Lady Macbeth is a Racist: Newspeak, Self-Censorship and Withdrawing Sanction

 

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed [ideologically]. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.

--George Orwell: Principles of Newspeak

 

Simply put, if you are . . . for Constitutionally limited government, free market capitalism, equality under the law, and freedom for all Americans, then you are a racist. If you are for unlimited government and increasing dependency on the Democrat Party, then you are not a racist. Any questions?

-- Kyle Becker: The Politically Correct Guide to Racism for Idiots 

 

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

--Ayn Rand: John Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged

 

There has been much discussion on the internet of the Progressive Democrat’s tendency to avoid constructing an argument or to shout down a painful truth by accusing others of racism. On the punditry level, such accusations has gone from the ridiculous to the outright idiotic as black Democratic Party hacks have gone from accusing libertarians and conservatives of racism for criticism of the president for his ideology and policies to accusing us of racism for the use of certain otherwise neutral words in our political speech. It has come to the point where one can neither criticize Obama for his general ineptitude, foreign policy or domestic policies, nor use certain words (“golf,” “apartment,” “anger,” “socialist” and “crime” all come to mind) in reference to any administration official whatsoever, without being accused of being a racist.

In the political arena, we know the purpose of this tactic: it is to silence and isolate the opposition without the bother of actually constructing an argument. Such demonization is a shortcut to winning through intimidation, in order that certain ideas become impossible to talk about at all, ensuring the Democratic party an unearned hegemony over public discourse. In short, it is Newspeak in the Orwellian sense:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

--George Orwell: Principles of Newspeak

Thus the accusation of racism in response to political speech in this fashion is the tool of the demagogue, pure and simple.

Even more troubling is the use of the tactic by progressives against their “friends” during personal and public conversations on any topic in which someone lets a political (but not necessarily partisan) statement slip out. Here again, the purpose of the accusation is to demonize someone who does not agree on some issue, and to 
silence opposition in order to evade an unwanted truth.

Since we live in a society that conflates accusation with guilt, such an attack is difficult to recover from, because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is a powerful technique of the political left, placing their enemies on the defensive, and allowing the demagogues to claim the moral high ground while conducting themselves in the most vile manner, in an impressive display of irrationality and bullying. 

Such attacks serve to impoverish the language of discourse, and leave rational people scratching their heads over whether they can talk about the ‘pot calling the kettle black’ or calling a ‘spade an f***ing shovel’. The self-righteous censors thus achieve their object of making discourse on certain topics impossible, and setting boundaries on what people who disagree with them are able to say, right down to the nouns themselves: black, dark, spot . . .

Did I say spot? Yes, I did. Because according to one self-righteously progressive former friend, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is a racist. In a personal conversation relating to a rather bitter and nasty remark she made toward another of her “friends” in the context of Obama’s second inaugural, “spot” is a racist term. After I allowed as to how the statement was unlike my  former friend’s usual happy and sunny disposition, she commented to me: “‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’” To which I responded:
“I don’t think I am ready to “out, out that damned spot.’”  She then enquired about the health of my sense of humor. Seeing that she didn’t really “get” my reference to her quote from Macbeth, I told her I didn’t have a sense of humor, apparently—since my poor attempt was not understood—excused myself and went about my day.
 
Later, I was totally blindsided when, in connection with a different discussion that she initiated, she wrote about the “racist comment” that I had left on her Facebook Timeline. Having already been accused of “protesting too much,” I pointed out that the reference was to Lady Macbeth’s mad scene, and when my former friend insisted it was a racist reference (I suppose about Obama, even though he had not been a topic of the conversation), I did not bother to continue the conversation.

For those who do not know the reference, as I suspect the progressive bully did not, here is the reference from Macbeth, Act 5 Scene I, in which the lady goes mad for having murdered the king:

LADY MACBETH
35 Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
36 then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
37 lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
38 fear who knows it, when none can call our power
39 to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
40 man to have had so much blood in him?

Doctor
41 Do you mark that?

LADY MACBETH
42 The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—
43 What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o'
44 that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with
45 this starting.

The spot she is seeing in her madness is the blood of murder on her hands. My reference was simply an attempt to defuse the rapidly deteriorating conversation by responding to the reference to Lady Macbeth with a reference of my own.  As one of my friends said, upon seeing the exchange between me and my once friendly bully: “Good thing you didn’t refer to Othello. That would have forever blackened your name.” 

The response to this kind of bullying is often self-censorship. The individual so attacked and publicly vilified so unfairly will often begin to think before speaking, to spend time trying to avoid all of the trip-wire words and phrases that might result in another accusation of racism. This is a useless exercise.

Make no mistake about it, the purpose of such tactics is to demonize and isolate anyone with a voice who would oppose the progressive ideology, in order to try to render her ineffective through the art of the smear. It doesn’t matter what words liberty-loving libertarians and conservatives say, the progressive ideologue will twist them or outright lie about their import, diverting attention from the actual topic of conversation into the denouncement of a personal attack. The purpose—overt or covert—is to silence dissent from the statist/collectivist/progressive world view. (For more on this see David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolutionaries: The Alinksy Model).

Now here I hasten to add that not everyone who makes the politically correct racist accusation is, in fact, a leftist ideologue. Many are the useful idiots, who buy the moral high-ground without understanding the basis of the tactics involved. Nor do they necessarily aspire to the ultimate goal, although they usually have some inchoate sense of helping to bring about utopia. A sense of being wronged, of being entitled to something someone else has, that they want and have not gotten often fuels such an attitude, as it has in my former friend’s case. She angrily accused me of having “got yours” and of all manner of violent intention and lack of charity now that I had it. None of this has any basis in reality, but it does bespeak anger and resentment improperly directed at me. To put it bluntly, my former friend is playing the politics of envy for her own purposes, and is likely a useful idiot rather than a leftist ideologue.

But whatever the reason for such accusations as this, the purpose is the same: to silence those who disagree and threaten the leftist Vision of the Anointed. And it often works. Ask yourself how often you have bit your tongue rather than respond to some diatribe in a university classroom, how often you have erased a comment after trying to craft it in order not to be misunderstood, and you will begin to recognize how often you may have censored yourself.

Although the progressive left is not above an overt attack on the First Amendment ( and we have already heard the warning shots across the bow), it is far easier to get people to censor themselves rather than to suppress them by external force. The power of social condemnation is great, and many otherwise vocal Americans would rather be silent than to risk it for little purpose. After all, we reason, it is unlikely that my speaking up will change any minds in this place at this time.

I vehemently disagree. Of course, it doesn’t do much good to continue an argument on someone else’s Facebook Timeline, blog or in their home and on their turf. However, in public, whether it be in a college class or PTA meetings, it is important to speak up, peacefully but firmly. Silence can be taken for assent, and we must not give  up our sanction to such unreasonable and downright evil tactics as demonization by accusations of racism.

In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s protagonists call this “the sanction of the victim.” This is the ideas that evil in and of itself is powerless and unreasonable, and must not only take from the good to survive, but needs the moral approbation of the victim in order to triumph. By silently accepting an accusation of racism and allowing it to shut us up, we are giving that much more power to false accusation. By apologizing for our principles arrived at rationally, we are allowing unreason and emptiness to take the moral high ground. How then can we complain when that emptiness and meanness brings down all that is creative and productive in our world?

It is also true that if you speak out, it is likely you will soon hear from a number of other people in the room who were thinking the same thing, but frightened to say it, each one feeling alone and isolated, which is just what the irrational accusation was intended to accomplish. Nothing defeats a bully tactic better that straight up, reasoned confrontation that brings principled people together. Hearing others refuse their sanction to patent nonsense encourages good people to speak up. It benefits all people of principle to encourage one another, for the culture wars are nothing less than a battle for our liberty and our civilization. We must fight it with more passion and conviction than our enemies, who take it very seriously indeed.

In my situation with my former friend, I knew it would be fruitless to continue in an “was not, was too” fashion there on her Timeline. I also recognized that we are not and cannot be friends. Friendship requires shared values and mutual respect—a sanction of one another’s goals at some level, and a genuine desire to bring out the best in the other. It is not a mark of friendship to tolerate another’s wrongs or weaknesses, and to accept less than the best in that person. I have known for some time that the shared values I used to enjoy with this friend have disappeared, and that her political ideology precludes any agreement. 

For the longest time, I did not understand why many of my friends and compatriots in the battle for liberty and reason would make announcements such as: “If you voted for Obama, then please unfriend me.” I thought that it was still possible to keep the lines of communication open. It has now dawned on me—too slowly to spare me pain—that there is no communication with those who substitute platitudes for principles and demagoguery for reason, that this is not about the ordinary disagreements of normal American politics, it is a battle between two incompatible world views, one of which will destroy the other.

