Intellectual Cowardice and Pre-Censorship as the Expressway to Dictatorship

Ayn Rand identified the four characteristics of dictatorship: “one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship.”*

The United States today is not there—yet. But it has elements of all four characteristics and speculation in some quarters says that a November election loss of our current president could fast-track the path to dictatorship, especially if one-party rule becomes established at the national level.

We have not had executions for political offenses, though we do have and have had considerable prosecutorial misconduct, including threats and actual use of solitary confinement along with pressure on witnesses not just to “sing,” to use Alan Dershowitz’s choice words (1; Applying Principles, pp. 68-70), but also to “compose.” Nationalization and expropriation? Some, but most occurs insidiously through creeping, and in some cases galloping, controls and regulations.

Censorship is the most concerning issue, because, as Rand puts it, “censorship is the tombstone of a free country.” Freedom of speech,” she says, is “the dividing line . . . between a ‘mixed economy’ and dictatorship” (“The Fascist New Frontier,” loc. 1684, The Ayn Rand Column.)

Today, we are working our way through that dividing line with a series of preludes to censorship, or pre-censorship actions, that are strictly speaking not censorship. Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, which means property owners have the right to deny what you may write or say on their property. Censorship is always an action by the government to silence dissent. Though the Federal Communications Commission exercises extensive control over the broadcast media, the print media are still relatively untouched by the government. Yes, exceptions can be found, but we are all still predominantly free to publish and speak freely on our own or as agreed to by a publisher or venue operator.

The most overt form of censorship would be an official bureau of the government, perhaps at the cabinet level and perhaps called “The Department of Truth and Social Justice,” that dictates what can and cannot be written or spoken. The preludes to censorship less overtly involve government and in some cases are performed entirely by private individuals or organizations. Preludes to censorship are more devious, as their goal is to soften citizens up and get them to accept the overt form.

There are several degrees of pre-censorship.

The most glaring, because it involves the legal system, is nonobjective law. An abundance of vague and overly broad laws gives us what I call dictatorship by excessive law. Such laws are what enabled Stalin’s chief of secret police to boast, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime” (Applying Principles, pp. 68-70; 2). When thousands of such laws are on the books, anyone can be arrested for anything, making it especially easy to silence dissent. (I include judicial gag orders in this category, because of the arbitrariness of many judges.) Nonobjective law plays no small part in today’s federal prosecutorial misconduct.

Nonobjective law in turn supports scapegoating, the ancient practice of blaming one person or one group of people for the flaws and mistakes of ruling elites who thereby can claim moral superiority. Nonobjective law makes it easier then to legalize and justify purges and pogroms.

Both nonobjective law and scapegoating, as Ayn Rand points out, are required to sustain a dictatorship. “In Soviet Russia,” says Rand, “the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.” And it still is business people, though some are promoting and funding the enemies of capitalism and the country’s march to dictatorship. Fools that they are, they don’t seem to believe, or know about, Lenin’s warning: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

But today’s scapegoats are also “unwoke” whites, Asians, and, unfortunately, again, Jews (not to mention any black person who rejects “wokeness.”)

Publicly funded educational institutions are a second form of pre-censorship, as they are obligated, but woefully fail, to uphold the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The same applies to private institutions that have “freedom of speech” clauses in their charters. These institutions that fail to protect free speech on their campuses, by default, are performing a role similar to that of government censor. Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is waging major legal battles to defend teachers and students and their First Amendment rights.

Other pre-censorship actions silence dissent without any apparent government intervention. They appear to be, and often are, actions of private individuals or organizations to exclude opinions with which they do not agree. Though difficult to find, government interventions may be present in some cases.

Social media exclusion is one such prelude that enjoys a government intervention. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act labels “interactive computer service[s]” forums for “political discourse” and, at the same time, exempts them from the legal liabilities of publishers. Yet some of these “forums” also perform the functions of publishers by canceling political discourse they do not agree with. This, critics point out, allows social media to be both private forums and de facto government censors.

