Preface to Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand's Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud's Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises's Economics (available July 1 in print and ebook forms at Amazon.com and others)

A sound theory of universals is fundamental to the defense of a free society.

 

    Plato said that universals, which he called forms, are located in another dimension of reality and only certain people can know them. Hence, his advocacy of a near-communistic society of philosopher-kings who would rule. Thomas Hobbes advocated a theory called nominalism, which says universals are conventional, arbitrary names, not sound or objective concepts that are true. This made him a relativist in ethics and advocate of a strong “public sword,” or monarchy, to keep the peace in society.

 

   Karl Marx did not have a theory of universals, though we might say it was implied in what Ludwig von Mises calls Marx’s polylogism, a theory of many logics that rejects the notion of only one fundamental logic based on Aristotle’s three laws. Thus, Marx claimed that the bourgeoisie have their logic, while the proletariat have theirs, which means the two classes cannot talk to or understand each other. Hence, his advocacy of the  dictatorship of the proletariat to establish that Garden of Eden called communism—or socialism—he considered both terms synonymous. Today’s postmodern Marxists say something similar: “You have your truth; I have my truth.” As consequence, what they advocate in political philosophy is a repressive society, with the so-called victim classes taking the place of the proletariat.

 

   Underlying any theory of political philosophy is a theory of human nature, also called philosophical psychology. A sound theory of universals is required to form and define the concepts that identify and define the essentials of human nature. Do human beings possess the capacity to reason, the word “capacity” meaning we do not reason automatically but must choose to exercise that capacity, which means we have an active consciousness with which we control our lives? Or are we determined by genes and environment with illusions of consciousness and free will? The illusion of consciousness is called materialism and the illusion of free will is called determinism. Both are advocated by Hobbes and Marx. If we do possess a volitional consciousness, however, the idea of a free society—capitalism—follows from basic concepts of rights, freedom, the moral validity of the pursuit of self-interest, and, in particular, a sound theory of universals that explains how objectivity and truth are possible.

    The significance of a correct theory of universals is that our knowledge, with the exception of proper names, is entirely in the form of universal concepts. If those concepts are not valid, they mean nothing when we move from epistemology to ethics and politics, and to all the special sciences, including psychology and economics. That is, we must be able to use and apply the theory of universals to validate science, especially our concept of human nature—to establish the foundations of psychology, to validate the concept of value to establish a theory of ethics, and to validate many other concepts to define the proper function of government. This last includes rights and freedom, along with such additional concepts as the nature and meaning of healthy and unhealthy motivation and behavior and the production of wealth in a social setting.

    A correct theory of universals means our minds are competent to know reality and thus can guide us in our choices and actions to grow, thrive, and prosper.

    Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, which I will argue is a sound theory of universals, is her most important and significant contribution to philosophy, especially to epistemology. Only by making the theory widely known and understood can the free society be properly defended.

    The present work is not a defense of capitalism per se. Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises provide unanswerable moral and economic justifications.[1] The subject of this book is epistemology and its importance in identifying the nature of science, basic and applied, with emphasis on the human sciences of psychology and economics. Its theme is that the essence of science is observation, not exact measurement, and that science employs as its primary and fundamental method the mental process of conceptualization: generalization from observation of particulars to identify universals, then application of previously formed universals to understand new particular cases. The issue of universals, based on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, runs throughout, providing the fundamental epistemological foundation for proper defenses of reason in philosophy, individualism in psychology, and capitalism in economics.

    My audience, as a result, is laypersons and academics interested in the underlying epistemology of science, especially the human sciences that, when integrated with psychology and economics, provide the ultimate vindication of a free society and answer to such ill-founded theories as those of Plato, Hobbes, and Marx.

    In chapter 1, using Rand’s theory of universals, or concepts as she calls them, I introduce her notion of measurement omission as the essence of abstraction to address the proper meanings of, and distinctions between, basic and applied science, theory and history, and the cognitive processes of generalization and application. Positivism—logical positivism or logical empiricism, as it is also labeled—and experimentation are discussed, followed by a presentation of what is called the problem of universals.

    In chapter 2, I elaborate Rand’s theory of concepts as an improvement on Aristotle’s theory of form and matter by identifying concepts and essences as neither intrinsic, in the thing, as Aristotle taught, nor subjective as the nominalists assert. Rather, concepts and essences are epistemological, in our minds, created by us and are valid and epistemologically objective if they correctly identify the metaphysical referents on which they are based. I further discuss Rand’s important explanations of abstraction from abstractions and concepts of consciousness. In concluding the chapter, I elaborate Rand’s usage of the terms “metaphysical” and “epistemological,” ending with a presentation of what I consider her radical theory of logic as non-contradictory identification.

    In chapter 3, I discuss several related philosophical issues using Rand’s theory to refute the bane of science, positivism, and to provide valid empirically-based explanations of Immanuel Kant’s allegedly innate “a priori” concepts—space, time, and causality—as well as a non-religious, non-Kantian empirical defense of free will. I continue with a discussion of the distinction between general knowledge, which we all possess to some degree and with some accuracy, and personal knowledge, which is unique to our own experiences. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the role and importance of emotion in both science and our personal lives.

    In chapters 4 and 5, respectively, I apply Rand’s theory to my understanding of psychology and economics as human sciences, with emphasis on the work of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. Both Freud and Mises have been criticized as pseudo- or non-scientific for using “literary” (Freud) or “non-quantitative” (Mises) methods to establish their theories. To the contrary, I argue that the methods of both are models of conceptualization, which I contend is the fundamental method of science.

    I became aware of the importance of conceptualization in science when I reread Edith Packer’s Lectures on Psychology after they had been made available as a Kindle book, in 2013, by her husband George Reisman. I realized after reading the book that conceptualization was what Dr. Packer was doing as a psychotherapist, and then realized that Mises, Dr. Reisman, Aristotle, and, when reading him later, Freud, were doing the same thing in their work. Masses of quantitative data and laboratory experiments, I realized, were not the essence of science.

    In chapter 6, I conclude the work with a summary of its thesis, elaborating on what I call thinking in definitions and clarifying the meanings of scientific law and principle. Finally, statements about Kant’s legacy and, subsequently, Ayn Rand’s complete the book.

    The significance of focusing on Freud and Mises is that they both provide fundamental concepts and principles for the foundation of a free society, Freud for the individual to pursue a healthy, happy, and psychologically independent life and Mises for individuals to cooperate with each other to achieve peace and prosperity. Both are experts on human nature, explicitly so for Freud, implicitly for Mises, and both, despite the comments of their critics, consider themselves to be scientists. This work aims to provide Freud and Mises a needed epistemological foundation.

    The meaning of free society that I am using is Ayn Rand’s concept of laissez-faire capitalism as a social system, presupposing an ethics of rational self-interest. That is, capitalism is not just the private ownership of the means of production, as economists, Mises in particular, define it, but a system based on the primacy of individual rights, especially property rights, with all property privately owned, allowing social cooperation to be achieved by voluntarily trading value for value. Rights are freedoms of action—deriving from human nature as a rational being—to speak and write openly and to work with others to pursue property, careers, relationships, hobbies, education, and happiness without the interference of initiated physical coercion, that is, physical force, by the government or criminals. Self-defensive coercion is delegated to the government unless involved in an emergency situation.

    The importance of defining capitalism as a social system is that it broadens the concept beyond economics alone. This is significant because totalitarian states are called such because they seek to and often do—in the name of an ethics of self-sacrifice—control every aspect of the individuals’ lives, not just their economic lives.[2] Totalitarianism means total control. Capitalism means total freedom—from direct or indirect initiated physical force of any type, economic or political.

    A further point about the meaning of Rand’s concept of capitalism. It is not what we have today or had in the late nineteenth century, though Rand acknowledges the United States came close in those earlier years. Her concept is a goal, a moral and political ideal, to work toward to achieve at some point in the future. It is not Marx’s utopia or creation of a “new man,” as Marx said communism would give us. Capitalism requires hard work and self-responsibility with no one expected to provide handouts. The problems with the apparent capitalism that we had in earlier days, and have today, is that many big businesses and governments have colluded with each other to gain favors and wealth for themselves, ignoring everyone else. This is not capitalism, but corporatism or, more precisely, fascism.

