This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Ludwig von Mises’ economics, and Edith Packer's psychology. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Note that I assume ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
My new book, Independent Judgment and Introspection: Fundamental Requirements of the Free Society, will be published on October 1. You can preorder it now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Information about the book can be found on its website books.jkirkpatrick.net. Here is the preface.
The boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is often admired for his independent judgment, that is, for his courage to speak a truth that the adults feared to acknowledge openly. Two questions, however, can be asked about independent judgment as a character and personality trait. One, can everyone really practice it (besides naïve children) or is it the province of true creators and innovators, such as Socrates and Galileo? And, perhaps giving rise to doubts expressed in the first question, a second asks, how does one handle the hazards of independent judgment, such as the prospect of offending other people, sometimes resulting in death (Socrates) or house arrest (Galileo)?
Independent judgment is correct perception of the facts of reality and courage to acknowledge and assert those facts. The two questions above arise because of complicating factors; intelligence and interest can affect one’s initial perception of facts and other people can affect both the initial perception and assertion of the judgment. Psychology plays a dominant role throughout.
Great innovators, especially those who challenge centuries of convention, are highly intelligent. They also are extremely interested and motivated in their areas of innovation. Those of us who do not possess the same intelligence or interest, whether college professor or blue-collar worker, can nevertheless use our intelligence in areas of interest to perceive and assert what we do see. Intelligence combined with interest determines who is likely to see ahead of others, and those of us who do not see initially can learn from those who do, but intelligence is not a prerogative of the highly educated. Independent judgment can be practiced equally by a garage door repairman as by a scientist.
So why don’t more people practice independent judgment? Which is to ask, why don’t they join the boy in the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? The answer is fear, real or imagined, of what might happen to them. The real fear of death or incarceration that can result from speaking one’s mind poses a needless moral quandary. We have no moral obligation to drink hemlock, as Socrates did, to preserve our independent judgment. Many in the Soviet Union managed to maintain theirs by expressing it to family and trusted friends, sometimes speaking in a foreign language to prevent nosy neighbors from overhearing their conversations and reporting them. They were conventional on the outside, in public, to preserve their lives, but independent on the inside, at home, to preserve their self-esteem.
Most of us do not face the real fears of a Socrates, Galileo, or citizen of the Soviet Union. Our fears of expressing independent judgment stem from what others might think of us. Disapproval, maybe rejection, is the worst that might happen, yet the anxiety caused by self-doubt can be so strong as to blur our perception of the facts, thus preventing any expression of an independent judgment. When choices based on self-doubt build up over time, habits of perceiving reality through clouded lenses become established patterns of behavior. Seeing the world through the eyes of others, whomever those significant others may be, becomes the norm. Conventionality is the result.
Can independent judgment be taught? Yes, but it must start at an early age. Children, of course, need to be given love and support, but they also need to be given freedom, within limits appropriate to their maturity, to choose their own values. And they need to be allowed to learn from their mistakes. Most parents are loving toward infants, but when the children move into their “terrible twos,” parents begin controlling and in some cases hitting. Often, the controlling continues throughout childhood and becomes a constant in traditional schools. Choice and self-assertion are seen as a disruption of authority and disobedience. In reality, they are signs of developing self-esteem and personal identity. When they are erased by the controlling, authoritarian behavior of adults, children quickly get the message that getting along means going along. It is a rare child who matures to adulthood with independent judgment intact. Perhaps this is why we tend to think that only certain people can fully achieve it.
Independent judgment is a fundamental requirement of the free society. Unless each adult citizen possesses a significant amount of self-esteem expressed as independent judgment, such a society cannot last.
The aim of this book is to explore the nature of independent judgment and its relationship to the free society. Throughout the journey, we will find that psychology, especially the skill of introspection, plays a significant role in developing and maintaining independence in the individual and in generating the desire to live in a free society.
The book begins by chronicling the historical war on independence, that is, how the character and personality trait has been ruthlessly destroyed in children from the earliest times of civilization and how it is routinely prevented from developing today. It next examines the nature of psychology as a science, psychology’s epistemological foundations and its relation to political individualism and moral egoism. The book further analyzes how independent judgment develops in the individual, probing the depths of psychology to demonstrate how seemingly uncontrollable subconscious premises guide our lives and how we can identify and change those premises through introspection.
