Communists, socialists, and fascists, as well as the usual American political suspects, Democrats and Republicans, have all advocated, and today still advocate, democracy.
The notion of a “soviet,” let me point out, was a locally elected communist council or committee, common in the USSR. Similar “elections” occurred in Maoist China. In World War II, the German people were “advised” to vote for the Nazi Party. And elections were also held in Mussolini’s Italy.*
Then, there are the “democratic socialists,” who seek to vote socialism into power. The problem with these “democrats,” as F. A. Hayek pointed out in 1944 (chap. 10), is that coercion, sometimes severe coercion, is required to implement the democrats’ policies, and lacking the will to coerce its unwilling citizens, ruthless dictators step in to put the Garden of Eden called socialism into practice.
The amount of blather today spoken and written about democracy approaches infinity. The word “blather,” according to the unabridged dictionary, means “to talk [or write] foolishly or nonsensically.” Somehow that word doesn’t seem accurate, and perhaps it is too kind. How about BS? Which means to talk or write in a way that sounds good to others, while not knowing or caring about the facts. You know, “Facts don’t matter, so I’ll just BS my way through.”
In today’s political context, BS is Goebbelsian propaganda. Say it loud and say it a lot, said Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. After a while, even though there may be no factual basis for the blather—I mean, BS—uncritical readers and listeners will begin to believe it.**
I could go on but probably should stop here to talk about the real (accurate, objective) meaning of democracy.
Fundamentally, democracy means unlimited majority rule, and entails voting that the king’s subjects in the days of monarchy were not allowed to do. The empowerment that voting gave citizens was a significant appeal to the classical liberals.
In ancient Greece and Rome, there was voting, but no concept of rights. Citizens, meaning adult males, did possess certain legal protections. So, in 399 BC, Socrates, as an adult male citizen of Athens, was entitled to a trial after being accused of impiety and corruption of the youth. Conviction and condemnation to death was by majority vote.
Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens possessed no such protections.
The Greeks and Romans, as well as the founding fathers of the United States, viewed democracy as a form of tyranny—dictatorship of the many, as opposed to a dictatorship of the one or few. The many, as the founding fathers also believed, quickly degenerates into factions vying for power.
“Direct democracy,” a term bandied about sometimes today, means everyone votes on every issue and delegate in the government, which is impossible in any sizeable country, though the state of California attempts it every election with its nearly infinite list of propositions that clutter the ballot.
The original US form of government was a constitutional republic, a considerably limited authority constrained by a Bill of Rights. The House of Representatives, one from each district, was and still is elected by the citizens of those districts, but the Senate was elected or chosen by the respective state legislatures. This provided a balance of power between the national government and the states.
The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913 at the insistence of the early progressives, established the election of senators by statewide plebiscite, making most of the federal government popularly elected. Only the election of president, via the electoral college, retains a small semblance of the original balance of powers.
The Bill of Rights prohibits the government (and criminals) from taking certain actions. Most importantly, it prevents the majority from voting away our rights. The problem today is that blather, or rather BS, reigns supreme in discussions of rights. Does anyone in public life know what the concept means? No, they don’t care. They only say what sounds good.
Rights are freedoms of action, that is, the freedom to take any action I choose to sustain and enhance my life, which includes the acquisition, use, and disposal of property, without being coerced one way or another by the government (or by a criminal), dealing with others through voluntary cooperation. “One way or another” means the government cannot force me to do what I do not want to do, such as get a vaccine or serve in the military, or force a woman to get an abortion. Nor can it forcibly prevent me from doing what I do want to do, such as raise my prices or increase the water pressure in my shower, or forcibly prevent a woman from getting an abortion.
Freedoms of action also especially include speaking and writing as I see fit, such as criticizing the government, providing one understands the presuppositions and complications I discussed last month.
Today’s “democracy” is in fact an oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats, many of whom are totalitarians both in spirit and practice. The system has also been described as “government by lobby,” because big businesses spend enormous amounts of money to influence congress and the bureaucrats to pass laws and regulatory rules in favor of the lobbyists.
Our de facto system is fascism: nominal—meaning "in name only"—private ownership of business and personal property, as well as of each of our lives, but extensive government regulation and control of it all. The system is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship, ruled by the despotic elites in power. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out (esp. chap. 1 and 2), any mixed system, unless corrected, must move inexorably to full dictatorship, a system we came close to enduring over the past five years.
Sometimes, one will hear the words “liberal democracy” or “constitutional democracy,” but the meaning of both depends on what is understood as “liberal” and “constitutional.” If, respectively, classical liberalism and the US Bill of Rights are meant by the adjectives, they are accurate. Voting is then used essentially to select new leaders thus ensuring a peaceful transition of power.
“Democratic republic” is also heard. When used and understood as Thomas Jefferson understood it—voting under a constitution and bill of rights to select leaders—it is accurate. If not, it is likely more BS.
Today, the blather and BS are so common in political discussions that the concept of democracy becomes whatever the speaker wants it to mean, which makes it a buzzword to scare the ignorant and unthinking into going along with the speaker and to disparage his or her opponents.