    For this reason, one of the best ways to describe capitalism is that it is a system in which business and state are completely separated in the same way and for the same reasons as we now have the (nearly) complete separation of church and state. And by “business,” I mean any organization that operates to earn a profit by offering value to paying customers. I include schools, roads, and utilities, today’s publicly owned and mixed institutions. I also believe that there should be no so-called nonprofit organizations. All societal institutions, business, church, or otherwise, should be privately owned and operated and expected to earn an excess of revenues or donations over expenses. If there is to be taxation to support the considerably limited government, it should be a flat tax applied to everyone, including to those so-called nonprofits. As Ayn Rand indicates, there are other options in financing government in a free society, but the issue is far removed from today’s problems. For the most part, it should be postponed for debate until we come closer to a truly free society.

    I did not come up with the theme of this book until recently, but the idea behind it was implanted in me during the spring quarter of my freshman year, 1966, at the University of Denver. I took the course “Modern Philosophy,” taught by Leonard Peikoff. The course covered Thomas Hobbes, the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz), the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), and Immanuel Kant—in ten weeks.[3] The issue of universals and political philosophy arose immediately because Dr. Peikoff’s lectures began with Hobbes and the consequences of Hobbes’s nominalism. The issue continued throughout the course, at least indirectly, when we came to John Locke’s inability to find a “something I know not what,” Hume’s failure to find a necessary connection between cause and effect, and, of course, Kant’s failure to find reality.

    An important note here is that Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts did not begin to be published until July of that year, and Dr. Peikoff’s teaching style was to present the best case he could for a viewpoint he did not accept, even bending over backwards to make it sound like he supported it. He knew Ayn Rand’s theory at this time but did not present it in the course.[4] Lively Q&A’s went on throughout the term, but no solution to the problem of universals was found. I concluded, reluctantly, that those of us most interested in the topic were left on the floor, desperately trying to find Aristotle’s intrinsic essences. After that quarter, Dr. Peikoff returned to New York City where he had lived for many years.

    When Ayn Rand’s theory was published, I memorized key definitions to think about them, for example, when waiting for my next class.[5] In the ensuing years, my interest in epistemology and the problem of universals never waned. It was a treat to read the discussions of epistemology by Ludwig von Mises and, though not exactly a treat, my knowledge of epistemology helped me in graduate school to fend off the assaults of that god called positivism.

 

     My relationship to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which she named Objectivism, is that I am a follower of her philosophy, but do not describe myself as an Objectivist. I call myself a student of Ayn Rand, in the same way I call myself a student of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. In 1968, in the aftermath of Rand’s break with Nathaniel Branden, she emphasized that Objectivism was her philosophy and that followers should take care not to speak for her, but to continue working as independent intellectuals in their own fields applying her ideas as relevant.[6] This is how I have viewed my scholarly work for many decades. In the present book, I emphasize that I am presenting and applying her ideas as I understand them. Elaborations and applications are mine.[7]

    My thirty-six-year academic career was spent in the applied science of business marketing, teaching and writing about fundamental ideas—Ayn Rand’s, as well as those of psychologists and economists—applying them to the business disciplines and education.

     The many references used in this book indicate a wide variety of influences on my thinking and writing. I endorse some, reject others or attempt to refute them, and some are neutral, providing important information as background and history. Aside from Ayn Rand, Freud, and Mises, my most significant influences are psychologist Edith Packer and economist George Reisman. My primary and permanent influence is my wife, soulmate, and editor, philosopher Linda Reardan. Her conceptions both of post-Kantian, modern Aristotelianism and of emotions as data for reasoning have influenced this book. Our daughter, a mechanical engineer, has also been helpful when challenging me to explain to her, in simple terms, the thesis of the work.

     The formatting, as with all my books, follows The Chicago Manual of Style, though not completely. I still prefer superscript numbers in the footnote reference, for example, as opposed to Chicago’s recommendation to use full-sized numbers followed by a period. Clarity and consistency are the criteria of formatting, which I learned from Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor.

 

     For references to the internet, I have shortened most of the uniform resource locators (URLs) to their domain names. When searching for my reference, I recommend using what is called the “site operator,” for example, site:freud.org.uk private meaning or site:mises.org economic calculation. This will almost always, at the top of the search, return the words that follow the domain name. Digital object identifiers (DOIs), unique locators usually of academic journal articles, have not been shortened. Citations to print publications have been shortened after the initial reference. All sources are listed in the bibliography in full, including uniform resource locators.

 

   A final note on “self-plagiarism,” a term I believe to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms that has gained some notoriety in the academic world. I emphatically do not endorse the notion that a writer can plagiarize him- or herself, especially when acknowledgment is made about the so-called recycling of one’s own work. For the record, I have been writing and posting monthly blogs for nineteen years and more than twenty of the posts, since 2021, were written as drafts for eventual use, after editing, in the present work. A few excerpts from the draft of this work have also been posted as blogs.[8]

   Notes    

 

   [1] I must add George Reisman and his magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Reisman is a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and former student of Mises.

 

    [2] The ethics, especially today, is usually a variant of Kant’s duty-over-inclination maxim, imposed at the point of a government gun (or Hobbes’s public sword). The individual’s life belongs to the state and must be sacrificed to it when and as requested. 

 

    [3] The quarter system at the time was ten weeks plus a week of finals, and classes were five days a week, fifty minutes each. I took Professor Peikoff’s introductory philosophy course during the previous winter quarter, along with 160 of my closest classmates. The modern philosophy class consisted of about thirty-five students.

 

    [4]    In the introduction to philosophy course, Dr. Peikoff had nearly everyone convinced he was a determinist. In the modern philosophy course, I knew that he knew Ayn Rand’s theory because he taught it in a graduate seminar during the fall quarter of 1965. I even had the audacity to walk into his office, before attending a single college class, to ask him if I could audit his graduate seminar. He said “no,” because it would not be fair to others. He did, however, give me the telephone number of the local representative of the Nathaniel Branden Institute that presented lecture courses on tape of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

 

    [5]    Rand’s theory of concepts was initially published in eight monthly installments in The Objectivist magazine from July 1966 to February 1967. One of the (non-epistemological) definitions I memorized was her notion of capitalism as a social system. When I mentioned it to a classmate, the classmate was surprised, and I was surprised that he was surprised—because I had assumed that Rand’s definition was self-evident and that everyone must have known it! 

 

    [6] Ayn Rand, “A Statement of Policy,” The Objectivist 7, no. 6 (June 1968): 7–9. 

 

    [7]    In the present work, I have concentrated on avoiding any tinges of moralism, a trait that unfortunately is sometimes present in Rand’s writing and in the demeanor of some of her followers. See my discussion of the anti-conceptual mentality in Jerry Kirkpatrick, Independent Judgment and Introspection: Fundamental Requirements of the Free Society (Kirkpatrick Books, 2019), 108–110, and below, chap. 3, the section titled “Defensive Habits and Free Will,” pp. 67–69.

 

    [8] See jerrykirkpatrick.blogspot.com for the blogs. I have always considered my blog posts to be drafts of whatever I might later publish. See Richard Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism (Pantheon, 2007), for his discussion of the legal and moral issues involved in plagiarism and “self-plagiarism.” The term “self-plagiarism” likely applies more correctly to students who turn in the same paper for two different classes. 

Systemic White Guilt and Its Groveling, Gutless Conformity

The documentary White Guilt by filmmaker Eli Steele and his father professor Shelby Steele is premiering this week at Arizona State University. Below is a repost, from July 13, 2020, of my discussion of Dr. Steele’s book of the same title. I urge everyone to see the film when it becomes available in your area (and to read the book). Trailer can be seen at whiteguiltfilm.com, and you can subscribe there for updates. Additional information is available at manofsteelproductions.com.
 

White guilt is an attempt by today’s Progressives to regain the sense of moral authority they once had during the desegregation protests of the 1960s.

This is the gist of Shelby Steele’s psychologically insightful 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

The guilt, writes Steele, is a secular version of original sin—cloaked variously as structural, systemic, or unconscious racism—that brings out a need for redemption in the eyes of black people.

Such redemption is achieved by apologizing to (including kneeling before) blacks to ask their forgiveness for the racism of white ancestors. More significantly, it has required the implementation of various government programs, such as a “war on poverty,” preferential treatment (affirmative action), diversity, and many other forms of welfare. In return, redemptive actions do not expect or require anything from blacks, particularly hard work and earning one’s own way. That would be racist. Besides, the guilty white gets no moral authority from an accomplished self-made black person.