Now I understand my friends’ actions. I will not tolerate a so-called friend who turns on me and demonize me so readily, because that is not the behavior of a friend. I cannot continue to give my sanction to irrational ravings and untruthful accusations, because I myself will lose my mooring to reality. There can be no compromise on principle, and there can be no surrender of my values without the loss of all that I have learned and all that I hope to accomplish in the future. 

I will not sit idly by while accusations of racism pervert and destroy discourse, silencing the good for the sake of the weak. 

 

Technorati Tags: Courage,Politically Incorrect,Moral Sanction,Newspeak

Occupy Wall Street: Fellow Travelers, Useful Idiots and the Wedge

“Dear Mr. Hammet:
And here I thought that you were a detective and a brilliant one, because The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite mystery stories. Don’t you know who I am? This is not to say that everyone should, but I think you should. And if you do, you ought to know better than to send me an invitation like this. Well, you’re half right, at that. I do welcome anyone fighting against "Coughlin’s “Social Justice.” But when you give a party to fight both “Social Justice” and “The Daily Worker”, count me in, and I’ll give you $7.00 per ticket, let alone $3.50. Not until then, Comrade, not until then.”

--Ayn Rand, Letter to Dashiell Hammet, August 1, 1940; Letters of Ayn Rand, Google E-book edition. 

 

 

During the last two weeks I have experienced two or three moments of surprise and dismay in conversation or in reading Facebook posts and comments, because people I thought should know better have excused and supported the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Wherever (OWS) actions and agenda.

I have heard self-identified conservatives (Chris Christie comes to mind) compare OWS to the Tea Parties, saying that we have the same goals (?) but wish to use different means. I have read comments by purported libertarians who defend OWS, stating that if the protesters want to end the Fed and destroy “Jewish control of the money”, they are all for it.  I have had conversations with Jews who excuse the anti-Semitism displayed at OWS gatherings across the nation, saying that because Jews are taking part in the demonstrations, it is meaningless; and anyway “there is anti-Semitism on the right, too.” As if that makes it unnecessary to confront it.

Even the President of the United States and the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress are saying that the OWS agenda reflects the concern and anger brewing among all Americans due to the stagnant economy.  And almost everybody in the MSM seems to be telling everybody else there that this “movement” is broad-based and grass roots, our very own Tahrir Square. I don’t what they’ve been smoking but there is no comparison between people who have been living under an Islamic dictatorship for more than 30 years and going hungry, with entitled individuals decrying the evils of corporations and demanding “free” stuff while texting on their i-Phones and ducking into Starbucks for a Venti Carmel Macchiato.

None of this is true, as even the casual observer can surmise just by identifying the organizers, watching the You Tube, and reading the various signs, manifestos and lists of demands coming from the OWS crowd. It has been known since last Spring, when Stephen Lerner (who is too radical even for the very left-leaning SEIU) was caught on digital stating the plan and purpose for OWS, that this movement is not grassroots. And since the protests started last month, such paragons of collectivism and unreason as the Communist Party USA, the American Nazi Party, the teachers unions and SEIU have provided material and/or moral support for the movement. Oh, and so has the Democratic Party. Now there are hard numbers to back up what the casual observer already knew. On Tuesday, October 18, Pollster Douglas Schoen wrote this in the Wall Street Journal:  

. . .the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people . . .

“The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

“Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.

 

Schoen goes on to give numbers. According to his analysis of the data compiled by Ms. Confino, 98% of her sample “support civil disobedience to achieve their goals.” (Since their actions are civil disobedience, and they are using force by “occupying” property, one has to wonder what--if anything--is going on in the minds of the other 2%). Further, 52% of them have protested before, and 31% would use violence to achieve their goals. 65% agree that “the government” is obliged to provide entitlements (free health care, college educations, retirement security) regardless of the bill, and to pay for it all, 77% support taxing the rich, but 58% do not support taxing everybody. Schoen continues:

 

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas. . . .

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal.

 

What is curious is that if even the casual observer can qualitatively know what the hard data now tells us, then why would Democratic Party leaders, and worse, conservatives and libertarians lend support to this movement, which after all is not large, and is completely out of step with the general public. After all, according to Schoen’s analysis, one quarter of the OWS crowd do not even plan to vote. However, the older and more conservative members of the general public do vote, and the independent registered voters tend to be moving away from supporting the Democrats in any case.

What would cause politically astute people to lend support of any kind to such a movement? And why in the world would libertarians, conservatives, and moderates  excuse, defend and even support the OWS crowd? Liberty-minded people support individual rights, economic freedom and personal responsibility, after all; whereas it is clear from Schoen’s analysis that the OWS crowd does not.

Certainly, there are those among the OWS supporters whose ideology is of the same hard-left, activist variety as that of the protesters themselves. They can be expected to proudly stand by them. And then there are those who agree with certain aspects of the OWS agenda, although they are not willing to go as far as joining in the movement itself. Nor do they wish to publically align themselves with socialism, fascism or communism and the overt supporters of these ideologies in the CPUSA, the American Nazi Party, or other variants. These are Fellow Travelers who end up serving a cause even if they do not wish to be seen as doing so, or with which they do not wholly agree. I suspect that most of the MSM are Fellow Travelers with one or another of the various collectivist ideologies.

But what about those who defend or excuse OWS even while claiming values and principles in opposition to those held by the protesters, the organizers and their overt supporters? The ones who claim to be conservatives or libertarians, or even moderates and traditionally “liberal” Democrats?

Some of them, especially the politicians among them, are likely not being totally honest about their most deeply held values and are taking on certain labels in order to woo voters. This dishonesty leads to the kind of corruption among the powerful we have come to almost expect. But I think the majority of these OWS excusers and defenders are confused about the labels they apply to themselves, or they have mixed premises, believing in liberty, but accepting certain anti-liberty premises as “practical” and “necessary.” Or they may be liberty-minded people who have not overtly examined the philosophy of liberty and therefore do not inform their positions on policy from liberty’s values and principles. These are the ones most likely to be duped into lending support to, or excusing movements like OWS, that are based on values and principles in contradiction to their own. In so doing, they become Useful Idiots.

Useful Idiots are people who make common cause with individuals and groups whose values are in opposition to their own out of  naiveté, either in an attempt to do good or to oppose some common enemy who is perceived to be more dangerous than the opposition with whom they cooperate. Unlike Fellow Travelers, Useful Idiots are cynically used by ideologues, and are induced to it by a covert strategy called the Wedge.

The Wedge works by introducing a concrete issue or policy into the discussion upon which each of two sides agree, even though each side holds principles contradictory to the other. Duping someone with the Wedge depends upon the individual not noticing that although he agrees with the particular policy or issue as framed by the ideologue, he does so for different reasons and/or may identify different solutions . (For a thorough review of the Wedge Strategy and its uses, see the four part series on Adam Reed’s blog, Born to Identify, beginning here).

For example, both the OWS activists and various liberty-minded groups agree that the Federal Reserve Bank and the banking system it controls is responsible for the housing bubble and the stock market crash and credit crunch of 2008. Therefore, members of both groups may wish to “End the Fed.” However, the OWS activists want to do so in order to increase direct government control over the economy, thus forcing private banks and other businesses to pay for the “free” stuff to which they believe they are entitled. On the other hand, conservative or libertarian individuals see ending the Fed as part of a larger strategy to set the economy free and re-establish Capitalism, an economic system in which all property is private and individuals are free to choose with whom they will do business and what they will do with their money. Ending the Fed is a Wedge that is conducive to the strategy of the statist organizers of OWS, who are far more interested in further collectivizing the United States than they are in ending the Fed. The Fed, after all, is a useful instrument for exerting more control over the economy, and with it, the lives of ordinary Americans.

Ending the Fed is one of several Wedges in play in the political discourse of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They are all useful in refocusing the opposition to their ultimate goal, seeking to make those of us who hold to the principles of liberty believe that we should, as one Useful Idiot puts it, “Unite against the 1% for Liberty and Freedom.” As Adam Reed points out in his blog series (referenced above):

 . . . if we agree with them on issue after issue, then there seems to be no contradiction between their ideals and ours. They might even be the good guys, and their ideas may deserve to be heard, and to be included in the national consensus on legislation and public policy.

 

In using terms like—“unity” and “freedom”--as a hook, the OWS organizers and their fellow travelers seek to conflate the goals and values of OWS with our own and thereby covertly get our cooperation with them. This can lead to them making converts to their cause, or at least confuse us enough to stop us from opposing their agenda, or from pointing out the characteristics that differentiate them from us.