Democracy in fact is a form of dictatorship.
* Aristotle tells us (1295a11–12) that barbarians even elected their despotic monarchs.
** On BS, think of your local used car sales rep, no offense intended to those reps who shoot straight and are honest. There are many.
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Democracy. Democracy. We’re All for Democracy!
Friday, October 08, 2021
The Communist-Fascist-Leftist Democratic-Socialist-Progressive Totalitarians: A Glossary of Dictatorship
This post can be thought of as a kind of compendium of dictatorship, with many links to previous posts where I have touched on the notions.
All terms in the title represent people who desire to, or do, exercise absolute authority or power over the citizenry. Differences between the terms and the people who espouse them are negligible. The consequences of such absolute power are not pretty.
Let me start with the totalitarians. They are the ones who want to and do use total coercive, governmental control to tell us what we can and cannot do in our personal and professional lives. Like, you know in recent times, to leave our homes, travel, sit down in a restaurant, run our businesses, etc., and perhaps even talk to our neighbors. In other words, covid totalitarianism.
The “left,” as in the left-right continuum, refers to the degree of government intrusion in and control of our personal and professional lives. The “far left” wants to control all, which means they are totalitarians. The right limits the government to self-defensive coercion against those who initiate physical force.
The left is Leninist socialism (there is no other type). It is Lenin’s giant post office that we all work for (government ownership of the means of production), protected by an armed proletariat (or other such “protectors”). The right is laissez-faire capitalism.*
The left wants to and does use physical force to establish and control everyone through a dictatorship. The right wants to and does establish the protection of individual rights, including especially property rights, political freedom, and equality before the (rationally defined, objective) law.
The middle ranges of the continuum are varying mixtures of freedom and dictatorship (or freedom and controls, as some say). The societies are also called mixed economies. “Moderates,” so called, fall within these ranges. They apparently like to distinguish themselves from the “extremists” on both ends of the continuum.
The freer countries of today’s world, including the United States, are mixed societies of freedom and dictatorship, the dictatorial control coming from the deep states’ and their governments’ overabundance of overly broad, vague laws and administrative rules (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83).
Putting the word “democratic” in front of socialism does not make it a kinder, gentler Garden of Eden in which the lion lies down beside the lamb, nor does it make socialism more peaceful than Marx’s violent revolution. It just means democrats want to use the vote and discussion to abolish private property and establish Lenin’s post office, in increments by gradually moving the mixed economy to total control. In recent times, note how less gradual and more quickly this move seems to be occurring.
The problem with democratic socialism, as F. A. Hayek (chap. 10) and George Reisman (part I) have pointed out, is that the democrats’ policies require coercion to enforce. And because the policies violate some citizens’ rights for the favor and privilege of others, sooner or later the citizens whose rights are being violated start thinking about rebelling. Eventually they disobey the dictatorial edicts. To maintain control, the “lions” in the government will gladly sacrifice the lambs to their favor and privilege.
The worst in moral character, as Hayek demonstrated, rise to the top of government leadership because democrats lose their nerve to enforce coercive policies. Reisman, putting it more bluntly, says that armed robbery and murder become necessary to overcome the citizens’ armed resistance to coercive policies. The worst who have risen to the top gladly comply with this requirement. (Motivation? Envy and hatred.)
This is the time when society becomes rather inelegant or unpretty, you know, as in one-party rule, political imprisonment and executions, expropriation of property, and censorship—and often is followed up with gulags and concentration camps.
Democracy (Applying Principles, pp. 101-05) means unlimited majority rule, which is a form of dictatorship. A modest search of the US’s founding fathers will reveal a frequent use of the word “tyranny” in conjunction with democracy. That’s why they called our new nation a constitutional republic, the constitutional part including a bill of rights that restrains the majority. “Democracy” and “free society” only go together if the words “classical liberal” are its modifiers, as in classically liberal democracy.
The significance of the vote in modern history, as identified by Ludwig von Mises (sec. 8, chap. 1), is its use in the transition of leadership, i.e., the vote in place of guns, which means the avoidance of civil war.
The progressives are socialists through and through, though divided into two eras of American history. The early progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), from 1880s to about 1930, were educated by German professors who were democratic socialists. Back in the US, the progressives’ goal was to replace classical liberalism with the so-called social variety (social liberalism, Applying Principles, pp. 36-39) by establishing an administrative state, i.e., a large bureaucracy of “experts” voting in new laws and establishing regulatory rules to tame the alleged “capitalist beast.” In other words, to establish a mixed economy that would move steadily toward socialism.
The modern version of progressivism, from 1930 to the present, was initially explicit communism or socialism, at least until the mid 1950s. It was Nikita Khruschev’s leaked secret speech about Stalin that caused the leftists to hide behind the banner of progressivism, often dressed up as democracy. (A “soviet is an elected governmental council in a Communist country.”)
