My Body, My Choice—Her Body, Her Choice. Same Principle

Principles are universal and provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

Examples from an earlier post, with appropriate qualifications, included water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and never lying in human relationships. The former is a causal explanation with implicit guidance to adjust cooking temperatures at higher altitudes and the latter is moral guidance with a fundamental explanation of benevolent cooperation. Both principles are universal and apply to all instances of water boiling and cooperation.

Two disputed issues in today’s world are coerced vaccinations and coerced birthing of unwanted children. Both violate individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The premise underlying both types of coercion, which itself is presented as a universal principle, is the altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice. As a universal, it justifies extending initiated coercion to other areas of our lives, such as coerced sterilization and coerced prevention of the use of birth control. The premise treats each of us as lambs to be sacrificed to the state. However, there is no right or duty to sacrifice ourselves to others, including the state, and certainly no right to sacrifice others to ourselves or the state.

Rights are freedoms of action, freedoms from any kind of initiated coercion, whether by another citizen or by the government, to choose the values we want to pursue and to take the actions necessary to acquire those values. Rights are moral guidance in a political context and causal explanation of peaceful social cooperation in a capitalist society.

Our only general obligation to others is to avoid initiating coercion against them.

Freedom of action in today’s world includes the freedom to refuse to get vaccinated or to have an unwanted baby. If anyone is afraid to get near the unvaccinated, it is that person’s prerogative to avoid them, not the responsibility of the government to punish or quarantine the unvaccinated. Private businesses can ask you to get vaccinated or stay home. The government cannot.

And the government is nearly everywhere in our lives in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, which means “follow and find the government intervention” before drawing conclusions about what should and should not be done in specific cases. Solution: get the government out of our lives, personal and professional.

Freedom of action also presupposes an actual, not potential, independent living human being who does the acting. Cells in a woman’s body is not an independent life and the woman has the right to decide what to do with her body and those cells. If a fetus develops, though not yet into an independent entity, and the woman’s life becomes threatened, terminating the pregnancy is her decision, no one else’s.*

Freedom of action is the legal issue. You can talk about ethical issues of recklessly refusing to take care of one’s health or of recklessly getting pregnant. But the government in a free society has no right to interfere in such a person’s life.

If I sneeze on you and you can prove my awareness of illness and my negligence or intent to harm, you might have a legal case against me. But if a woman gets pregnant to increase her welfare payments—the only thing morally or legally guilty here is the government welfare system, which should be cancelled.

In April 2020, I cited John Goodman of the Goodman Institute who projected what a truly free market in medicine might be like in a pandemic—meaning absent licensing monopolies and health or medical czars telling us what we can and cannot do. Such as, inexpensive testing kits rapidly produced and made available. Doctors or nurses (an abundance of both because there would be no artificial restriction of supply caused by the licensing) would be available immediately to talk to you via telephone or, more likely, the internet, or actually to make a house call. And if you had serious symptoms, you would be welcomed to the hospital emergency rooms (many more than today because of their built-in excess capacity) and treated promptly.

Quarantining (including “lockdowns”) of asymptomatic people is preventive law and, as Ayn Rand has said, preventive law “is the legal hallmark of dictatorship . . . the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.”**

Emergency powers and martial law of any kind are violations of individual rights and should be banned in free societies.

Also in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, both left and right, that is, the pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates have much to clean up before they can talk about the issue of abortion. The welfare state and poverty programs that have given us welfare recipients, including pregnant teenagers, who refuse to get a job or a husband to father their children need to be opposed and repealed. And the adoption system, hopelessly mired in bureaucratic rules that prolong and extend the process, should not have any government involvement at all.

Needless to say, the government and its money should also not be involved in birth control or the actual medical procedure of abortion. Let the market decide and operate. It will do a far better job than any federal, state, or local government.

My body, my choice—her body, her choice. Both follow from the US Bill of Rights.


* The right to life, in other words, begins at birth and the abortion issue is nearly entirely about the first trimester, though the woman’s life, health, or future must never be sacrificed, whether to a rapist or to a healthy fetus, or to a severely disabled one.

** Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon was the only one of over 400 carriers of salmonella typhi forcibly confined by the health czars of New York City. For a total of twenty-six years! The common cold is asymptomatic for one to four days. If we develop a test and find someone positive after two days, do we put that person in jail (quarantine)? Protect the vulnerable is the advice of rational scientists today. See Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 monograph Pandemics (Kindle, location 380), where she suggests that our “current patterns of international travel” have exposed us to all kinds of pathogens and likely given us a “global wall of immunity.” Lockdowns and other forms of confinement prevent our acquisition of such an immunity. And, as Gupta also points out, older people during the 1918 Spanish Flu seem not to have been affected because they likely had developed immunity during previous influenza outbreaks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandemics, Kindle, location 20).

Goebbelsian Propaganda and the Rawlsian Reductio to the Rathole—In Our Current Case, Criminals and Terrorists

In a previous post, I argued that our current culture has become “Goebbelsian,” meaning that a torrent of hyperbole, BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09), half-truths, and outright lies, best described as smears, has become the norm in communication. It is a way of life for much of our press and many politicians.

Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His strategy was to tell a big lie, then say it loud and a lot, until the ignorant populace begins to believe it. The contemporary strategy, since rational people often do not believe the first lie, is to switch to a second lie, and then to another, and then another.

Switching generates confusion and a disbelief in the possibility of truth. The postmoderns, of course, have been teaching for many years that reason, logic, and truth are out, leaving each of us with our own “narratives,” which I prefer to call fictions.

Facts, to most of these “thought” leaders, don’t matter.

