Masculinity and Femininity: The Differences Are Not Arbitrary “Social Constructs”

Following is a repost from August 8, 2018. The issue today needs to be restated.

 

Masculinity and femininity are emotional styles that express our sexual self-confidence as a male or female person in relation to the opposite sex.*

They are psychological achievements that derive from our different anatomies and physiologies. Deficiencies in masculinity and femininity, that is, diminished confidence in oneself as a male or female person, are signs of an arrested development.

At birth, our minds are tabula rasa, which means our minds have no cognitive content. At birth, we begin processing the world we live in, which produces an initial cognitive content. As we grow, especially when we begin to talk, cognitive processing escalates.

Our character and personality, in other words, are self-created; genes and environment can influence us, but they do not create us (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18). How well we cognitively process the world in which we live, that is, how objective and rational are the conclusions we draw, determines how psychologically healthy we will be in adulthood.

How well we process the world depends, in large part, on how well we have been taught by our parents and teachers about psychology, especially about how to introspect our developing psychologies to catch and correct errors in the processing.

Throughout history, and especially in today’s culture, the answer to the question “How well have we been taught?” must be: “not very well, if at all.” Thus, most of us reach adulthood with mental inhibitions, that is, deficiencies in self-esteem, often expressed as anxiety and defensive habits (defense mechanisms) to cope with the anxiety, for example, depression, obsessions, compulsions, projection, rationalization, hostility, and so on.

In today’s culture, consequently, most of us reach adulthood with arrested development in many areas of our psychologies, in varying degrees, not necessarily extreme. An arrested development, nonetheless, combined with mistaken ideas in the culture, may lead us to conclude that we are controlled by genes and environment.

To be sure, environment influences us in both helpful and hurtful ways, but we remain the ones who must process the events of the environment, draw conclusions about ourselves in relation to them, then act to deal with the situations.

This applies to the development of our masculinity and femininity. Thus, depending on our upbringing and schooling, we may conclude that masculinity means to be a “macho man,” with big biceps, and that femininity means to be a “clinging vine” or a fashion model.

Behavioral manifestations can and do express our masculinity and femininity, but they do not define them.

The essence of masculinity and femininity, according to psychologist Nathaniel Branden, derives from our respective sexual roles in a heterosexual relationship, and that, in turn, derives from our respective anatomies and physiologies. Men, says Branden, in addition to the obvious sexual differences, are bigger and stronger—they have stronger upper-body muscle, while women have broader hips. Geneticists, indeed, say there are over 6500 genetic expressions that differentiate men from women, and the differences begin in the womb. “Society” has nothing to say about these differences.

In the romantic-sexual relationship (and only in the romantic-sexual relationship), Branden goes on to say that the man is more active and dominant. “He has the greater measure of control over his own pleasure and that of his partner; it is he who penetrates and the woman who is penetrated (with everything this entails, physically and psychologically” (The Psychology of Self-Esteem, p. 206).

Healthy—fearless and guiltless—self-assertiveness, strength, and self-confidence, says Branden, are desirable in both men and women. Pride in oneself and one’s achievements and admiration of one’s partner are prerequisite to a healthy romantic-sexual relationship.

The difference is that the man feels his masculinity as romantic initiator and, more generally, as protector of the woman, while the woman feels her femininity as challenger and responder.**

To put this difference in the vernacular, the man’s job is to make the woman feel “real good.” In this process, the man also feels, or should also feel, if psychologically healthy, “real good” in performing the role. The woman’s job is to feel sufficiently free and confident to accept and experience the man’s offer of total trust and security, not to mention the pleasure he is giving her (and the reciprocal pleasure she gives him).

The romantic-sexual act of intercourse between a man and a woman truly in love becomes a feeling of total integration, an experience of being one, a union. Branden describes this as “the most intense union” and highest form of pleasure available to human beings (p. 136).

Behavioral manifestations of a confident masculinity and femininity become highly desirable, for example, to “look nice” for the opposite sex, and for men to hold the door open for a woman and for the woman to look up to and admire the man by saying “thank you.”***

Size of biceps, length of hair, and whether or not a man or a woman wears a skirt or pants do not define masculinity and femininity. These are just socially arbitrary conventions.

It is not unfeminine for a woman to run a railroad (as does Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged), nor is it unmasculine for a man to wear tight pants and excel as a world-class ballet dancer (as did Mikhail Baryshnikov).

Masculinity and femininity are objective, reality-based psychological achievements. An arrested development means self-doubt about our sex in relation to the opposite. A young man scared to death to talk to girls, let alone ask one for a date, is one example. A young woman who is afraid to respond to a young man’s rational advances, a man the young woman might actually admire, is another.

The objective, reality-based meaning of masculinity and femininity raises a question that will have to be deferred to another post. Is same-sex attraction and behavior psychologically healthy? [Posted September 7, 2018] I immediately hasten to add that such attraction or behavior is not in any way immoral or a sin.

But is it healthy?


* “Sexual self-confidence” is the term used by psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 6, section 2). Other psychologists have used the words “gender esteem,” an interesting narrowing of the broader “self-esteem.”

** Branden uses the terms “romantic dominance” and “romantic surrender,” but by using the above concepts I am trying to avoid the older, historical connotations of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress. “Initiator,” “challenger,” and “responder” are words used by Branden.

*** Tradition says a man walking on the outside of the woman, nearer to the street, originated in the days of chamber pots being emptied into the roadway. The man, as a gentleman, eagerly sought to protect his lady. Today, it is simply a pleasant gesture for the man to perform—and for the lady to accept.

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

Below is a repost from July 18, 2022, that is important for our upcoming election. Most of my previous posts from 2017–22 have political themes and many are linked in the article below. I plan to repost another political essay in October and, again, on November 1. Note that links to my book Applying Principles are to a free, downloadable pdf.
 
 
A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since, progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barack Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58).
 
The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious minds well-ordered to guide our lives in moral and successful ways. Focus may be like throwing a switch—a dimmer switch more likely—but the decision to think or not, especially the quality of thinking we generate, can face obstacles.
 