Communism and fascism, the final terms to mention, are both forms of socialism, and both decidedly leftist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all considered communism a synonym of socialism. Fascism (Mussolini’s term) and Nazism (Hitler’s version) were systems that inherited industrial economies with large private sectors. The essence of fascism, as identified by Mises, is a nominal—in name only—private ownership of the means of production, with severe or total control and regulation by the government. Mises’ essentialization (chap. 7) makes it clear that fascism, as “socialism of the German pattern,” belongs on the left in the left-right continuum. It is only the manner of control that differs.
This means today’s mixed economies that have private property and private ownership of the means of production and are controlled and regulated by the government are fascistic. This includes present-day United States. The amount and severity of control pushes the country closer and closer to a de facto socialism.
Other issues associated with fascism, such as racism, militarism, intimidation of voters, concentration camps, and declarations of emergency powers, are either nonessential to the meaning of fascism or are shared with socialism. Not all fascist countries were racist, for one thing, and Hitler learned his tactics from Lenin and Stalin.
Where does this put the United States today? No matter what you call it, we are headed toward a communist-fascist-leftist democratic-socialist-progressive totalitarianism.
Keep in mind, as David Horowitz says (quoted in his website’s masthead), “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”
And as Ludwig von Mises (p. 52) put it, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence.”
* The “right,” traditionally, has been said to be the home of fascistic, military dictatorships, and the notion can be traced to what is called right-Hegelianism and to the French Revolution. This designation is often meant to denigrate capitalism as fascistic and the accusation comes from the communist-socialist leftists.
Monday, April 09, 2018
On the Worst—and Best—Rising to the Top
When initiated coercion is legalized, it attracts those who are willing to use it.*
Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.
This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).
The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.
The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”
A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.
By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.
The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.
The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.
Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.
Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.
Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.
The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.
In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.
When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.
In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.
In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.
The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.
Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.
Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.
Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.
As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.
Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.
In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.
It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.
This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.
* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.
Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.
This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).
The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.
The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”
A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.
By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.
The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.
The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.
Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.
Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.
Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.
The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.
In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.
When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.
In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.
In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.
The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.
Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.
Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.
Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.
As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.
Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.
In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.
It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.
This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.
* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.
Monday, December 11, 2017
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.
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.
Monday, July 10, 2017
Do We Have to Die to Maintain Our Independent Psychologies?
Socrates was an independent personality in ancient Greece, much like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Socrates said too many prominent citizens were scantily clad.
As a result, he was convicted by democratic vote in an Athenian court on charges of impiety and corruption of the youth. He was also then condemned to death by democratic vote.
Democracy, it would seem, killed Socrates, though some would say it was his obstinate insistence on remaining independent.
The question arises, must we die for our independence? Doesn’t life require compromise?
The concept of rights in Socrates’ time was extremely limited and applied only to Athenian citizens, which meant men. Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens were excluded.
Socrates was a citizen, so he was entitled to a trial. Plato’s dialogue Crito tells the story of Crito’s offer to finance Socrates’ escape into exile. Socrates rejects the offer. His argument is familiar still today.
Socrates said that it would be unjust for him to break the laws of Athens that he has agreed to obey. The citizens’ relation to the state, he said, is the same as that of a child to a parent or slave to a master. This is an appeal to the omnipotence of the state and an implicit social contract that binds citizens to the laws of the land.
The answer to Socrates comes from the modern tradition of individual rights as defined by John Locke and clarified by Ayn Rand, especially Rand’s principle that no one may initiate the use of physical force against anyone. This especially applies to governments to whom one’s rights have been delegated for protection.
This also means that if laws are unjust, by initiating force against citizens, retaliatory force in self-defense can be supported.
For example, it is morally just for a citizen to break an unjust law—provided one is willing to accept the consequences, as in civil disobedience, or is willing to live in exile, as occurred during the Vietnam War era when young men moved to Canada to avoid the military draft’s involuntary servitude. In extreme cases it is just to start a revolution, as occurred in Colonial America.
In contrast, blocking entry to a venue to prevent patrons from hearing a lecture is not civil disobedience. It is criminality.
Socrates should have gone into exile. The state is not our master and the social contract is only a metaphor, a bad one at that.*
Thus, we do not have to die for our independence. Nor do we have to compromise our principles or sell our souls to the devil to live and prosper.
We have no moral obligation to tell the truth when our privacy or other rights are being threatened. Living under a dictatorship with secret police and civilian informants is certainly initiated force. Surviving under such conditions where truth telling can result in jail or execution requires ingenuity. In the Soviet Union, some families resorted to speaking to each other in a foreign language to avoid being misunderstood by spies and snooping neighbors.
Even in a semi-free country as the United States where education is dominated by government-initiated coercion, encouraging students to “give teachers what they want” and then to study on their own to develop ideas that may not be acceptable to the government-controlled schools is just.
Free expression and free thought, contrary to pretensions otherwise, are not endorsed by our government citadels of reason. Ludwig von Mises (pp. 81-83) has taught us that academic freedom originated in European universities and today still means freedom to agree with the government.**
And Ayn Rand has taught us that “morality ends where a gun begins” so where the gun begins, we can lie our heads off. The issue is a practical one. If lying to a thief who demands our money could lead to harm or death, because the thief does not believe us, it would be unwise to practice the deceit.