Yesterday, the “lethality” of a coronavirus was the message of the day. Today, it is “defund the police.” Tomorrow it will be something else. An underlying theme for decades has been “America’s systemic racism to protect white privilege.” As with Goebbels, today’s leftist propaganda is agenda driven—to destroy capitalism and now to remove or defeat our current president (who represents capitalism). But I want to identify a more fundamental point driving the agenda: the ethics of altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice.

“Compassion” is the buzzword used to intimidate and silence anyone who may object to this leftist propaganda. “You’re not compassionate toward the poor, the black, women, LGBTQ’s, etc.” Why? “Because you can’t feel what they feel. You enjoy white (rich, male, straight) privilege.”

The problem with this ruse is that too many rational people (non-leftists) don’t buy the alleged discrimination the propagandists say these groups of people (Marxist classes) are still experiencing in the year 2020. Rational people also therefore do not buy the guilt trip that is being laid on them.

The left now has to go further down the rathole to find additional “classes”—criminals and terrorists—to feel compassion for. This goes beyond societal status to blatant immorality and injustice, stretching the rational person’s credulity. (A rathole, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a seemingly bottomless or unfillable hole.” Leftists who wear the  environmentalist hat have moved further down to the unhuman and inanimate: trees and rocks that we must feel compassion for. Have we hit bottom yet?)

If you object? “Well, it’s obvious you have no compassion! We must have compassion for the least well off and that includes illegal aliens and nonviolent criminals.” Looting and burning buildings? “That’s just property. We have to understand the looters’ plight.”*

Where does this come from?? It comes from the epistemological requirement of consistency and the ethical and political “maximin” principle of Harvard philosopher John Rawls.

The doctrine of self-sacrifice means to give up a higher value to a lower or non-value. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 43-44):

Self-sacrifice means, for example, the pursuit of a career to please one’s parents instead of the career one truly loves and wants. It means marrying a person one does not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity. It means doing your job because it’s your duty, not because you enjoy it. It means giving birth to a child you do not want and enslaving yourself to a mistake or accident that occurred when you were young.

According to altruism, all of these actions are moral, making you virtuous. To be consistent, it also means you must care about and give up your values for the sake of those who are less well off, even if the sacrifice drags you down to their level. That is the ultimate goal of altruism and it is the goal and meaning of Rawls’ maximin principle.**

“Maximin” means to maximize the minimum. It does not mean to raise the least well off up to the level of those who are in a better situation. It means, if necessary, according to Rawls, to drag those in the middle and upper social regions down to the level of the lower. This would then make society truly just—socially just—and equal, that is, egalitarian. Rawls states (p. 227):

All inequalities should be arranged for the advantage for the most unfortunate even if some inequalities are not to the advantage of those in the middle positions.

It is not just a redistribution of wealth, but also of social position. The poor are not just to be given some of the wealthy’s money, but also their status.

This is Marxism and Marx’s updated determinism. The fundamental assumption is that all social and economic positions in society are dealt to each of us at birth, but some, those in the higher positions, acquired additional status and wealth by stealing from the poor and downtrodden. Such people, whether bourgeoisie or white, straight males or capitalists must be punished to rightly achieve justice.

In today’s world, the worst off “poor” are not those who live in slums, but those who have been prevented from coming to this country or who loot and destroy property. The least advantaged, when the altruist premise is pushed to its most consistent extreme, are illegals and criminals—and terrorists.

Sacrificing everything we have worked for and earned is the ultimate giving up of higher values for the sake of lesser or non-values.

As I wrote in 2016, the reductio of bureaucracy (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) is the concentration camp. Because, as Victor Frankl wrote about his experience in such a camp, “the list had to be correct.” Totalitarian societies are massive bureaucracies and the camps are just one more bureau.

So similarly, the reductio of altruism is the sacrifice we must all make to criminals and terrorists (and trees and rocks).

Says who? The left. The preaching of sacrifices is how they seek and, if not stopped, gain power.

Ayn Rand warned us: “It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

Rand also taught us that the smallest minority on earth is the individual, not groups or Marxist classes (or trees or rocks). This means, simply, we should all be advocates and promoters of philosophical individualism! This also means we each can then work hard and strive to lift ourselves up beyond our “original (Rawlsian) positions.”

Our current president, incidentally, is not an altruist, which is why he is so hated. He does not want to sacrifice anyone’s interest, including our national interests, to anyone else. He in fact wants every individual to be able to lift him- or herself up to as high a level as possible!


* One synonym of compassion is pity and one definition of pity is “a somewhat disdainful or contemptuous feeling of regret over the condition of one viewed by the speaker as in some way inferior or reprehensible.” An appropriate description of leftist condescension.

** Rawls apparently did not like the maximin designation, since he saw it as coming from rational choice theory. He does, however, spend several pages discussing it in his major work, A Theory of Justice (chap. III, sec. 26). The words have become associated with his theory.

The “Sacred” and “Profane” of the Left—Or Rather, Their Cynicism, Malevolence, and Nihilism

Ayn Rand described religion as a primitive form of philosophy that has “usurped the highest moral concepts of our language,” thereby putting the accompanying emotions and connotational meanings outside of our reach on earth. “Sacred” is one such concept. “Profane” is its opposite.

To Rand, “sacred” means “the best, the highest possible to man,” the “not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.” The “profane” defiles the sacred by exerting minimal or no effort—or worse, by the desperate, self-doubt-driven effort of destruction that betrays the “highest possible to man” and sacrifices higher, more worthy values to lesser ones or to non-values.

