Title: Confucian Libertarian

Age: Ageless

Location: Sydney, NSW

Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.
-Nietzsche


Bianzheng lunzhi (辨证论治)
In Classical Chinese Medicine, this term has come to mean a style of diagnosis often translated as “Pattern Discrimination”.  This is to distinguish it from that based on “Disease Discrimination”, so that instead of treating every case of a headache as a headache, it is seen in the context of the state of the entire body/mind involved, by taking into account various other seemingly unrelated signs and symptoms as indicators. 

This is important because experience in the Classical Chinese Medicine way of seeing shows that any single “Disease” may require two completely opposite treatment principles, depending on the underlying patterns involved in the current presenting condition's manifestation.  What worked for one case may worsen another, a practical example of the dangers of the inflexible application of our linguistic and conceptual shorthands.

In Classical Chinese Medicine and Chinese thought generally, context and analogy is everything, and even the most seemingly humble of phenomena can provide access to fathomless depths.


Where Classical Chinese Medicine and Austrian Economics meet:

- Many worldly phenomena hang together on the basis of subjective value/phenomenology and the complexities of their interactions. The patterns arising from these interactions seem to be most stable, resilient and creative when left to their own devices, free from too much rational-conceptual intervention.

- That which provides great short-term benefits almost inevitably comes at the price of long-term cost. These costs are often at a different level to the benefits, so they will be missed by those that focus too much on the measurement of those benefits as a gauge of total effectiveness.

- Appearances are therefore often deceptive (especially when we think we know this!). It is often the case that the more things seem to be getting better, the worse they really are at a deeper level, and vice versa. Not always though: this is why ever deepening knowledge of history and the accumulated experience of one's lineage/s comes in very handy (at least, as long as these things don't also cause us to become complacent and lose humility).

- Stability, consistency and certainty can only be externally maintained at the cost of an ever increasing superficiality and brittleness.  An imposed “Balance” and “Equilibrium” cannot last without being parasitical upon the conditions which facilitate their spontaneous manifestation.  The development of a more “natural” or intrinsic resiliency requires that the terror of the possibility of real change in every present moment be squarely faced.


—- Take care of the means, and the ends will take care of themselves. —-

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