This is why some Jews, for example, make excuses for the overt and unopposed anti-Semitism in evidence at OWS rallies across the nation. They buy the Wedge, even though it is false, and ignore the reality that anti-Semitism is a racist ideology opposed to individual liberty. This characteristic rhetoric ought to demonstrate that our principles and values are different than theirs, and that there can be no compromise, no “popular front” between us.

In order not to be taken in by the Wedge Strategy, liberty-minded individuals must be conscious our values and principles and consistently and deliberately apply them to the goals and strategies expressed by those who wish to make common cause with them. When our values and principles are not aligned with theirs, we can recognize when a Wedge is being used against us. In order not to serve, defend or excuse a cause that violates our principles, we then must not participate in the organizations and activities of those who promoting such a cause.

Further, once the Wedge is in play in the shared political discourse of a community or country, we ought to point it out because sunshine is the best disinfectant. In our own discussions of the issue or policy being used as a wedge, we need to promote our view from the standpoint of our values, and point out the difference between our reason and theirs. In so doing, the consequences of our line of reasoning will differentiate implications to our advocacy of the issue that our opposition will disagree with, making it clear that we do not have common cause or a “popular front.”

In this way, we remain true to our own values, come what may, and we keep our principles ever before us so that we can create the future that we plan to live. One of liberty and respect for each individual’s rights.

Cult of Death: Islamist Thanatophilia

"We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are most
vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we will take from
them. We will win because they love life and we love death."
--Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah

During the Bronze Age, human societies engaged in the cult of death. Evidence of this can be seen in the Vale of Hinnon (Ge-hinnon, the original vision of hell) near Jerusalem where archaeologists have uncovered jars and jars of the bones and ashes of children sacrificed to the idol Molach. The children were thrown alive into the fires within the mouth of a graven image of the idol in order to appease the god. Similar evidence has been found that is associated with civilizations practicing human sacrifice on a large scale throughout the world. The cult of death seems to be associated with a level of tool technology and the organization of society that is consistent with the Bronze Age. Thus, the Aztec rulers were engaged in human sacrifice at the time of first contact with the Spanish explorers, which was well into historical times for European civilization.

In these cults of death, the sacrifice of individuals was justified for the good of the people, their lands and crops, and carried out by a religious hierarchy that was wedded in some way to the political rulers, whether by actual intermarriage or by a fusing of the ruling family with godhood. The religions tended to be nature religions in which gods were thought to be in control of the various functions of nature (the sun, moon, rain and storms, crops, etc.) and were considered to be capricious and so needed to be placated by the spilling of human blood.

The Western Religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all stem from the Israelite Religion, which also began as a nature religion that required human sacrifice. It is the evolution of this religion through monolatry (the worship of one god while acknowledging the existence of others) to a monotheism that developed the replacement of human sacrifices with animal sacrifices, and then with prayer and study, as an understanding of the unique nature and value of individual human life seemed to go together with the worship of a unique and individual deity. This development has resulted only recently in the value modern Westerners place on the individual human being as an individual with rights.

Although Islam is categorized by scholars as one of the Western Religions (because it, too, developed out of the ancient Israelite Religion), it does not share the same Western values with Christianity and Judaism. A little more than a century after the death of Islam's founder Mohammed, it got stuck or turned away (the term is in the eye of the beholder), from such a development, maintaining instead a culture that placed value not on the individual and his choices, but upon the society as a collective, its values dictated by its ruler-priests. The reasons given for this turning away are varied according to historians and scholars of religion, and include the nature of Islam's parent society, and internal and external conflicts during its spread. Islam had access to much of the Western Classical Canon at a time when Europe did not, and in fact transmitted that heritage back into European culture while, at the same time, turning away from it.

In Islam, as it was among the Bronze age Israelites-to-be, the rules do no apply equally to all, but are administered through certain individuals according tribe and family. The tribal and familial heads have standing and everyone else is subsumed in those identities. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas terms it, the society is "strong group", which means that human worth is judged through group identification, rather than through individual character. This means that some lives are worth more than others, and that those whose lives are worth less than others may be sacrificed, sometimes even capriciously, with little remorse on the part of the killers for the lives taken. This means that it can be perceived as an honor to allow others to use one's life and death for their own purposes, so long as those purposes are referenced to the needs of the group. This is how Islamists can claim that they represent "the religion of peace" while condoning barbaric practices such as the stoning of women, or suicide bombings, or the ritual sacrifice of children. Their judgment of what is peace is made according to the impact on the group, and in these cases, only the group they value, and not the impact on the individuals who have been sacrificed to the perceived needs of that group. (This is a pattern shared with other collectivist cultures and sub-cultures whether they are religious or not).

A week ago Shabbat, the nature of the Islamist Death Cult was on display again as two terrorists invaded the home of an Israeli family, murdering the father, his three-month old baby daughter, and two sons while they slept. The mother was also murdered as she tried to fight them. The children were murdered in a manner consistent with the ancient cults of human sacrifices, the perfect knife slashed their throats in one stroke. The attack was a terrorist attack by definition, since these people were killed in an attempt to terrify others in the name of the political/religious goals of the Islamists. But even more ominous, the ritual nature of the sacrifice demonstrates the allegiance of the killers to the ancient and barbaric death cult.

There are those who will put themselves through all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to either justify the actions of these terrorists or to portray them as confused men who did not act on their own volition, but were used by unnamed "third parties". One such apologist commenting on my Facebook account even tried to argue that "nobody wants to harm others."
This is at its sorry best, wishful thinking, and at its worst, an injustice to the innocent victims of murder plain and simple.

Those who justify murder and child sacrifice often do so in order to maintain their fantasy that all ideas and cultures are equally good, and that one cannot be preferred over another. This is the concept of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism was the justification that hid behind the robes of the judge in New Jersey who thought it was just fine for a Muslim man to rape his wife in America because our laws should not override the husband's religious beliefs. Although this decision was overturned by a higher court, a sign that neither logic or righteousness are totally absent from American jurisprudence, most commentators still thought of this as a case of 'religious freedom' gone too far. Almost no one was able to articulate the principle that makes the original decision wrong. (Hint: It's Individual Rights).

It is clear that the Islamists' death cult is an example of Thanatophilia--a love of death over life--they have said so, and very clearly. If the Nasrallah quote above is not enough, here is one from the Albanian Islamist leader, Ali Benhadjj, who said:

"Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day; by adding up massacres and charnel-houses." (Cited in Anna Griefman's Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Communist Russia).

What may not be so clear is that those who would make themselves apologists for such murders are also bowing down at the shrine of the death cult, and are worshiping at the idol of death, destroyer of worlds. To make moral equivalence between a three-month old baby in Itamar and her murderer, or between a four year old child running from the terrorists' guns in Beslan and his killers, is an exercise in the destruction of the difference between good and evil, and between evil and innocence. It is itself an indication about how far from Western values some westerners have strayed, and how willing they are to bow to the death-dealers, and have become themselves worshipers of death, the real haters of the human race.

Despite the peddlers of moral equivalence and multiculturalism, there are large differences between murder of the innocent, and the defense of one's own life and its value; there are large differences between a culture that values death over life, and one that values life over death, and values will ultimately determine how we make the judgment between them. While members of Hamas and Hezbollah were passing out candy and urging Islamists to celebrate the sacrifice of innocent children to the cult of death, their grandfather, speaking at their funeral was reminding his people of the commandment at the heart of the cult of life:

See, I place before you this day life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live. (My translation).

In accordance with this commandment, with the value placed on life, indiscriminate murder is forbidden. And so the grandfather and rabbi pleaded for justice through law and sound judgment, and pleaded against indiscriminate revenge.

There can be no justice at all in a society that bows down to the idols of death and destruction on principle. There, one will always witness the "religion of peace" unselfconsciously stoning women, sending young men off to death and murder by suicide attack, and ritually murdering innocent children. A society that worships at the altar of death is likely to see the massive deaths of themselves and their own innocent children. This is more than terrorism for political purposes, it is the love of death for its own sake. It is the cult of death.

Those who love life will act on that value. They will defend the innocent and will not traffic in the moral equivalency between the murderer and the murdered, and they will not allow their own judgment to be clouded by moral relativism, but will stand up for the rights of the innocent, and justice for their undeserved murders.

Owning Oneself and Loving Life

"Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual

who voluntarily gave it to you--who gave it to you in exchange

for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar.

You have no moral obligation to "give back," because

you didn't take anything in the first place."