Two additional preludes to censorship were identified by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. He states that “legal penalties [government censorship] are . . . the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts.” The two greater obstacles, though I would dispute Russell’s ranking (government censorship can silence all dissent), are “economic penalties and distortion of evidence.”

Economic penalties restrict or prevent writers, speakers, and teachers from writing, speaking, and teaching—ultimately from earning a living. This includes today’s politically correct cancel culture and disinvitations, not to mention the deliberate refusal to acknowledge alternative points of view, along with character assassinations, that is, guilt by accusation or outright lies to have writers, speakers, and teachers removed from their professions. Character assassination under Marx and Engels, as Ludwig von Mises points out, became literal assassination under Lenin.

Distortion of evidence, Russell’s second obstacle, refers to smears and Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2). Smears are the first half of the ad hominem fallacy—“Mr. X is immoral,” in infinite variations—with no pretensions to a follow-up argument that Mr. X’s ideas are false. In our postmodern age, reason, logic, and facts and truth are out. Instead, Goebbelsian yelping is all that is left and the yelping, unfortunately, as philosopher Stephen Hicks pointed out (1, p. 200; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), performs the role of Iago to the Enlightenment’s Othello, namely to inject doubt into modernity’s values and “let that doubt work like a slow poison.”

In a proposed preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 USSR allegory, Orwell described a number of Goebbelsian preludes to censorship that were used in England during World War II. The preface, however, titled “The Freedom of the Press,” was vetoed by his publisher and was not known to exist until 1972.

Libels, double standards, suppression of criticism, and flagrant sins of omission during Orwell’s time all came from the press and intellectuals, not the UK government’s Ministry of Information. Their goal was not to offend Stalinist Russia. “In this country,” Orwell writes, “intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.” Fear of public opinion, he says, is motivator of the press’s and intellectuals’ cowardice.

“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin,” continues Orwell, “but it is quite safe to attack Churchill . . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” Orwell called it “veiled censorship” when the government was not involved.

Orwell concludes, “These people [the press, intellectuals, and all the other gutless compromisers] don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”

Final word about our current plight: “non-negotiable demands” left over from the 1960s and transported to the present, threats, intimidation, riots, arson, bombings, and other forms of violence, whether performed by private individuals and organizations or with the sanction of government officials, constitute totalitarian attempts to stage a putsch, the result of which would be the end of free speech and the establishment of dictatorship.

* The recent shutdown mania has given us a taste of dictatorship, stemming mostly from our Progressive mayors and governors. “Airtight,” the working title of Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living, is an apt description of what it feels like under dictatorship. Rand’s main character shouts at her communist antagonist (p. 385): “You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst!” (“Sensory deprivation” is how prisoners have described their time locked away.)

Is Homosexuality Psychologically Healthy? Or Are We Talking About the Propagandistic Politicization of Sex?

Science and politics are the two subjects of this post. Let us take the science first.

Character and personality are volitionally created—not “socially constructed”—psychological products that generate and guide our actions. Same-sex behavior between two consenting adults, as a non-coercive relationship, is neither immoral nor a sin, nor should a contract between the two, or any other business or personal relationships involving same-sex attractions or behavior between consenting adults, be illegal. Individual rights apply to all human beings, not special “classes” or “groups.”

Psychology, however, is not the same as morality or politics.

Psychology studies the conscious conclusions we draw, and subconscious integrations we make, to direct our lives. If we hold objectively rational (that is, healthy) convictions, assuming a more or less friendly environment, we will likely live a happy life. To the extent that our convictions are irrational (unhealthy, not consonant with reality), to that extent we will be unhappy.

The job of psychologists and psychiatrists is to help us correct mistaken conclusions and incorrect subconscious integrations to enable us to live that happier life.

The leading theory on the origins of homosexuality derives from Freud, who did not write extensively on the subject, but whose followers over the past one hundred years have extended the theory considerably and even cleansed it of much Freudian jargon.