Defensive habits in particular are a significant obstacle to clear thinking. Defensive symptoms of the neurotic type are a form of delusion—though not nearly as serious as the delusions of a person experiencing a psychotic episode.
 
A young man, for example, who is fired from his job and jilted by his lover on the same day may become depressed and conclude, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” * This is not true and can be called a delusion, a false belief about reality. This person, in addition, may, without help, have considerable difficulty doing much of anything for several days or weeks. His thought processes are turned off, partially or completely.
 
Much of what we think, feel, and do as adults has been influenced and shaped by the conclusions we make as children and teenagers. An influential part of our psychologies is what Edith Packer (chap. 2) calls core evaluations about our selves, other people, and the world in general. How well these premises have been formed, meaning how correct and healthy they are, determines how we will act later.
 
This gives rise to a question: how well can we focus our minds to develop a well-ordered subconscious when we experience a host of psychological problems? Not easily is the answer.
 
The formation of these premises depends greatly on our parental upbringing and teaching in school. What we believe and feel as adults is often not as simple as flipping a switch, though generally, absent drug influence or physiological damage to our brains, behavior is controllable. Which means we can refrain from pulling out a gun and shooting someone, or cheating someone through a dishonest act, but certain areas of our lives may not exhibit what an outside observer would call clear thinking.
 
The influence of defensive habits, I believe, is underemphasized in Ayn Rand’s writings, though she does call these types of failures to focus and think errors in knowledge, as opposed to willful evasions.**
 
Technically, this is true. The person with psychological problems does have free will and did in his or her younger years when initially creating the false premises, though the formation of many of these premises occur by emotional generalization and chance.
 
Many false premises become repressed and shaped into habits manifested as symptoms that cloud our perception of reality. Such a person often does not know how to correct the errors. And with the present influential view of determinism by genes and environment, many conclude, “That’s me and I can’t do anything about it.” However, free will as a controllable behavior means we can seek help, professional or personal, or continue to live our lives despite the obstacles. Dealing with our psychological problems is more difficult, especially in today’s culture, than many realize.
 
Alcoholics who want to stay sober, for example, must every day confront strong obsessive urges for a drink. Clouded thinking is often the result. The same is true of people with other psychological problems and their neurotic symptoms.
 
Let me conclude with this quotation from contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler (432) who understands the relationship between psychological problems and free will:

Psychoanalytic therapists believe expanding our understanding of the meanings and causes of our behavior creates freedom, choice, and a freer will [my italics]. People can change, people do change, and psychoanalytic therapy helps people change, sometimes in profound ways. Every legitimate psychotherapist, deep down, believes in the human capacity to grow, change, and experience a greater sense of freedom and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable hardships. If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.

 
* I first used this example in Independent Judgment and Introspection (94).
 
** Rand seems to view our subconscious minds as equivalent to Sigmund Freud’s preconscious, the store of unrepressed knowledge that we are not now aware of but can recall at a moment’s notice. She does not make allowance for motivation by repressed premises and therefore is quick to condemn people as dishonest and immoral. Using her terms, though, non-self-defensive shooting of someone, or cheating, is clear evasion of what is right or moral for decent life. The criminal personality, as Stanton Samenow has well demonstrated, lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden.

The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.”
 
The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.
 
Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream, not separate compartments that can be shut off at will, though the evaluations that stand behind emotions can be repressed.
 
Scientists clearly have emotions, not just in their eureka moments of a major discovery, but in their typical workdays. Emotions are what motivate us.
 
When we acknowledge the presence of emotions in science, and scientists, we acknowledge that evaluations are present.  Behind every emotion the evaluation, as Packer argues, has two aspects, one universal that applies to all instances of a particular emotion, such as joy or anger, and one personal that includes all the concrete details of the moment when we have experienced the emotion.
 
Joy, for example, at the universal level means “I have achieved an important value.” Thus, “eureka”—or “I have found it,” the translation of the Greek—is a form of joy. The scientist’s personal evaluation—“all of my years of research have been worth it”—in the eureka moment might be expressed in behavior as energetic shouting and jumping up and down such that he almost knocks a beaker off the table. This would be a personal evaluation and experience that likely would last a long time in the scientist’s subconscious memories.*
 
It is this inner conversation or voice, as Packer describes personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge. Which means that knowledge, general or personal, is not “value-free” as the logical positivists for decades have insisted it must be.
 
Every emotion exhibits not just an evaluation, but also an action tendency, or urge to act. The scientist who, when young, is given a chemistry set for a birthday may later get excited in high school chemistry class and begin to think about a career in chemistry. Meeting and talking to professional chemists—a chemical engineer and a research chemist, for example—may help the young person solidify his or her career goals.
 
Going to work every day in an office or lab, after all, is motivated by our emotions of pleasure or pain we associate with the work.
 
Emotion is the driver of everything we do. Writers of both fact and fiction say they follow their emotions to come up with subjects, themes, and even the phrasing of sentences.  Many write “by ear,” more so than by the current rules of grammar and syntax.**
 
Whatever we have liked or disliked in our past, influences our present. Emotions contribute knowledge to our thought processes.  Those past emotions often are the sources of connections we make in the present, sometimes called creative insight, as well as guidance to follow particular lines of thought and experimentation.***
 
Repressed persons are also motivated by past emotions, though usually negative ones that they seek to avoid. Some who are repressed may appear in the present to experience no emotions.
 
A severely repressed scientist, for example, may exhibit a highly muted reaction to the eureka moment, such as a sober, unexpressive face and words that say, “This is good.” But the emotions, which means evaluations and values, are there at some level. Such a person is often desperately trying to avoid the error and appearance of the fallacy of the appeal to emotion.
 
Where does this fallacy come in to play? It is actually a simple notion that says it makes no sense to say or write, “It is true because I feel it.” This does not mean that we should not be motivated to become a scientist because of our emotions from the past or that we should not get excited over a eureka moment. It is indeed unfortunate that the repressed scientist does not jump up and down.
 
The point of the fallacy is that whatever emotions we have in the process of identifying a fact of reality, we must follow Aristotle’s laws of logic, especially the law of non-contradiction. Ayn Rand defines logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Thus, in our work, we bring up our emotions to see if any of them are influencing our perceptions of reality.
 
