Financial "Literacy"

The American trend of conflating literacy with intelligence (rationality) is reflected in the way familiarity with personal finance concepts or competence in living them out is phrased: people often refer to this as financial literacy.  It goes quite nicely with what many people seem to think about how it is impossible to have true knowledge, perhaps apart from matters of immediate personal sense experience, without consulting a formally published book, an online article, a YouTube video, a TED Talk, etc.  I am not saying that these resources are incapable of incidentally helping someone pragmatically achieve a personal financial goal or prompting them to pinpoint or focus on an actual logical truth.  Those things would very well be the case.  

But reading books (or articles) does not make one more intelligent; literacy is not rationality.  Discovering and grasping logical necessities makes someone intelligent.  This inevitably begins with recognizing logical axioms such as how there must be truth because otherwise it is true that nothing is true.  While this might be dismissed as too easy, not only is relative ease irrelevant, it is the very nature of logic that it is both inherently true and immediately accessible.  However, though all truths are really abstract logical truths, including necessary truths about finance, it is neither self-evident nor apparent from logic alone, without any experiential prompting, that a given country has a certain currency or that it takes a certain amount of that currency to typically live in that nation, for instance.

Not everything is this far removed from everyone's ability to verify (and yes, hearsay cannot prove anything about the aforementioned economic matters beyond that there is hearsay, of course, though it acts as evidence).  Of course public figures might love for you to believe that without them and their resources (including those for sale), there is little to nothing that can be known about money, wealth-building, and so on.  If not in the industry for marketing and moneymaking purposes, perhaps they like feeling important because others supposedly need them and their expertise.  And none of them have likely ever considered the real nature of reason starting with the self-evident, supremely foundational logical axioms.  All of reality hinges on these.  As slaves to assumptions, they cannot be genuinely intelligent, but they often gladly or blindly perpetuate a culture that mistakes having conversations, reading/viewing/listening to sources, or accepting non sequiturs because of who is proposing them for being an intelligent person.

I write online articles, yes.  But as a rationalist, I do not encourage or pressure anyone to believe in something because I or anyone else believes or proclaims it.  I only promote the awareness and celebration of logical facts using a written medium; never do I hope someone will neglect consulting logic itself instead of my words or any sort of subjective impression of veracity derived from reading my blog.  Nor do I in any way want people to sidestep looking directly to reason about a matter until after they have read one of my posts.  But many appear to feel validated by the approval of other people or to feel safer by embracing a consensus, or even apart from consensus, putting themselves at the mercy of agreeing with a supposed authority figure.

Assumptions, fallacies, and emotionalism do not become valid when rooted in a person's own mind instead of those of others.  Subjectivism and any kind of personal assumption are likewise illogical, because reason alone is true in itself and delivers one from the abyss of unverifiability.  Belief in assumptions that one embraces due to personal intuition or preference is still irrational, just like assuming that anyone else's ideas are right, no matter who is the one thinking of or proposing them. 

Ironically, though logical axioms and other purely logical truths, as well as logical facts about the existence and nature of one's own consciousness, are the only things that can be known wholly apart from some form of external prompting, they are precisely the things that many people acknowledge the least and often seem least competent with handling.  For instance, logic is often confused for a mental reasoning process rather than a set of independent necessary truths.  Many either tend to ignore the likes of logical axioms entirely or thoroughly misunderstand them.  Due to the combination of people 1) failing to look past emotional persuasion or the practical components of everyday life and 2) latching onto cultural conditioning to accept various philosophical assumptions (even when they are demonstrably false or utterly unprovable), as long as they are promoted by "experts" and figures with societal influence, there are few rationalists indeed.

By nature, no one needs to be educated by teacher figures or prompted by any kind of conversation or media to realize strictly logical truths about finance, though there would be no particular reason to have ever thought of money at all apart from some sort of social experience.  That nuance would likely go right over the heads of most personal finance educators!  And what might examples of those logical facts about finance (personal or otherwise) be?  For instance, all money is a social construct with no inherent economic value; the values assigned are arbitrary despite numbers and their relationships being matters of logical necessity independent of human belief and activity.

Spending more than one makes, given long enough and with no mitigating factors (like having the excess covered by family or friends), will deplete one's financial resources and result in debt.  And there is no contradiction between spending some money on non-necessities now, given that it is money one actually has and can afford to devote to such an end, and saving for an adequate retirement.  No one needs prompting from other people or resources to realize such things, though many act as if they need something like conversational or lecture-based teaching to ever discover basic logically necessary facts about personal finance.

On the contrary, to know something like if it is likely that a distant region is on the brink of a recession or what options are available for high-yield savings accounts, one must go beyond looking to pure logical proof and look to fallible, experiential evidences, some of which might be "expert" testimony as presented in news reports or any other sources such as the ones listed in the third paragraph.  Even so, one must still rely on logic to know anything that can be known about the issue in question, and there hearsay is still objectively irrelevant, including from any expert, to the truth of an idea.

Most people are simply so passive that they never even consider the difference between concepts related to a priori and a posteriori epistemology, and no, they do not need to learn these formal Latin words through sources or education to know logical axioms and other necessary truths with absolute certainty.  All they have to do is look to reason.  "Financial literacy" is a phrase people would contrive almost solely if they they believe in some error regarding epistemology and intelligence, particularly by conflating literacy with intelligence, revering familiarity with literature or sources (not logic), and accepting appeals to authority.  "Financial rationality" is the objectively more accurate phrase.  Familiarity in the ultimate sense with personal finance is not about literacy at all.  It is about transcendent logical facts and grasping them through rationality!