In religion, which preaches the doctrine of self-sacrifice, Rand continues, “‘Sacred’ means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth.” That is, the “sacred” is the altar upon which we must dutifully sacrifice ourselves, deriving little or no benefit from our sacrifices. This is the  opposite of Rand’s uplifting and man-worshipping ideal.

Today’s Left is not and has never been religious, but they are altruistic, demanding self-sacrifice, and border on being a religious cult. Philosophy professor Molly Brigid McGrath demonstrates this by analogy to such religious concepts as the sacred and profane, and piety and blasphemy.

The sacred, for example, as McGrath understands the Left, are oppressed victims—blacks, women, and gays—who suffer unjustly, whereas the pious are guilty privileged and mostly white straight males who must cleanse themselves of their (original) sins by sacrificing to the sacred.

The profane are privileged (white straight males) who do not feel guilty and therefore refuse to suffer or sacrifice for the sacred. Blasphemers, though, are the worst. They deny the validity of a “sacred” class, desecrating them and perpetrating injustices and committing crimes, often through speech that is indistinguishable from violence.

“It is difficult, in any sacred system,” says McGrath, “to make room for benevolent and intelligent people who simply disagree.” Blasphemers must be “publicly shamed, deplatformed, ostracized, often slandered and fired.” The punishment is “what justifies, psychologically, for activists and social media mobs, their unmeasured response.”

“Unmeasured response,” of course, is an academic’s polite way of saying hatred, hostility, and aggression, emotions and defensive actions I attributed to the Left in an earlier post.

The analogy indeed applies, but additional emotions identify today’s Left, such as cynicism, malevolence, and nihilism. And it’s not difficult to come up with examples.

Cynically intense pessimism is often expressed as sneering sarcasm at any attempt to hold up approvingly the American values of hard work, accomplishment, and earning one’s own way.

Malevolently desiring evil to others can be seen in the glee with which leftists celebrate the jailing of political opponents, especially in that modern version of the dungeon, solitary confinement, and doing so over trifles that had the same infraction, and in some cases the alleged infraction, been committed by a member of the Left either would have been dismissed or never would have surfaced in the legal system.

Nihilism? It’s everywhere in our culture, or what’s left of it, since the goal of the Left for many years has been to tear down and destroy all remaining remnants of Western civilization, especially reason, logic, objectivity and the notion of an objective reality, art, and, of course, capitalism. Art? Take a look at what the postmoderns have done. But be careful. You might get spit in your eye!

Sacred? To the Left? McGrath is being far too generous, even by granting them the religious version of the concept.

Ayn Rand asks us to look at “a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world—inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride.”

The child’s face is sacred, “the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.”

That first spark and eventual fire of earned pride is precisely what the Left is aiming to extinguish.

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.)

Naïveté, Gutlessness, and Concessions: On the Anatomy of Compromise

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” This is the motto of the left and I quoted it in an earlier post.

Its meaning? Say and do whatever will work to achieve power. Cloak your words and actions in “democracy” or, as in today’s “anything goes” cultural atmosphere, call anyone who disagrees with you a racist or fascist or, perhaps worst of all, someone who is deplorably lacking in compassion and, of course, is selfish. When one issue fails to work, move on to the next, with relentless energy.

In our Goebbelsian culture facts don’t matter. Truth and objectivity are out.

BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09) is the accepted method of communication, which means: say what sounds good and true to advance your agenda, not what is good and true.

How do we oppose this leftist juggernaut and why do the leftists seem to have so much energy? The answer to the second question, aside from their envy-ridden and hatred-driven motivation, is that the leftists’ most important value is politics and the drive for power and control. The rest of us have lives and careers beyond politics.*

Opposing the leftist juggernaut, in answer to the first question, is more challenging and requires, of course, thorough knowledge to answer any arguments the left may put forth, though intellectual argument today is rare. It even more importantly requires realism not to be naïve in the face of their pretended sincerity, and courage to stand fast against their onslaught. It requires the refusal to compromise our principles.

Insincerity needs to be called out as such, not swallowed as its opposite and taken seriously. Fabricated accusations of all kinds are rampant today and need to be named and condemned with moral indignation, as we would do to any nonpolitical friend or acquaintance who lied to or BS’d us.

Why so much insincerity? It’s built into leftist theory: Marx’s rejection of a universal Aristotelian logic (polylogism, Applying Principles, pp. 309-10), updated today as postmodern group identity theory, and Marx’s premise that anyone who is wealthy, especially business people and their companies, stole their wealth from the group currently held up as having been exploited. No one who is wealthy or a capitalist deserves truth or objectivity, even if such virtues were possible.

To take these leftists seriously makes us vulnerable to compromising our principles. When we compromise, the left moves forward with greater and greater confidence, because they do not compromise. Their greater consistency is precisely what today has moved them further and further left, perhaps too far, having underestimated the “deplorables” of middle America.

Ayn Rand (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, chap. 14) has provided an interesting “anatomy of compromise” to help us understand what we must and must not do in debates. She suggests three rules (paraphrased): (1) when two people or groups hold the same basic principles, the more consistent wins, (2) when two people or groups collaborate, the more evil or irrational wins, and (3) when opposite principles are clearly defined, the more rational wins, but when hidden or evaded, the more irrational wins.

All three can be seen operating in debates about or with the left. Indeed, the rules have been present and operating in US politics for many decades. The right (conservatives and Republicans), by “me-tooing” and often outdoing the left with leftist policies, are the biggest compromisers.** Both sides accept altruism and self-sacrifice as the correct ethics and both sides accept the use of initiated coercion by the government to violate individual rights as the proper method of governing society.

Let’s look at these premises and apply Rand’s rules. The left is far more consistent (rule one), which is why they are winning. The left wants full (totalitarian) governmental control. The right makes concessions by trying to uphold a mixture of freedom and control, that is, the “mixed economy.”