If I am feeling that a leprechaun is on my desk instead of a glass of water, I assure you I am committing the fallacy. Or, consider the young man fired and jilted on the same day (in Individual Judgment and Introspection, 66–67); he feels that he will never find another job or lover. This is all the fallacy refers to, a feeling (in here) that contradicts the facts (out there).
 
Thus, scientists, I am quite certain, when coming up with a solution to a problem can, without guilt, go wild and crazy to celebrate!
 
 
* Another example: the universal evaluation of anger says, “An injustice has been done to me.” The personal evaluation would be the specific experiences of the moment when feeling anger at another person or institution.
 
** I have told students who could not come up with a term paper topic to “go with what grabs you,” meaning what your emotions are telling you. See this short essay on writing by ear and Ayn Rand (Kindle, 88): When writing, as opposed to editing, “you go by your emotions.”
 
*** For example, when researching my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a connection between Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Ayn Rand. They obviously do not agree with each other, but they nevertheless exhibit some similarities. See Linda Reardan, Emotions and Rational Values, chap. 4, for the fundamental explanation of how emotions contribute to thought.

The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis

“Basic sciences,” as I wrote in last month’s post, “are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.”
 
Let me now summarize in brief the basic science of psychoanalysis. Freud says that human beings possess needs that give rise to drives, or urges to act, to satisfy those needs. The process requires mental activity to identify what will satisfy the need and action to attain it. The causal impetus from these mostly unconscious biological drives is what Freud calls the “pleasure principle,” though a better translation of lust, according to H. F. Brull, would be joy or desire.
 
For example, when dying of thirst on a hot summer morning, I often feel a strong desire for a glass of water and experience joy in its consumption. The “reality principle” of our reasoning mind, however, can interfere with, detour, or adapt my unconscious drive because of what is required for daily life in the world.
 
The I may remind us, in other words, as it often does me, soon after drinking the cold glass of water that perhaps it was not a good idea and that sips of water with food would have produced a better outcome. The upper I, our memories of parental influence (plus other influences), may also have something to say about this reminding us not to drink too much water on an empty stomach in the morning, unaccompanied by food.
 
This in a highly simplified nutshell is the essence of Freud’s theory of normal psychology. Deficiencies in meeting our innate (psychological) needs lead to neurosis.
 
Hunger and thirst, of course, are not the drives that Freud focuses on, though he does use them as analogies.* His main drive is the libido, a Latin word adopted by him that means wish, desire, or love. In his younger years it meant the sex urge, but he broadened it later to mean emotional energy that originates in our sexuality, expressing our sense of self. When connected to the I-drive, it emphasizes and expresses self-assertion (Brull’s preferred translation for Selbstbehauptung, as opposed to the standard translation of “self-preservation”). Libido is the life force or love drive that motivates us.
 
Sense of self can be interpreted as self-esteem, which Freud was not unaware of as a psychological need, and he did observe its deficiency in many of his patients. Freud, however, did not emphasize self-esteem as a need or drive, though in several places he quotes patients expressing precisely what Edith Packer calls core evaluations. “I always had a low opinion of myself,” says one patient (Studies on Hysteria, 278). And “I can’t accomplish anything. I can’t succeed in anything,” says another (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 59). Loss of love in childhood, says Freud, can lead to “a legacy of diminished self-feeling amounting to a narcissistic scar” (58), the German word for self-feeling being Selbstgefühls, which also can be translated as self-esteem, though the former is probably more correct.
 
Self-feeling, rather than self-esteem, is more in line with Freud’s concept of narcissism, a self-absorption of children, and adults who are physically or mentally ill. That is, narcissists lack maturity (in the case of children) or health (in adults) to allow themselves to focus on and love—that is, to invest one’s libido in—other people or even material goods to enhance their lives. Being in love, says Freud, increases our self-feeling by reducing narcissism. Suffering neurosis, however, reduces self-feeling, which leads to various symptoms, including the sense of inferiority that most neurotics experience.
 
Narcissism for Freud is inherent in all of us from birth as part of the libido drive that most of us do not and probably cannot overcome. Sublimation, or rising above the lower biological drives, means, for example, pursuing de-sexualized artistic or intellectual careers. Such paths, however, he says, are not open to everyone.
 
In my words, I would say that the libido drive is the pursuit of values, including romantic values, in oneself and in the pleasure of the company of others. The pursuit of mistaken or unhealthy values then is what leads to neurosis.
 
In childhood, this pursuit of values includes the exploration of our sexuality.
 
According to Freud, sexuality develops in childhood in three stages of sensuousness: the oral, sucking of the breast and thumbs; the sadistic-anal, of learning to control defecation (and maybe even playing with the feces) coinciding with teething and therefore “sadistic” biting (though I would put “terrible twos” here, the beginning of self-assertion, but Freud does not mention it); and the genital, with all the questions about where babies come from and the differences between the sexes that follow, and of course, the pleasure of touching the genitals.
 
This was radical for Freud to assert in his time, that sexuality begins before puberty. Sexuality, as he points out, is a broader term than the sex or sexual relations of adults. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a daring and non-judgmental (that is, de-moralized) masterpiece for his time, covering all forms of sexuality, which include all the known deviations from penile-vaginal intercourse. A fixation on the foot or a piece of clothing—fetishes, in other words—or inversions (for example, voyeurism at the same or opposite sex), Freud points out, develop early and cause neurotic problems in adulthood.
 
Freud focused so much on sex because his Victorian culture produced in his patients problems that derived from their early childhood experiences, and especially from the often negative reactions of their parents. Women, for example, may not have been taught or known anything about sex and young men, in addition to suffering threats of having their penises cut off, were considerably bothered by coitus interruptus, the withdrawal method of birth control, and impotence.**
 
When the libido, also called the Eros drive, misfires, the death or destructiveness drive leads us to a “flight into illness” and “withdrawal from reality” (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 54). The misfiring produces “excitation” (one of Freud’s neurophysiological terms) experienced during disturbing or frightening events, often in childhood, that were not dealt with appropriately at the time. Thus, the emotions of multiple events are condensed and displaced into a symptom, while the ideation of the events is repressed.
 