Joseph Nicolosi calls it the trauma theory of attachment loss (1, 2, 3). Typical pattern for a pre-homosexual boy includes an absent father, a mean father or other adult male (who may or may not be physically or sexually abusive), or an aloof father. The challenge of a young boy is to separate from his mother and be welcomed, as Edith Packer (p. 172) puts it, into his father’s club, to be dubbed a “male.” If this does not happen, problems arise and intensify.

Such a boy is often a sensitive, non-athletic child. As a result, he may be ridiculed by other boys, leaving him with no or few male friends. He may then become overinvolved with his mother (or sometimes girls of his own age, in a nonsexual way). He concludes, or more likely draws a subconscious emotional generalization, that he is not masculine and cannot become a man.

The boy is subsequently drawn erotically to other boys as an attempt to compensate for or repair his masculine deficit and attachment loss. He is often drawn to older boys or young men who are only too eager to welcome him to their club. But as one adult gay man said, it was not the sex so much that he wanted as to be held. And another said he just wanted a best friend (Nicolosi, pp. 111, 136). Loneliness, shame, and sadness are common emotions, profound grief and sadness, according to Nicolosi.

Janelle Hallman writes similarly about homosexual women and their relationships with their mothers (1, 2, 3, 4). Young girls tend to conclude that it is either unsafe, due to abuse, or undesirable, due to an absent, depressed, or alcoholic mother, to be a woman. Like boys, they tend to have no or few same-sex friends. Like boys, they often say lesbianism is not about the sex; they say, “I just want to be held, and I don’t want to be alone.”

Girls growing up, though, have a somewhat easier task than boys in the sense that they do not have to separate from their mothers. If there is attachment, Hallman interestingly suggests, this may explain the emotional differences between boys and girls. Psychologically healthy girls retain and readily show more than boys the emotional warmth and relationship-building skills of their mothers.

If there is no attachment, or a damaged attachment, feelings of abandonment and other problems result. The little girl may feel that there is something wrong with her, she may become afraid of or even hate men, and she can develop a subconscious hatred of herself. She is then drawn erotically to other women as compensation or reparation for the emptiness and loneliness in her psyche. The relationships begin quickly and just as quickly become highly emotionally dependent and possessive.

In a small percentage of cases, Nicolosi points out, an exception to the trauma theory is an infatuation of some adolescents that does not last long and is usually not further pursued after the initial infatuation’s ending.

What does the research say? Is homosexuality genetic, that is, inborn? No, this has been a settled issue for geneticists, which includes work by gay researchers, since at least the early 1990s (Nicolosi, pp. 42-43).

New Zealanders N. E. and B. K. Whitehead (1, 2, 3) have reviewed over 10,000 studies and publications to arrive at an emphatic no to the question of whether homosexuality is inborn.

In addition, many studies have been conducted comparing mental issues of homosexual men and women to heterosexuals in both the so-called tolerant western countries (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand) and the so-called less tolerant ones (UK, US, Australia).

Name the mental issue and gays unfortunately suffer it at least three to twenty times more than heterosexuals (1, 2, 3): three times the depression, six-and-a-half times the agoraphobia, twenty times the borderline personality disorder, five times the bipolar disorder, seven times the obsessive-compulsiveness . . . and so on. Suicidality and substance abuse are widespread and occur more frequently than for heterosexuals.

All numbers are the same in both tolerant and less tolerant countries, which effectively eliminate discrimination or social stigma as a causal influence.

Homosexuals have five times the number of partners as heterosexuals. Promiscuity, even after marriage, is rampant for both sexes—so common that activists have redefined it as normal and healthy (“extradyadic sex” and “open relationships,” they call it). Ability to stay together and maintain an intimate relationship is rare; at most the median for gays, depending on study, is three to five years, whereas in the “divorce-prone USA” (the Whiteheads’ words), median for married heterosexuals is twenty-five years.