The formula, says Steele, is simple: “lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism” (p. 62).

A further cause and consequence of the guilt and need for redemption is what Steele calls a “white blindness” to black people that does not see blacks as individual human beings, but as a class or group of victims who de facto are also still inferiors.

The blindness, of course, existed under slavery where owners viewed their slaves as fundamentally inferior, giving them only a subsistence living; no freedom, no responsibility. Under segregation, blacks had control over their lives, responsibility, and in some cases thriving free-market communities, but their freedom was severely restricted outside their segregated areas. And they were still marked as inferior.

Today, since the 1960s, the psychological effect of guilty white Progressives has been to expect no responsibility or competence from black people, only entitlement and grievance—a mutual codependence, it would seem. The result has been the near-total collapse of slum neighborhoods into poverty, illiteracy, drugs, crime and gang warfare, fatherless homes, and unwed mothers. But “good intention” is what gives moral authority to the guilty white. That is all that matters because “they’ve tried hard.” (Implied premise: to help those who allegedly cannot help themselves and who are therefore inferior.)

The invisibility caused by white blindness, continues Steele, is what also causes rage in blacks that has given us the militant black power movements of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter, both of which organizations are Marxist, segregationist, terrorist, anti-semitic and racist against whites. Rage was present under slavery and segregation but it was only acted out in recent times because of a perceived weakness of the oppressors—the moral vacuum felt by the guilty white (and the permission granted by Marxist premises, I might add).

This is what Steele means when he says “blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era.”

Underlying white guilt, as Steele correctly points out, is Marx’s notion of social or economic determinism. We were born with the sin of racism, so the determinist argument goes, and can do nothing about it. This drives the guilty white in their frantic efforts to assuage guilt by adopting additional notions and behaviors of political correctness, virtue signaling, and identity politics.

Identity politics is collectivism. Its psychology, as I have written before, is dependence.

But racism in America, according to Steele, effectively ended by the mid to late 1960s, achieved largely by the moral authority of Martin Luther King’s peaceful protests and emphasis on seeing black people as individuals, not as a class or group.

Not denying that a minority of people or incidents are still racist, Steele means by this that both then and now, as opposed to the 1950s, he can go to any restaurant or stay in any hotel he can afford, and find a bathroom, which he could not easily do in the years of segregation.

King’s assassination in 1968 was a turning point that brought out not just the rage of black power, but also the guilt of white Progressives. Why? The moral authority used and felt in the marches and protests for desegregation disappeared with integration. Rather than rejecting their underlying Marxist premises and taking up King’s individualism, white Progressives saw their new moral compass in the  march for redemption from “systemic racism.”

What seems transparent (or puzzling) to anyone not suffering such a psychology or holding the Marxist premises is that white Progressives suffer a “structural, systemic, or unconscious guilt” that knocks out and defeats any respect they may have ever held for our country’s founding principles of individualism.

Hence, today’s spectacle of groveling cowardice and conformity combined with blatant intimidation, threats, and violence.
 

Triumphs of the American Sense of Life

Below is a repost from November 13, 2018. In the first line of paragraph four, I link to two earlier posts that make good companions to the present one. The first is from February 8, 2017, posted shortly after the 2016 election, “Condescension, Intelligence Defense Values—and the Deplorables—And Oh Yes, The Putsch Mentality.” The second is from January 12, 2018, “More on Condescension toward the Weak, Stupid, and Ignorant,” a more detailed discussion of how the elites view the “deplorables.” At the end of the present post, I have added a brief note on the current state of the American sense of life and what it is up against in today’s elites. 

 

“Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. . . . I hope [they] will see through this charade” (Senator Lindsey Graham, Kavanaugh Hearing: Transcript, p. 702, September 27, 2018).

Fortunately, the American people have seen through the sham and charade, but those holding and seeking additional power continue their campaigns to gain more.

Is the American sense of life strong enough to slow down and defeat the leftists’ rabid—and rapid—march toward dictatorship?

I have written in earlier posts (1, 2) that our current president won his election two years ago by tapping into what Ayn Rand calls the American sense of life. He did not, and still does not, condescend toward the “deplorables” of middle America. He respects them, and unlike many (most?) politicians, is straightforward and honest with them.

Sense of life is a composite emotional sum of who each one of us is as a person. It consists of what Edith Packer calls our core evaluations, as well as our level of self-esteem. It expresses our view of ourselves and our attitudes toward other people and the world in general (Lectures on Psychology, pp. 9-10).

Ayn Rand describes sense of life as a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics,” “a generalized feeling about existence . . . with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all [our] other emotions and underlies all [our] experiences” (The Romantic Manifesto, pp. 25-26).

Sense of life is what an artist projects in a work of art and what patrons of the arts respond to. It is also what one does or does not fall in love with in a member of the opposite sex and what one initially likes or dislikes in another person.

An astute observer of emotions might notice that one person is “eaten up with envy” and another “really loves life and is at ease with himself” (Packer’s examples). These are descriptions of the two individuals’ senses of life. It is possible and not uncommon for individuals to hold contradictory core evaluations and therefore a contradictory sense of life.

A nation is a sum or average of its individual citizens’ values and behavior, which means a country’s sense of life can be identified, albeit not easily, and described based on its citizens’ dominant traits and emotional expressions.

Ayn Rand identifies the dominant American sense of life as essentially individualistic and hardworking, with fundamental values placed on achievement, initiative, effort, earning your own way, genuineness, a strong reality orientation, and a defiance of authority. Typical Americanisms that describe the sense of life are “you can’t push me around” and “my money’s as good as the next fella’s” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, chap. 18).

The American sense of life insists on the right to the pursuit of happiness and Americans generally are happy and optimistic—happier and more optimistic than the citizens of many, perhaps all, other nations in the world. The American sense of life represents the freedom, accomplishments, and well-deserved benefits of capitalism, while most of the rest of the world is mired in varying degrees of statism and dictatorship, including abject poverty.

This American sense of life, therefore, is best (though certainly not exclusively) represented by the so-called deplorable dregs of society, the ones who live in flyover country and are mocked by the bi-coastal elites, especially those members of the communist-fascist left and their sycophantic followers. The elites, which include most college professors and the condescendingly leftist press, derive their sense of life from European intellectuals and aristocrats. They do not share the same sense of life as the “deplorables,” or at least in the same degree.

The “deplorables” are the ones who voted for our current president in 2016 and supported his program and candidates in the recent midterm election. The elites are the ones who labeled, and continue to label, anyone who exhibits the American sense of life a racist and a bigot.

If we go back a few decades in our political history, we can see the American sense of life in operation in several presidential campaigns. In 1964, the press and leftist elites, for example, were beside themselves when someone like Senator Barry Goldwater could win the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, especially after their incessantly relentless charges of racism and bigotry against the senator and anyone who supported him. Sound familiar?

At that time, Ayn Rand commented on the press’s loss of respect and influence, as well as their considerable myopia and the criteria they must have been using to report the news: “It is as if newsmen, with ‘their ears to the ground,’ had heard everything except an earthquake in full progress.”*

It was their leftist (and European) anti-American sense of life that clashed with that of the deplorables and prevented them from seeing (or feeling) the earthquake. Unfortunately, Goldwater’s subsequent campaign collapsed in anti-intellectualism, causing him to lose by a landslide.**

In 1972, however, the American people were offered explicit socialism in the form of Senator George McGovern. His opponent, the less-than-inspiring Richard Nixon, won forty-nine states. The American sense of life spoke—against McGovern, not for Nixon.

Later expressions of the American sense of life can be seen in the Reagan years and, less enthusiastically, in the years of the two Bushes. The sense of life came back in 2016 and also this year, though not nearly as strongly as the previous years, especially 1972.

The problem with a sense of life is that it is an emotion and emotions are not infallible, nor are they permanent, especially as new generations are educated in the anti-capitalist government-run schools and constantly confronted with the ferocious onslaught of leftist propaganda.

If the American sense of life is not articulated explicitly in terms of philosophy, economics, and psychology, it cannot survive—especially in today’s postmodern Orwellian climate of doublespeak and deliberately chaotic disingenuousness.

