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.
 

All It Takes Is Guts

A president from the American past stated this about his previous four years:

During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare.

No, this is not a statement of our most recent former president. The words are from Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural on March 4, 1805, in which Jefferson endorses and praises the American experiment in a free press. He continues:

The experiment is noted, to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions, on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.

“Censorship of public opinion,” does not mean government censorship. As Jefferson clarifies, it means “punishment in the public indignation.” He continues, “Truth and reason” will prevail, as “facts are piercing through the veil drawn over them.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, so he trusted all voters to exercise their reasoning capacity to speak up against the falsehoods of a “licentious” press. Do voters today do so? And will they in the future?

Edmund Burke, another man of the Enlightenment, supposedly said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” These words, though, do not appear in his writings. Ayn Rand, however, did write that evil is impotent and succeeds only from the sanction of its victims, that is, the victims’ willingness, due to ignorance or choice, to suffer silently, for example, through today’s covid totalitarianism.

Our culture’s intelligentsia, which includes the corrupt press, has eagerly promoted, and continues to promote, this total control of our personal and professional lives.

The solution, as it is with any bully, is to stand up to the communist-fascist left that is attempting to destroy civilization. “Stand up” means to speak out and write against the Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2), to name names and never back down, especially if and when the “cancel culture” comes after you. This means, as I wrote in a previous post, no compromise of principle, no collaboration with the left, no concessions to them.

“All it takes is guts,” said Walter Williams in the title of his 1987 book of newspaper columns. “I have no shame in admitting my uncompromising bias for the sanctity of personal freedom,” he said in his preface, “and freely admit that as economist qua columnist I try to sell Americans on the moral superiority of individual freedom” (second emphasis added).

Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh displayed a similar intestinal fortitude with many courageous examples of standing up to the cancel crowd. Normally, Rush ignored whatever the intelligentsia, especially the “drive-by” media as he called them, threw his way. The following incident, however, required a major offensive.

Rush’s primary rule, according to his spokesman and strategist, Brian Glicklich, was “no faux apologies for fake transgressions.” A letter signed by 40-plus Democratic senators, sent to Rush’s syndicator, demanded an apology from Rush for a discussion he had with a listener. The subject of the discussion was “phony soldiers,” fraudulent people who claimed to have served heroically in the military, but did not. The letter claimed that Rush was denigrating these “heroes.”

Not only did Rush not apologize, nor would the apology have been accepted by the Democrats (as Glicklich points out), Rush sold the letter for $2.1 million, matching the sum from his own checkbook, and donated all of it “to scholarships for the children of fallen service members and police officers.”

Rush’s sponsors were then viciously attacked in the usual leftist manner of what looked like thousands of people sending thousands of emails threatening to stop patronizing the sponsors’ businesses. Rush did not just not back down; he provided research showing his sponsors “that 80% or more of all online boycott messages came from a group of people so small as to ‘fit into the elevator we used to come to your office for this meeting.’”

Finally, Rush realized that the handful of aggressors against his sponsors preferred to remain anonymous and unaccountable, so he named them on his website. Like all bullies, they ran.

Not apologizing, compromising, or backing down, Rush instead went on the offensive. “The Limbaugh doctrine against the suppression of speech,” as Glicklich put it, “was to offer more speech.” Rush often aggressively “fished for liberals’ outrage” and tweaked it, doing so with glee, or rather, in his words, “with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.”

Rush Limbaugh, as did our previous president, taught many of us how to have guts and to display that intestinal fortitude.

Alan Dershowitz, a moderate Democrat, is an uncompromising First Amendment lawyer who, as victim of the cancel culture himself, has courageously and aggressively stood his ground. When falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he offered mounds of evidence in his defense, filed a defamation lawsuit, and wrote the book Guilt by Accusation.

More recently, Dershowitz wrote Cancel Culture: the Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process, in which he exposes the Stalinist and McCarthyite origins of such suppression of free speech. He also produced a video podcast “Cancel Culture Must Be Canceled.”

Dershowitz is very much aware of the need for more people to speak up. In an earlier video podcast he asked “Where are the libertarian Democrats?” The two words together likely mean Bill-of-Rights moderate Democrats, often called “liberals,” who have been far too silent over the past several years.*

In our postmodern age of the “Un-Enlightenment,” an age of untruth and unreason, will there be enough Jeffersonians to courageously counter the Goebbelsian propaganda that is spewed ceaselessly and ubiquitously?

As Rush said, to counter the suppression of free speech, more speech is needed—spoken and written without compromise or concession.

It just takes guts!


* Moderate Democrats, such as Dershowitz, are mixed-economy-Democrats who see some role for the government to regulate business. Far left or leftist Democrats today want the government to control every aspect of our lives, social and economic, which makes them totalitarians, whether of the communist, socialist, or fascist variety. The usual meaning of libertarian is classical liberalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
 

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.)