--Yaron Brook & Don Watkins,

The Guilt Pledge (in Forbes)

When I was a teacher of the intellectually gifted, I used to hear comments about the kids I taught from time to time that implied that because my students were geniuses they therefore had some extra responsibility to "give back to society", a responsibility that did not belong to those blessed with a more ordinary level of intelligence. This well-meaning but poorly thought out type of statement was usually said in order to justify the education dollars spent on special services for the intellectually gifted. But it has a rather ominous ring to it, as if the children I taught had some a priori moral duty to unspecified others because of their intelligence. It was but a small step to saying that highly intelligent children have no right to establish their own life's purpose, and no right to the pursuit of their own happiness.

Recently, I posted a quote from ARI's Yaron Brook on my Facebook Status, a quote that a collectivist FB friend took exception to, and in a series of comments, he tried to show that Yaron was wrong. This man is somewhat of a second-hander, as are most political hacks--their side is right because it is their side--and he is certainly no match for Yaron Brook. But in the course of reading his comments, I found that he promotes the same idea about those who have created great wealth, as people did toward my gifted students. In very nearly the same paragraph that he claimed that the authors of "the Giving Pledge" did not believe that people should do what they do for the sake of others, he also said that "to paraphrase Spiderman, with great wealth comes great responsibility."

The first question that came to mind about this statement was, "Responsibility? To whom?"
I didn't ask it in my reply though because I know the answer would have been that great modern glittering generality: society. But even as I wrote a very short reply, I was thinking about how much that statement echoes the ones I was constantly hearing about my gifted students. And both imply that in some way the success of extraordinary individuals is an unearned gift from society. That somehow, the successful entrepeneur, or the academically successful gifted student both took something from others who are not successful, and that now they owe those people something in return. In fact, in his FB comment, my FB collectivist friend not only implied it, he said it:

"After all, success in business doesn't occur in a vacuum and always depends on the community to some extent. Warren Buffet, Paul Allen, Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas and others know that they would not be where they are today without some pretty significant assistance from others."

"Well, no," I want to reply, "success in business does not occur in a vacuum." But my FB collectivist conveniently ignores the fact that the successful businessman paid those who "assisted" him for that help, and that he earned the money--as Yaron Brook says above--by producing something of value to those who were willing to pay for it. Something of value that those who work for him, and those who benefit from his work did not create. In fact, quite often, the kinds of breakthrough technologies and efficiencies created by the work of entrepeneurs is far more valuable than what people actually pay for them. This is so because technologies and efficiencies cut down on work, and multiply both the power of a person to apply their efforts elsewhere, and they also multiply time. (These concepts: work, power and efficiency are real physical entities that can be calculated). In this way, the entrepeneur has already benefitted others--even those who do not buy his product--through his pursuit of his own happiness. What Yaron Brook was saying in the essay is that this productivity is in itself a great moral good, and it need not be justified by whether or not it benefits others who are not as productive, even though it does that too.

And demanding that someone who has already produced something of value, something others are willing to exchange their own work to procure, must also be responsible to some vague collective (the community, society) for a value so vague that it is essentially a blank check is exactly what that statement from Spiderman means. And it is but a small step from that idea to the idea that individuals do not own themselves and their work, but that they are slaves to some collective--whether that be "society" or some supreme soviet state--and that the harder they work and provide value to others, the MORE they owe the collective. And it is but a small step further to make the claim that a person's existence can only be justified by their use to others, rather than by their ability to provide for themselves and their own happiness. And in the bloody 20th century, we have seen all too often where this leads. Even before the Nazi genocide and Stalin's purges, the Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw said these words on film in the Soviet Story:

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yours." (Emphasis added).

The point that my FB collectivist friend evaded, the point that brings the whole house of socialist cards down is that socialists believe that they--by some magic endowment--are the sole arbiters and deciders of the worth of every human being. And as Shaw candidly admitted earlier in the same film: "I don't want to punish anybody. But there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill."

Chilling words, those. And those are the words that will eventually come out of the mouths of those who believe that people owe something to some amorphous "society" beyond the ordinary good will that comes as each individual pursues his own happiness and his own benefit, and in so doing--as an unitended side effect--benefit others as well.

I will take C.S. Lewis over George Bernard Shaw any day. Lewis wrote:

"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects --military, political, economic, and what not.But in a way things are much simpler than that.The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.
A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub,a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden --that is what the State is there for.And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments,all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."-- C. S. Lewis

Oh, the collectivists sound like they have the moral high ground, until one considers where such thinking has led throughout time. The Fabians, the Communists, the National-Solcialists--make it sound as if we will all live our lives with great and sacrificial purpose, or we shall not live at all. And they made damn sure that billions didn't.

But I'll take the chat by the fire, that game of darts, that book and that garden--ordinary as they may seem, over all of the high and awful purposes on earth. For they are all symbols of the pursuit of happiness of many people over the generations. They are the more ordinary expressions of the extraordinary pursuits and great achievements of entrepeneurs who have created such value that others willingly exchange their work for that greatness. These are all, great and small, expressions of human individuals loving life.

Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: This View of Life

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its

several powers having been originally breathed

into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this

planet has gone cycling on according to the

fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

have been, and are being, evolved."

--Charles Darwin, 1859: On the Origin of Species

In my second entry on the topic of Glenn Beck's misapprehension of the theory of evolution, I discussed the fallacy that he spoke on his radio show; the idea that humans evolved from monkeys, or even from apes. Darwin's theory does not posit this idea at all; rather human beings, as well as the great apes, have descended from some common ancestor that in certain features and functions resembles us both, however remotely. But I am not quite done, because another idea was expressed, later in that same hour of the radio broadcast, that is also fallacious: Glenn Beck's claim that collectivists require Darwin's theory, because they must have a view of human individuals as endlessly malleable and therefore perfectible by other humans or, in the case of socialists and outright communists, by some unspecified "social force" that generally turn out to be a force perpetrated by tyrants.

This idea turns on another common misunderstanding of Darwin's theory, one that became a force in American politics at the end of the 19th century, the idea called "Social Darwinism."
Social Darwinism can be defined as any number of political ideologies that use Darwin's theory to suggest that societies evolve in the biological sense and that certain individuals in society are more "evolved" than others, and that they have an obligation to direct human evolution to specific ends. This ideology has nothing to do with the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, except the usurpation of Darwin's name. And in Darwin's name, a whole host of fallacies have been developed to limit human freedom: the Nazi concept of the Obermenschen (supermen) is one, and so is the American progressive idea that a better citizen can be bred through eugenics.

Social 'Darwinism' includes two fallacies that make the ideology foreign to Darwin's theory. The first is that societies evolve biologically, meaning that society is an entity that natural selection acts upon, and that action changes gene frequencies due to various social pressures. The second is that Darwinian evolution is goal directed, and that natural selection is more than a mechanism, that in some way it is working to a specific, predetermined end.

I think the first fallacy is driven by a complete misunderstanding about how Darwinian evolution is defined, and the second by an equally powerful misapprehension about how natural selection works.

A society is nothing more than a grouping of individuals that are distinguished by location, and perhaps by a shared nationality and culture. There may be numerous social groups in that larger amorphous thing that we call society, and those different subsets may very well have their own unique subcultures and value systems. There is not much that defines a society except the obvious: that members of a society tend to socially interact with one another at some level. A society is not some mystical synergistic whole. It has no self-awareness and no will. If societies evolve, those changes are not biological, and they are not driven by natural selection.

Natural selection acts on the relatively fixed phenotype (the way that genes are expressed) of the individual, producing change over time in biological populations. That evolution--for change over time is what the word evolution means--is measured by the change of gene frequencies in a population over time. Individuals do not evolve, but biological populations do. A biological population is not some random group of individuals that interacts socially. Rather it is a group of individuals that can and do interbreed with one another. That they can interbreed means that they are members of the same species, but being a population means that these individuals have access to one another for the purpose of reproduction. Thus alleles (specific forms of each genes) are spread around that population. There are numerous biological populations of human beings on the earth, separated by geography and by culture and by language, which are but different barriers humans have to reproduction with one another. None of these barriers is perfect, and by migration of individuals from one population to another, novel alleles are introduced to populations, changing the gene frequencies in each population. Thus, evolution is always occurring.

When I said above that natural selection acts on individuals, I meant that the genetic traits of an individual vary in expression, creating as many unique phenotypes as there are individuals. Within a given environment, some expressions of a trait will lead to a robustness that allows an individual to survive and pass on those traits, while other expressions of the same trait may--in that same environment--lead to a weakness that means an individual does not live long enough to reproduce, or reproduces less often. Evolutionary "fitness" is defined as the number of offspring an individual has, thus influencing how many copies of the allele is passed on into the next generation, thus spreading through the population in greater or lesser numbers.

