culture of
the conquered people and found, to their amazement, that the people of what
is now Mexico possessed a vast body of medical knowledge based on the
curative qualities of plants.
The Spanish filed reports and sent back to Spain drawings of the
plants with their Aztec names together with information about their curative
powers.
The reaction of the doctors in Spain was immediate. They scoffed at
the value of the supposed medical knowledge of these newly-conquered
“barbarians”. Their argument was: “These primitive people
have no medical theory to support their medical claims. They do not know that
the human body is governed by four humors or liquid spirits in the body: the
choleric, the phlegmatic, the sanguine and the melancholic humors. These
humors are affected by the planets, the Sun and the Moon. When there is no
balance of these humors in the body, then the body is sick. The Aztecs have only
experience upon which to base their medicine; our medicine is vastly
superior because we know the true theory of health, and we deduce our
medicine from the theory. All that medicine from New Spain (Mexico) is
nonsense.”
There is a curious anecdote from the 16th century; an Aztec was
summoned before a court of medical doctors, because he was practicing
medicine without a license. Faced by an accuser, he pulled out a cutting from
an herb from a little bag he was carrying. He asked the accuser to smell it,
which he did. The accuser’s nose began to bleed uncontrollably, it was
a veritable hemorrhage. Nothing could stop it. The Aztec was implored to stop
the bleeding. He pulled out another herb from his bag and gave it to the
bleeding man to smell. The hemorrhage stopped immediately. The case against
the Aztec doctor was dismissed.
Such is the world, and such it will ever be. Today, Ph Ds in Economics infest the landscape. They are
supposed to know a lot more than the rest of us, who refer to experience
in our critical view of the world’s illness, and point out what is
wrong. However, we are not to be taken into account, like the Aztec doctors,
because we do not know the all-important theory. We only have the experience
of centuries, or millennia, to back up our considerations, and that of
course, cuts no ice: no diplomas and no TV time for people who refer to
historical experience; diplomas and kudos and respect are for the theorists,
as possessors of arcane knowledge.
Of course, all of us have preconceived notions about everything, we
couldn’t manage life without them; but some people are able to see past
important preconceived notions, especially those who have spent many years
looking at facts and attempting to make sense out of them. Others can look at
facts and never really see anything, because they are intellectually
lazy or because they just don’t care to set aside generally accepted
opinion and decide for themselves. It’s so much easier to go with the
flow!
Take the case of the Dutchman Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723). He
became wealthy as a cloth merchant. In his youth, as an apprentice to a cloth
merchant, he first saw a magnifying glass, which was used by such merchants
to examine their goods more closely. Later on, he developed a fascination
with lenses; he began to make his own lenses and to apply them to looking at
tiny things which had never been examined before. In 1674 he sent a report to
the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in London, about some tiny
“animalcules”, invisible to the naked eye, which he had seen in
pond water. He wrote to the Royal Society believing them to be open-mined and
interested in his work. Well, the Royal Society disbelieved his account of
these microbes – the first any man had seen! So he had to send them a
letter signed by eight distinguished persons – parsons, doctors and
lawyers – who testified that they had seen the
“animalcules”. The Royal Society, to their credit, did finally
take great interest in Leeuwenhoek’s work, and he sent them 300 letters
describing his incredible discoveries.
He was the first man to see human spermatozoa and he realized that
what he saw was the seed which serves to reproduce all mammals – a fact
which he knew was quite at odds with the “scientific” opinion of
his times.
Leeuwenhoek’s work was not appreciated by many, who criticized
his “lack of scientific preparation”: he had no Ph D. He was only a retired cloth merchant. What could he
know?
Then again, we have Galileo, who first saw the moons that circle
Jupiter, which convinced him that the Earth circles the Sun – an
opinion hateful to the Catholic Church at that time. He barely escaped
burning at the stake, a fate which ended the life of Giordano Bruno in 1600,
who postulated an infinite Universe and the multiplicity of worlds. An
emissary from the Inquisition visited Galileo in his home. Galileo urged him
to look through his telescope and see the moons of Jupiter for himself. The
official refused to look through the telescope. Theory or dogma had to take
precedence. The facts are irrelevant if they do not confirm the theory or
dogma. This attitude prevails to our day, and will always prevail as long as
human nature is what it is. We see it today, in the rejection on the part of
the astrophysics establishment of the new and fascinating theory of the
“electrical universe”.
The experience of the Wright brothers is illuminating with regard to
the Media. The Wright brothers had been flying their airplane on the
outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, for five years before the local newspaper
decided to send a reporter to investigate – the idea of a
heavier-than-air machine taking to the air was unthinkable, why bother?
Now we have the 9/11 delusion. The vast majority of people do not
really see with their own eyes: they “see” what they are
told to see, and will swear by it. Competent civil engineers, observing (with
sound “off”) the collapse of the Twin Towers and of the almost
ignored WTC -7 - a forty seven story building – immediately identified
the event as, unquestionably, a programmed demolition. However, hundreds of
millions of individuals all over the world attribute the collapse of these
buildings to the fact that they were struck by two airplanes, and they will
get angry if you suggest that the buildings could not have collapsed as a
result of those airplanes crashing into them; the fact that WTC-7 collapsed
on its own footprint, like the Twin Towers, and no airplane struck it
is – well, beside the point for these people. Facts are supposed to
confirm a theory; if they do not – then the facts must be shelved.