Add to this: there are more ex-gays alive in the world today than gays. As gays get older, the tendency (frequently without therapeutic intervention) is to go straight and sometimes to marry and establish a traditional nuclear family, where, the research overwhelmingly shows, children do far better than in either single-parent or gay-parent homes (Nicolosi, chap. 11; Whiteheads, chap. 12; Regnerus; Allen).

Not a small percentage of gays of both sexes experience opposite sex attraction, which is now called “sexual fluidity.” All this term means is that attraction is an emotion and emotions have causes, which means emotions can change, either by oneself through introspection or with the help of a therapist or confidential friend.

Is something missing in gay relationships?

This brings us to the politics of sex, beginning with another pathway to homosexuality. The gay activists—“Stalinist gay activists” and “Stalinist feminists,” as lesbian Camille Paglia (pp. 67-92, excerpts here) calls them—appeal to young kids and adolescents to sell them on homosexuality as a healthy alternative lifestyle.

Leftist activists, after all, are abject subjectivists who see no differences between men and women or masculinity and femininity or, for that matter, men and boys—as in pedophilia, now euphemized as “intergenerational intimacy,” with the logical consequence of subjectivism that there should also be no difference between humans and animals (or between humans and trees) . . . in sex. See also Heyer.*

What the activists are doing is appealing to adolescents (and also to politically inclined adults) to adopt homosexuality as a defense value, to feel “cool” or “special” or to be a “celebrity” in the eyes of their peers for doing something different. A defense value is a pseudo-self-esteem, an attempt to fend off anxiety that makes us feel special in the eyes of significant others and superior to outsiders. Bragging is a sign that a defense value is operating, and the value can be rational or irrational. A criminal, for example, may brag, “I shoplift and never get caught.” See Nathaniel Branden, pp. 143-53, and Packer, pp. 185-88.**

Adolescents who fall for the activist line and say they are gay usually have not had any or substantial physical experiences. Perhaps this is why 98% of sixteen-year-olds who say they are gay a year later say they are not.

More on the politics of sex. From about 1970-73, gay activists harassed, intimidated, disrupted scientific conferences, and, in some cases, threatened members of the American Psychiatric Association to “persuade” them that homosexuality is not psychologically problematic. Because of the harassment and intimidation, only 54% of the membership in 1973 voted on the issue, 33% in favor of a resolution to normalize homosexuality. The activists won. (See also Whiteheads, chap. 12)

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the press, those exemplars of courage and independence, flip-flopped (Paglia’s words) to preach the party line of the activists. The press still preaches the party line, including the falsehood that “the gay gene has been found.” This demonstrates why we cannot get our science from the press (or from television or Hollywood).

Gay activists now control the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Centers for Disease Control. These organizations determine what gets funded for research and what gets published.

Conclusions reached from research funded by non-activist sources, usually religious organizations and conducted by religious researchers, are not friendly to the gay activists. Hurling vile invective at the researchers is the modus operandi of Stalinist activists, including attempts to have researchers fired from their academic positions.

Vile invective is also what Dr. Nicolosi was victim of over the course of his career. Even his Wikipedia entry, as well as discussion of “reparative therapy” under the entry “conversion therapy,” has been repeatedly falsified. For a year, Nicolosi reported, he would change the falsehoods to the truth only to see almost immediately his corrections changed back to falsehoods by the activists. The falsehoods are still there today.***

Frail egos, adapting Paglia’s words, cannot tolerate differences or, especially, “that some people may not wish to be gay.” Criticism of activists, therefore, and disagreement with them are not allowed.

The activists’ ultimate goal is to ban all ideas and discussion that homosexuality may not be totally healthy. (Never mind the issues of HIV and AIDS.) The activists especially want to use government guns to ban psychotherapy for anyone seeking to examine unwanted same-sex attractions or behavior, and they have had some successes on this front (1, 2, 3, though the recent California bill has been withdrawn).

A final note. There are many reasons to feel proud of ourselves, for example, pride in our personal and professional accomplishments and pride in our rights and freedoms as individual human beings, but I don’t feel particularly proud (or not proud) of being a man or a white person or a heterosexual, or of having self-esteem. I don’t think about these issues in that way. To brag about them would be a pseudo self-esteem or defense value.