The American people and their sense of life have thus far heeded Senator Graham’s call not to fall for the shams and charades of the left. The American people also have not fallen for the Soviet tactic of condemning as “mentally incompetent” both Senator Graham and Judge Kavanaugh for their angry and correctly expressed moral indignation at the left’s flagrantly unjust and dishonest attempt to prevent the judge’s confirmation.

No, our current president is not perfect, though he is committed to defending the American way of life, flawed as his conception may be. He is the best public figure to come along in many years to express the sense life.

Intellectual articulation of that American sense of life is available in the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, George Reisman, and Edith Packer. These fundamental ideas urgently need to be read, discussed, and understood—and taught in universities, which unfortunately is not likely to happen for some time—then expanded upon so they may trickle down to the press and politicians.

And to the “deplorables.”

Those who feel the American sense of life understand emotionally what the American way of life stands for. They need to understand it intellectually.


* “‘Extremism’ or The Art of Smearing,” The Objectivist Newsletter, September, 1964. This section on the media was deleted from the article’s reprint in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (chap. 17).

** The European sense of life, says Rand, sees oneself as fundamentally a servant of the state. Europeans, generally and in contrast to Americans, worship the state and consider it an honor to work in the government. “If you told a [European],” says Rand, “that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost.”

Postscript. Small detail can sometimes capture differences between national senses of life. A charming anecdote I would often tell my students when discussing cultural differences comes from Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini, in Brian Lamb’s Booknotes interview on C-SPAN in 2002 (at 00:17:04 in the video). When asking a question, said Severgnini, of an Italian, a Brit, a German, and an American, he would get the following responses (my paraphrase): the Italian would answer with another question, the Brit would tell a joke, the German would give a little essay, but the American would give an answer. Elsewhere in the interview, Severgnini commented on how Americans love competition, because they do not mind losing. It just means they try harder the next time. In Italy, he said, losing, especially failing at a business, means you are labeled for life as a loser.


Addendum, February 28, 2026. The American sense of life is alive and well, as evidenced by the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 and his followers’ approval of his breathtaking number of accomplishments over the past year. The communist-fascist left has gotten worse, more desperate, more virulent, and violent—all in the name of “democracy,” of course. They show no signs of stopping or of apologizing for past failures. They are even more intellectually bankrupt than they were before, aiming only at the destruction of civilization and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. The American sense of life, if it can hold on, must stop this juggernaut.
 

Thinking in Definitions

From the time I first read Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, almost sixty years ago, I have thought of myself as someone who thinks in definitions.
 
Why? All our knowledge, with the exception of proper nouns, consists of concepts. Combinations of concepts that make important connections to each other are called principles. When concepts and principles are well crafted, they become extremely illuminating, to myself, of course, but also to others when I write and teach. In simple terms, thinking in definitions means I know what I am thinking and talking about and, I would hope, others, my students and readers, also understand what I am saying.
 
Unfortunately, definitions today, if any attempt at a definition is made, fall into the “kinda, sorta, maybe, let’s assume” category, or are the positivists’ nonobjective arbitrary constructs, useful only in pushing words around in rationalistic discussions or writing. Textbooks, in particular, provide definitions that are too long and wordy, nonessential, and violate most of the rules of good definition.
 
What is a good definition? One that identifies genus and differentia of the referents being defined, that is, the general category within which the referents are distinguished and their essential distinguishing characteristic, which as Ayn Rand states, is the one that explains and causes most or all of the other distinguishing characteristics.
 
Human beings, for example, are animals that possess the capacity to reason. “Animal” is the genus and “capacity to reason” is the differentia, the characteristic that explains and causes all or most of the others that humans share, such as the ability to speak a language or to build skyscrapers. The definition is concise and, as Rand says, summarizes and condenses all our knowledge of humans in the “file folder,” to use Rand’s metaphor, stored in our minds.
 
Note that we all have our own file folders of humans that can be thin (for a child), thick (for most adults), or fat (for, say, a biologist or psychologist). The definition is written, to continue the metaphor, on the outside of the folder with the word that denotes the concept written on the tab.
 
The rules of a good definition are straightforward—identify genus and differentia but also ensure that the definition is truly essential and is not too broad or narrow, circular, vague, obscure, metaphorical, or, if possible, negative. It does require practice to become competent at the skill.
 
Thinking in definitions can also be thought of as thinking in ranges of measurement. Ayn Rand identifies abstraction as measurement omission, but that does not mean we forget about the measurements. It means that in the process of identifying the differentia of a concept we must be aware of the “stopping points” or boundaries of those measurements that are omitted. In this process, we limit the concept to a certain range. 
 
Tables, for example, are not a mile long, nor are they only one inch long. Bridges are flat with supports and hold objects called automobiles, but bridges are not tables. A toy table may be flat with supports and hold tiny teacups and saucers, but it is not the type of table adults eat dinner on.
 
The concept “human” is based on the range of measurements that describes our distinctive type of mental processing and distinguishes it from that of the higher mammals, the lower end of the continuum being the point at which we observe humans using reason to form and apply concepts, but not the higher mammals.
 
When the boundaries of cholera, to use three examples from McCaskey’s article “Induction in the Socratic Tradition,” were narrowed to an illness involving an “organic poison,” after dismissing season of year and foul water as competing causes, Robert Koch further narrowed the range of measurements, the cause and differentia, to the bacterium he called the comma bacillus. When Charles Wells, after many experiments, narrowed the boundaries of dew to droplets created in accordance with the laws of heat, particularly liquefaction, he recognized that condensation from vapor in the air was the cause and differentia. In both cases, the range of measurements of the respective differentia, comma bacillus and water condensation, were sufficiently limited to establish the concepts as universal.
 
Lord Kelvin concluded, after two hundred years of imprecise and often inaccurate tidal measurements, that Newton had been right, namely that tides are ocean movements that result from gravitational pull of the sun and moon, measurements omitted.
 
There are options in the formation process, as Ayn Rand points out, because different concepts may use different “stopping points” in the continuum. Hence, the English word “man” can be a synonym of human being or, using the range of measurements describing male and female anatomy, can mean a male person. The Yiddish word “mensch,” now an accepted part of the English language, means a rational, volitional human being who acts with integrity and honor. 
 
Options in concept formation are what make translation from one language to another challenging, because the range of measurements used in the concept’s formation differ from language to language. Keeping in mind the continuums that constitute our concepts enables us to maintain contact with reality, the reality of the different-but-similar referents we are discussing.
 
Thinking in well-constructed definitions especially enables us quickly to bring to mind the meaning of broad abstractions—abstractions from abstractions, and concepts of consciousness. Thinking in not-so-well-constructed definitions leaves us with the “kinda, sorta, maybe, let’s assume” category that even academics are guilty of, rationalists and positivists in particular.
 
The favorite vehicle of argumentation of these rationalists and positivists is to make grossly unrealistic assumptions and then announce, “Let’s assume, by definition, that dogs can fly or that humans are “brains in a vat,” and see where that takes us. If, by definition, they mean, and they usually do, arbitrary, disconnected floating abstractions and flimsily constructed tautologies, which violate all the rules of good definition, knowledge can be anything they want it to be, which is where we are today as consequence of Immanuel Kant’s inability to find reality and his positivist followers who restricted awareness of reality to the level of perceived concretes.
 
Flying dogs (and maybe brains in a vat) may make interesting fiction, but they do not make good science. In economics, the doctrine of pure and perfect competition does not even make good fiction—“perfect” information, that is, omniscience, just being one of its absurd assumptions. (See Kirkpatrick, In Defense of Advertising, 118–21.)
 
Concepts, to emphasize, are not “true by definition.” A concept, and its definition, is “true by reality,” that is, true by our having correctly identified the referents in reality and having summarized and condensed the file folder’s content for ease of use. They are open-ended in the sense that they apply to all referents of the same kind, past, present, and future—because they are classifications and cross-classifications (in our minds) of reality.
 
Concepts and their definitions are cognitive necessities, and they are constructed to meet cognitive needs. They are not “out there,” embedded in the concretes of the world. As Rand states, concepts and essences are epistemological, not metaphysical.
 