In my summary of the “Little Hans” case (October post) I pointed out how anxiety, the fear with no apparent object, is experienced in response to the “excitations” of disturbing events, which can also be described as a misfiring or blocking of the libido, and how the ideas associated with the events are subsequently repressed or pushed out of conscious awareness, not recurring sometimes until adulthood and then only as neurotic symptoms. Repression is the fundamental defense that the I uses to protect itself, but there are other defenses, such as reaction formation, projection, and regression, as well as displacement and sublimation.
 
Most of these concepts of defense—reaction formation the exception—predate Freud, but he gave them new and more developed meanings, especially as they apply to psychology. The Oedipal Complex is original to Freud and is his metaphor for childhood injury that results from parental reactions to the overemphasis of libido on one parent, usually the mother, and underemphasis on the other, the father.
 
The above, I hope, presents a sense of Freud’s large and complex system, or at least some of his key concepts. Next month, Freud’s applied science of psychotherapy.
 
 
* See especially Freud’s (90-92) discussion of the evolution of psychoanalytic theory that began with what he called the “popular” distinction between the drives of hunger and love.
 
** Josef Breuer (21), from whom Freud learned the method of talk therapy, in 1880-82 treated a twenty-one year old woman whose “sexuality,” he described, “was astonishingly undeveloped.” The woman was Bertha Pappenheim but in print was referred as Anna O.

The Components of Our Psychology

This month’s post is an excerpt from my 2019 book Independent Judgment and Introspection, pp. 88–99. Light edits and the omission of some paragraphs and all footnotes have been made.
 
 
Core Evaluations. Core evaluations are fundamental subconscious conclusions (evaluations) formed in childhood about ourselves, other people, and the world in general (reality). They are held as self-evident truths and operate as automatized habits to influence our future development and present actions. Self-esteem is formed as a cluster of core evaluations, based on our mental choices and physical actions over time, plus other less fundamental, mid-level evaluations. Specifically, self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and efficacy. Sense of life is the emotional sum and expression of our core evaluations and self-esteem.
 
Core evaluations are “few in number—probably less than ten,” says [psychologist Edith] Packer (pp. 4–5), formed early in life usually by emotional generalization, not conscious choice. Core evaluations are then held subconsciously to influence our future. And all of us are capable of holding, and often do hold, contradictory core evaluations, correct and rational ones along with those that are mistaken. “Mistaken core evaluations,” continues Packer, “are at the root of all defense mechanisms and most out-of-context emotions. They are at the base of all neurosis.” Core evaluations are the “autopilots” of our lives, habits and standing orders for good or ill, that guide the way we process new experiences, make choices, and act.
 
Emotional generalization, to further elaborate the process, begins with reactions to specific events, say, a father yelling at and calling his son a klutz (or worse) for spilling a glass of milk. The child may feel fear and anxiety for having done something wrong and probably hurt at the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event. Similar events repeated over time, may lead the child (the child’s subconscious integrating actions) to generalize the fear and hurt to other people, such as teachers, and in adulthood, to all other people he comes in contact with. The integrating actions, unexamined by the young child, see similarities between father, teachers, and others who yell. A core evaluation becomes established in the subconscious and automatized as, perhaps, “I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”
 
It is important to emphasize and to clarify that this is not environmental determinism. The child could have reacted differently to the spilled milk and name-calling father. And some children do react differently in such situations, by saying to themselves, for example, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do it on purpose. Father is being ridiculous!” Better teaching—of the parents, teachers, and other adults who yell at children and call them names when they make mistakes—would go a long way in countering the development of this and other similarly negative core evaluations. The adult needs to help the child process the event, not make the situation and the child’s psychology worse. Haim Ginott’s advice (chap. 2*), paraphrased, is appropriate here: “Oh, the milk spilled. Here’s a sponge. Let’s clean it up and get you another glass.” 
 
The ease with which children can draw mistaken conclusions indicates how important it is for their parents and other adults to be there for them, to support them, by finding out what is going on in their minds. In particular, they need to help children put words to their emotions by identifying the thoughts and evaluations that stand behind the feelings. This requires trust and intimacy. Unfortunately, says Packer (pp. 10, 12), “most children do not share many of their important thoughts and emotions with their parents,” or other adults. Core evaluations, both good and bad, build up brick by brick as “hundreds and hundreds” of concrete experiences.
 
The significance of core evaluations is that our subconscious applies them in the present to every new concrete experience remotely similar to the ones that gave rise to the core evaluation in the first place, “without our permission in the present,” to quote Packer’s choice words (p. 7).
 
Self-Esteem. Self-esteem is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.
 
The worthiness component of self-esteem is our certainty that we are valuable to ourselves, that we are our own highest value. Self-worth and self-respect are synonyms. This makes worthiness fundamentally egoistic; demands for self-sacrifice undercut it. If we value ourselves highly, we can easily value ourselves in addition as capable of being valued, that is, loved, by others. The source of this self-worth initially comes from the infant’s mother, then also from the father and other significant adults in the child’s surroundings. Holding and touching, plus verbal expressions of love, interact with the infant’s self-esteem to provide the warmth and security that young, as well as older, children need.
 
This means that around age two—the “terrible twos”—when children begin to assert themselves (sometimes opposing adults, sometimes just asserting their developing self-confidence), verbal abuse, such as yelling, name-calling, and irrational commands like “don’t be selfish,” plus physical abuse, including spanking by hand, are often experienced by the child as humiliating, or even threatening. These traditional techniques of child-rearing are the primary early influences that lead children to develop negative core evaluations, especially self-doubt about themselves, but also fear of others, and confusion or even negative conclusions about the world in which they live. Today’s permissive directionless parenting is just as bad, if not worse, because of the psychological chaos it creates.
 
The efficacy component of self-esteem is cognitive competence, the certainty that we can and do perform the actions necessary to use our minds properly, to identify rational values and act to acquire them. “Actions necessary to use our minds properly” means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts. This commitment requires us to monitor the contents and functioning of our conscious and subconscious minds. It means introspection to identify the nature, meaning, and cause of our emotions, which ultimately means to identify and correct any mistaken core and mid-level evaluations. Introspection must continue throughout our lives.
 
