I will put my Law within them, and I will write it on their hearts

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33 NRSV).

In the previous post I explored “two kinds of thinking”. I contrasted “directed thinking in logical sequences” (conscious) with spontaneous, largely non-verbal, non-mental and non-logical processes (unconscious) as it relates societal survival rather than incremental economic growth. The discussion was, for the most part, conducted within the context of an agrarian economy.

In this post, I use Jeremiah 31:33 as a foil for a discussion of the industrial and post-industrial economy/society and how this system directs the operation of its market economy.

I read Jeremiah 31:33 as a triumph of entrepreneurship and decentralized headless markets systems over centralized institutions and government. Note: I differentiate entrepreneurship and individualism: entrepreneurs create often using unconscious non-logical processes while individualism consumes often using conscious logical thinking.

The similarity between Jeremiah 31:33 and the decentralized market system and democracy is clear to me. The essence of both doctrines is the idea that each individual has God’s law (market value) within them (unconscious, idiosyncratic and dynamic) because each individual is “created equal”. Metaphorically, each individual is like a pixel so that individually, and collectively, we form the “image of God”. Whether you zoom in or zoom out, you see God’s image. Using a biological analogy, each individual has their unique DNA but each of us is still human.

In other words, the emergence of social/market order is a spontaneous self-governing self-regulating process that does not depend on some other external law (scripture, constitution) and its policing. The upside of the Jeremiah 31:33 approach is resilience and stability (anti-fragile), the downside is slower development and susceptibility to external threats.

How does such a society direct the operation of its economy in order to thwart the occasional external threat?

I will let this question linger here for a few weeks (or months), does anyone have an answer?

Jeremiah 31:33 privileges our gut feelings and intuition — God’s law, or love, within us — over facts as constructed/interpreted by man-made logical processes and institutions. Whereas man-made logical processes/institutions rely on the so-called evidence-based scientific methods (for normal times), God’s law is epiphanic, a prophetic revelation of eschatological (end-times) proportions. The revelation is reveled to the chosen through dreams and visions.

These visions and dreams can be contrasted, antagonistically, with directed or logical, verbal thinking. C. G Jung (italics in the original, pp.17–18) describes the latter as follows: “the images inside our minds follow one another in the same strictly causal sequence as the events taking place outside it…. the material with which we think [directedly] is language and verbal concepts…[so that when] we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others.”

Unlike directed thinking , visions and dreams require an external ethical and moral compass lest we fall prey to false prophets. This moral compass is summarized in the maxim “love your neighbor as yourself”.