The same applies to government initiators of coercion. Compromise of principles is unethical, but when under duress, as the Anglo-American legal system allows, self-defense becomes the guiding principle.
On the other hand, making concessions in a business negotiation is not a compromise of principles, because both parties have accepted the principle of trade. Nor is it a compromise to accompany one’s spouse to attend an opera, though you may not like opera. The mutually accepted principle is one of love and shared values.
Life does not require the compromise of principles. We compromise only in areas that involve moral options.
The challenge in living under duress, in a dictatorship or attending coercive government-controlled schools, is psychological. The challenge is to maintain one’s independence while putting on a front for protection. This means maintaining one’s conviction to understand thoroughly the facts of any given situation—or in a student’s case, the facts and truth of an assignment—while on the surface seemingly making concessions to the dictatorship or government school.***
Galileo recanted to the Inquisition, but did not sacrifice his scientific convictions. Faust, on the other hand, made a compact with the devil—and lost his soul.
Did democracy kill Socrates? Yes, but so also did his false premises about obedience to the state and what it means to remain independent.
In a truly free society that respects individual rights, democracy is not as powerful as it was in ancient Athens. Today, democracy is, or should be, relegated to procedural functions, such as selecting our leaders.
* Social contract was an attempt to explain the origin of the state, but it is a fiction. More likely, powerful nomadic tribes conquered the weaker ones to establish control, and later the settled farmers. The state holds the monopoly on the use of physical force. Its origin is in violence and coercion, not agreement. The aim of rights theory was and has always been to restrain and delimit government power. See Oppenheimer on the state’s origin and Hamburger on our current administrative threat.
** Some teachers, of course, are fair so this is a judgment call for students. If a teacher is fair, students should strongly express, argue, and defend their views. If a teacher punishes students for disagreement by giving lower grades, students must do what they have to do to survive.
*** The same advice applies to students attending private schools, as private schools also operate in the government’s coercive environment and must obey its regulations. Free speech, free expression, and academic freedom are rarities in academia today.
As a result, he was convicted by democratic vote in an Athenian court on charges of impiety and corruption of the youth. He was also then condemned to death by democratic vote.
Democracy, it would seem, killed Socrates, though some would say it was his obstinate insistence on remaining independent.
The question arises, must we die for our independence? Doesn’t life require compromise?
The concept of rights in Socrates’ time was extremely limited and applied only to Athenian citizens, which meant men. Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens were excluded.
Socrates was a citizen, so he was entitled to a trial. Plato’s dialogue Crito tells the story of Crito’s offer to finance Socrates’ escape into exile. Socrates rejects the offer. His argument is familiar still today.
Socrates said that it would be unjust for him to break the laws of Athens that he has agreed to obey. The citizens’ relation to the state, he said, is the same as that of a child to a parent or slave to a master. This is an appeal to the omnipotence of the state and an implicit social contract that binds citizens to the laws of the land.
The answer to Socrates comes from the modern tradition of individual rights as defined by John Locke and clarified by Ayn Rand, especially Rand’s principle that no one may initiate the use of physical force against anyone. This especially applies to governments to whom one’s rights have been delegated for protection.
This also means that if laws are unjust, by initiating force against citizens, retaliatory force in self-defense can be supported.
For example, it is morally just for a citizen to break an unjust law—provided one is willing to accept the consequences, as in civil disobedience, or is willing to live in exile, as occurred during the Vietnam War era when young men moved to Canada to avoid the military draft’s involuntary servitude. In extreme cases it is just to start a revolution, as occurred in Colonial America.
In contrast, blocking entry to a venue to prevent patrons from hearing a lecture is not civil disobedience. It is criminality.
Socrates should have gone into exile. The state is not our master and the social contract is only a metaphor, a bad one at that.*
Thus, we do not have to die for our independence. Nor do we have to compromise our principles or sell our souls to the devil to live and prosper.
We have no moral obligation to tell the truth when our privacy or other rights are being threatened. Living under a dictatorship with secret police and civilian informants is certainly initiated force. Surviving under such conditions where truth telling can result in jail or execution requires ingenuity. In the Soviet Union, some families resorted to speaking to each other in a foreign language to avoid being misunderstood by spies and snooping neighbors.
Even in a semi-free country as the United States where education is dominated by government-initiated coercion, encouraging students to “give teachers what they want” and then to study on their own to develop ideas that may not be acceptable to the government-controlled schools is just.
Free expression and free thought, contrary to pretensions otherwise, are not endorsed by our government citadels of reason. Ludwig von Mises (pp. 81-83) has taught us that academic freedom originated in European universities and today still means freedom to agree with the government.**
And Ayn Rand has taught us that “morality ends where a gun begins” so where the gun begins, we can lie our heads off. The issue is a practical one. If lying to a thief who demands our money could lead to harm or death, because the thief does not believe us, it would be unwise to practice the deceit.
The same applies to government initiators of coercion. Compromise of principles is unethical, but when under duress, as the Anglo-American legal system allows, self-defense becomes the guiding principle.
On the other hand, making concessions in a business negotiation is not a compromise of principles, because both parties have accepted the principle of trade. Nor is it a compromise to accompany one’s spouse to attend an opera, though you may not like opera. The mutually accepted principle is one of love and shared values.