The two components of self-esteem influence and reinforce each other, so a high self-worth encourages and supports strong competency, and vice versa. Alternatively, low self-worth undercuts our competencies, and vice versa. High self-esteem is an accomplishment that has to be earned over many years and sustained with persistent monitoring. It is not experienced as a brag or boast, for example, as Packer puts it (p. 230), “Boy, I’m a great, worthy [and competent] person.” That is not self-esteem. “Rather, self-esteem is experienced as a total emotional state” that gives us “a certain calm and a sense of control—as if the most important issues about [ourselves are] settled.” Self-esteem is a quiet confidence. Its emotional expression is pride.
 
If put into words, a healthy self-esteem would say something to the effect, “I am confident that I am valuable to myself and others, deserving to be loved—by myself and others—as the honest and independent person I am. I am also competent to use my mind in a correct, rational way to make me happy in life.”  In Packer’s words (p. 230), self-esteem says, “I am basically fit for life. I do not have to doubt that fact.” Doubting oneself, or self-doubt, is expressed as the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety then is what generates our need for defensive maneuvers to defend against the unpleasant feeling.
 
Sense of Life. Core evaluations and self-esteem determine who we are as individuals. Sense of life expresses our identity as an emotional sum, a composite set of emotions that outwardly expresses our outlook on life. As Ayn Rand says (pp. 25-26), it is a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics.” Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality and our place in it, so the “pre-conceptual” part of our sense of life is our core evaluations from childhood formed through emotional generalizations that express who we are and what we think about other people and the world in which we live. Sense of life, according to Rand, “becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics 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” (italics Rand's).
 
Sense of life is what an artist projects in a work of art and what patrons of the arts respond to. If it could be put into words, a sense of life would say, from the artist’s perspective, “this is life as I see it,” and from the patron’s viewpoint, “this is how I do or do not see life.” Sense of life attracts and repels, so sense of life is what one falls in love with, or does not fall in love with. Sometimes, in experiencing an instant like or dislike of someone we meet, it is our sense of life meshing or clashing with the other person’s sense of life.
 
Sense of life, however, it must be emphasized, is a composite emotion and emotions are not infallible. Getting to know another person, whether as a friend or romantic partner, requires time and patience to explore and learn all of the other person’s values, ranging from the philosophical and abstract to the everyday and concrete. Judging another person is even more difficult. Judging whether another person is honest and independent requires close interaction before a reliable conclusion can be drawn. Sense of life only gives clues, both to one’s own subconscious and to that of others.
 
 
* I seem to have inadvertently changed Ginott’s example from “juice” to “milk.”

Two Types of Knowledge: General and Personal

General knowledge, that is, book reading, school learning, and the ability to cite or quote sources at will, does not by itself make us interesting or even a really knowledgeable person.
 
Personal knowledge does, though it often is not even considered knowledge.
 
Our emotions evoked by general knowledge and more particularly our personal reactions to, and experiences with, all aspects of our lives give us personal knowledge that no else possesses.
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection, I make passing reference to these two types of knowledge. I also discuss Edith Packer’s distinction (pp. 226-38) between universal and personal evaluations when identifying emotions. Personal evaluations constitute a significant part of our personal knowledge.
 
Consider two quotations from my book that summarize general and personal knowledge:

To survive and flourish, humans require general knowledge, or education, in the form of concepts and principles to guide their choices and actions. Each individual, in addition, requires specific knowledge, or a set of concepts and principles unique to his or her experience, to direct action to the achievement of health and happiness (p. 54).
 
Systematic bodies of concepts and principles constitute our sciences; specific bodies of concepts and principles, unique to our own experiences, constitute our personal knowledge (p. 73).

General knowledge comes largely from others; it is essentially our education broadly construed, not just what we learn in school. Personal knowledge, which includes the general, is what we have experienced over the years and makes us who we are as individuals.
 
Personal knowledge comes first. It is what we begin acquiring early in life, and continue to acquire throughout. It starts developing before we can speak, perhaps even in the womb, in reaction to pleasureful and painful experiences. The pleasure-pain aspects of these experiences provide the foundation of our emotions, and the emotions we associate with concrete experiences in childhood and youth influence how healthy and happy we will be as adults.
 
Personal knowledge, as a result, might also be called experiential knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge based on the objects, persons, events, and even ideas we come in contact with, or rather, experience firsthand.
 
When we learn to talk, we form concepts and elementary, childlike principles, such as “all animals that walk on two legs are human beings,” which is to say at this point we are beginning to form universals that constitute the basis from which we go on to acquire general knowledge. The principles are called “childlike” because they may not agree with what a more knowledgeable adult might say.
 
General knowledge is what we learn from older people, initially our parents, siblings, and others around us. More importantly, it comes from teachers and books.
 
General knowledge is our education and does not stop, one would hope, after receiving high school or college diplomas. It is the systematic bodies of concepts and principles that constitute our sciences, both basic and applied, and we learn and remember the portions of each that are relevant to our lives.
 
General knowledge becomes part of our personal knowledge when it is individualized to our interests and goals.
 
Personal knowledge indicates who we are as unique, individual human beings and forms the basis of our personalities, our distinctive ways of thinking and acting. Much of our personal knowledge is specific to concrete objects, persons, and events, such as a ball bouncing and rolling (seen as a young child), a recent performance of a Brahms symphony, or the practical competence of changing a tire on the family car.
 
Personal knowledge is not universal in the way general knowledge is, though it can become general if, say, we continually increase our general knowledge enabling us to write a book about Brahms symphonies or the repair of certain automobiles. Most of what we do with our personal knowledge is apply the general we have learned previously (1, 2).
 
Personal knowledge is a collection of experiences—with parents and other relatives; with school subjects, teachers, and classmates; of the time we learned how to ride a bicycle; of happy and sad times at summer camp; and, as an adult, of work, family, and leisure. Throughout life.
 
The application of knowledge, whether general or personal, is not an emotion-free process.
 
All knowledge contains evaluations, universal and personal, and those evaluations are what produce our emotions.
 