The right is, and has been for decades, collaborating with the left by granting them sincerity and apologizing for them by saying, “they mean well” (rule two). But they don’t.

And the right is foolish when it thinks the concept of rights used by both sides means the same thing (rule three). Rights to conservatives and Republicans usually means individual rights, but to the left it means group identity. In accordance with rule three, this difference is hidden and evaded. It should be exposed for what it is: group privilege to take wealth away from those who have earned it.

The worst premise accepted by the right is that of altruism and self-sacrifice as the proper ethics of a free society. The left also accepts altruism, but is quite clear about its meaning (rule one): everyone must sacrifice to the state; everyone, especially the well-off, must pay higher and higher taxes so their wealth may be redistributed to the groups that are allegedly less well-off and allegedly have been victimized by those who are wealthy; and the United States must sacrifice itself and its wealth to all other countries in the world, especially those in the so-called third world.

To collaborate with the left by saying, “we are just as compassionate [altruistic] as you are” is a disastrous trap. The left simply responds by saying, “No, you’re not, because we want to do this, this, and this,” that is, move further and further left. Those on the right, as a result, often end up saying nothing, as unfortunately was demonstrated by many congressional conservatives and Republicans over the past two years (rule two).

To fight the leftist juggernaut, conservatives and Republicans must endorse rational self-interest and reject any form of self-sacrifice as a valid morality. They must then explain it clearly and openly (rule three).

Naïveté, gutlessness, and concessions and compromise are not the path to maintaining the freedom and prosperity of this country. The left wants to tear it down. Giving in will only hasten the process.

What is slowing this destruction is the sense of life of our current president and his constituents, the “deplorables” of middle America. As I have written before, sense of life is an emotion, but emotion is not enough to defend the American way of life and Western civilization. Strong, articulate intellectual arguments are needed, as well as realism and courage to stand up to the left.


* There is an analogy between the political and criminal personalities, and no doubt some in politics exhibit a criminal element, because they relish the coercion and control of others. “Take my crime away, and you take my world away,” is what one offender said to Stanton Samenow. Replace the word “crime” with “politics” and you have one explanation of the leftist’s motivation and energy.

** The press and business need to be mentioned. Many journalists blow with the wind and today that direction is to the left. They are not introspective to identify their hidden biases, or, in some (many?) cases, are explicit in their biases and therefore are complicit with the left. And contrary to their pretensions, courage is not a virtue of most of the press. Nor is it of most business people, especially those who cave to the email blasts threatening them with boycotts unless they remove advertising from certain cable broadcasters. Granted that business people are busy running businesses, they need to understand that they are the primary targets of leftist attacks. It would be nice if they showed some spine.

The Meaning of Sacrifice and the Staying Power of Statism

Why does statism and its collectivist progeny, communism, socialism, fascism, and, especially, democratic socialism, still attract followers?

The answer is still Ayn Rand’s. You can argue the impracticality of statism until you are blue in the face, but unless you reject the moral ideal on which statism rests—altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice—your listener will respond by saying the failures of the USSR or Mao’s China or today’s Venezuela were caused by the selfish dictators who usurped power and destroyed the ideal.

In our present cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos, discussion of ideas is rare and discussion in terms of fundamental principles even rarer. Let’s see if we can find some fundamentals.

Altruism, as I have written before, does not mean kindness or gentleness or helping little old ladies across the street (Applying Principles, pp. 39-41, 88-90). Immanuel Kant, though he did not know the word “altruism,” clarified its essence when he said moral behavior means always acting from duty, never from inclination.

And coiner of the term, Auguste Comte, as cited by George Smith, makes it clear that altruism has nothing to do with individual rights or individualism, but with living for the collective of “humanity.”

Which is to say that morality is not supposed to be fun. It means obedience to authority . . . of God, society, or some group. Pleasure and fun lead to selfishness and that is bad.

Self-sacrifice, then, is meant to be painful. The word, in fact, means to kill, destroy, or abnegate, which means sacrifice is supposed to hurt and you especially should not get anything in return for your pain.*

Sacrifice means giving up something that you value highly to something or someone you value less highly or not at all.

For example, a sacrifice from pre-historic times meant throwing your child into the fire to pay homage to the gods. Now that may be rationalized as giving up a lesser value for the sake of a higher one, and some usage and dictionary definitions of the word “sacrifice” tend to support this notion, but the correct meaning of self-sacrifice in religion and ethics remains the act of giving up a higher value to a lower- or non-value.

Sacrifice, in other words, is not a commercial trade in which a buyer gives up money (the lesser value) for a product (the higher value), and vice versa for the seller. Religious and ethical sacrifices are painful and are meant to be painful.

To further illustrate, it is not a sacrifice to spend extra years of your life, perhaps working at multiple part-time jobs, to acquire an advanced college degree in order to pursue a more personally rewarding career.

Nor is it a sacrifice to have children and raise a family. The parents, after all, have made a choice—they signed a twenty-plus year contract—to start a family and presumably they value the children more than the childless life they used to enjoy. (I have to admit that this last is not always obvious when observing the behavior of some young couples.)

Self-sacrifice means the pursuit of a career to please your parents instead of the career you truly love and want. It means marrying a person you do not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity.

Sacrifice means doing your job because it’s your duty—not because you enjoy it.

“Moral purification through suffering” is how the ascetic life is sometimes described. It is the motto of altruism. This is why young women who get pregnant are punished—for a lifetime, as it often turns out—by preventing them from aborting the pregnancy.** This is why small business owners are coerced, in flagrant violation of property rights, to provide services to customers they do not willingly choose to serve.