Insight and Eloquence in Thomas Sowell’s A Man of Letters

Awhile back I ordered economist Thomas Sowell’s book A Man of Letters. I seldom read entire books of letters, but Sowell’s was quite enjoyable, both insightful and eloquent.

The book consists of Sowell’s letters from 1960 to 2006 with emails intermixed in the later years, along with editorial comments between the letters.

Sowell is known for his strict adherence to facts through the extensive research he has conducted over the decades. Let me cite several examples that shine through his letters and comments.

On IQ and other forms of assessment testing, Sowell offers data that show race does not explain differences, as white groups both in the US and abroad have similar IQ scores as blacks. In the US, some black schools have IQ’s equal to or better than the national average and black women outscore black men (p. 110).

Commenting on his Harlem high school classmates, Sowell writes, “The kids I had trouble keeping up with had an average IQ of 84. . . . A few years later I was able to hold my own in a class where the average IQ was over 120.” Sowell says he is “appalled at some of the questions [test makers] ask to test ‘intelligence.’” His conclusion: nearly all mass assessment testing is “biased against the poor and the disadvantaged” (pp. 154-55).

On the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Sowell was not a huge fan of, he points out the steady improvements in the standard of living of blacks as well as their increased success at securing higher-level employment throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. In the 1960s, however, after passage of the bill, improvements slowed with new trends of increased crime, unemployment, and unwed motherhood taking over (p. 44).

In his younger years, Sowell’s research convinced him that minimum wage laws increased unemployment, especially among poor blacks. In a letter to a black mayor in Alabama who wanted to relax the wage laws, Sowell of course praised the mayor but went on to emphasize how necessary it is for young blacks to obtain work experience, no matter how “menial” it may be. “They need the work experience even more than they need the money,” he writes. Work experience of any kind teaches young people the meaning and value of work.

“In my research on racial and ethnic groups around the world,” says Sowell, “I discovered again and again that groups who are hung up over ‘menial’ work get overtaken and left behind by groups who consider a job a job” (pp. 204-205).

And as for “preferential treatment”—his preferred term instead of “affirmative action”—his letter from 1972 to the economics department chairman at Swarthmore College may sum up his attitude. The letter to Sowell said the college is “actively looking for a black economist.” Sowell’s reply: “Many a self-respecting black scholar would never accept an offer like this. . . . You and I know that many of these special recruiting efforts are not aimed at helping black faculty members or black or white students, but rather at hanging on to the school’s federal money.”

The result of “quotas” and “affirmative action,” says Sowell in his editorial transition, is “the ‘new racism’—that is, more racial polarization than had existed on those same campuses decades earlier" (pp. 97-99).

Numerous letters are to his longtime friends economist Walter Williams and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a 1991 letter to Williams, about the contentious nomination hearings of Thomas, Sowell writes, “Clarence is still young enough to be shocked at being knifed in the back by someone he went out of his way to help . . . My theory is that Clarence’s problem arose precisely because he did not sexually harass Anita Hill. . . . As for Clarence, he has done himself proud in the way he has handled this thing (pp. 232-33).” [That is, his righteous moral indignation at the falsehoods hurled at him, falsehoods not unlike those slung at a recent Supreme Court nominee who also dared to defend himself with equally righteous moral indignation.]

In an editorial comment, Sowell tells this anecdote about Clarence Thomas’s “human touch” and “respect for other people” (something the press did not grant him). When Thomas in 1982 became chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he was entitled to a chauffeur, an elderly man referred to by everyone at the time by his first name. Thomas immediately addressed him “Mr. Randall,” with the staffers subsequently following suit. Writes Sowell, “When riding in the car with the two of them, I was struck by their considerate politeness toward each other.” It was difficult to tell “who was the chauffeur and who was the head of the agency” (p. 234).

In response to a 1981 letter inviting Sowell to write a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, he submitted two on a topic he said “needs to be confronted clearly.” After their publication, the columns “sparked the bitterest attacks” on him “before or since.” The columns are reprinted following the invitation letter.

“Blacker Than Thou” and “Blacker Than Thou (II)” are the columns. The bitter attacks stem from his revealing “the dirty little secret of internal color discrimination among blacks in a white newspaper.” The discrimination derives from the differences—physical, cultural, and educational—between lighter skinned blacks and the darker ones. In the days of slavery, the lighter skinned tended to be slaves who were freed or who worked as house servants. The darker skinned blacks were field slaves.

Over the last century and a half the lighter skinned and their descendants were more privileged than the darker ones, absorbing the dominant culture and attending school, including college. Many subsequently adopted “holier than thou” condescension toward their darker brothers. Not coincidentally, the lighter skinned blacks have tended to become “the militant black leader[s] not only distant from but snobbish toward the people in whose name [they speak].”