Unrestricted Violence and Oppression

Below is a repost from April 14, 2017. The title is new, replacing the lengthy original: “Brains or Blood? Take Your Pick—The Choice Is Not New but the Threat Is Worse.” The post is about 1960s violence and oppression on university campuses that made blood, rather than brains, the preferred method of settling disputes. The first quotation from Ludwig von Mises about Vladimir Lenin states the premise of today’s, and yesterday’s, leftists, while the second from chancellor Mitchell demonstrates the proper response. Today, if I were rewriting this, I would have to extend the violence and oppression beyond universities to public and private venues, parks, buildings, and streets and highways, with Mitchell’s courageous expel-and-arrest solution expanded to prompt arrest and deportation.
 
Recall that Lenin urged his generals to use “ruthless terror” in the establishment of his workers’ paradise called socialism. Today, random violence on streets and subways, plus assassinations, are not just called for but cheered when they occur. Recall also F. A. Hayek’s chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” in which he explained why so-called democratic socialism always gives rise to dictators: their policies require coercion and sooner or later the democrats lack the ruthlessness to carry out the necessary physical force. Hence, the rise of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, among others, to take the steps to establish socialism.
 
Are we there yet?

Allow me to begin this post with a couple of quotations.

The real significance of the Lenin revolution is to be seen in the fact that it was the bursting forth of the principle of unrestricted violence and oppression. It was the negation of all the political ideals that had for three thousand years guided the evolution of Western civilization.

This letter is to inform you that this university has dismissed more than 40 students on this day. . . . [The] university will not be run by threats and intimidation. It will not respond to ultimatums from students, and it will not be intimidated by the pressures of groups who are dedicated to the disruption of institutions of higher learning or seek disorganization to the point where such institutions can be controlled by violence and run under constant threat of disruption.

The first quote is from Planned Chaos (chapter 6) by Ludwig von Mises, referencing the Russian Revolution of 1917. The second is a rare statement of courage by a college administrator; it is from a letter to friends of the University of Denver (my alma mater), dated April 30,1968, by Chancellor Maurice B. Mitchell.*

The connection between the two is the “principle of unrestricted violence and oppression” practiced by the Bolshevists in the early twentieth century, then later by the New Left “revolutionaries” of the 1960s. Today, we see the same unrestricted violence and oppression on college campuses the aim of which is to shut down free speech and its consequent diversity of ideas.

Violence does not require the use of a gun or the laying on of hands. Criminal assault is a threat that does not involve touching. Preventing patrons from voluntarily entering a lecture hall to listen to a speaker, regardless of the nature of the ideas presented, is as much the initiation of the use of physical force as a pistol whip to the head.

In recent months, the violence, in addition to blocking patron entrance, has been quite physical: setting a food cart on fire and breaking windows of the venue (UC Berkeley), grabbing the hair of a sponsoring professor and sending her to the hospital (Middlebury College), and shouting and banging on the venue windows to disrupt the speaker, even when the presentation was being live streamed in an empty auditorium (Claremont McKenna College).

In the past I have referred to college administrators as spineless (Applying Principles, pp. 101-105) for their lack of courage to stand up to the belligerents and for their refusal to expel all participants from their universities, as did Chancellor Mitchell.

Subsequent criminal prosecution is the only way to dampen and stop campus violence and oppression.

“Complicit,” however, is the more correct word to describe our present-day college administrators. A brigade of police to protect the patrons and round up all perpetrators of rights violations is all that would be required. Some administrators in the 1960s were complicit, but it seems more common that colleges today order police to stand down when violence erupts.

Brains or blood, college administrators.** It’s your choice and you seem to have made it for the latter. Respect for brains, freedom of speech and expression, and diversity of ideas have disappeared from your citadels of reason.

“Bolshevists set the precedent,” as Mises pointed out in Omnipotent Government (p. 178). “The success of the Lenin clique encouraged the Mussolini gang and the Hitler troops. Both Italian Fascism and German Nazism adopted the political methods of Soviet Russia.”

And no one stood up to Lenin to dampen or stop his violence and oppression. Indeed, he was seen by many as a hero and liberator, but it is a straight line from Lenin to Hitler and Mussolini to the New Left to the violent Progressive (or Post-Modern—call it what you want) Left of the present.

It all comes from the same source. Marx and Engels made no distinction between communism and socialism, except to say that there was a lower and higher phase of communist society. Social democrats called themselves socialists to distinguish themselves from Lenin’s communism, but they shared the same goal (Planned Chaos, chapter 3). Social democracy is what the American Progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13) learned in Prussian universities in the late nineteenth century.

British guild socialism of the Fabian Society is what Hitler and Mussolini took as their models of the modern fascist state (Omnipotent Government, p. 178). And Bismarck’s Prussia was modeled on the medieval guilds. Thus, communism, socialism, and social democracy, at root, are all essentially medieval ideas, premised on the illiberal notion of initiating physical force to achieve one’s goals, which is to say based on the premise of unrestricted violence and oppression.

Governments hold the monopoly on the use of physical force and when they use it for anything other than retaliation against aggressors, they themselves become the aggressors. Thus, taxation, regulation, and involuntary anything, whether the military draft or public domain laws, as well as non-objective law—vague and overly broad statutes, many of which we have today, including the deliberate nebulousness of Title IX that terrorizes college campuses—are descendants of the medieval guilds and the Marx-Engels-Lenin axis of violence and oppression.

It is time to choose brains over blood, to check our premises and adopt the true liberalism of freedom of speech, property rights, voluntary trade and association, and most importantly, tolerance for a diversity of ideas.


* The students had presented the university with “non-negotiable demands” and staged a sit-in at the Registrar’s and Chancellor’s offices. By 1960s standards this was mild when compared to the wanton destruction of research and records at other universities, among other criminal activity.

** “Brains or Blood?” was the [not so] subtle title of a one-page document co-authored by yours truly and four classmates at the University of Denver, distributed on campus a year after Chancellor Mitchell’s letter. It was a response to and refutation of non-negotiable demands presented to the university by a cabal of New Leftists. Children of the sixties? Yes, we were, but we defended our chancellor! [The document was presented to chancellor Mitchell and published as a letter to the editor in The Denver Post.]

 

Postscript (11/13/2025). An anecdote about chancellor Mitchell. He did not possess even a bachelor’s degree, let alone a PhD—which made him my kind of chancellor! His extensive executive experience culminated in positions as director of Britannica Films and, before accepting the job in Denver, as president of Encyclopedia Britannica. The story goes that he was a member of the school’s board of trustees, so when it came time to select a new chancellor, one board member turned to Mitchell and said, “Why don’t you do it?”

The Fascist Left

Below is a repost from October 8, 2017, that discusses the origin and meaning of fascism as a form of socialism, which means it belongs on the left side of the left-right political and economic continuum. Following this repost, I have added a postscript on racism. For a detailed presentation of why the German form of fascism, Nazism, was totalitarian socialism, see George Reisman’s essay, “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian.” 

 

Slinging unfriendly epithets today has become sport, so I thought I’d throw out a few myself.

Political leftists can be described as intellectually bankrupt, hate-filled, envy-ridden fascists. They’re also postmodern progressives, but, unfortunately, they don't consider those terms to be insulting. I do.

Let me start with the left-right political spectrum. It goes back to the 1789 French National Assembly. Aristocrats and churchmen, supporters of the king, sat on the right, while the revolutionaries, some of whom were legitimate classical liberals, sat on the left.

In the ensuing two hundred years, the terms have varied in nuanced ways, but essentially the left has been understood as home of the good guys (socialists, statists, progressives) and the right as home of the bad guys, especially fascists, reactionaries and other conservatives, and thanks to the communists, capitalists.*

In my undergraduate school days of the late ‘60s, the spectrum was described as a horseshoe. At the top of the curve, in the middle, was democracy, so all of us good guys were middle-of-the-roaders who, of course, believed in voting and compromise. After all, there is and can be no perfectly free society and extremists, especially those who stick to principle, were dangerous.

No distinction between the compromise of principles and options was made (1, 2).
   
As some have pointed out, and I agree, the spectrum is best thought of as a straight-line continuum from the left—total control of life and economy by the state—to the right—laissez-faire capitalism (or liberalism in the classical tradition). In the middle is the so-called mixed economy, a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Statism is the general term that identifies the left with its two inconsequential variants, socialism and fascism. This means that fascism is “right” only in the sense that it is on the “right side of the left.”