It is environment that effects the fitness of a certain trait. A trait that creates an effect that leads to the allele being passed on in great numbers in one environment, may have no such effect in another environment, or may be deleterious to the individual that carries it in a third environment. For example, the recessive allele that blocks the deposition of pigments in the eye, caused the blue-eyed phenotype, has no effect in northern climates, where the solar angle is low, but in equatorial locations, it results in a much greater risk of cataracts and cancer at a younger age. Thus one might expect to find more of the recessive "blue-eye" alleles in northern populations than in equatorial ones. Since there may be more than one direction of pressure on a trait (or suite of traits) at any given time, the end result is a variety of expression, creating those "endless forms most beautiful" of which Darwin spoke. In any given species in any given environment, not all traits are under selection at any given time. It really depends on the variety of alleles, and upon the rate of environmental change that a species may be experiencing. The point here is that fitness is not some fixed array of parameters that have been ranked by some conscious process of choosing. It is simply what variations on a trait, among those present, are most beneficial to the differential reproduction of the individuals within a population that carry them.

And this brings me to the second fallacy held by the Social "Darwinists": the fallacy that evolution has some direction, some predetermined end. Since natural selection acts on the variations of a trait that happen to be present in a given population at a given time, there can be no "goal" for evolution. If, as Stephen J. Gould used to say, we could rewind the tape of the evolution of life on earth and begin it again, we would not see the same movie. Evolution would likely run a wildly different course.

There is a random element to Darwinian evolution, and this is why species eventually go extinct, ending their contributions to the future of life on earth. Sooner or later, a variation on a trait that would allow a species to get through a certain set of environmental changes will not be present in any of the biological populations of the species; or else there will not be time for a beneficial variation to spread through the population, and the species will die out. Just as death is part of every individual life, extinction is the destiny of every species.

I think that this lack of direction, this randomness that exists in our being here at all, in how species come and go upon the earth, is the most unsettling idea about evolution of all for many people. It certainly changes one's view of one's place in a very large and random universe. And yet, it also magnifies the uniqueness of each individual life on earth, and places a premium on human self-awareness, which is what sets our species apart from the other lives that share our planet.

Since evolution has no direction, and since no individuals in a species are "more evolved" than any others, two things are true. One is that there is no perfection awaiting the future of human life on earth. We are what we are, and as human beings we exist within certain parameters that make us human. Although we are all unique, our uniqueness exists as variations on the theme of human being. Individuals do not evolve. Each of us can only play the genes we were dealt. The second truth is that no human beings are wiser than any others in their ability to know how to shape human evolution to certain ends. There are no philosopher-kings who can see outside the cave, and select for certain traits in order to bring the rest of us to what they believe is their level.

The Social "Darwinists", who have arrogantly arrogated to themselves the role of gods and goddesses, do so using a perversion of Darwinian evolution in which selection is anything but natural, and fitness is defined as those traits they most admire in themselves. Traits that may have very little to do with the traits that are actually under selection in different human populations. Unfortunately, there are those--like Glenn Beck--who have so little knowledge and understanding of Darwin's theory, that they equate the unifying theory of modern biology with an ideology that is based on a misunderstanding of evolution by natural selection; an ideology that is as profoundly wrong as are the misperceptions of the creationists. This is what I mean when I say that the leftists and the collectivists are often equally as ignorant of Darwin's theory of evolution as are those on the religious right.

But I believe the collectivists on the left are the more dangerous. The creationists are for the most part reacting to the usurpation of their power to pass their religion on to their children. All of the equal-time debates, all of the legal challenges they make are in response to public education. If creationists were no longer forced by law to pay for their children to be instructed to accept an idea that they believe is against their religion, there would be no debates and no legal battles. But those on the left believe that they have some mandate to act as those who would select out the traits that they believe do not contribute to the perfection of humanity in the next great step of "social evolution." But all such traits originate in the phenotype of individuals, so this means that certain individuals must be selected out. This is what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a notorious progressive, understood his role to be when he ruled that a woman could be forcibly sterilized for the good of the State, saying:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for a crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." (Buck vs. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

Here Holmes imagines himself to be the agent of selection, a selection that is not at all natural. He further implies that there is some direction to evolution, that a certain kind of human being--his kind--has some destiny that is the pinnacle, the perfect end of evolution. An end that would result in a deadly sameness, in which there would be no variation for natural selection to act upon. An end that would result in destruction and death, as it always does. An end that would result in the ultimate extinction of the human species from the face of the earth.

Nothing could be further from the true nature of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. This view of life predicts infinite variation in infinite combinations developing over time from so simple a beginning. There is indeed a grandeur in it, a grandeur that is missed by all of those who misapprehend the beauty of life on earth in all its wonderful variety.

More on Those E-mail Chains . . .

About a week and half ago, I posted my concerns about one of those chain e-mails that was going around, because I was concerned about what kind of message was being sent. That blog post, Ayekha, can be found by clicking the link. Today, I received another chain e-mail, this time ending with the claim that "the Marines want this to roll" on the internet.

You've got to be kidding. Which marines? I am sure that the contents, anonymous and unsourced did not come from the commander of the United States Marines. But so many people seem to reflexively re-post these things, without giving a thought to what is being said, or the fact that readers really don't know by whom it is being said. In this case, the first three quarters of the post was largely true, and the argument interesting, though unsourced. (It argued that when Islamists become a certain percentage of the population of a Western and relatively free society, they begin agitating for privileges that end up underming the core values of liberty and tolerance that the society has extended to the Islamists). And the overall sentiment of the message was one that I can agree with--that the principles and values of Islamic Totalitarianism are incompatible with those of the United States.

However . . .you knew that a however was coming, didn't you?
However, my concern came with a bit of unreason purported to be by an American who had lived in Saudi Arabia for twenty years, that was completely contrary to the principles of individualism and liberty that we are claiming to defend. The piece called "Can Muslims be Good Americans" has passed through my in-box before, and contains ten arguments all of which contain factual errors, and all of which could be used to argue that Catholics or all Christians or Jews could not be good Americans either. In fact the first time I saw this non-argument, I set about doing exactly that by substituting the word "Christian" and then the word "Jew" into it, and constructing the particular arguments based on what I know about those religions. The one "proving" that Jews cannot be good Americans was particularly devastating, because I know a lot more about Judaism. I just did what the author of this piece did an combined ideas and laws from all over the 5,000 year history of Judaism, without rhyme, reason or qualification, and generalized them to all Jews, and viola! Jews cannot be good Americans.

I am not going to argue the particulars of this piece of badly written propaganda because the fundamental flaw is that it is overgeneralized,and each point can be simply refuted by this argument. If you wish to see the propaganda, it has been published here, and there are numerous rebuttals to each and every point all over the internet.

In this case, what we see is a well-meaning discussion of the very real dangers of Islamic Totalitarianism and its goals combined to which the unknown author appended this piece of drivel, wrote that the marines really want readers to pass it on, and then hit send to several thousand of his or her closest friends and relatives. In this case, it was BCC'ed to me, preventing me from responding to everyone that the person who sent it to me sent it to, so I responded to the person who sent it to me, and the person who sent it to her. After that, the origins are lost in cyberspace.

Here is my reply:

The first three quarters of this message is in great part correct. Islam is a complete system of life just as Christianity was in Europe in the Medieval period (the 5th to 15th Century C.E.) The danger to us is that Western individualism is in conflict with such a complete system (this is why that system ruled by the Roman Catholic Church in Europe did not survive modernity), and the modern Western way of life based on individual liberty cannot coexist with a theocracy. Further, although it is identified as a Western Religion because Mohammed was influenced by Judaism and Christianity, Islam is not at all Western in its thought. Western thought can be identified as thought that was heavily influenced by Greek logic and by the Rule of Law as understood by Greeks, Romans and Jews of the Hellenic period (500 B.C.E. - 400 C.E.). Because Islam is NOT Western, we are making a huge mistake if we believe that we can reason with the rulers of Islam, or if we believe that tolerance extended to them will cause them to be tolerant of us. The idea that we live and let live so long as no ones rights are being violated is a Western idea that took the whole of the Hellenic Period and the Medieval Period to come to full fruit in the West. It took 2000 years of religious development, philosophical development, and many religious wars to move from the concept of the Divine Right of Kings to the concept of Individual Sovereignty.

Islam, isolated in the middle east after the Battle of Vienna, bypassed a good deal of that development, and although Islam--in the form of the Caliphate of Spain--can be credited with preserving certain Greek ideas, it did nothing with them. It was, rather, the careful preservation of Greek writings by the Christian Monastics that led to the Renaissance, and the flowering of modern Western culture.