I believe the activists are doing a considerable disservice to gays for telling them they should feel proud of their sexual orientation, especially considering how many suffer serious psychological problems. Telling gays (or anyone) they should feel proud of their psychological problems does not enable them to feel proud. It likely intensifies the problems.

Over the several decades of my life I have enjoyed gay friends and gay co-workers. At one point, for about a year, two of my co-workers became after-work drinking buddies, that is, until I had to plead poverty and the need to start banking my hard-earned Scotch money. Sadly, these two friends have since died of AIDS.

I respect gays and their rights as consenting adults, and I feel sympathy for them. Are they happy?

As for the Stalinist activists . . . I feel an unrestrained anger. They deserve moral condemnation.


* The propaganda of the activists even promotes homosexual sex as superior to heterosexual intercourse, though a significant problem has to be that gays can only mimic intercourse, which many do, often in unhealthy ways. Lack of complementary gender differences, the “mystery of the opposite sex,” also has to be a problem. Romantic love? In our present culture, romantic love is rarely discussed—favorably or at all—for heterosexual relationships, let alone for homosexuals. As for today’s “women’s advocates,” I prefer to call them “toxically hostile feminists,” because they poison young girls’ minds by teaching them to distrust and hate men. For many of these in-your-face Stalinists, their motto is “who needs men?” They do not teach Betty-Friedan-style or Ayn-Rand-style that little girls psychologically need to think about and pursue productive careers. Paglia, not one to mince her words, makes this comment about the “lesbian dildo craze” of Stalinist feminists: “If penetration excites . . . why not go on to real penises?”

** And today, the activists appeal to young, pre-teen children, committing a vicious child abuse by encouraging hormone treatments of minors based entirely on a feeling of the child. (Have epistemology and psychology, not to mention morality, sunk this low?) Transgenderism, says psychiatrist Joseph Berger, is “emotional unhappiness.” Johns Hopkins University, a pioneer in transgender surgery, abandoned it in 1979, because sex was all the men seeking the surgery talked about (not family or children) and they were depressed before and still depressed after (1; 2, pp. 220-28). On detransition from transgenderism, see Heyer. Economist Walter Williams has facetiously declared himself a springbok trapped in a human body. Does that make him one? Reality is dispensable in the Stalinist activist world.

*** Nicolosi’s work is said by the activists (of course) to be “discredited” and “pseudoscientific.” The Popperian word “pseudoscientific” is used to denigrate claims of clinical psychologists who do not use the “experimental-positivistic-behavioristic” methodology (Maslow’s words) of logical positivism. The activists also falsely describe Nicolosi’s therapy as “conversion” and “reorientation,” neither term of which he endorsed. Nicolosi called his therapy “reparative,” to help his patients repair their gender wounds. Nicolosi, like all honest therapists, simply sought to help patients work out their problems in order to live a happier life. Unfortunately, Dr. Nicolosi passed away unexpectedly in March, 2017. (And the words “vile invective” are too kind to describe what activists have said about him since his passing.)

The Fascist Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship

The continued expansion of bureaucratic management leads ultimately to totalitarian dictatorship.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, describes this termination point:

The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.*

In several previous posts I have used the following words to represent the generally acknowledged mindset of a bureaucrat (1, 2): “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.”

Rules, lists, and paperwork. This is bureaucracy.

As Ludwig von Mises has taught us, bureaucracy is not a large, hierarchically structured organization, whether of big government or big business. It is the government’s method of managing its affairs, which means it is the “peaceful” method of managing coercion. Laws of the land, a budget for each bureau, and regulatory rules dictate to citizens what they can and cannot do. Disobedience brings punishment. The method is top-down; the higher authority must be obeyed.**

Business management is bottom-up, deriving its legitimacy from customer satisfaction, the only means in a free market of earning profits. Policies, not rules, are guidelines informing everyone in the company, from president to stock clerk, how to function in order to achieve optimal customer satisfaction and therefore optimal profits.