Socialism, though, is not just control, but ownership, of life and economy. Lenin’s metaphor of the socialist state was that it would be a giant post office and we would all work for and be controlled by, or rather, belong to, the postal service, aka the state, “under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat.” (State and Revolution, p. 44, emphasis added.)

Though its roots go back earlier, fascism came about when Mussolini broke off from the socialist party and had to come up with something different. (Mussolini and Hitler were socialists to their core.) Unlike Lenin, Mussolini, and later, Hitler, inherited an industrial economy with large degrees of private life and property.

The Italian word fascio means workers’ league, which is consistent with Mussolini’s socialism, so Mussolini used it in 1914 and ‘15 and eventually adapted it to fascismo in 1921 to describe his “vision.” The private sector was allowed to continue in name only—he would have destroyed it, as Lenin nearly did, if he had nationalized everything—but it was controlled and regulated by a large and militant “deep state,” i.e., government bureaucracy.

Initially, Mussolini and the fascists adopted guild socialism, modeled on the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Syndicalism and corporativism were other terms used. All three differ only in who is going to control and regulate the economy, and how the control is to be exercised. None worked, so Mussolini increasingly adopted the Nazi approach to control, as well as Nazi tactics. Both Mussolini and Hitler copied the tactics of Lenin and Stalin.**

Entrepreneurs, as a result, ceased to exist. “In the terminology of the Nazi legislation,” says Ludwig von Mises, they became shop managers. (Human Action, p. 717. See also Planned Chaos, chap. 1, 7, and 8 and Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy). Fascism, as Mises identified, is socialism of the German pattern, differing only superficially from the Russian version.

Nominal private control and ownership of life and economy is what we have today in the United States, and have had increasingly since the 1890s with the beginnings of the early progressive era (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).

It is therefore not a stretch to describe our political and economic system as fascistic. It is not a system of liberty, classical liberalism, or laissez-faire capitalism.

Now I say the left is intellectually bankrupt because it has no new ideas to offer. It relies on the postmodern abandonment of reason and logic (Marx’s polylogism updated) to brand anyone who disagrees with them a hate-filled racist, misogynist, and homophobe. No arguments or facts are given. Only the shouting of collectivist clichés.

The louder and longer the shouting goes on, the assumption apparently is, the more their falsehoods will be believed.

But it is the leftists who are hate-filled—because of their seething, hostile yelling. They also are envy-ridden. This last has been well-documented in Helmut Schoeck’s thorough analysis of envy and the motivations for statism. (Redistributionism, after all, means taking wealth from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.)

I have a recommendation for the more sincere Democrats who feel uncomfortable with our current Weimar-like culture and are in search of new ideas to promote: look at Grover Cleveland.

A Democrat, Cleveland was the last US president who advocated classical liberalism. He served two unconnected terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97. In 1888 he won the popular election against Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral vote. (His supporters, interestingly, did not whine about having the election stolen!)

Cleveland was a strict constitutionalist who vetoed more bills than any president until Franklin Roosevelt’s determined efforts to protect his progressive-inspired welfare state. Cleveland’s vetoes slowed the early progressives’ juggernaut toward statism.

The fascist left is nearly indistinguishable from its socialist and communist brethren. All use state-initiated coercion to achieve their ends.

The liberal right—the liberalism of the classical tradition—repudiates state-initiated coercion of any kind and guarantees protection for those freedoms to take action called individual rights.

The social and economic theory of liberty is a free society of laissez-faire capitalism.


* Recall that communists and fascists in the United States were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. At that point, communists equated fascism with capitalism and started calling anyone who disagreed with them a fascist. Recall also that Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms.

**And anyone today who wears black clothing and calls themselves “anti-fascists” are, by their apparel and tactics, mimicking Mussolini’s blackshirted goons.

 

Postscript (10/8/2025). “Racism,” Ayn Rand writes, “is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage . . . . Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” As a form of collectivism, racism will be found in some form in all dictatorships, whether communism, fascism, or socialism. Why? Because dictators need scapegoats, to blame for the country’s problems and “to use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.”
 
In other words, racism is not an essential distinguishing characteristic of Nazism. It is an essential trait of dictatorship. In today’s postmodern, nihilistic world, the wannabe dictators, without knowledge of or care about history, or of any care of or understanding for the concepts they are using, freely sling the words “racist” and “fascist” at their chosen scapegoats, white males in particular, or anyone who works in or runs a business.

Hatred, the Leftist Emotion?

Below is a repost from May 15, 2018, lightly edited. Two months later I posted “Is the Next Step for the Left to Liquidate Its Enemies?” July 11, 2018, in which I ask three times, “Are We There Yet?” A year earlier, October 8, 2017, I posted “The Fascist Left,” explaining the left-right continuum and arguing that fascism belongs on the left, as it is a form of socialism, “socialism of the German pattern,” as Ludwig von Mises wrote (Human Action, p. 759).   

 ------

You’re a white racist.

This is one of the lovely epithets being slung around today. If I were on the receiving end of such hostility, I would have to respond by saying that I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Therefore . . .

You’re a totalitarian, postmodern progressive irrationalist, which means you are a communist/socialist/fascist/Nazi polylogist leftist and wannabe dictator whose only method of accomplishing anything is through physical force masked by governmentally initiated coercion and legal plunder called laws and regulations.

Other comments could be added, such as, “you’re a racist against whites, a misandrist, and a heterophobe,” but let’s just say, for short, that you are a communist/fascist leftist.* Your motivation is envy and hatred.

Envy has been covered by Helmet Schoeck and Ayn Rand, though Rand said envy is not the right word. Hatred of the good for being the good is more correct. So, let’s look at the psychology of hatred.

“Hatred of the good” is not envy because bad students who express this emotion do not want to be good students. They want the good students to fail, or at least be dragged down to their level. The same can be said for today’s entitlement poor. They do not want to work hard to become rich like successful business people. They want the rich to suffer (ignoring the history of rags-to-riches stories) and become like them.

Hatred, according to psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 4), is an emotion that begins with anger and resentment. If unchecked, that is, if underlying evaluations of the emotions are not examined for truth or falsity, and when false, not corrected, anger and resentment can develop into rage, hostility, and aggression.

Underlying anger, says Packer, is the universal evaluation that “an injustice has been done to me,” the word “universal” meaning all instances of anger express the same evaluation. That evaluation in any specific instance, however, may be valid or true, as when someone rudely cuts in front of us in a movie line, or invalid or false when it turns out that the cutter was joining his wife who was holding his place, or the cutting was inadvertent.

Anger expresses an injustice resulting from a specific action. Resentment expresses stored-up anger, stemming from a belief (valid or invalid) of long-term unjust treatment that has been neither confronted nor resolved. This can then lead to hatred.

Hatred says the target of the emotion is totally contemptible, that the person’s character, not just his or her specific action, is despised. To quote Packer, “an individual who feels hatred usually also feels helpless to correct the injustices committed by the person he hates. While hatred can be justified in some rare cases, almost always it is neurotic or pathological”** (pp. 103-04).

Rage, an out-of-control fury deriving from the conviction that somehow I am the cause of this injustice, often follows from hatred and is pathological. As is hostility, although hostility is a defense mechanism [or habit] that only looks like anger. Deriving from self-doubt that is projected outward at an alleged injustice, the aim of hostility is to make the target suffer. Aggression, finally, is the behavioral manifestation of hostility, verbal or physical actions to deliver the intended injuries.

Hatred of the good that we see today is rage, hostility, and aggression, by way of shouting down speakers or banging on windows to disturb them, blocking street intersections or entrances to venues, and, in the worst cases, hurling rocks and other missiles at the targets and destroying their property.

Such hostile behaviors are criminal, driven by frail egos filled with self-doubt, and are not new.

Recall the decidedly un-civil-disobedient student demonstrations of the 1960s, the seizures of property, kidnappings of college deans . . . and bombings and killings. Or recall 1920s Weimar Germany and its street clashes between red-coated communists and brown-shirted Nazis, not to mention Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

The pathological and contemptibly immoral goal in both time periods was to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of capitalism and, ultimately, replace it with some form of totalitarianism. The same is occurring today.

Marx and Engels advocated violent revolution. Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were just carrying out the communist/fascist founder’s wishes.