I agree with you both in that I hardly think it is our duty to allow the world to plunge into the chaos of religious war and theocracy by surrendering our values for the dross of multiculturalism and thereby honoring the barbaric values of a desert culture that wants to take over the world. And multiculturalism is not a modern Western value, it is a post-modernist fantasy. In order to prevent the destruction of the West, we must defend our principles and our values, and understand that no one has the right to destroy the rights of others, and that our Constitution cannot be used to destroy itself.

And that leads me to the last quarter of this e-mail, entitled "Why Muslims Cannot be Good Americans" . . .
I have seen this before, and I have replaced "Muslims" with "Christians" and "Jews" for each of the points and came up with similarly absurd results. Apparently neither Christians nor Jews can be good Americans! This is because the assumption in the piece is based on the collectivist notion that every Muslim, Christian or Jew is exactly the same as any other, and the equally collectivist notion that the United States was built on the principles of a Christian Theocracy. By the time of the Enlightenment, during which the values of individual rights and liberty became fully developed, theocracy had been tried by the West and found wanting.

Here is the crucial piece: Individual Muslims can be good Americans, as can individual Christians and individual Jews, so long as they accept the values of individualism as opposed to those of collectivism. In our system, rights are inherent in each human being, are therefore individual rights. There are no "group rights." Islam as individual religious expression can and should be tolerated, but any demand for collective privileges (a better term than "group rights" which is a contradiction in terms) must be repulsed at once. IOW, we ought to do as MacArthur did with Shinto during the occupation of Japan. As an individual religious expression, he told the Japanese to have at it. But any attempt by an individual or group to form an oligarchy--that is any attempt to gain privileges or power over any individuals sanctioned by government based on Shinto emperor worship--was firmly stopped. MacArthur did this with the blessings of James Byrne, from the US State Department, who wrote to the General in a telegram:

"Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments." (Quoted in : No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism by John David Lewis in The Objective Standard, Winter 2006-2007)


(By the way, this article is excellent intellectual ammunition for those of us concerned with preserving our values, and can be read for free at the link I put on the title).

What was done in the occupation of another country in order to pacify it, is certainly the proper policy to pursue on our own shores in order to protect the rights of Americans, which is the purpose of our government in the first place. Certainly, Islam as individual religious expression must be left alone according to our own values, but just as certainly Islam as an attempt to dominate our people must be fought according to those very same values. And we must go beyond the vague feel-good statements of the multiculturalists, as well as the diatribes of religious dominionists of the Christian persuasion, to define the difference according to the values of individual liberty enshrined in our founding documents.

Some of my readers may believe that my attempts to fight drivel on the internet are quixotic, and in general, they probably are. But, after all, my replies to to the people I know who send the stuff to me with a flick of the finger. And my goal is to get those people for whom what I say may have some influence to think before they push the "forward" icon. Undoubtedly, I will be unsuccessful in a large number of cases--especially among those who have confused religion with the Constitution. But for those who really do believe in individual liberty, I hope my arguments may cause them to consider what they are supporting when they forward this kind of stuff.

The Cartoon "Road to Serfdom"

In 1944, during the war against collectivism that we call WWII, F.A. Hayek published a book in Britian. The book was called The Road to Serfdom. This book was published in the United States later the same year. Hayek was an Austrian School economist working in London at the time. He was concerned about the role of central planning in the inevitable descent of collectivism into barbarism that he had watched happen on Continental Europe. He pointed out that although such economic theory was generally begun by people of good purpose, that the Road to Serfdom is paved with such good intentions. He said:


However much we may differ when we name the culprit . . . we all are, or at least until recently, certain of one thing: that the leading ideas which in the last generation have become common to most people of good will and have determined the major changes in our social life cannot have been wrong. We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our part and that pursuit of our most cherished ideal have apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected."
(F.A. Hayek (1944). The Abandoned Road. In Bruce Caldwell (Ed.). The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents (The Definitive Edition). p. 65-66).


I first read The Road to Serfdom in college, but re-read it two years ago, and as I have often found for myself, I appreciated and understood Hayek's reasoning more fully with the passage of time. Part of the reason for this may be that my understanding of the world improved with age, and another part may indeed be that the United States has traveled further along the Road to Serfdom in the 30 years that have passed since I first read the book, and so its meaning and importance have become more immediate.

The book itself is written for the layman, and is not a text in economics. Rather, it explains the importance of economic theory to human action, particularly with respect to the problem of central planning. However, it was written in a style suited to its time, and in this age of bits, bytes, and soundbytes, where our time has become limited, those who are scrambling for a living in increasingly precarious situations may not have the time to read it.

In the early 1950's Look Magazine developed the main theme of each chapter into an illustrated pamphlet. Although the ideas are not fleshed out as carefully as Hayek did in the book, the main progression down the Road to Serfdom is well done. Here, as forshpice to actually reading the book, is a You Tube video of the Look Magazine pamphlet:

It is my hope that if you haven't yet read the book, this will whet your appetite.

CAVEAT: In the book, and even in this pamplet, the defintion of socialism that Hayek used necessarily included central planning. At that time, there was no soft, European-style socialism that had as its central focus the so-called "redistribution" of wealth via taxes and the welfare state. Hayek discusses this in his 1976 Preface to the book, which can be found in the Caldweller Edition cited above. That the work pre-dates this kind of "social democracy" does not mean that this kind of economic system is immune from the consequences of collectivism on human liberty, it only means that this way of limiting human liberty had not been invented yet.

Ayekha? Where Are You?

"Walking hand-in-hand upon the Mountain,

Weighted down by lumber and a knife,

Abraham remembers Sarah's laughter,

And for a moment, he fears for Isaac's life.

But then he shudders with the wind,

And fills his head with faith,

And struggles for a different point of view.

As he reaches deep inside, to find the handle to that flame--

"Abraham!" G-d screams, "Where are you?"

--Rabbi Joe Black, "Ayeka"

from Leave a Little Bit Undone, 1999

Today is the new moon, and as the sun sets, we enter Rosh Chodesh Elul, the beginning of the month preceding the Holy Days, when we stand before the Eternal and listen to the question put to us--Ayekha? Where are you?

As human beings, endowed with reason and with choice, it is our obligation to discover the principles by which our lives can be lived, and to walk in their light. And because we may make errors of knowledge and errors of choice, we are also obligated to ask ourselves: "Where are you?"

As the summer days' heat yields to the cool winds of evening at this time of year, it seems that the season provokes a dream or a thought that makes me pause, to begin to ask this question. This year there was no dream, no vision of fog and cloud, but one of those "pass this on" e-mails that go around the internet from time to time, that gave me pause. And tonight, the question is not only an individual one, but one that many of us in the Liberty Movement might ask ourselves:

After this year or more of petitioning for redress, of watching our federal government pass legislation that violates our liberty on the most basic level; a year or more of being dismissed and sneered at by the media, and ignored and disrespected by our non-representing representatives--where are we? Do we still adhere to the principles that lit the flame of liberty in our hearts, that caused us to carry signs at the tea parties, and write and make phone calls to our representatives? Or have we given way to frustration and anger because we have experienced defeat after defeat after defeat? And are we willing to turn our backs on our founding principles in order to gain the momentary satisfaction of action that rises from our anger and our pain?

In the stages of social movements, now is the place where we find ourselves at the moment of maximum danger; the place where we are tempted to give up on our principles and act out of despair or violence. But just as the night seems all the darker just before the dawn, so we are also at the time just before our Liberty movement experiences a regeneration of purpose; a renewal of hope and determination that can take us though the crisis to come and into the future beyond.

Being here now, is the time to recall our principles and act on them with determination, and to be the watchman for the morning, calling upon those with us to remember them too. And this is the spirit in which I wish to critique that chain e-mail that came to my desktop this morning.

It was sent by a leader in the local patriot movement, and I do not know the origin of it before it came to him. It was a little scenario intended to divide "us" from "them" by characterizing the "them" in the most ridiculous terms. It was also intended to create a bandwagon of very narrow dimensions in that even some of the readers would become the enemy, and one in which the jumpers-on can drink the strong brew of anger and violent ideation made acceptable with a laugh. And though it purported to be a factual story, in my estimation it is very unlikely to be true. Here is the story:

If you don't know God, don't make stupid remarks!!!!!!

A United States Marine was taking some college courses
between assignments. He had completed 20 missions in Iraq
and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who
was an avowed atheist, and a member of the ACLU.
One day the professor shocked the class when he came in.
He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, "GOD, if you are real, then
I want you to knock me off this platform... I'll give you exactly 15 min."
The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes
went by and the professor proclaimed, "Here I am GOD, I'm still waiting."
It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got
out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him;
knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.
The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently.
The other students were shocked and stunned, and sat there
looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to,
noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked,
"What in the world is the matter with you? Why did you do that?"
The Marine calmly replied,
"God was too busy today protecting America 's
soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid
stuff and act like an idiot. So He sent me."
The classroom erupted in cheers!
THIS IS GOOD, KEEP IT GOING!