Your duty is to suffer and, if necessary, die for your country. This is why involuntary servitude in the form of a military draft or “national service” is justified.

You are immoral if you think you have a right to pursue your own self-interest.

Why does statism continue to thrive? Continued support of the doctrine of self-sacrifice and hesitancy or outright refusal to defend a morality of self-interest.

Capitalism and the free society rest on and require a foundation of rational egoism. Altruism and its statist political manifestations are acts of enslavement and destruction.

Thus, if we continue to allow the state to claim authority to coerce us in any way other than self-defensive, retaliatory force against those who initiate its use, we compromise our principles and yield the high ground to the statists.

These compromises include the acceptance or tolerance of coerced prohibition of abortion, coerced business service to unwanted customers, coerced military service, coerced removal of money from our wallets (through taxation and the depreciation of the value of money) . . . and on and on, including the thousands of coerced rules, regulations, and laws passed by the deep state and legislatures to control our business and personal lives.

Democratic socialism? The vote, somehow, since at least Marx’s time, and on all sides of the political spectrum, has become the panacea for all kinds of decisions, including the initiated coercion of socialism.

If it has been voted on, so goes the thought and argument, then it must be okay.

Democracy unrestrained by individual rights is a form of dictatorship. Anyone who advocates the vote without the rights qualification—or without making it clear that there is a rights qualification—is supporting and endorsing statism.

This worshipful blather over democracy, of course, in just another indication of our cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos.


* From the Oxford English Dictionary (OED online), self-sacrifice means “the giving up of one’s own interests, happiness, and desires, for the sake of duty or the welfare of others.”

** “An embryo,” as Ayn Rand vigorously argued, “has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). . . . One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual . . . is to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former.” (Emphasis in original.) If both pro- and anti-abortionists were sincere about women’s liberty and rights, they would promote above all else the removal of bureaucratic obstacles to child adoption and the governmental encouragements (entitlements, welfare, incompetent government schools, etc.) of unwed teenage pregnancies. Instead, both sides would rather punish, that is, coerce sacrifice of, those who violate their arbitrary rules.

Ayn Rand, of Course, Was Right

“It turns out, of course, that Mises was right.”

The quote is from that “worldly philosopher,” socialist Robert Heilbroner, in a New Yorker article in 1989 (see Skousen). It acknowledges that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises correctly predicted the decline and collapse of the worker’s paradise known as the USSR.

Bureaucrats in planned economies, as Mises pointed out in 1920, have no God’s-eye view (that is, omniscience), capable of flawlessly determining who should produce what, in what quantities, at what price, and who should get what, in what quantities, at what price.

In other words, socialism is incapable of economic calculation.

Ayn Rand, unfortunately, has yet to find her Heilbroner. Someday, perhaps, a distinguished member of the philosophical profession will announce that “Ayn Rand, of course, was right . . . about many things, but especially altruism.”

Even a cursory reading of Rand’s writings makes it abundantly clear that she did not understand altruism to mean kindness and gentleness or, for that matter, that she did not think it altruistic—or wrong—to aid a deserving friend or relative or to help little old ladies across the street.

To Rand, altruism means self-sacrifice, the giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower- or non-value, the pursuit of a career to please one’s parents instead of the career one truly loves and wants. It means marrying a person one does not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, ethnicity, . . . or sexual orientation.

It means doing your job because it’s your duty, not because you enjoy it. It means giving birth to a child you do not want and enslaving yourself to a mistake or accident that occurred when you were young.

“Moral purification through suffering” is how the ascetic life is sometimes described. It is the motto of altruism.

Immanuel Kant did not not know the word “altruism,” but he did give us the essence of it: always act from duty, not inclination.

It was Auguste Comte who coined the word, and he meant every bit of the notion of self-sacrifice. For Comte, the golden rule is too selfish, as is Jesus’ prescription to love your neighbor as yourself. Suicide is selfish and so are rights.

Fortunately, George Smith at libertarianism.org has read Comte’s “tiresome writings” that explain his theory in “excruciating detail.” In a five-part article, Smith demonstrates that Ayn Rand correctly understood the meaning of altruism.

Comte’s ethics, as quoted by Smith:

. . . never admits anything but duties, of all to all. For its persistently social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, constantly based on individualism. We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, and to our contemporaries. . . . All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral.

The agnostic Comte developed a secular religion such that our duty, harkening back to the devout Kant, is to all of humanity. As Kant said, our duty is to humanity as an end in itself; humanity is never a means to our own ends. Comte put it this way: “To live for others affords the only means of freely developing the whole existence of man.”

Rights, therefore, are out. The collective is in.

Does the individual even exist? No, says Comte. “Man . . . as an individual, cannot properly be said to exist, except in the too abstract brain of modern metaphysicians. Existence in the true sense can only be predicated of Humanity.”

So sacrifice the individual to the collective. On this, too, of course, Ayn Rand was right: altruism and collectivism go hand in hand.

And she was right that the unprecedented devastation of the twentieth century—between 100 and 300 million war deaths, depending on source—was caused by the two doctrines.

Kindness and gentleness are not what altruism is all about. Self-sacrifice is.


Postscript: The 1988 book The Altruistic Personality by Oliner and Oliner is sometimes taken to be the epitome of altruistic behavior. The book consists of a myriad of reflections by rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. Fascinating reading, the book shows that there were many Anne Franks throughout the occupied countries and several Schindlers. The authors correctly identify Comte as coiner of the word “altruism,” meaning duty, selflessness, and not acting on inclination, but then they redefine it for purposes of their study as “rescue behavior,” which means anyone who has the courage to act in the face of considerable risk.