Several mistaken conceptions of independence are discussed, including the Socrates question, “do we have to die for our independence?” along with a clarification of the meanings of autonomy and responsibility, the relation of independence to intelligence and epistemological certainty, and a comment on three well-known deference to authority studies from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the book elaborates the meaning of introspection and the defensive habits we must identify and correct through introspective skill, and it then recommends to parents and teachers methods of teaching that skill to their children and students. The overall aim of “educating for independence,” as the last chapter is titled, is to correct, and preferably prevent, thinking errors that lead to psychological problems.
It is those psychological problems that prevent the development of independence and happiness and, in turn, the uncompromising desire to live in a totally free society. Independent judgment and introspection in each individual are the fundamental requirements of expanding personal and political freedom.
Intersex people. Intersex infants, children, and adults, formerly referred to by the pejorative “hermaphrodite,” are born with ambiguous genitalia—for example, with external penis and vagina, usually of different sizes, or with an external vagina and internal testes but no uterus or ovaries.
Dreger’s doctoral dissertation focused on late nineteenth and early twentieth century hermaphroditism. Because such sexual differences were seldom ever talked about, most intersex people in that period lived relatively normal lives, presumably because they assumed that everyone else was built the same way. As Dreger put it, perhaps a little surprise on the doctor’s face when examining the patient was the only awareness anyone had of the medical issue!
Sometime during the twentieth century, doctors decided they should do something about the “shameful” condition. They decided, usually only telling the parents that some infant surgery was necessary, to play God and change intersex infants into boys or girls, based entirely on their judgment of which way the infant should go.
In recent times, it seems doctors have become more transparent by telling parents what they are doing . . . but rarely, even today, have doctors or parents told their patients and children what was done to them as infants.
“Shame, secrecy, and lies” is how Dreger describes the attitudes and behavior of doctors and parents. And it is this shame, secrecy, and lying that has incensed the human sexual identity activists. Intersex people are individuals with rights just like everyone else, but they have been denied honesty, have been discriminated against, and even denied choice—over which way they want to go, or whether to go at all.
Several early chapters of Dreger’s book detail her own activism to get the medical profession to fess up and change its ways. The stone wall she hit is part of the reason she felt the depression mentioned in my previous post.*
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Another stone wall was hit and described in the latter chapters of Dreger’s book. A doctor in New York City has made a career of administering dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, to in utero fetuses to prevent the formation of ambiguous genitalia and other sexual anomalies that can result from this inherited disease.
Dreger tallied a number of problems with this medical practice and lobbied hard, but failed, to stop it. The off-label drug—many drugs are so used—must be administered before there is any evidence the fetus is developing in an anomalous manner.
Dreger’s math found that only one out of ten such treated fetuses stood to benefit from the drug. On the other hand, the risks? Only one study—and only one—has been conducted to discern long-term consequences. The findings of that study indicated a significant minority of the sample suffered retardation, memory difficulties, and growth disorders; as a result, the study was shut down.
The controversy centered around informed consent, much of which seems not to have been given, and bureaucratic approval to proceed with such a treatment.
At one point, charges of fraud for phantom research projects were brought up, but the whistleblower, like many operating in bureaucratic environments, was attacked and threatened with psychiatric treatment. The Feds, responsible for protecting the public from risky medical practice, did little to stop a prestigious and well-established doctor.
Dreger lost the battle.
Social justice. Dr. Dreger views herself as an activist fighting for social justice. This has pushed me to clarify in my mind the difference between social and individual justice. “Social justice” has a long history, so it is not unique to Karl Marx, but today’s advocates use it in a distinctively Marxian flavor.
Is Dreger an advocate of social justice? Not really, though I’m sure she would disagree with my interpretation of her work.
Social justice, as I define it using today’s Marxian flavor, is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging oppressed classes as underprivileged and granting them restitution in the form of additional wealth, education, employment, along with other favors that they otherwise have not been able to attain. The underprivileged include anyone who is deemed unsuccessful, but especially African Americans, women, and LGBTs. This is the collectivist definition.
Individual justice is the virtue of fairly and accurately judging individuals—oneself and others—according to the standards of honesty, integrity, courage, independence, and especially productiveness. This is the individualist definition.