This story is no literary masterpiece, and I could go through it line by line, pointing out the logical fallacies, and the contemptuous assumptions within. However, there is a larger point to be made, and a bigger question to be asked: What does this piece tell us about those patriots who would agree with this action? Where are they? Where are we?

I did e-mail the patriot leader who sent this to me, and asked him if he condoned the action described above. He replied that he did. I wrote a longer e-mail back telling him why I disagree, and why the thing concerned me. I don't know what he will reply--and though I left the door open for rapproachment, I know that any reply could be defensive or even offensive, because my critique targeted some cherished falsehoods held by certain members of the Liberty movement, and further, urged a consideration of the story in the light of our bedrock principles of liberty--Individual Rights and the Non-INITIATION of Force Principle (NIP).

With respect to these principles, this story is one of failing.

The Marine--a member of a uniformed service who has taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States--initiated force against a civilian who was exercising his freedom of speech. If this story had been true we would have seen it trumpeted in the media, because the marine would have been arrested, handed over to the CO of his duty station, and made an example of at Captain's Mast. For a military member in uniform to violate the rights of a civilian is not only a dishonor to the uniform, it is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). When a person becomes a member of the military, he signs away certain of his civil rights for the duration of the time he wears the uniform. This includes his right to freedom of speech, his liberty (he must obey lawful orders), and his right to a civilian jury trial. IMHO, not only would a marine with such an extensive service record be unlikely to be stupid enough to take the action described in the story, but the person with whom this story originated is ignorant of the role and the honor of our men and women in uniform.

But of ultimate concern to me is what this story is intended to teach those who agree with it. It encourages the idea that it is a good thing to violate the rights of another person, to initiate force against him, because you disagree with his ideas. IOW, it encourages the violation of the rights of those who think differently, who have a different political point of view, and who are exercising their freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. This story encourages the sympathetic reader to deny the principle of Individual Rights, and subtly suggests that if you disagree with that, you are not a member of the club.

If one is defend to Constitution of the United States, one must accept and defend the Principle of Individual Rights upon which that document is based. This means that every person is endowed with the right to life, liberty and property, including atheists and members of the ACLU, and all others with whom one might disagree. The Constitution is a compact by which we agree to not only refuse to initiate force against other individuals, but by which we agree to cede the right to retaliate against one who initiates force against us to the courts unless self-defense is immediately required.

Unlike progressives--for whom the end justifies the means--defenders of liberty cannot use the Alinsky tactics of Rules for Radicals. Liberty cannot be gained by the violation of it; we cannot force people to be free. We cannot violate individual rights in order to restore them.

Further, anyone who has read the MIAC report, or studied the methods of the marxists and progressives currently in power know that they need us to violate our principles, to initiate force, and to give them an excuse to take what little of our liberty is left. They may fabricate such an incident (this is a false-flag), but we should not hand it to them. Surely any one of us is free to tell and distribute such a story as this, but given it's obvious appeal to anger and chauvinism, is it wise to do so? How does it encourage those in the liberty movement who have not been educated in the Principles of Liberty to think about our bedrock principles--Individual Rights and the Non-Initiation of Force Principle?

Where are we? What are we encouraging people to think about and do?

These questions are paramount, especially for those who would be leaders in the Cause of Liberty. We cannot afford to encourage disrespect of our principles within our own movement, and at the same time fight that disrespect from without. We must cling to our principles with the utmost integrity, and be just in our evaluation of those with whom we disagree, and even those who have made themselves the opponents of Liberty.

Every time I receive and e-mail that says: "This is good. Keep it going," it is important that I ask myself: Where am I on this? What principles does this e-mail support? Which of my principles does it violate? What kind of behavior does it encourage? Does it encourage justice and honor? What about respect for the rights of others, even those with whom I disagree? Or does it encourage injustice and the use of force?

I submit that we must be absolutely unyielding in upholding these principles of Liberty, and we must stand firm in encouraging those with whom we work to do so as well. This means respect for the individual rights of every person, in every circumstance, no matter how much we disagree with his ideas or the way he expresses them. And we must not suffer fools who encourage the violation of these principles gladly. We cannot associate ourselves with them, or encourage them lest we lose our stand. In this way we will be worthy of the name "Patriot", and we will uphold the heritage of those great men who pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

Ayn Rand Refuses a Sanction: Truth, Tolerance and the Level of Discourse

The manner in which discourse is conducted in the media and in public speeches and statements made by politicians today is beyond apalling. The insinuations, excuses, lack of respect for the listeners--or in the case of interviews--the person being interviewed, has become the norm rather than the exception, and is expected and even approved of by members of the media, the intellectuals, political hacks, politicians and even some members of the general public. I have discussed this before, even back to the beginning of this blog, and I have wondered about how we had come to this pass, and what values we have learned and taught that would have allowed such a deterioration of discourse, turning it into a kind of anti-discourse in which ideas are never exchanged.

Today, I as I was catching up on my blogging reading list, I came upon a post that featured a segment of Milton Friedman on Phil Donahue in 1979. I had forgotten what a sharp man he was, and how he used humor to his advantage. So I watched the whole show--which can be found in 5 segments starting here. From there I found the whole of a Phil Donahue show that featured Ayn Rand in the same year. Oddly, though I had seen the Milton Friedman episode when it was broadcast, I had missed the Ayn Rand episode of Donahue. My boyfriend at the time told me about it, knowing how much I admired her. I remembered what he said, and it pertains to my topic as well shall see.

Miss Rand had much to say in this interview, and as I watched, I was struck by two things. The first was how much time Phil Donahue spent actually listening to the answers to questions he posed, and how, in his discussion, he endeavored to be fair to the guest, even when it was clear that he disagreed with the ideas presented. This used to be the norm, and now I never experience it--not even with respect to some talk radio hosts that I believe have a point. The other was the very serious way Miss Rand listened to Donahue, often hearing and repeating verbatum his words in order to illustrate her own ideas as well as his. This was a hallmark of Miss Rand's interactions. She was serious about ideas, and would underscore a questioner's words in such a way that he--and everyone else listening--had to realize what he had actually said and what it meant. Often, she would look at the speaker with a shrug, a smile and an intense look that said that she had heard what the speaker was actually saying, but did the speaker hear it?

On this level alone, the episode was refreshing--a blast from a kinder, more focused past, but at the end of the third segment something occurred that got me thinking once again about the nature of discourse, and I got it, finally; the "it" being the value that has been lost in order to allow the ugly sniping that has replaced discourse in the present.

What happened is that a young woman got up to ask a question. But rather than simply ask a question, she added a preamble in which she said:

Questioner: Fifteen years ago I was impressed with your books and I sort of felt that your philosophy was proper. Today, however, I am more educated and I find that if a company . . ."
Rand: This is what I don't answer--
Donahue: Well, wait a minute, you haven't heard the question yet.
(Audience chatter, laughter)
Rand: She's already estimated her position, in my work, incidently displaying the quality of her brain. If today she says she is more educated--
Questioner (interrupting): No, no, no! I am more educated now than I was 15 years ago when I was in high school, before I went to college--
Rand (talking over Questioner): --then, uh, I'm not interested in your biography (unintelligible) wrong context.
Questioner (over Rand):--and read the newspapers.
Donahue: Let her make her point! Let her make her point!
(Audience murmers, talking).
Rand: (gestures and bows, gives floor to Questioner)
Questioner: It's very basic. When a company is allowed to do what it wants to do like ITT, you wind up with Nazi Germany and ITT doing whatever it well please, and any other company in the United States doing the same damn thing! Conglomerates are not monopolies--they can do whatever they want. ITT owns everything from baking companies to telephone companies to munition plants. I mean, I really think that's wrong! And I really think--
Donahue (getting between Rand and Questioner): Miss Rand thinks it's wrong, too. But she thinks it's not a government force that's going to correct the problem.
Questioner: I don't think government force is going to correct the problem either, but she's not--
Donahue: But she says that if we just back away and let the invisible hand to work, and let competition and free enterprise happen according to it's own inclinations--
Questioner: I understand that--
Donahue: We're not going to have abuse--and abuse and evil will fall of its own weight.
Questioner: I don't believe that.


The above can be seen here, starting at 9:53. Watch Rand's expressions and body language closely.