Ayn Rand said she would take a bullet for her husband. This did not make her an altruist, nor does the behavior of these heroic rescuers make them altruists!

The Role of Honor in Moral Revolutions

In her 1974 West Point Military Academy address, Ayn Rand said, “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.” It is a sense of worthiness and competence that others can see in one’s deportment. It is not pseudo-self esteem that requires praise or respect from others lest an affront occur that demands satisfaction. It is not psychological dependence.

Yet that is precisely what Kwame Appiah in his book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen means by honor. The book is interesting because it chronicles the role of honor, or at least what certain cultures have understood to be honor, in supporting and eventually eliminating the practices of dueling, footbinding, and slavery.

Appiah also suggests a desperately needed role for honor in bringing about an end to the modern, horrific practice of honor killing.

The Triumph of Ethics over Practicality: A Tale of Two Cities

My title this month—the triumph of ethics over practicality—is sarcastic because I believe, as Ayn Rand taught, that the moral is the practical. My reference is to the continued unquestioned acceptance and dominance of altruism as the equivalent of ethics. And just as unquestioned, the premise that self-interest is bad.

The two cities are Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. About a year ago, a month apart, both were hit with devastating tornadoes. A year later Joplin is thriving, largely revived and rebuilt. Tuscaloosa, on the other hand, still has undemolished ruins, vacant lots, and businesses awaiting permit approvals to rebuild.

This is an old story, of course: West vs. East Germany, South vs. North Korea, the US vs. the USSR. Why is the lesson never learned that capitalism works and socialism—central planning of any kind, including urban planning—does not? The answer once again is ethics, especially the primacy of altruism.

The pursuit of profit, the alleged reasoning goes, especially in an emergency situation such as the aftermath of a tornado, is unconscionably selfish and self-evidently harmful. This requires careful thought and planning by experts who know what is best for the public, those poor distraught victims. “It is our duty to serve,” the urban planners and other do-gooding bureaucrats rush in to say, “and serve we will.”

To be more explicit, the reasoning continues, egoism is evil and self-sacrifice is noble, the public servant being the most noble of all. All work and effort is expended for the sake of others, often at great personal sacrifice. This largesse is manifested, as Ayn Rand scathingly pointed out, in “the most wasteful, useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 89). Monument builders in return expect gratitude and prestige from their constituents, a form of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

The public monument of these two cities is Tuscaloosa, a “showpiece,” as the city’s recovery plan states, of  “state-of-the-art urban planning,” with “unique neighborhoods that are healthy, safe, accessible, connected, and sustainable,” anchored by “village centers”—and unfinished, one year later. The Tuscaloosa plan, however, the Wall Street Journal comments, “never mentions protecting property rights.” It’s the monument that counts, the “state-of-the-art” plan.

That is because a public monument is always presented as “a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it,” (Virtue, p. 89). In the case of Tuscaloosa the “forced labor and extorted money” was taxation, construction moratoria, and restrictions and regulations that increased the cost of doing business by thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rights were irrelevant.

Joplin, on the other hand, took the free market route by suspending licensing and zoning regulations and allowing home and business owners to make their own decisions as to when and how they were going to rebuild. No monuments were built in Joplin.

What underlies the monument building mentality, whether it was construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt or a military arch in the local park, is a theory of human nature. Egoism assumes that human beings are capable, resilient, self-directing and self-controlling. Altruism assumes that we are weak, inept, and in need of leadership from the more knowing and competent others, a ruling elite. It is not surprising then that a self-responsibility theory of human nature underlies egoism and capitalism. A theory of dependence underlies altruism and socialism in all of its variants. It is what underlies the theory of external control psychology.

The monument builder is the one who vocally preaches self-sacrifice and in the end collects the sacrifices. The monument builder is a public servant who thinks of him- or herself as doing very important work. Practicality is irrelevant. Ethics—the ethics of altruism—is paramount. Thus, monument building becomes self-congratulatory but it often lacks external praise, as from one’s constituents who might not always see the builder’s work as “very important” or appreciate the builder’s “sacrifices” that have been made.

The need to build more monuments becomes significant. More “forced labor and extorted money”—in today’s parlance, increased taxes, more regulations, and elaborate public works programs—become required.

The monument building mentality quite simply is that of a dictator.

Altruistic Twaddle and the Harm It Causes

Twaddle, as the dictionary says, is “empty silly talk,” that is, “empty” in the sense that nothing is really being said, “silly” in the sense of being ridiculous or trivial or frivolous, and “talk” . . . well, in the sense that someone is saying or writing it. “Drivel” and “nonsense” might be other descriptives of the word. 

When I put “altruistic” in front of it, I am talking about the tiresome nonsense that today is praised and promoted as ethical behavior, such as cleaning bedpans in nursing homes to demonstrate one’s unselfish public service and thereby become eligible to attend an Ivy League or other highly reputed college. Or the ads encouraging us to give five dollars to the Starbucks Foundation to help create jobs. (On job creation, see this.) Or to help promote economic development and create world peace by digging ditches in a third-world country

Not that there is anything wrong, demeaning, or unethical about these behaviors. I have not cleaned bedpans, but I have donated to charity and for pay I have dug at least one ditch. It is the disconnect stemming from a screaming ignorance of economics that stands out among those who say we should work side by side old people, poor people, and people living in abject poverty on the other side of the world to achieve world peace and prosperity. 

The reasoning seems to flow like this (1, 2). If we work side by side these people, we will acquire a mutual understanding of each other, gain respect, and become friends. This, somehow, will make war obsolete because peace must necessarily follow from our friendships. Then justice, and finally—the greatest leap of all—economic prosperity (presumably, by digging ditches and building schools), will follow.