Life does not require the compromise of principles. We compromise only in areas that involve moral options.
The challenge in living under duress, in a dictatorship or attending coercive government-controlled schools, is psychological. The challenge is to maintain one’s independence while putting on a front for protection. This means maintaining one’s conviction to understand thoroughly the facts of any given situation—or in a student’s case, the facts and truth of an assignment—while on the surface seemingly making concessions to the dictatorship or government school.***
Galileo recanted to the Inquisition, but did not sacrifice his scientific convictions. Faust, on the other hand, made a compact with the devil—and lost his soul.
Did democracy kill Socrates? Yes, but so also did his false premises about obedience to the state and what it means to remain independent.
In a truly free society that respects individual rights, democracy is not as powerful as it was in ancient Athens. Today, democracy is, or should be, relegated to procedural functions, such as selecting our leaders.
* Social contract was an attempt to explain the origin of the state, but it is a fiction. More likely, powerful nomadic tribes conquered the weaker ones to establish control, and later the settled farmers. The state holds the monopoly on the use of physical force. Its origin is in violence and coercion, not agreement. The aim of rights theory was and has always been to restrain and delimit government power. See Oppenheimer on the state’s origin and Hamburger on our current administrative threat.
** Some teachers, of course, are fair so this is a judgment call for students. If a teacher is fair, students should strongly express, argue, and defend their views. If a teacher punishes students for disagreement by giving lower grades, students must do what they have to do to survive.
*** The same advice applies to students attending private schools, as private schools also operate in the government’s coercive environment and must obey its regulations. Free speech, free expression, and academic freedom are rarities in academia today.
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
Independence and Certainty
In our age of post-Kantian skepticism and relativism, it follows, according to the skeptics and relativists, that anyone claiming epistemological or ethical certainty is either a deluded fundamentalist or a wannabe or actual dictator.
Inquisitors and jihadis are certain of their convictions and maim and kill those who do not agree with them. Hitler was certain and viciously imposed his will on his own citizens and the world and, of course, the Jewish people. The implication is that Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers are selfish, independent personalities.
The argument often does not go this far, though it is implied, and some, including Holocaust scholars, have said as much.* After all, this train of thought continues, no one is omniscient, and because of our inherent fallibility, we must allow freedom of speech. This is what makes a society free.
Lack of omniscience means inability to be certain, which means we must invite and relish criticism to clarify our thoughts, and perhaps gradually get closer and closer to the truth, though absolute truth can never be attained.
This is what logical positivism and its offspring have taught us. Claims of certainty are dangerous. We have to talk things over and aim for consensus, sometimes through voting. This in essence is the epistemological justification of democracy.**
In other words, anyone who believes in absolutes believes in absolute authority. The independent personality is one who asserts facts as absolutely true, and that is what is dangerous.
So does this mean the boy in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes should request a vote before speaking up, assuming the emperor is tolerant of critics(!)? In addition to the self-contradictions of skepticism and relativism, this question is a reductio ad absurdum.***
It does not follow from human fallibility that absolute certainty is authoritarian or that strong, independent personalities are actual or wannabe dictators. Nor is the argument from fallibility the fundamental defense of freedom of speech and the free society.
In a single sentence, the answer to the issue is a sound, objective theory of universals that allows the identification of sound, objective values, which in turn defines social relationships in terms of individual rights, that is, freedoms to take action without coercion, including the freedom to express oneself on one’s own property or on that of someone else with whom one has contracted to make that expression.
Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, and democracy, if it is not to be a form of dictatorship—democracy, remember, killed Socrates—presupposes and is restrained by all individual rights, which therefore means democracy in a free society is demoted to the relatively minor function of selecting our leaders, along with other non-rights-violating details.
Democracy is not the arbiter of truth (or “approximate” truth) or of ethical or legal behavior.
The sound theory of universals is Ayn Rand’s (1; Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). It is a theory based on the contextual nature of knowledge that allows certain truth to be asserted as absolute within a specified context. Because knowledge grows over time, adjustments to earlier absolute certainties may have to be made, as Newton’s theories were adjusted by Einstein’s.
Incidentally, something over the years must have been right, true, and certain about Newton’s and Einstein’s ideas, because in the use of both theories, spaceships have gone to the moon and back.
Truth and certainty—by peaceful, independent-minded, non-authoritarian scientists—do seem possible.
Yes, we are fallible and not omniscient, which means we must submit our expressions to evaluation and criticism and be prepared to defend them, but this is not a justification of freedom of speech.
In order to survive and flourish, humans must exercise their inborn, volitional capacity to reason. Because this exercise of reason is not activated by our genes or environment (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18), we must be left free to choose—that is, it is right or moral for us to be free from the coercion of others, especially the government—to allow each of us as individuals to generate and sustain action to achieve our chosen values. Trade is our means of social cooperation.
The source and justification of individual rights is our nature as rational beings. It is right and moral to be free of any initiation against us of the use of physical force.