Every emotion, as Edith Packer has written (1, pp. 226-38; 2, 151-53), expresses a universal evaluation that is present in all instances of that one emotion. For example, quoting Packer,  joy says “I have achieved one of my most important values” and anger says “an injustice has been done to me.”
 
Behind every emotion and its universal evaluation, we have our own personal experience of the emotion that draws a correct or incorrect conclusion about the experience. For joy: “I got into my first choice of school and feel like dancing around the room!” For anger: “The teacher said I’m no good at math—I’m never going to like or trust teachers.”
 
It is these inner conversations or voice, as Packer describes the personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge.
 
The quantity of general knowledge that we each hold obviously varies from person to person, as does its quality, that is, its degree of truth or falsity. But the variation in personal knowledge is even more diverse, as we all come from different backgrounds, family cultures—and experiences. Which is to say, we’ve all felt diverse emotions throughout our lives, which essentially is what gives us unique personalities.
 
Personal knowledge is what makes us and other people interesting—happy or sad, funny or obnoxious, caring or mean.
 
Unfortunately, personal evaluations associated with the many emotions we have had in our lives are precisely what most of us are not aware of and have not been taught to identify. Nor have we been taught how to change mistaken evaluations.
 
General knowledge by itself can be thought of as a sort of sterile academic content in our brains. Personal knowledge makes us engaging—or repugnant.
 
Personal knowledge is what gives meaning to the expression “variety is the spice of life.”

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barak Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

Mass Psychological Conformity

Thinking about our current covid totalitarianism, columnist Roger Simon recently wrote:

What we have witnessed throughout the world [today] is millions, really billions, of people taking orders without thinking or, in the majority of cases, even seriously investigating what they have been told.

Simon states that witnessing this has helped him answer his long-held question (also held by many, including me): how could educated people in World War II Germany do what the Nazis did to Jews?

The best he could come up with:

We live in a culture of pervasive obedience….It’s everywhere—people giving up their personal agency, even their ability to reason, out of fear and willingly adhering to the mass.

A generation of conformists has been created as never before in our history.

Which certainly is true, but leaves the question “why?” unanswered. The best I can come up with is “mass psychological conformity,” or to elaborate, “mass psychologically-generated callous conformity, indifferent to harm caused to others.” The harm can range from “lockdowns” to mass extermination. In the case of the latter, “inhumanity” may be substituted for callous conformity.

Which still leaves the questions: “Why?” and “How?”

Various attempts to name this syndrome have been made: group psychology, groupthink, the madness of crowds, or true believers in a mass movement. Tulip mania, the current situation is not, though “herd conformity” is a phrase I have used before to describe it. Most recently, the terms “mass delusional psychosis” or “mass formation psychosis” have been offered.

“Delusion” is correct because in its simplest definition delusion means belief in something that is false, whether it’s “I’m probably going to die if you breathe anywhere near me” or “I’m Jesus Christ.”

And the syndrome is “mass” because so many people worldwide have gone along with their authoritarian public health and political leaders.

But these followers are not psychotic in the sense that they completely withdraw from reality, suspending conscious control over life and allowing the subconscious to take over.* Because thinking errors are the cause of neuroses, all psychological problems can be said to some extent to be delusional.

“Inhumanity,” according to Merriam-Webster means “being cruel or barbarous” and “the absence of warmth or geniality.” The past two years have certainly seemed inhumane, at least to those who have been harmed the most: children, small businesses that have closed and workers, if they still have a job, many of them single moms, who have to mask up to serve the laptop elite while the latter dine and shop. Then there are the non-virus related deaths, many by suicide.

Callous indifference, indeed! (See my post “They Just Don’t Care—Rationalization and the Need to Look Good.”

Who exactly am I talking about? The intelligentsia in particular: mainstream media, leftist teachers and professors, certain left-leaning entertainers and business leaders, politicians, and the public health cadre of unelected deep staters.

The latter two may even have a worse psychology. The past two years seem to have brought out their inner totalitarian, as in “we’re telling you who you can have in your home and when or if you can travel. Obey!”

Other people, such as the laptop elite who support the intelligentsia’s doctrines, would have to be included. The cause of all psychologies varies widely, in this case likely ranging from plain ignorance of the doctrine’s consequences to deliberate envious glee for those harmed (akin to many Germans during World War II).

Today, most people are just scared, thanks to the unrelenting propaganda campaign waged by the intelligentsia.

The root of the syndrome is psychological dependence, a psychology that does not depart completely from reality as a psychotic does, but one that shifts reality to other people as their source of beliefs and values. It is a passive acceptance of what those significant others think, feel, and do—a suspension of independent judgment to go along to get along . . . with the crowd.

We all often fail to seriously investigate, because we learn from books and other people and can’t escape the need to rely on experts.

But why the suspension of independent judgment? On the mass scale, this is where there is again a wide variety of reasons. The culture’s philosophy contributes in large part to explaining Simon’s observation of “pervasive obedience.” Germany’s duty ethics of self-sacrifice to the state (or Führer) eclipses independence. “It’s your duty to obey.”

The United States holds a nearly as strong duty ethics based on its predominant Protestantism. Just look at attitudes toward the military draft: “It’s your duty to die for your country.” (Should a big war break out, a new draft would be passed in a heartbeat by Congress and supported by the public. See The Ominous Parallels.)

For over 120 years, American culture has been assaulted and battered unendingly by the progressive left demanding that to be moral we must sacrifice ourselves to the collective, the group, the state.

And in non-Judeo-Christian cultures, asceticism and self-denial are widely held doctrines, with authoritarianism not even questioned.

Hence, worldwide, pervasive obedience.

Psychologically, independence derives from a strong sense of personal identity and self-responsibility. Courage, integrity, and self-esteem are consequences. Parental and formal education (the “how” of this issue) are both crucial in helping us develop these traits, but preaching self-sacrifice and victimhood erodes or blocks the development of independence.

“Dependent personalities,” as I have written before (p. 105), “gravitate to groups as the source of their identity, such as their religion, nation, race, class, ethnicity, or private clubs. They gravitate to the government as their caretaker.”**

Depending on the level of deficiency in self-esteem, dependent personalities will blindly accept whatever the government and its public health officials say, even if they are asking us to give up our rights.