Sowell does not hesitate to name names. Patricia Roberts Harris, cabinet secretary in Jimmy Carter’s administration, is quoted as saying that people like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell “don’t know what poverty is.” Harris and Sowell attended Howard University at the same time, but, as Sowell says, “under entirely different conditions.” Sowell worked full time and attended school at night. Harris, on the other hand, attended school full time, was a “campus social leader,” and also a member of “an ‘exclusive’ sorority” (pp. 166-76).

As for Sowell and Williams? Both were raised in fatherless homes. Thomas Sowell lived initially in North Carolina without hot running water or electricity, then moved to Harlem where he had to quit high school to make money. Williams grew up in the projects of Philadelphia.

I believe Sowell has insightfully and eloquently made his point.

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.)

Americanized Maoism, the “Narrative” of Political Correctness, and Racist Minimum Wage Legislation

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has referred to our current political correctness madness as “a kind of Americanized Maoism.” This is an interesting characterization.*

China did not have a proletariat of factory workers, so Mao chose peasants as the oppressed class we should worship and model our lives on and, of course, protect from the evil capitalists.

Today’s American leftists certainly would not seem to mind having us all wear Mao tunics, nor would they mind reducing our standard of living to the level of Mao’s peasants.

Note a few of the consumer products that have been banned by those who know what is best for us: phosphates in laundry and dish detergents, high-flow water valves, incandescent light bulbs, plastic shopping bags, and the vent hole in the lowly gasoline can.

Jeffrey Tucker (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has examined a number of these civilization killers. On the light bulb ban, he writes, “It’s the plot of [Ayn Rand’s] Anthem lived in real time.”

The gasoline can? Apparently, wealthy leftists have never had to mow their own lawns and don’t care to remember their elementary physics. That second hole makes it easy and spillage-free to pour gas into the mower’s tank. Tucker’s conclusion: the bureaucrats in power want us to reduce our lives to the misery of pre-capitalist eras.

The Americanized part of “Americanized Maoism,” however, is just another import from Europe. It is the post-modern rejection of Enlightenment values and establishment of what I referred to in a previous post as a virulent absolutism in an age of epistemological and moral relativism. (Some terms were borrowed from Stephen Hicks. See 1, 2.)

This is what has given us the word “narrative.” When challenging the left, the dismissive response will often be, “That’s only your narrative.” Which is another way of saying what’s true for you is not necessarily true for me. And it’s also Marx’s polylogism dressed up in new garb.

So why should we listen to the left? The unspoken and sometimes not so unspoken reply is, “We have the power. You don’t. Our narrative is in charge.”

One current “narrative” taken as a given is that opposition to minimum wage is racist. Fortunately, a recent column by Professor Williams has taught us an important history lesson about who really is the racist.

The 1931 origin and design of minimum wage legislation was to prevent African Americans from getting work. Nearly every economist in the United States knows minimum wage laws prevent the least skilled—mostly African Americans at that time, and still today—from being hired. Similar motivation operated in South Africa’s 1925 Apartheid legislation to prevent the hiring of “Natives.”

The true racists are the advocates of minimum wage, and since capitalism is the cure for racism, anyone who opposes free markets should be labelled haters of the minority disadvantaged and oppressed.

Trigger warning for the poor babies on college campuses:

The left has it wrong.

Capitalism—free markets and free speech—are what you should be studying and supporting. It’s time to get your feelings hurt. You might learn something in the process.

*Henninger also argues that the popularity of certain “outsiders” in the 2016 Republican presidential circus is a revolt of the politically incorrect, meaning that Americans, probably through their “you can’t push me around” sense of life, are sick of being badgered by the left and told what to think, feel, and do.



A Note on Correctness. The term usually means free from error, accurate, or precise, but in the pejorative sense in which the word is used today, it means conformity to an orthodoxy with deviation calling for punishment.

Penalties for failure to conform range from expressions of disapproval, shock, contempt, and condemnation to the more serious excommunication, expulsion, or termination to the ultimate of imprisonment, and death.

Today’s radical Marxist left—in the form of political correctness—is not unique in insisting on such conformity.

Just ask Socrates about Athenian correctness in the fifth century BC or Galileo about the Inquisition’s Catholic correctness in 1633.

Throughout history, religious, ideological, and intellectual movements have produced their share of correctness zealots. Christian and Islamic correctness, as in “radical Christianity” and “radical Islam,” are not inappropriate designations.

Nor is Freudian correctness. See Jeffrey Masson on his expulsion from the Freud Archives and other psychoanalytic societies over his view of Freud’s seduction theory.

The motivation for correctness zealotry is intolerance of difference, especially as manifested in language and behavior that deviates from the orthodoxy. The goal is control, initially censorship of language but in the end total control of thought and behavior.

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.