Marx’s method of argument was to declare to his opponents, “you’re just a bourgeoisie.” We can’t reason with you, he would say, because you don’t understand proletarian logic. That’s the meaning of “polylogism.”

Today’s Marxists, that is, the postmodern progressive Leninist, Mussolinian, Stalinist, Hitlerian leftists, do not even pretend to offer arguments. They smear opponents—people of prominent positions in universities, business, entertainment, and, especially, the media—by calling them names: “You’re a white racist, misogynist, homophobe.”

And they intimidate and threaten them, by pouring money into campaigns of vilification. If the targets do not toe the politically correct party line, or apologize grovelingly when they cross it, the leftists step up their campaigns to have them removed and their careers destroyed.

If this is not hatred—hatred of the good, the competent, the able—I don’t know what is.

(By the way, communist/fascist leftists, all crimes are hate crimes. That pickpocket who relieves you of your wallet is not doing it out of warm, fuzzy love.)

Postmodernism, and its leftist activists, reject the Enlightenment’s values of objective reality, reason, logic, individual rights, and capitalism. Stephen Hicks, in his book Explaining Postmodernism (1; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), eloquently dubs postmodernists the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. Their goal is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and, as Iago did with Othello, “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (Hicks, p. 200).

Or, as Hicks elsewhere describes the activists on college campuses (whom he denies the epithets “snowflakes” and “delicate flowers” because their tears, he says, are a tactic): the “grievances are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to fester and be used in the service of power-politics strategy. . . . The protesters’ point is to make unreasonable demands, and their goal is to see how much they can get away with.”

Calculated hate? How can it not be!

The antidote to this festering poison is a rational psychology that the Iagos do not possess, but if they did, it would consist of independence and a commitment to facts and truth.

In particular, it would be a commitment to the Enlightenment’s values that there really is an objective reality “out there,” that we can identify it through reason and logic, that we each individually possess rights deriving from our nature as human beings and applying universally to every person on earth, and that laissez-faire capitalism, or the closest thing we have ever come to it, has cured, and continues to cure, dread diseases, and has abolished, and continues to abolish, poverty in cultures worldwide by providing abundant opportunities for all to rise above their original stations in life.


* I’ve been struggling for some time to come up with an appropriate sobriquet to describe the far leftists. “Communist/fascist” works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. “Left” on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy—this includes fascism—so “totalitarian" becomes redundant when talking about leftism.

** A justified emotion of hatred, for example, might be that of a victim of the Holocaust whose hatred is directed at the Nazis and their modern-day sympathizers.

Delusion or Lie? Which Is It?

Two prominent and accomplished conservative-leaning news analysts with decades of experience disagree in their assessments of today’s mainstream media. Bernard Goldberg says they are delusional, while Bill O’Reilly says they are lying.
 
Take your pick of the issues. The media, whether print “reporter” or cable news talking head, frequently say things that are not true about our current president, our previous president, the previous president before our previous president, our adventure in covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam.
 
The difference between delusion and lie raises epistemological questions about the nature of these concepts and their referents, and, especially, about their place in the continuum from moral to immoral behavior.
 
Both concepts entail falsehoods or incorrect perceptions. “Lying” usually means the falsehood is intentional or deliberate. Delusion may or may not mean that. Let us take delusion first.
 
In previous posts (1, 2), I have used “delusion” broadly to include false perceptions caused by psychological problems, whether neurotic or psychotic. A young man, for example, who on the same day is fired from his job and jilted by his lover suffers neurotic depression and concludes, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” This is not true, but the young man strongly feels it.
 
Typical psychotic delusions include hearing voices, seeing false images, or concluding things like “I am Jesus.” Psychotic delusion is a belief completely cut off from reality with the subconscious taking over. Neurotic delusion is an exaggerated belief based on an exaggerated emotional reaction to something, but an overall connection to reality still exists.
 
In both neurosis and psychosis, the delusion is fixed and impervious to change. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “a form of mental derangement,” which makes us think of a certain derangement syndrome in response to our previous and now current president. “Fixed and impervious to change” means the person is motivated by the subconscious and is not aware of the mistaken perception. Such a person is motivated by a defensive habit that says, “I am correct in what I have written or spoken and that content is right, noble, and moral.” Self-reflection—introspection—does not often occur.
 
Honest and healthy people who are simply mistaken, on the other hand, are not “fixed and impervious to change,” because they do change when they realize their mistake or when it is pointed out to them. They are not driven by the subconscious premise that their frail ego depends on always being right, noble, and moral—albeit “moral” in a superficial way, usually steeped in “looking good to others” or just rationalization. Honest and healthy people are committed to facts and truth, which means they are committed to reason and reality, with no major defensive habits or subconscious motivations controlling them.
 
Lying is an easier case to discuss, at least on the surface, as liars are deliberate and intentional. They know that what they are writing or speaking is false. They know the facts but state the opposite.
 
This, however, is the dilemma I have been writing about for some time: how do we judge other people, especially others we do not know but who, working in the public arena, namely the media and politicians, affect our lives. How do we know whether they are lying? Or are delusional?
 
In previous posts, I have drawn the line with the criminal personality who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden. The criminal is clearly immoral and many are attracted to law enforcement, the military, and politics. As Yochelson and Samenow point out, there also exists what they call “non-arrestable” criminals who do not overtly violate laws, but nonetheless enjoy manipulating and cheating relatives, co-workers, and citizens of our country. Are such people delusional or lying?
 
I stand by my earlier conclusion that to judge others who are not criminal personalities, we must know the persons well. Judging people from a distance, meaning not knowing them or knowing them well, is nearly impossible because they, particularly reporters, cable TV talking heads, and politicians, can have so many different motivations.
 
Many who work in business, for example, follow the dictum, “Business is business and ethics is ethics,” which means what we do in business has nothing to do with ethics, thus endorsing such dubious practices as cutting corners and BS-ing. Others just follow the money, meaning they choose to work for the highest bidder. Sales representatives, for example, sometimes cynically say this about an unprincipled co-worker: “He’s just whoring himself for a sale.” It seems this unprincipled motivation of “whoring oneself” is present in many professions, as well as, or especially, in politics.
 
A certain presidential administration in the recent past repeatedly ignored the law—immigration, student loan repayment, covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam—and the media supported the moves. Is that not explicit lying? The problem here is that we are, or should be, attempting to judge individual human beings, not a collective called “the administration” or “the media.” The problem is we do not personally know the individuals in the administration who executed the unlawful orders or the members of the press who promoted the actions.
 
This does not mean that we cannot speak up and yell about the violations of law. If someone steps on my foot while standing in line, I will yell whether the act was intentional or accidental. What about the person who ordered the violations of law? Such a person likely justifies the orders and actions as variations on Plato’s so-called noble lie: “It’s for a good cause and, besides, the law itself is immoral.” Is this not the rationalization of a criminal personality? Maybe, but we still do not know the person.
 
This last, the morality or immorality of law, is a complication in making moral judgments. If the law itself can be demonstrated as immoral, violation of it can be the moral thing to do, hiding Jews from the Nazis, for example, or helping them escape Nazi rule. Or evading the military draft. In the late 1960s, one of my roommates quit school, which at the time meant you were almost immediately drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. He immediately moved to Canada. I wholeheartedly condoned his actions—and hoped I would not have to make the same decision. (I didn’t have to.)
 
What about an Adolf Hitler and other dictators who often isolate and label a group of people as scapegoats, by saying such things as “Jews are vermin,” then jailing or killing them? Yes, of course, this type of person, for which there is plenty of evidence in writing, speech, and action is a psychopathically criminal personality.
 
Delusional or lying? Both. The defensive habit of compulsively perceiving reality falsely and reporting it as such does not seem terribly different from what is called the bald-faced lie. The behaviors can be plotted along a continuum, from knowing something is false and saying it anyway to saying something is false but believing it to be true, unaware that it is false.* 
 
The delusional neurotic—the young man fired and jilted on the same day—still probably has some vague sense or glimmer that what he is saying is not true but does not know what to do about it and, perhaps, does not care to find out. Liars, on the other hand, clearly know what they are doing.
 
So who is right, Goldberg or O’Reilly? Both are, but lacking personal knowledge of particular players in the media market, how can we know whether any of them are delusional or lying? Presumably, some are delusional, some are lying, and the rest are somewhere in between the two extremes.
 