It takes a confident mind to stand up to the irrational onslaught we have been going through over the past two years.

Perhaps the best explanation of mass gutlessness is the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracy is how governments manage their affairs and rules and laws are their tools. “Rules are rules” is the battle cry and “I don’t make ‘em, I just enforce ‘em” is what we have been up against for many years.

Those who respond by saying “Oh, okay”—without understanding or questioning what is being asked of them—encourage the totalitarians to continue with more total control.

The rules and laws—far too many of both in the United States, for about a century—all allow both citizens and bureaucrats to rationalize what they are doing as good. “I’m just following (or enforcing) the law.”

Rationalization is a strong defensive habit that allows us to make excuses for our behavior. Criminals thrive on it. So did many Germans in Nazi Germany.

Deference to authority comes first. Then, the obedience. Rationalization does not require or allow examination.

The bureaucratic state of Nazi Germany had gangs of secretaries typing orders to send Jews to the death camps. How could they do it? The explanation has to be that they thought they were doing something good! See “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) and William L. Shirer’s book.

Deference sacrifices independent judgment. Obedience makes one a follower and in extreme cases a killer.

Are we going to reclaim our rights, our personal agency, and, most importantly, our ability to reason to assert independence from the madness of crowds?

Or are we going to continue to go along to get along?


* Psychotics usually have episodes. They are not constantly “out of their minds,” living in a “waking dream,” as psychosis has sometimes been described. Even statuesque catatonics are aware of their surroundings and occasionally will respond to a nearby conversation before retreating to their trance-like states. And one psychiatrist asked a psychotic to “stop acting crazy now so I can talk to you.” The response? “Oh, okay.”

** Psychologist Edith Packer (p. 264): “Such people want to be taken care of, and in return they will gladly obey. A nation that breeds a dictator is a nation of people who are afraid of life.”

From the Preface to Applying Principles

Applying Principles: Short Essays Based on the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Economics of Ludwig von Mises, and Psychology of Edith Packer will be published October 1. It is my first ten years of blogging. The book may be preordered at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with more information on its website books.jkirkpatrick.net. Here are edited selections from the preface.


Although I spent thirty-six years in college classrooms teaching undergraduate and graduate students business marketing, my bachelor’s degree was in philosophy. That subject influenced and underscored my entire career. As a result, I never let the day job of teaching students how to sell soap (as I would often describe my academic duties) become disconnected from its foundations in psychology, economics, or philosophy.

Indeed, I recognized early in graduate school that marketing, as well as the other business disciplines, are properly described as applied sciences that rest on those more fundamental fields. “Art” is sometimes used to describe applied science, but the usage is correct only if it is meant as a synonym. Often the word is meant to disparage applied fields because they are allegedly less precise or rigorous than “real” science, which means the physical or quantitative sciences. A student many years ago complimented me when she realized that advertising was as disciplined (her word) as finance, her major. There may not be universal equations in the applied human sciences, but the principles are universal in their appropriate context and the fields are “disciplined.”

Business as applied science is analogous to medicine and engineering. Medicine rests on biology for its more fundamental foundation and engineering on physics and chemistry. All fundamental and derivative special sciences, again in turn, rest on philosophy. All such fields are related and should be integrated, rather than isolated as they so often are in today’s academic world.

Thus, what I did when researching, writing, and teaching was to apply principles from the other, more fundamental fields, which explains my interest in epistemology and psychology, as well as the principles unique to marketing and advertising.

To illustrate further, the civil engineer whose goal is to build a bridge must know not just the fundamentals of physics and chemistry, but also the nature and composition of materials (used to build the bridge), and also the nature and behavior of rivers, which includes the history of the particular river over which the bridge will span and the nature and behavior of the river’s soil and water.

Applied science gathers all relevant concrete facts of the specific case it is working on, then uses, that is, applies, the universal concepts and principles of the fundamental sciences on which it rests, plus the narrower concepts and principles of its discipline.

Application is one of the two fundamental methods of cognition and is deductive. Generalization is the other and is inductive. We all use both every day in our lives. The two methods, as I say in my 2018 blog post, “are not the monopoly of scientists, philosophers, or academics in general.” Generalization gives us concepts and principles to guide our lives, while it also gives us theory and theoretical science. Application, which requires the previously acquired knowledge that generalization gives us, is what our medical doctors do, what Sherlock Holmes did, and what we do on a daily basis.

Application means we identify “a this as an instance of a that.” We present a cough and runny nose to our doctor and he or she quickly concludes, based on accumulated knowledge and patient history, that we have a cold. Similarly, Holmes saw that Watson was tanned and showed signs of having been wounded in a war; thus he concluded Watson recently came back from Afghanistan. And a child applies the previously learned concept of balance by shifting weight when learning to ride a bicycle. All three examples are processes of deduction, and illustrate how deduction is the predominant method of applied sciences, as well as everyday life.*

Deduction, therefore, is essentially what I have been doing when writing my blog posts. I am not in any intended way coming up with new concepts or principles, nor am I repeating the proofs of the great writers listed in my masthead, or others I may cite in a post as a reference. I take their ideas and apply them to specific issues.


The following essays are not journalistic as a newspaper column might be. I gave myself the assignment always to come up with something more fundamental than the news of the day, whether theoretical or historical, which last includes relevant citation of research.

The posts are organized into seven chapters, listed chronologically within chapter. Because of the way I write—“interdisciplinary” to use the academic jargon—one may quibble over some classifications. The chapters are “Capitalism and Politics,” “Academia,” “Education,” “Psychology,” “Epistemology,” “Youth Sports,” and “The Arts.”

I do have favorites. It was difficult to choose one per chapter, but here they are, in chapter order:

• “The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship”

• “Because the Stakes Are So Small”

• “Go Fish!”

• “Look at Your Premises. Look. Look. Look!”

• “Why Don’t Facts Matter?”