Thus, whatever we say or write, either on our own property or on that of the others cooperating with us, is, at least sometimes, an assertion of truth and certainty. It is right and moral for us to make these assertions, first, because our freedom of expression is consonant with and required by our human nature and, second, because our speech, writing, and expressions derive from our rights to life, liberty and property.
Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers of the world, in contrast, do also make assertions of truth and certainty, but they back up their assertions with a gun. Their expressions are not open to evaluation and criticism because they tolerate no disagreement.
They are the authoritarians, the dictators, who at root, as Stanton Samenow demonstrates, are criminal personalities. As liars and cheaters, they are not the least bit interested in perceiving and asserting facts as facts. They most certainly are not independent personalities; they are among the worst of the dependent.
Brandishing and using guns, as they do, is anathema to our rational nature. Their goals and accomplishments are to silence our reason. Their “truth” and “certainty” lead to wanton destruction of humankind and civilization.
Talking and voting does not make any individual more or less independent, and it is not the means of preventing another Holocaust. Lack of certainty may indicate insecurity or insufficient knowledge to make a decision with confidence.
To link certainty to dictatorship is the red herring of all red herrings, brought to us by post-Kantian agnosticism, both in epistemology and ethics.
It is time to restore certainty to its proper place in knowledge and values.
* Years ago, I heard a Holocaust scholar say that the Nazis were certain of their convictions; therefore, it is good that we not be.
** The argument is John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian defense of free speech, restated in Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Rauch in 1993 was responding to an early wave of censorship by political correctness.
*** Here are the self-contradictions: skeptics assert as an absolute certainty that certainty is impossible and the relativists claim absolutely that all claims are relative. Cratylus, the Greek skeptic who stopped talking, is another reductio.
Inquisitors and jihadis are certain of their convictions and maim and kill those who do not agree with them. Hitler was certain and viciously imposed his will on his own citizens and the world and, of course, the Jewish people. The implication is that Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers are selfish, independent personalities.
The argument often does not go this far, though it is implied, and some, including Holocaust scholars, have said as much.* After all, this train of thought continues, no one is omniscient, and because of our inherent fallibility, we must allow freedom of speech. This is what makes a society free.
Lack of omniscience means inability to be certain, which means we must invite and relish criticism to clarify our thoughts, and perhaps gradually get closer and closer to the truth, though absolute truth can never be attained.
This is what logical positivism and its offspring have taught us. Claims of certainty are dangerous. We have to talk things over and aim for consensus, sometimes through voting. This in essence is the epistemological justification of democracy.**
In other words, anyone who believes in absolutes believes in absolute authority. The independent personality is one who asserts facts as absolutely true, and that is what is dangerous.
So does this mean the boy in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes should request a vote before speaking up, assuming the emperor is tolerant of critics(!)? In addition to the self-contradictions of skepticism and relativism, this question is a reductio ad absurdum.***
It does not follow from human fallibility that absolute certainty is authoritarian or that strong, independent personalities are actual or wannabe dictators. Nor is the argument from fallibility the fundamental defense of freedom of speech and the free society.
In a single sentence, the answer to the issue is a sound, objective theory of universals that allows the identification of sound, objective values, which in turn defines social relationships in terms of individual rights, that is, freedoms to take action without coercion, including the freedom to express oneself on one’s own property or on that of someone else with whom one has contracted to make that expression.
Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, and democracy, if it is not to be a form of dictatorship—democracy, remember, killed Socrates—presupposes and is restrained by all individual rights, which therefore means democracy in a free society is demoted to the relatively minor function of selecting our leaders, along with other non-rights-violating details.
Democracy is not the arbiter of truth (or “approximate” truth) or of ethical or legal behavior.
The sound theory of universals is Ayn Rand’s (1; Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). It is a theory based on the contextual nature of knowledge that allows certain truth to be asserted as absolute within a specified context. Because knowledge grows over time, adjustments to earlier absolute certainties may have to be made, as Newton’s theories were adjusted by Einstein’s.
Incidentally, something over the years must have been right, true, and certain about Newton’s and Einstein’s ideas, because in the use of both theories, spaceships have gone to the moon and back.
Truth and certainty—by peaceful, independent-minded, non-authoritarian scientists—do seem possible.
Yes, we are fallible and not omniscient, which means we must submit our expressions to evaluation and criticism and be prepared to defend them, but this is not a justification of freedom of speech.
In order to survive and flourish, humans must exercise their inborn, volitional capacity to reason. Because this exercise of reason is not activated by our genes or environment (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18), we must be left free to choose—that is, it is right or moral for us to be free from the coercion of others, especially the government—to allow each of us as individuals to generate and sustain action to achieve our chosen values. Trade is our means of social cooperation.
The source and justification of individual rights is our nature as rational beings. It is right and moral to be free of any initiation against us of the use of physical force.
Thus, whatever we say or write, either on our own property or on that of the others cooperating with us, is, at least sometimes, an assertion of truth and certainty. It is right and moral for us to make these assertions, first, because our freedom of expression is consonant with and required by our human nature and, second, because our speech, writing, and expressions derive from our rights to life, liberty and property.