 
* These two personality types on a continuum are similar to the two continuums I wrote about in a paper on BS’ers and liars. The continuums range, on the one hand, from the BS-er who talks for show (facts don’t matter) to the liar who is concerned about facts to state the opposite and, on the other hand, from the deliberate motivation to BS or lie to a motivation from carelessness, ignorance, or unthought-about habit.

On the Nature of Human Nature

Theories of human nature underly theories of political and economic systems.
 
Some people attempt to justify capitalism with the Calvinist theory that says, because of Original Sin, the inherent tendency to evil, we should do our duty by working hard to absolve those sins and ensure acceptance into Heaven. This is the gist of the Protestant Ethic. 
 
Others attack capitalism by saying it assumes an inherent goodness in human beings, at which point they cry hypocrisy and list all the evil that goes on in the world.
 
Sigmund Freud’s theory of human nature is more sophisticated, albeit based on determinism. It says we have two fundamental drives, analogous to hunger or sex, that determine our behavior, namely the life or positive self-assertion drive and the death or destruction drive. The latter gives some of us a strongly aggressive personality that culture—civilization—must control. Hence, our “discontent” that results from living in civilization.
 
The theory of human nature best representing a free society holds that human beings possess free will, are self-responsible, and possess the ability, if they so choose to exert the effort, to raise themselves up from their original stations in life, that is, for example, to achieve and enjoy a higher standard of living than that of their parents.*
 
The theory does not describe human beings as inherently evil or inherently good, or as helpless victims of genes and environment—those theories deny free will.
 
Freedom of the will means that a person’s choices are the essential source of both good and evil, though culture—the environment we were reared in, especially family and education—are also important sources of our thoughts and behaviors. (See my post “On the Nature of Evil.”)
 
This free-will theory is sometimes said to be neutral, meaning we are born neither good nor evil. We have the equal potential for both. Nevertheless, we can challenge this complete neutrality by considering whether humans by nature have a stronger tendency to do good than to do evil. How so?
 
Just as the human body has a tendency to heal itself, so also does the human consciousness.
 
A minor cut on the finger or hand, for example, in most people clots and heals itself in a few days. The tendency to heal ourselves psychologically derives from the biological function of consciousness to use reason to perceive our selves and environment correctly, then choose values and take actions necessary to sustain and enhance our lives.
 
This tendency to goodness can be called, with qualifications, the will to do the right thing. We see this desire in children from their earliest years, depending on parental influence, eagerly seeking to live their lives in a healthy and happy way, and often continuing through adolescence and adulthood even after being confronted with major unpleasant environmental obstacles.
 
This will gives most people in a civilized society a benevolent intention in their lives and slants the theory of human nature more toward an inherent goodness.
 
What precisely do I mean by “the will to do the right thing”? Fundamentally, it is a psychological requirement for our consciousness to function. We have a need to feel right before taking an action. Does this mean we are always right? No. It is a theory based on free will, which means we can make mistakes or do evil things.
 
Psychologically, however, we must believe that we are right each time we select what to do; it is a perception of being right. Otherwise, we will not be able to act.
 
This perception of rightness, that I am calling the will to do the right thing, is analogous to the psychological concept of perceived risk. Just as risk perception varies from person to person, so also does “rightness” vary from person to person. **
 
“Being right” applies to everyone, both good and evil, with a continuum of “rightness” and multiple meanings of the word. Let us now look at some examples along that continuum.
 
The most common usage of the concept “right,” when talking about “doing the right thing,” means doing the morally right thing. It means especially being honest in thought, communication with others, and action. Most people, I submit, at least in American culture, do strive to be honest, so this statement probably can be applied to most Americans.
 
The “right thing,” however, within the science of ethics depends on the moral theory and standard of value one is assuming, though it usually means what we were taught as children.
 
A significant influence on American culture is the ethics of Immanuel Kant, who insists that telling the truth is an unconditional principle that is consistent with his categorical imperative of always acting in accordance with duty, never from inclination. This means it is one’s unconditional duty to tell the truth to a homicidal maniac who comes to your door looking for his or her victim. Kant says there is a difference between doing what is right versus what avoids harm to another person. Telling the truth in this situation is not wrong.
 
Ayn Rand, however, disagrees with Kant and says that both physical and moral principles can and do have qualifications. The statement that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit is not the end of the story. The qualification, varying by air pressure and purity of water, must be added.
 
Similarly, telling the truth does not mean qualifications or consequences be damned (as Kant’s theory says). Honesty means telling the truth unless confronted by direct or indirect initiated coercion, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person.
 
Thus, doing the right thing varies by underlying moral theory, but most people today, I would add (again, in our present culture), are uncomfortable with the strict Kantian ethics of duty over inclination and to a great extent with the concept of Original Sin.
 
Hence, as I continue to say, most people try to do the right thing, however they may understand it, at least on a practical level. None probably have ever had a homicidal maniac come to their door and many likely have fibbed to avoid unduly hurting a friend or relative.
 
My father, for example, seems to have been a good Kantian in ethics, though I am certain he had never heard of Immanuel Kant. He said to me once, “You do your work because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.” He was raised Protestant on a farm and worked most of his life as a clerk in the post office. His intentions and honesty were decidedly right—and I do think he enjoyed his work.
 
Some people with psychological problems may, to an outside observer, appear not to be honest. Usually, however, such problems are not moral failings.
 
Psychological problems—typically involving self-doubt and the emotion of anxiety—trigger the strong need in us to allay, reduce, or blot out that feeling by adopting defensive habits, such as withdrawal, hostility, or a compulsive behavior. Often, as children, we develop defensive symptoms subconsciously, not knowing how we got them. Nevertheless, the purpose of a defensive habit is to give us the feeling of doing right while also assuaging our anxiety.
 
The psychological need to feel right is the source of what I am calling the tendency to do the right thing—however one might define “right.”
 
The extreme example on the negative end of the continuum of “rightness” is the criminal personality. Rationalization—excuse-making to feel right—seems to be the primary defensive habit of criminals whose self-esteem is low. As one put it, “I am a nothing. If I thought about it, I would have to kill myself.” Thus, the rapist says, “She really wanted me” and the murderer says, “He deserved it.”
 
Rationalization also describes dictators, as they are criminal personalities who must believe (rationalize) they are right in every action they take. See Ayn Rand’s comment, 246, on Nikita Khrushchev’s need to justify his behavior by reciting the mantra of dialectical materialism, and my use of Rand’s comment in Applying Principles, 314, where I attempt to explain why facts don’t matter to many people, including, or especially, dictators.
 
Doing the “right thing” for the criminal is definitely not the objectively moral thing to do, nor is this statement a justification or exoneration of criminal or immoral behavior. It is a psychological observation that criminal behavior feels right to the criminal and explains his or her actions.
 
Surely, then, one might assert, there are people who knowingly do the wrong thing. Yes, as a double standard. This is the criminal personality who enjoys getting away with the forbidden. Yes, the criminal says, I know it is illegal, but that is who I am. The criminal’s identity is such that he or she feels right to rob banks, and worse. 
 
Or, as one criminal said incredulously to a psychologist, “You expect me to get a job to buy what I want when I can just go into the store and take it?” Paying for goods in a store is for suckers, he said. He believed or felt, as his rationalization, that he was doing the right thing.
 
Only suckers, according to the criminal, obey the law. What he does is right, according to his rationalization-infested mind. (See Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind.)
 
Most people, as I continue to maintain, exhibit a will to do the morally right thing, indicating that human nature has built into it a tendency to do good, meaning most people can and do exhibit varying degrees of good intentions.
 
According to the theory of human nature presented here, I put most people on the scale of honesty and goodness.
 
Both values are required for a lasting free society.
 
 
* Psychiatrist William Glasser (chap. 1) assumed a similar theory when treating his patients. He said, “We choose our own misery. Thus, we can choose our own happiness.” His goal as therapist was to work with patients to help them choose healthier and happier behaviors.
 
** Perceived risk, also called subjective risk, means, for example, that some people need alcoholic beverages before getting on an airplane, while others like to walk on wings for a living. Risk perception exists along a continuum, which means we can now draw an analogy between epistemology where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be true­—and what is true, and ethics where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be right—and what is right. In both cases, people vary considerably according to what they believe to be true and right—and what is true and right.