I think Dr. Dreger, because of her uncompromising commitment to facts, is closer to practicing the latter form of justice than the former. This, I would say, is why she could not accept her Marxist colleagues’ epistemological relativism. Yes, African Americans, women, and LGBTs have been badly discriminated against, even enslaved, but each individual must be judged on his or her own merits. No “class,” to use Marx’s terminology, owes any other “class” anything, especially when restitution is made at the point of a gun.
To use a reductio argument against the Marxists one might say this: Ayn Rand wrote that the individual is the smallest minority on earth. Turning the thought around, can we not say that the group or “class” of individuals is the largest “class” on earth? And therefore the largest “class” on earth that has been discriminated against and oppressed??
Individuals of the world should unite! And fight off their oppressers!!
Marxists should be advocates of individualism if they are seriously concerned about justice for the oppressed.
Free speech at Northwestern. An unwavering defender of First Amendment rights, Dreger has, since the publication of her book, performed a little flipping off herself. She has resigned from the Northwestern University Medical School over her dean’s attempts to censor the content of a faculty magazine she edited. The content? About sex, of course, but also possibly “offensive” content—to the hospital’s brand name!
Sigh! As a marketing prof, I have to make one last comment. Bureaucrats, whether in academia or government, have no clue what sound marketing, including branding, means. They think the usual BS that marketing is just that and that a brand image is something made up and pawned off on the helpless, unsuspecting public. This is just good Marxist thinking about business.
Sound branding—that is, product identification—of a first class hospital should run something like this.
We use the latest, most advanced knowledge and techniques to treat and cure our patients. In the process we entertain and examine all ideas—the wilder and more offensive the better. The better because we will then know that we have left no stone unturned in order to come up with treatments and cures to do justice [there’s that word again!] for our patients.
*To the sheltered, like yours truly, this was an eye-opening read. It also struck me as the perfect “borderline case” in the philosophical problem of universals. The existence of intersex people (and animals) demonstrates that there is no intrinsic maleness or femaleness “out there, in the thing” as the intrinsic theory of essences claims. It also took my teenage daughter to explain the difference between gender, which is social (actually, psychological), and sex, which is biological. Now I understand!
Medical historian and bioethicist Alice Dreger, in her provocatively titled book Galileo’s Middle Finger, provides a variety of descriptions of what she calls the Galilean Personality:
It consists of “men and women who are smart, egotistical, innovative, and know they’re right” (p. 180), who “tend to believe that the truth will save them, and to insist on the truth even when giving up on it might reduce their suffering” (181). Such personalities are “pugnacious, articulate, [and] politically incorrect.” Like the namesake of their personalities, they believe they are “right in the fight but never infallible” (185).
Confidence, independence, integrity, and, above all, commitment to facts. These traits apply equally to Dreger, as to the several heroes she chronicles in her book.
The title, as some reviewers have noted, is a bit misleading, because the book is not a history of scientists from Galileo’s day to the present who rebelled against dogmatic authorities. Nor is it particularly about Galileo’s middle finger, though after observing the scientist’s mummified digit in a Florence museum Dreger did get inspired by the thought of Galileo flipping off the Pope.*
Galileo’s science that confirmed the Copernican revolution, as Dreger observes, asserts that human identity is not what we thought it was, because humans, as consequence of Galileo’s work, can no longer be understood as occupying the center of the universe. The Pope took exception.
Similarly, scientists today who assert their research outcomes on human sexual identity find themselves engaged in battles with the dogmatic authorities of sexual identity politics. This theme became central to Dreger’s book.
“Wall-to-wall Marxism”** refers to the activist intellectual context in which Dreger operated while researching and writing the book. Dreger would probably describe herself as a “moderate liberal,” but it was her Galilean commitment to facts that got her into hot water with the radical Marxist left. They didn’t like what she said and wrote, let alone what the scientists she wrote about had said and written.
In fact, in one depressed moment during her research—depressed because of the hostility and, at one point, threat, thrown at her—she captured the essence of her modern Marxist colleagues and reported her feeling in the book:
We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people [like two good guys] say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them. (p. 137)
These are Dreger’s words describing the way her Marxist colleagues think. The two good guys are J. Michael Bailey and Craig Palmer.
Bailey’s research reported that many men who have sex change operations do so for erotic reasons, not, as transgender political activists insist, because they are “born with the brain of one sex and the body of the other” (p. 9).
Palmer co-authored a book asserting that rape often includes a sexual component, meaning that rapists do not always rape solely for reasons of power and conquest, but also because they enjoy sex.