If a large, hierarchically structured business today seems bureaucratic, in the sense of being inefficient and insensitive to customers, look for the government’s demands for compliance to laws and rules. Compliance means obedience to a higher power, which consequently deflects attention from customer needs and wants. This is what makes businesses in a mixed economy take on the “rules are rules” mentality.

So why the bureaucratic indifference to people? Paperwork is the only yardstick bureaucracy has to measure its “success.” Laws and rules are commands that compel citizens to obey, and citizens usually do obey to avoid punishment. Paperwork records the compliance—but it must be correct.

The objective yardstick of a business is its bottom line, profits, which means it is successfully meeting its customer’s needs and wants.

A bureaucratic society is a rule-bound society. Freedom and creativity are not valued. (Creativity, after all, means breaking rules.) The more bureaucratic the society, the more rule-bound it will become. The socialist state, therefore, is a society dominated almost entirely by laws and rules. The more laws and rules, the more total the regulation of human affairs, the less value it places on its citizens’ lives.

Total bureaucracy—the totalitarian socialist state—is dictatorship by excessive law. This describes Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as the USSR and many similar regimes in the twentieth century.

The list has to be correct because all paperwork has to be correct. William Shirer made this clear in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when he described gangs of German secretaries dutifully typing orders to send Jewish people to their deaths.

Even a few members of Kerensky’s provisional Russian government, who were discovered by illiterate Bolshevik revolutionaries during the 1917 October Revolution, were compelled to write their own arrest papers. The paperwork had to be correct!

In a bureaucratic society, thought is neither required nor appreciated, only compliance. Thus, paperwork has to be correct for the lower-ranked official to avoid punishment and for the higher to justify his or her actions, by reference to a law or rule.

Concern for the person behind a bureaucratic number is minimal or non-existent. Just ask students at state-run universities what it is like to be a number on a roster. (And the rosters do have to be correct!)

Message for advocates of a free society? The fewer laws and rules, the better. Indeed, a strong argument has been made that we could easily do without legislature-made, statutory law by replacing it with common law.

Central planning requires centralized law-making, that is, deliberative assemblies (legislatures) and regulatory agencies to write and pass thousands of pages of laws and rules, all of which are subject to ossification, officious manipulation, and arbitrary application. This gives us the nefarious rule by men under a pretext of rule by law.***

Common law is decentralized and requires conceptual thinking by each citizen and judge to resolve specific disputes with reference to principles. Justice evolves and improves on a case by case basis, as wealth and well-being do in the decentralized free market.

Conceptual thinking requires the discovery and understanding of universal principles that can be applied to many concrete instances. Common law, therefore, is general and guided by rights, such as the requirement to prove intent in criminal cases, but it is constrained by precedent and usually confined to specific parties. Change in common law occurs slowly and deliberately.

Legislature-made laws and rules, in contrast, aside from their flagrant violations of individual rights, are at the same time concrete and sweeping, such as a ban on smoking in all public places and within twenty feet of a building. And because legislature-made law is made, not discovered, change occurs quickly and frequently, thus leading to a continual increase of laws and rules—and paperwork.

Thinking in principles and independent judgment are prerequisites for building and sustaining a free society. When our minds are driven to focus on lists and paperwork that must be accurate, conceptual thinking becomes difficult, though not impossible. For many, however, in bureaucratic situations, morality—honesty, integrity, courage, dignity . . . and human decency—go out the window.

The list has to be correct.

For more on the relationship between bureaucracy, socialism, and dictatorship, see Mises’ 1944 book Bureaucracy. Here is his one-paragraph summary and conclusion (p. 125):

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

Bureaucracy is not a benign institution.


* Man’s Search for Meaning (pp. 52-53). In this work, Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, describes his experiences in the concentration camps and his struggles to survive.