Friendship certainly does develop over weeks or months when one works beside a total stranger. It’s almost impossible not to become friendly on some level. But friendship does not guarantee peace. Blood relatives and neighbors have fought and killed each other in many a civil war (1, 2). Clearly, something more fundamental about human relationships than friendship must determine the causes of war and peace.

There is good reason why culture has been likened to an iceberg, with nine-tenths of its core values buried beneath surface appearances (and surface friendships that may develop in the Peace Corps and other missionary organizations). It is this depth of what defines a culture, or rather, the ignorance of it, that has led American presidents to naively assume boots on the ground can quickly turn a dictatorship into a free state.

The core value that made the United States great is its respect for individual rights, especially property rights. “Make trade, not war” is the slogan that should replace the familiar fluff from the 1960s. Trading goods and services with, as opposed to shooting bullets at, each other is the only way to prevent war and alleviate poverty. It means, however, keeping the government out of both our bedrooms and board rooms, something advocates of altruism almost never agree with.

Other forms of altruistic twaddle include buying expensive hybrid or electric cars or installing expensive solar panels—and I say “expensive” to emphasize that low income people are unlikely to participate in these markets.* And the newly approved benefit corporation that allows businesses to put social and environmental objectives ahead of profits. But about this last, Doug French at the Mises Institute commented: “While a business owner may make grand pronouncements that the environment or some social issue is more important than profits, what he or she is really saying is that the company believes these issues are more important than customers.” And: “The idea at the root of benefit corporations is that profit should be abolished.”

This is the ultimate consequence of altruistic twaddle. The twaddle may strike some, as it does me, as tiresome nonsense, but it is not harmless. People who perform these behaviors may do them for the warm, fuzzy feeling of being moral, or even more moral than thou, according to the altruistic ethics, but in truth their ideas and actions harm consumers, harm the poor, harm the old, and harm those living in abject poverty on the other side of the world.

Self-interest, the profit motive, and capitalism are what create. Altruism destroys.



*I never say never to entrepreneurs, because some entrepreneur, some day, somewhere may, even in today’s government-hampered markets, figure out how to make these products cost effective and profitable when sold to low income buyers. Today, of course, aside from the inefficiencies of the technologies, these markets are shot through with government meddling and favoritism, ranging from tax credits to bailouts.



Postscript. I have never been a fan of the Peace Corps but the source of the reasoning in paragraph four above is the private nonprofit organization Global Volunteers. A labor of love of its entrepreneurial founders, the organization is billed as leader in the volunteer vacation movement. As I read through the site, I found myself faintly attracted to its mission and I think it is because anyone who works or aspires to work in a helping profession naturally would like to test his or her skills at helping. I know too much about economics, however, to think that this kind of volunteer work will ever achieve world peace or alleviate poverty.

One more question remains. Who actually is helped by missionary work? The helper’s self-esteem is surely boosted, but what about the unseen nine-tenths of the helpee? When rich Americans fly half-way around the world to spend their two-week vacations helping others who supposedly cannot help themselves, might there not be a touch of resentment lurking beneath the surface, not to mention feelings of inferiority?

For a different angle on this topic, see Coerced Altruism, Involuntary Servitude, and Contempt for the Less Well Off.

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Follow-up:

Theory of the Big Mouth. In a short 2003 essay in the Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert: The Habits and Needs of a Little-Understood Group,” Jonathan Rauch quotes silent Calvin Coolidge as saying, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?” A flood of responses from readers led to this interview: “Introverts of the World, Unite!” Rauch must be on to something!

Coerced Altruism, Involuntary Servitude, and Contempt for the Less Well Off

“Many people need to be coerced to do things for their own good.” This is a common refrain heard from social liberals and religious conservatives alike.

National service was advocated by both presidential candidates in the recent election; young people are to be coerced to “do good for their own good.” Advocates of the military draft have always argued that it is the duty of eighteen-year-olds to serve their country and to die for it; unless current ideological trends change, future drafts will extend involuntary servitude to young women, putting them next to the young men so they may also die for their country. And in the government-run, government-coerced education system “service learning”—the notion of learning about the poor and downtrodden while at the same time receiving an altruistic jolt by serving them—is abuzz. Students are forced to clean bedpans in nursing homes and give food to the homeless.

Such notions are usually put forth by the more highly educated. The less educated just follow along in agreement. Two questions come to mind: Why do so many people think this way? And how do they come to think of children, young people, and others in general as their slaves? The first is readily answered as the two-and-a-half thousand years of cultural tradition that equates altruism and self-sacrifice to ethics. The second is more subtle and takes us into psychology.

Of course, most advocates of these ideas do not think of their victims as slaves. The word is harsh, but forcing someone to do something against his or her will does not make that person an autonomous individual. That it is the highly educated who espouse these notions indicates an air of superiority over those who are coerced. Historically, it has always been the upper-class aristocrats who have taken it upon themselves to make decisions that control the lives of their subjects, the lower, less educated classes. Today, we do not have an official aristocracy, but Plato’s philosopher kings (1, 2) have most certainly been replaced by our present-day PhD kings, the ones who hold authoritative (and authoritarian) positions in various government agencies.

Interestingly, this elite, when pressed for details about why they believe what they do, exhibits not just an air of condescension over the lower and less-educated, but also an apprehension to let the uncultivated guide their own lives. There appears to be a fear, not unlike that of the old aristocracy, to the effect: “I know what’s best for the uneducated, but I don’t want to associate with them. We have nothing in common.” Do I dare say that the attitude of this contemporary elite is “I don’t want to associate with the ‘great unwashed’”? The elite fears a loss of status or rank, and therefore power, over its subordinates by hobnobbing with them; the dirt may rub off and cause contamination. The elite fears that they might lose their pseudo self-esteem.