The activists fiercely attacked Bailey and Palmer, charging them, among other alleged crimes, with rights abuse of research subjects and falsifying data. One scientific journal, cited by Dreger, published an article saying Palmer and his co-author deserve to be hung (p. 116).
Dreger’s role in this, as a historian of fact, was to pore over everything relevant to the controversies, ranging from the works of the scientists involved to all of the various criticisms offered, some of them found in forgotten transcripts and archives.
Bailey and Palmer fought valiantly to defend themselves, which is why Dreger gave them the accolade of Galilean personality. Dreger’s work has cleared their names—at least, to anyone interested in reading the facts.
Bailey and Palmer are not the only ones profiled and defended in Dreger’s book. Napoleon Chagnon spent many years studying the Yanomamö tribe in Venezuela, describing them as a fierce, male dominated tribe that fought violently over females, practiced domestic brutality, used drugs ritualistically, and couldn’t care less about the environment.
This was not the right thing to say.
Chagnon’s enemies unleashed a torrent of character assassinations, from the usual charges of cooked data to hints and not-so-subtle hints of beliefs in eugenics and intentional use of a bad vaccine that infected the whole tribe.
Dreger’s indefatigable efforts to dig for facts also cleared this Galilean personality.
So what is Dreger’s conclusion from these stories? Facts don’t matter—to today’s identity activists, as summed up in her depressed feeling quoted above.
In a somewhat understated way, she does acknowledge that the activists get their motivating ideology straight from Karl Marx, but I would add: Marxist polylogism is emboldened by our current atmosphere of post-modern epistemological relativism. Only the “oppressed classes” have changed.
The premise remains that opposition to dogma must be silenced. And Dreger’s book makes it clear that relativism results in the same authoritarianism as does religion.
* The book’s dust jacket shows half of an 1873 painting with Galileo sitting in front of a globe, his right hand obscured. A student to whom Galileo is lecturing was cut out of the picture and it is Galileo’s index—not middle—finger that is extended in the original painting.
**The phrase “wall-to-wall Marxism” is from the feisty and indefatigable Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley. Monckton was referring to the National Socialist Workers’ Party in Scotland and the Royal Society in England, but the words seem an appropriate description of our current cultural environment. Monckton is a prominent “climate change doubter,” as the Associated Press’s revised stylebook now prefers to call “climate deniers.”
The boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is often admired for his independent judgment, that is, for his courage to speak a truth that the adults feared to acknowledge openly. Two questions, however, can be asked about independent judgment as a virtue. One, can everyone really practice it (besides naive children) or is it the province of true creators and innovators, such as Socrates and Galileo? And, perhaps giving rise to doubts expressed in the first question, a second asks, how does one handle the dangers of independent judgment, that is, the prospect of offending other people, sometimes resulting in death (Socrates) or house arrest (Galileo)?
Independent judgment is correct perception of the facts of reality and the courage to acknowledge and assert them. The two questions above arise because of complicating factors; intelligence and interest can affect the initial perception and other people can affect both the initial perception and the assertion of it. Psychology plays a role throughout.
Great innovators, especially those who challenge centuries of convention, are highly intelligent. They also are extremely interested and motivated in their areas of innovation. Those of us who do not possess the same intelligence or interest, whether college professor or blue collar worker, can nevertheless use our intelligence in our areas of interest to perceive and assert what we do see. Intelligence combined with interest determines who is likely to see ahead of others, and those of us who do not see initially can learn from those who do, but intelligence is not a prerogative of the highly educated. Independent judgment can be practiced equally by a garage door repairman as by a scientist.
So why don’t more people practice independent judgment? Which is to ask, why are they so afraid to join the boy in the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? The answer is fear, real or imagined, of what might happen to them. The real fear of death or incarceration that can result from speaking one’s mind poses a needless moral quandary for some. We have no moral obligation to drink hemlock, as Socrates did, in order to preserve our independent judgment. Many in the Soviet Union managed to maintain theirs by expressing it to family and trusted friends, sometimes speaking in a foreign language to prevent nosy neighbors from overhearing their conversations and reporting them. They were conventional on the outside, in public, to preserve their lives, but independent on the inside, at home, to preserve their self-esteem.