** “Peaceful” is in scare quotes because any expansion of laws and rules beyond retaliatory force to protect individual rights, through administration of the police, military, and legal system, is a violation of rights and therefore becomes a declaration of war on citizens. The overt use of guns is not usually required in many bureaucratic systems, because of citizen compliance, but the guns nonetheless are there in the background.

*** “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime,” said Stalin’s chief of secret police. See this post (pp. 280-83) where I discuss similarities between criminal and bureaucratic personalities.

Cross posted at the Foundation for Economic Education. 

Crybullies, Non-Negotiable Demands, Micro-Totalitarianisms, Academic Fascism . . . and Cabaret

“It is nothing! Children on their way to school. Mischievous children! Nothing more!”—from the Broadway musical Cabaret.

The words are spoken by Herr Schultz, the Jewish fruit shop owner whose window has been smashed by a brick. The setting of the story is the eve of Hitler’s rise, 1931 Weimar Germany.

Too strong a comparison to make to the “children” on today’s college campuses?

Is it?

Roger Kimball, author of the 1990 book Tenured Radicals (2nd ed. 2008) has called protesting students crybullies. Those are the ones making non-negotiable demands for trigger warnings lest certain words or ideas they disagree with hurt their feelings.

The mothers of present-day crybullies apparently did not teach their children the familiar rhyme about sticks and stones . . . versus words.

Thomas Sowell prefers to call the new “micro-aggression” buzzword micro-totalitarianism. “Macro-aggression” supposedly means blatant physical force, including the battery of unwanted touching. But hurtful, offensive words are said to be small coercions that, if allowed, can accumulate to become just as bad as the macro ones.

More correctly, Sowell argues, the micro-censorships that the Marxist left is pushing are moving us “even if by small steps” more and more toward the macro silencing of dissent. This is the last step to dictatorship and total control.

The list of the left’s no-no’s that must be censored has now climbed to at least 80 and were it not such a serious issue would qualify for theater of the absurd. For example, “American is the land of opportunity,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” and “Where are you from or where were you born?” are said to be racist micro-aggressions that should be banned from the home of academic freedom.

Violators of these prescriptions, the protesters demand, must be reprimanded, suspended, required to attend sensitivity training classes, or, preferably, forced to resign. Students at Emory University are demanding that course evaluations rate professorial micro-aggressions—the predictable ones that might offend (Marxist) class identities.

Walter Williams calls the current atmosphere on college campuses academic fascism.

From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Free speech is a basic tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.

Williams cites one English professor who in the process of expressing his opposition to what the left calls Israeli Apartheid (compare 1, 2) said we must “not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.”

The phrase means what it sounds like. Says Williams: “That professor's vision differs little from Adolf Hitler's brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in their effort to crush dissent.”

The resurrection of 1960s-style intolerance is not lost on older professors, including Sowell: “Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate preemptive surrender by college administrators — such as at the University of Missouri recently—bring back memories of the 1960s . . . .”

That is to say, non-negotiable demands followed by administrator capitulation are not new.

Not every university administration from the 1960s era, however, gave in. The University of Chicago (and my alma mater, the University of Denver) expelled and suspended numerous students who staged sit-ins at campus buildings.

Just mischievous children?

Some are ignorant, but the leaders are neither ignorant nor mischievous.

One classmate circa 1968-69 gave an impromptu speech at a protest crowd on the steps of my alma mater’s administration building. His voice boomed about struggle and revolution and his fist pumped.

The chilling thought that went through my mind was this: in 1917 St. Petersburg this classmate would have been on the front lines of Bolshevism.

Today, please, let us not stick our heads in the sand as did Weimar culture in interwar Germany.

Not seeing, or wanting to see, what was on the horizon of Germany’s future is the theme of Cabaret. Go see it, or if you have seen it, see it again.

The Sovietization of Federal Law

“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

That paean to non-objective law is attributed to Lavrenti Beria, Joseph Stalin’s chief of secret police. It is cited by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz in his foreword to Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, by Harvey Silverglate (p. xxxvi).