The essence of this attitude is a profound lack of respect for the less well off accompanied by the contemptuous sorrow known as pity that apparently gives rise to the need to lord it over them. The need to lord it over others, as I pointed out in a previous post, derives from defensive anxiety. Having grown up in the ranks of the “less well off” and “less educated,” I can attest to the lack of respect communicated by those who thought they knew what was best for me. Ironically, neither I nor most of my friends or relatives considered ourselves “less well off” or “disadvantaged.” Our unquestioned assumption was that we would do better than our parents. Self-esteem, it seems, is precondition not just to raise oneself above one’s original station in life, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to avoid turning around and looking down on those from whence one came.

The conviction to impose altruism and involuntary servitude on others stems from unexamined premises embedded in our culture for thousands of years. The root of the premises, though, is the thousands-of-years old view of human nature that certain types of people are incapable of helping themselves or, especially, making sound decisions for themselves. And “types of people” here means anyone of a certain skin color, gender, religion, nationality, or level of income, education, and occupation, etc. The source of this theory of human nature, in turn, seems to be rationalization for the fears those in power feel toward those who are lower in status. This is a case of psychology influencing and determining perception.

Altruism is the main premise in our culture that needs to be examined. It does not mean kindness or gentleness. It means giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower or non-value. It means self-sacrifice. The first step to questioning altruism is to acknowledge the full meaning of the adage, “We were put on earth to serve others.” The full meaning is implied in what one wag added to the familiar phrase: “ . . . but I don’t know why the others were put here.” The others were put here to collect our sacrifices and it is our duty to continue sacrificing to those others. That is the meaning of altruism. It is ancient ethics still reigning over us in the twenty-first century.

The Dangerous Admiration of BS

Why is BS’ing admired, almost to the point of being “cuddly and warm,” as philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, whereas lying is considered morally repugnant?

Frankfurt examined BS in his 2005 monograph On Bullshit (BS) and distinguished it from lying. The liar, Frankfurt argued, is focused on facts so he or she may state the opposite, but the BS’er is an entertainer or artist who uses words and sophistical arguments to manipulate others. Individual statements of the BS’er may be true, but their truth or falsity are irrelevant. The “show” is what counts. A sales rep, thus, puts pressure on a prospect by saying, “buy now, because I already have two firm offers.” The rep may or may not have two other offers; those particular words were chosen because they provide the most persuasive language.

Frankfurt’s discussion seems to imply that the creative and imaginative skills of the artist are what people admire in BS’ers and lead many to make comments about BS’ers to the effect “He’s good” or “She’s clever.” Such comments may be made about anyone. Politicians, of course, are often consummately admired spinmeisters, as are many lawyers and sales and advertising practitioners. Some admiration may stem from the challenge a BS’er must overcome, such as a sales person confronted with the objections of a particularly difficult prospect. A well-crafted story, not entirely based on fact, to convince the prospect to buy can produce the above accolades.

Expectation of truth is doubtless the reason we are offended by the liar, but why not the same for the BS’er? After all, the overall impression made by the BS’er is false, even though individual statements made by such a person may be true. BS, as I suggested in a conference paper, is a species of lying, the two behaviors occupying opposite ends of a continuum.

In a post-publication interview, Frankfurt named marketing (of course) and, perhaps surprisingly, democracy as causes of the preponderance of BS in our culture today. Marketing, because salesmanship and advertising are falsely assumed to mean lying in order to separate consumers from their hard-earned dollars. And democracy, because in such a system we are obligated to have an opinion about everything; since we cannot know everything, says Frankfurt, our opinions amount to BS.*

One consequence of the connection between democracy and BS, Frankfurt continued, is that the highly educated, because they have the linguistic skills with which to express their opinions and the arrogance to neglect facts in the process, are more prone to BS than their lesser educated counterparts. Does this “democratic skill” cause admiration of others who exhibit the same?

Rationalization abounds to justify BS, such as “everyone does it,” “everyone knows it’s done this way,” and “that’s how business (or politics) is conducted.” Not “everyone” does know it, however, and if everyone did know it, how would that justify departures from the truth? Storytelling belongs in the art of fiction, not in business, politics, or daily conversation. Justifying fabrication in negotiation and salesmanship is precisely what gives capitalism a bad name.

The danger in admiring BS, and not carefully distinguishing it from the creative fiction of a true artist, is that habits of mind become established and human relationships end up being built out of little more than BS. Perception of the truth becomes nearly impossible, because every statement is for show, not a description of facts. Politics has become almost entirely a BS show, with honest intention seemingly nonexistent.

Worst of all, parents can encourage this habit in children at an early age. Smiling approval of a less-than truthful statement can communicate a “you’re clever” message to a child. For example, a boy who wants to get his way makes something up that will please his mother. The mother plays along, knowing fully that the gambit is less than genuine. A pattern of behavior has just been sanctioned by the mother.

Commitment to facts and truth, when such encouragement is continued throughout childhood and adolescence, goes out the window. Of course, parents who exhibit the same behavior become their children’s models. The BS habit becomes ingrained in the child’s subconscious and he or she may not even be aware that anything is wrong. “My parents do it. Everyone around me does it. Politicians do it. It must be right.”

From this beginning in the home, we derive a culture of BS.


* The fundamental cause is altruism, specifically the premise that self-interested behavior, which is required in our daily lives, is opposed to character and morality.)