• “Yes, There Is Crying in Softball”

• “Life in Three-Quarter Time”

My idea for publishing this collection comes from two books of columns: All It Takes Is Guts by economist Walter Williams and Double Standards by radio show host Larry Elder. I did not read these books from beginning to end. I skimmed the table of contents and read whatever caught my attention. Readers of this work might want to do the same.


* It is in this sense that history is also an applied science. We, as well as professional historians, look at past events, natural or human, and try to explain them, that is, identify their causes, by reference to our accumulated theoretical knowledge. Historians in the human sciences rely in particular on political philosophy, economics, and psychology. See Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, amazon.com.
 

On Abortion and Cake-Baking

What do you not get, dear conservatives and dear leftists, in the expression “Stay out of our bedrooms and board rooms?”

The expression, of course, is metaphor, but it’s not too far from the literal truth. Individual rights means everyone, but especially the government, should stay out of our personal lives and our business and professional lives. It means what we do in our personal and business and professional lives—between consenting adults, which means we don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights—is none of your business.

The result of this principle is, or would be, if implemented consistently, laissez-faire capitalism.

Dear conservatives and dear leftists, you both conflate legal and moral issues. You both agree that what you consider immoral should be illegal and therefore moral transgressors must be punished.

If abortion is murder, for example, why not execute the aborters? Something similar can be said about small business people who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. No, you conservatives and leftists have not gone so far as to recommend execution—yet—but both of you have no qualms about putting victims of your legal shenanigans in that modern version of the dungeon called solitary confinement, “for their own protection,” as you put it. (Think Jerry Sandusky and Paul Manafort.)

In an earlier post, I quoted Ludwig von Mises, who said, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. . . . He refuses to convince his fellow citizens. He prefers to ‘liquidate’ them. . . . [He] worships violence and bloodshed.”

Are we there yet? You both preach self-sacrifice, otherwise known as altruism. According to both of you, we should all be sacrificing ourselves to some “higher good,” whether God or “society” (which means the state) . . . or you.

Suffering is supposedly our natural fate and you intend to make us suffer. Individual rights? That’s selfish!

Let us now take these self-sacrificial issues one at a time.

Abortion is not murder, nor does our soul begin at conception, or even at birth. At twelve weeks, the fetus is a couple of inches of cells in the woman’s body. Let’s emphasize that: in the woman’s body, not in your body. Each woman owns her body and, as does every adult individual, has the right to do with her body whatever she wants. (Suicide laws in most states have been properly abolished.)

We are, after all, overwhelmingly talking about the first trimester (91.1% of abortions performed) and we are talking about ending a potential, not actual, human life. Beyond the first thirteen weeks, each woman still has a legal right to abort, especially if her life is at risk due to a difficult pregnancy. This is what the “right to life” means! It begins at birth. This is the legal issue.

The moral issue is narrower.

Is it really the moral duty of a young woman to become enslaved to a child she does not want?  I’m not just talking about malformed children. What about the psychology of physically healthy children who have been raised by a mother (and father) who did not want them?

As for the soul . . . the soul is our consciousness and fundamental motivating values, our core and mid-level evaluations, as psychologist Edith Packer (chap. 1) identifies them, that give us a personal identity. The soul-making process takes many years, with development beginning most likely in toddlerhood, though infants, through the treatment of their caregivers and their experiences of pleasureful satisfactions and painful frustrations, may begin to develop a potential soul.

Conception and the months of pregnancy give us genes that determine our skin and eye color, not our souls.

Suffering, I guess you conservatives would say, is the plight of both children and parents, but especially parents, because they are the ones who chose to have sex. And this is where we have arrived in the discussion. It is sex that must be controlled, by the government, and you are the ones who want to be in charge.*

Now dear leftists, there’s nothing subtle about you and your recycled Marxism and collectivist clichés. Your issues are blatant power grabs. Ultimately, you or your followers or descendants, if current trends continue, will soon start worshiping violence and bloodshed, if it hasn’t already begun. As did Robespierre, you are already dressing up violence as virtue.

Sacrificing a baker to an alleged “public good,” coercing him to make a cake for someone he does not want to serve, is only the beginning. As your policies dictate, the dungeon, or rather, solitary confinement (and, of course, eventually the guillotine), is where hinderers of your march to power, whom you propagandize as violators of morality, should go.

The issue is the primacy of property rights and you know it. Capitalism is a system of private property, private ownership of the means of production, which includes the baking of cakes. I can do whatever I want to on my property (and say anything, if we are talking about free speech), provided, again, that I’m not violating other peoples’ rights who are residents or guests. So you, dear leftists, get out!

But that is precisely what you cannot tolerate—being unable to control other people on their own property—so you brandish your government guns like any other petty or psychopathic criminal.

“Without property rights,” as Ayn Rand says, “no other rights are possible.” Property rights are sacrosanct and should be untouchable. They are the implementation of the rights to life and liberty.

The destruction of capitalism has always begun with the destruction of property rights. It continues to be a fundamental part of your campaign.

Dear leftists, I sympathize in today’s intellectual climate with conservatives and side with them in their war against you and your medievalist friends who want to reinstitute a modern version of serfdom with you in charge of the fiefdom. Most conservatives seem to understand your envy and hatred of the good, the capitalist good, that has brought us out of the abject poverty you want to send us back to.

Abortion is not an insignificant issue, but you leftists have no principles with which to argue your case—“pro-choice” or not. You so obviously want power.


*This is not an endorsement of every abortion. The moral decisions of getting pregnant and raising children, as well as aborting a fetus, are serious and must be carefully thought out ahead of time. It is decidedly immoral to get pregnant just to collect welfare or because one feels like it; it is also decidedly immoral to abort based on whim. Parents must provide information and support to their children about sex, birth control, and abortion, including information about abortion’s potential for physical and emotional pain,. But this means the government on both sides of the political aisle must get out of the abortion business. This means in particular no tax-payer funds or regulations to or for either side, and especially it means no tax-payer funds to “nonprofits” like Planned Parenthood and the various conservative counterparts! (Scare quotes intended, as many so-called nonprofits are highly profitable.) And, as I have written before, both sides have the moral obligation of removing legal and regulatory obstacles to adoption and the legal and regulatory encouragements of unwed teenage pregnancies. (On this last, see Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.)