Inquisitors, jihadis, and Hitlers of the world, in contrast, do also make assertions of truth and certainty, but they back up their assertions with a gun. Their expressions are not open to evaluation and criticism because they tolerate no disagreement.
They are the authoritarians, the dictators, who at root, as Stanton Samenow demonstrates, are criminal personalities. As liars and cheaters, they are not the least bit interested in perceiving and asserting facts as facts. They most certainly are not independent personalities; they are among the worst of the dependent.
Brandishing and using guns, as they do, is anathema to our rational nature. Their goals and accomplishments are to silence our reason. Their “truth” and “certainty” lead to wanton destruction of humankind and civilization.
Talking and voting does not make any individual more or less independent, and it is not the means of preventing another Holocaust. Lack of certainty may indicate insecurity or insufficient knowledge to make a decision with confidence.
To link certainty to dictatorship is the red herring of all red herrings, brought to us by post-Kantian agnosticism, both in epistemology and ethics.
It is time to restore certainty to its proper place in knowledge and values.
* Years ago, I heard a Holocaust scholar say that the Nazis were certain of their convictions; therefore, it is good that we not be.
** The argument is John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian defense of free speech, restated in Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Rauch in 1993 was responding to an early wave of censorship by political correctness.
*** Here are the self-contradictions: skeptics assert as an absolute certainty that certainty is impossible and the relativists claim absolutely that all claims are relative. Cratylus, the Greek skeptic who stopped talking, is another reductio.
Friday, March 04, 2016
The Communist Era and Capitalism vs. Democracy
Sidney Hook’s 600-page autobiography Out of Step provides a wealth of information about New York intellectual life in the twentieth century, especially the communist era from the 1930s to 1960s.
It also indicates that the main debate today is not, or should not be, capitalism vs. socialism, but capitalism vs. democracy.
As Marxist scholar, communist fellow traveler, anti-Stalinist, pro-Cold Warrior, anti-New Leftist, and adamant defender of democracy, Hook knew or was acquainted with nearly all of the players of the communist era.
The difference between Hook and his Communist Party colleagues is that he actually read and thoroughly understood Karl Marx, so if he had been a professor in a USSR university in the 1920s and ‘30s, he, like others before him, certainly would have been purged.
The names of many of these players should be familiar to anyone who has read about or lived through any portion of the communist era, for example, playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was worshipped by my 1960s New Left professors, and journalist Whittaker Chambers. Hook has stories about all of them.
Brecht, one day in Hook’s apartment in 1935, made a casual remark about a Stalin-assigned assassination: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook showed Brecht the door and never saw him again.
Chambers was a Stalinist spy in the 1930s who, when he came in from the cold, was immediately hired by Time magazine. Chambers later testified against Alger Hiss, accusing the high-level State Department official of also being a former spy. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury and went to his death denying it all. Hook concluded the evidence was against him.*
Never a card-carrying Party member, Hook became anti-communist after the Moscow Show Trial revelations of 1936-38. He supported US entry into World War II against the Nazis while Party members, who took their orders from the Kremlin, opposed any support for the evil capitalist regime of the United States.
During the Cold War, when communist apologists were advocating unilateral disarmament on the part of the US and saying it was better to be red than dead, Hook supported a strong defense and pushed the slogan “better free than slave.”
His chapter on the New Left’s spring 1969 uprising at New York University, that is, its occupation and disruption of academic life, is detailed and alarming. His description of the corresponding spinelessness of the school’s administration is equally detailed and alarming.
Not a friend of the New Left in the 1960s, Hook declared its campaigners “anti-intellectual” and “barbarians of virtue.”
And to set the record straight on whether or not, in earlier years, Communist Party members had infiltrated US educational institutions—the New Left had rewritten history to say otherwise—Hook cites Communist Party instructions to its members to teach Marxist-Leninism in every class without being caught or exposed. This confirms what I once heard Ayn Rand say, this time in Hook’s words: the duty of card-carrying communists was “to deceive and to cheat.”
The main political debate throughout Hook’s life, especially as stated by him, was democracy vs. totalitarianism. Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism represented the latter, but as a lifelong socialist—on moral, not economic, grounds—the former meant democratic socialism.
For Hook and his socialist colleagues, socialism is the ultimate end of Jeffersonian democracy and the Bill of Rights. This is sometimes called social democracy, though more often in the US its close cousin is social or progressive—as opposed to classical—liberalism. Social liberalism is an alleged improvement on the classical type.
At the end of his life (and book), Hook acknowledged that collective ownership of the means of production—the socialist state as giant post office, to use Lenin’s metaphor—does not work. Thus, he describes himself as “an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax.” Interventionism, in other words, with a strong leftward bias.
Although he spent many of his last years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1985 by President Reagan, Hook was no conservative. He was a secular humanist (and naturalist), which means he was a lifelong atheist and ardent supporter of science and scientific method.**
Democracy for Hook, however, was primary. He and nearly everyone else in the world today, including the Marxists and communists, seem to advocate democracy. So what does Hook mean by it?
In the absence of genus and differentia, he gives descriptions, such as “free discussion,” “freely given consent,” “voluntary [consent], not subject to coercion,” and, most importantly, the absence of economic obstructions to that consent and to the pursuit of education, jobs, and happiness.