Most of us do not face the real fears of a Socrates, Galileo, or citizen of the Soviet Union. Our fears of expressing independent judgment stem from what others might think of us. Disapproval, maybe rejection, is the worst that might happen, yet the anxiety caused by the fear can be so strong as to blur our perception of the facts, thus preventing any expression of an independent judgment. When choices based on fear build up over time, habits of perceiving reality through clouded lenses become established patterns of behavior. Seeing the world through the eyes of others, whoever those significant others may be, becomes the norm. Conventionality is the result.
Can independent judgment be taught? Yes, but from an early age. Children need, of course, to be given love and support, but they also need to be given freedom, within limits appropriate to their maturity, to choose their own values. And they need to be allowed to learn from their mistakes. Most parents are loving toward infants, but when the children move into their “terrible twos,” parents begin controlling and in some cases hitting. Often, the controlling continues throughout childhood and becomes a constant in traditional schools. Choice and self-assertion are seen as signs of disruption and disobedience to authority. In reality, they are signs of developing self-esteem and personal identity. When they are erased by the controlling, authoritarian behavior of adults, children quickly get the message that getting along means going along. It is a rare child who matures as an adult with independent judgment intact. Perhaps this is why we tend to think that only certain people can fully achieve it.
Independent judgment is a fundamental requirement of the free society. Unless every adult citizen possesses a significant amount of self-esteem expressed as independent judgment, such a society cannot last.
Sound judgment means sensible—i.e., rational or considered, not impulsive—decision making. Many parents and teachers value this process as a primary skill that children and students should possess upon reaching adulthood.
In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality and character trait that should be exhibited by all citizens of a fully free society. Independent judgment, and its practical consequence, independent action, should be a fundamental aim of both parenting and education. What is independent judgment and why is it not encouraged by parents and teachers?
Independence is the more common term that parents and teachers use to describe what they think children should achieve as adults, but this usually means the ability to pay one’s own bills, by providing one’s own food, shelter, and clothing without parental help. The mental act of asserting something as fact and doing so entirely on one’s own is independent judgment. The willingness to act on what one has judged to be right, in the face of disapproval and opposition, is independent action. True independence is the ability and willingness to see and say that the emperor has no clothes.
In history, both Socrates and Galileo exhibited this true independence, both to their detriment. Socrates (1, 2) could have bowed to the will of the majority and stopped upsetting the Athenian elite, but he chose not to and was put to death for his independence. Galileo (1, 2) did capitulate to the Inquisition, but nonetheless was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In literature, Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People (1, 2) stood steadfastly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. Independent judgment and action are not well tolerated by those who are not themselves independent.
Some advocates of sensible decision making may argue that Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann, by stirring up the hornet’s nests in which they were trying to work, were not being reasonable. But there are two issues here: are the advocates of sensible decision making saying that these three men should have given up their judgments in order to conform to the majority? or are they saying that independent judgment does not require sacrifices when under duress? The principle of self-defense indeed does say that it is morally equivalent to fight or flee when threatened with force. Rejecting self-sacrifice as a noble ideal, as I do, Socrates probably should have escaped to live in exile. Ibsen’s Stockmann remained to fight partly because he assumed that many of his so-called friends were on his side but mainly because fighting was the right thing to do. Giving in as a pretense, which is what Galileo did, is a third option. Abject conformity or sacrificing one’s independent judgment was not considered by any of these men.
The problem with sound judgment as a goal of education is that it often becomes interpreted as conformity or conventionality. A free society requires rebels—people like Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann whose independence leads them to see and say what the majority cannot. People with independent judgment are the innovators and entrepreneurs who move economies and societies forward. They rock boats, not necessarily on purpose, but because they see things others do not. The challenge is, can independent judgment be taught? and can every person possess such a trait? My answers are: indirectly and yes.
Independent judgment is first and foremost the correct perception of reality that is not influenced or contaminated by the perceptions of others. Misinformation is not a goal of education, so teaching facts is a start, but encouraging children and students to pursue their own goals and ideas without commands, criticism, and ridicule is better. This will enable them to develop the conviction that they can do anything they set their minds to—regardless of what others say or do. Freedom and nurture in the learning process, not coercion or neglect, are two requirements for instilling an independent and confident spirit in the child and student.
So can everyone in adulthood possess this childlike independent and confident spirit that says “the emperor has no clothes”? Why not? That many adults today do not possess such a spirit indicates only that something is terribly wrong with our educational system such that it kills the spirit.
By about the fifth grade, according to John Holt (p. 263).