Archeologist Michael Cremo has written a
thick book, “Forbidden Archeology” which is crammed with
facts proving that Man has existed upon this earth in his present form, for
many millions of years. However, these facts contradict Darwinism, and
Darwinism and Evolution are regarded with religious reverence by
today’s archaeology. So the uncomfortable facts that archeologists come
up with are filtered out of their reports. In their field of investigation,
theory comes first, and only facts which agree with the Darwinian theory of
evolution are reported. Other facts are discreetly ignored.
But the ultimate delusion prevailing in the world for the last forty
years is fiat money. This delusion is so powerful that only a tiny minority
among the close to 7 billion human beings on Earth is aware that it is a
delusion, that all the money being used in the world as money, is in fact not
money, but a simulation of money. Fiat money is now rapidly destroying the
world, but in spite of all the signs pointing to fiat money as the cause, the
foremost brains of the world refuse to acknowledge the fact. Their theories,
which they were taught in prestigious schools and universities, take
precedence over the fact of collapsing economies. As James Grant, publisher
of The Interest Rate Observer points out, we are on a “Ph D Standard” – and the Ph
Ds are taking the world down with their theories. I suspect that if these Ph Ds were injected with a “truth serum”,
they would confess that they don’t actually believe their theories, but
that for personal reasons, they prefer not to question them publicly.
To conclude, I present “Prologue for Our Times”
which I have written for a Spanish translation of Andrew Dickson
White’s masterpiece, “Fiat Money Inflation in France”.
* * * * *
Whoever wishes to understand what is taking place in the world today
would do well to read this small but highly important book, which we have
translated into Spanish: “Fiat Money Inflation in France”,
by Andrew Dickson White, a former President of Cornell University, at one
time in the diplomatic service of the United States, a student of economic
and social affairs and author of numerous books. This book was first
published in 1896, and reprinted in 1933.
This book places before us a microcosm of our present world.
What happened in Revolutionary France in the years 1790 to 1797 is
precisely what is taking place in the whole world in 2011.
The world is living in a process of monetary degeneration which began,
explicitly, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, though its origin lay
in a series of previous financial malpractices dating back years before World
War I; the disastrous conclusion of that process is approaching.
The fiat money inflation in France, whose birth and death took place
in the short span of seven years, originated in a typically
“revolutionary” idea held by the French lawmakers of the period:
that human intelligence can dispense with the permanent and immutable laws
that govern human action and can substitute them with schemes devised by the
intellect, in order to achieve prosperity in the short term without the
bothersome need to exercise the “bourgeois” virtues of savings,
honest work, prudence and patience.
The lawmakers, impatient to resolve the problem of economic malaise
which the Revolution itself had caused, decided to take a short-cut to stimulate
the economy. Faced with popular unrest which cried out that “There
is no money!” they proposed to remedy the supposed lack of money (a
mere symptom) by creating money out of nothing.
Deaf to the warnings of men with financial experience, they confirmed
to one another the supposed validity of their fallacious reasoning;
convincing themselves of the viability of their monetary scheme, the
lawmakers carried forward a project based on fiat money – money
irredeemable in gold or silver.
In spite of the negative results which this policy soon produced
– a steadily falling purchasing power of this fiat money, reflected in
the rising prices of all goods - they insisted on pressing forward on this
mistaken road and attributed the bad results to everything but their policy
of inflation with fictitious money. That invariable law of finance with
regard to fiat money, the law of the acceleration in the issue of fiat
money and its concomitant accelerated depreciation, took possession of
the French legislature.
Seven years later, France was totally ruined. Manufacturing had closed
down. Unemployment was pervasive and consequently the stagnating salaries for
labor brought enormous hardship for the poor, amid rising prices of food,
clothing and fuel. Unemployment was only relieved by the military drafts
which sent millions of Frenchmen to their deaths in the foreign wars. Morals
suffered a precipitous decline. All business activity became a game of
chance. Speculation enriched unscrupulous men and at the same time swept the
poorer classes of the population into misery. Famine forced the government to
dole out bread to the population.
What is perhaps most noteworthy in this fateful French experiment is
that not one of those responsible for the disaster ever acknowledged having
been mistaken. What took place in France, under the régime of fiat
money, is precisely what is happening in our world today. The same phenomena
observed in France in the 18th century can be seen all over the world, today.
Those responsible for the huge world crisis of the present time insist
on continuing down the path that led to this disaster. Not one of those
responsible is willing to recognize that they have all been mistaken. They
insist, as did the French revolutionaries, on applying greater doses of fiat
money: if enough money is created, they say, the problems of the crisis will
be resolved.
The destruction of France took only seven years. The same policy that
destroyed France now operates around the world. Therefore, the moral and
economic destruction has taken longer, since the whole world is the theatre
of this tragedy, and not only one country.
The fatal outcome of this experiment with fiat money will arrive,
sooner or later; it will have worldwide effects and it will take a century,
at least, for the world to regain economic health.
And
when this tragic conclusion shall have arrived, the readers of this little
book may be quite sure that not one of those responsible for the catastrophe
will ever admit that he had been mistaken.
Hugo Salinas Price
President, Mexican Civic Association Pro
Silver
www.plata.com.mx/plata/
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