The encounter continues at the beginning of segment 4:

Questioner: I can't believe that because money is power--
(Audience applause, whistles, clapping)
Questioner: --the more power you have.
Donahue: Can we encourage you to make a contribution to this expression.
Rand: I will not answer anyone who is impolite. But, to show you --
(Audience expresses disapproval)
Donahue: She wasn't impolite--
Rand: I do not sanction impoliteness and I am not the victim of hippies. But--
Donahue: Hippies?
(Audience laughing, talking).
Rand:--that's where it started. That the--in the dropping of politeness and the manners.
Donahue: You're equating someone who disagrees with you with impoliteness. That's not fair.
Rand: No, no. If you didn't--
(Audience laughter, calls and applause)
Rand: If you didn't interrupt me, I would have demonstrated what I mean. I will assure you that I am not evading the question. If anyone else wants to ask the same question politely, I'll be delighted to answer.
Donahue: There was nothing impolite! . . . This is the kind of woman we are trying to attract to our television audience.
Rand: Fine. Teach her some manners--I--
Donahue: But Miss Rand--
Rand: I will now repeat what she said: "I used to agree with you, but now that I'm more educated. . ." What does that mean.
Donahue: Well that means that she now has a different view. There's nothing personal about that observation. Don't be so sensitive!"
Rand: I am going to be. I intend to be!
{BREAK}
Rand (after answering another question): --But I want to answer the preceding question. Doesn't anybody want to ask it politely?
Donahue: Uh, well yes.. Ah, sure... ah--your question. . . your question wants this audience to agree with your assessment of the questioner, and I don't think they will. That's the problem.
(Audience applause)
Rand: All of them? Uh--then why do they want to listen to me at all?
Donahue: Alright, does anybody want to. . .? Alright . . . over here. Could you please stand?
Commentor: I' suprised that somebody with the intelligence of Miss Rand could so emotional in her approach.
(Audience applause).
Rand (pointing): I can answer you. I didn't come here to be judged. I came here to answer questions. A question asked in the following form: "I used to agree with you but now that I'm more educated, I don't." It is an insult--
Donahue: All right--
Rand:--which I cannot sanction.
Donahue: All right.
Rand: I am not interested in the woman's history. She didn't have to begin it that way--
Donahue: All right.
Rand:--and that's what I want to register my protest--
Donahue: How do we keep ITT from developing too much . . .
(Here Donahue goes on to ask, and Rand answers the question)


Here is the next half, on segment four--from the beginning to about 4:05.


Here is Ayn Rand's point: that the woman was impolite and that she (Rand) would not therefore sanction the question. That is, Rand refused to ignore the context in which the question was asked, and the assumption that the woman was making, in order to ask the question.

Donahue here misunderstands Rand's intent, and interprets it to mean that Rand will not answer because she disagrees with the Questioner.

What I noticed is that, despite what has been said about Rand by those who hate her, she is completely genuine in her verbal and facial expressions. She lets anyone watching know that she is being direct, but that she is not angry. She is refusing to answer this woman on principle. Twice, this woman begins her statements by talking down to Rand, a context that Rand then refuses to ignore. The first time the woman speaks, she implies that uneducated, naive people are the only ones who would consider Rand's ideas proper. The second time, she says: "It's very basic . . ." Both of these statements essentially talk down to Rand and her ideas. Despite what Donahue says, they are personal, and change the tone of the conversation. If Rand had ignored the insult and answered the question, she would have given her sanction to the lack of good manners--and good rhetorical skills--of her questioner. Rand would not do that. Had she had the desire, Rand would have made an excellent teacher for young people. She would not have let them get away with such attempts at one-upmanship, however unconscious or subtle, and the kids would have respected her for it.

To understand what Rand was doing in the above interview, I believe that one must understand that Ayn Rand was far more concerned with truth than she was with tolerance. That she was not prepared to allow a lie or an evasion (and this was more likely the latter on the part of the Questioner) for the sake of being nice, or appearing to turn the other cheek. Ayn Rand believed that sacrifice--the act of ignoring or destroying something or someone of greater value to oneself for the sake of a lesser value--is evil. She was a very consistent practitioner of justice, which is the opposite of such sacrifice. Ayn Rand was also consistent in that she would not suffer fools gladly. She understood that tolerance of the bad is destruction of the good; that tolerance of foolishness means ignorance of wisdom; that tolerance of evasion is the destruction of truth. It was her contention that sanctioning a non-value drives out value, and that this is what is evil about such tolerance. Ayn Rand was definitely not PC.

And this brings me to the issue of how reasonable discourse has been driven out in favor of empty rhetoric, lies and insults. As I watched these YouTube segments, I saw that the value that underlies political correctness is unlimited tolerance. People have many rationales for tolerating being lied to and being continuously insulted by those who wish to replace argument with empty words. One that the collectivists have much exploited, is the desire people have to appear to be tolerant. The leftists use this through continual accusations of racism and other calumny applied to anyone who is not tolerant of the course state of discourse today. And the reluctance people have to being labeled as intolerant--whether it is true or not--makes such labeling an easy way to control people who desire the good opinion of others, no matter who they are and what they believe. You may have noticed that Rand does not care about the good opinion of others unless she respects them.

Tolerance has been treated as a primary virtue: that is a virtue that must be practiced without limits. And among people of good will, a certain amount of tolerance for differences in beliefs and practices is necessary, as well as is tolerance for differences in taste and preferences. It is also important to have some tolerance for the errors of knowlege that people of good will can make, so that we can get along with one another. But tolerance cannot be a primary virtue.

In engineering, tolerance is defined as: "the leeway for deviation from a standard"; and more precisely as "the permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension." These definitions imply that there are limits to tolerance, and indeed an engineer is very careful to calculate the limits to a deviation, because beyond those limits a structure could not stand.

And so it is within the values that we place on behavior and interactions among human beings. To tolerate benign errors of knowlege, differences in beliefs and practices that do not affect the rights of another is within the limits. But should we tolerate destruction of property? The enslavement of women? Murder? Genocide? Is it virtuous to tolerate the culture and beliefs of those who wish to destroy our life, liberty and property? Many of us would respond viscerally with a resounding "NO!"

And yet, what is it we do when we believe that it is proper to treat with murderers and psychopathic and genocidal leaders such as the president of Iran? When we allow such a man to speak to our Congress and to students in our unversities? When we applaud him because it is "nice" to do so? It is wrong to do so because tolerance of evil does mean the destruction of the good. We cannot have it both ways. By tolerating evil, we destroy the good. This is the opposite of justice, no matter how often the leftists speak of justice in social terms.

So it is with the issue of discourse. By giving our sanction to liars, tyrants and murderers, we participate in the decline of polite and reasoned discourse and the discussion of ideas over personalities. This may not seem like a huge concession when compared to murder and genocide. But discourse strikes at the heart of all political interactions, and by driving out truth and justice tbrough tolerance of lies and deceit, we are helping to build the on-ramp to the destruction of our Constitution and our liberty.

Many of us, present company included, have often given our sanction to to the undeserving because we wanted to appear to be tolerant, to be considered "nice". And we have to stop it right now. Being nice is not the equivalent of being good. Tolerance is not a primary virtue, and it is meaningless without limits. What should our children say to us if we allow their freedom and liberty to be destroyed because we wished to appear to be tolerant and nice?

G-d forbid that I should ever need to have that conversation with my kids.

Ayn Rand understood this, and that is why she refused to sanction the woman's question. For the late '60's and '70's saw the resurgence of the loss of justice, the loss of truth in argument, and the beginning of unlimited tolerance practiced out of fear of the bad opinions of others and a desire to appear "nice."

Ayn Rand understood what was happening--did you catch her comment about hippies?--and that is why she stood her ground, firmly. By refusing to tolerate the young woman's question, and persistently pursuing the issue, she taught that audience--and all of us--that tolerance is no substitute for truth and justice.

Justice cannot survive when we bow down to unlimited tolerance.

Watching this episode has brought me an understanding of how we have come to a place where we are afraid to assert the goodness of our values, and why we tolerate behavior that seeks to destroy them. It has made me reflect on my premises and reject those that have brought me to self-censorship for the sake of not offending the indefensible. I have learned something about what to listen for, and how to respond. Certainly, I am not Ayn Rand. My expression of the same ideas will be different, but the goal will be the same: To practice the refusal to sanction an unreasonable assertion by providing a reasonable response and to call attention to the context of such a substitute for discourse, and to the purpose behind the speaker's strategy, which is usually to shift the ground of the conversation away from reason. (In the case of the Questioner above, I believe it was unconscious. Rand reminds me of some of the older European Jewish women I know, who practice both the straighforwardness and manners of a different time). This will require a more conscious attention to not only what is being said, but to the context in which it is presented.

Thank you, Ayn Rand.