Hook’s moral basis for being a socialist was, of course, his unexamined assumption that capitalism exploits workers. Socialists are more moral because they are “nicer” (meaning more altruistic, though Hook does not use the term) than the capitalists who are mean and selfish. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite of modern democracy is that economic power must be put under political control.
I say the main debate today is, or should be, capitalism vs. democracy, rather than vs. socialism, because of the near-universal endorsement of democracy and equally near-universal failure to define it. Hook’s somewhat muddled understanding is how most currently see it.
Socialism, to be sure, still needs to be refuted, though Ludwig von Mises did it thoroughly in 1922. And telling a naive voter that the government often abuses its legal monopoly on the use of physical force is likely to produce a “but we are the government and we can change it” response.
What percentage influence does a voter have in a typical US presidential election? Less than a millionth of a percent!
As I suggested in an earlier post, the vote is not unimportant in a free society, but it is neither primary nor fundamental. Hong Kong, after all, did quite well for decades with no general elections. What it did have was the English constitution and legal system.
This means that if democracy is a term to be endorsed at all, it must be defined as voting restrained by individual rights and those rights must be clearly distinguished from the collectivized versions of the social liberals. Individual rights are freedoms to take action, not entitlements to things, that is, to food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, and happiness.
I’m tempted to say that democracy should be tossed entirely in defenses of the free society. If capitalism is understood as a social system, not just economic, it can be put where it belongs—in philosophy—and therefore cannot be dismissed as “just economic,” which most opponents and the ignorant alike do when the term comes up.
Discussions of social systems come from the fourth branch of philosophy called social (or political) philosophy. Social philosophy defines the nature and proper function of government, which brings rights and ethics into the discussion of capitalism, which means egoism should also be brought in, as well as a theory of human nature, and a theory of consciousness and universals, among other fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.
Sidney Hook was a philosopher who knew about discussions of this sort, at the fundamental level, and used fundamentals to defend Marx and socialism. He was an advocate of Enlightenment values: reason, science, technology, freedom, and, of course, rights and democracy, as most socialists of his era were.
Defenders of the free society cannot just say they are advocates of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, technology, freedom, rights, and democracy . . . and expect to win arguments.
What is required today for a proper defense is the elevation—that is, the boosting, heightening, raising up—of discussion from our current concrete-bound, trivial, and disconnected mess to universal and fundamental principles.
Socialism was a moral ideal in the 1920s, ‘30s, and, according to Ayn Rand, until the end of World War II. As a practical ideal it died with the USSR collapse in 1991, yet its flotsam lingers in 2016 to obstruct passage to a genuinely free society.
It lingers by default because of the lack of principled opposition.
Sidney Hook was a significant member of the generation that sought to promote a moral ideal. His book provides lessons for anyone in 2016 who wishes to do the same, this time, one would hope, promoting the ideal of laissez-faire capitalism and all that it rests on.
* Chambers became a neoconservative and wrote the infamously sleazy review of Atlas Shrugged in William Buckley’s National Review. “From almost any page,” says Chambers, “a voice can be heard . . . commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’” Chambers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1984 by President Reagan.
** F. A. Hayek, in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” points out that conservatives are not averse to using coercion to achieve their goals and he even suggests that coercion is the common denominator uniting “repentant socialists” (like Whittaker Chambers) and conservatism. True (classical) liberalism, says Hayek, supports liberty over equality or democracy.
It also indicates that the main debate today is not, or should not be, capitalism vs. socialism, but capitalism vs. democracy.
As Marxist scholar, communist fellow traveler, anti-Stalinist, pro-Cold Warrior, anti-New Leftist, and adamant defender of democracy, Hook knew or was acquainted with nearly all of the players of the communist era.
The difference between Hook and his Communist Party colleagues is that he actually read and thoroughly understood Karl Marx, so if he had been a professor in a USSR university in the 1920s and ‘30s, he, like others before him, certainly would have been purged.
The names of many of these players should be familiar to anyone who has read about or lived through any portion of the communist era, for example, playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was worshipped by my 1960s New Left professors, and journalist Whittaker Chambers. Hook has stories about all of them.
Brecht, one day in Hook’s apartment in 1935, made a casual remark about a Stalin-assigned assassination: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook showed Brecht the door and never saw him again.
Chambers was a Stalinist spy in the 1930s who, when he came in from the cold, was immediately hired by Time magazine. Chambers later testified against Alger Hiss, accusing the high-level State Department official of also being a former spy. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury and went to his death denying it all. Hook concluded the evidence was against him.*
Never a card-carrying Party member, Hook became anti-communist after the Moscow Show Trial revelations of 1936-38. He supported US entry into World War II against the Nazis while Party members, who took their orders from the Kremlin, opposed any support for the evil capitalist regime of the United States.
During the Cold War, when communist apologists were advocating unilateral disarmament on the part of the US and saying it was better to be red than dead, Hook supported a strong defense and pushed the slogan “better free than slave.”
His chapter on the New Left’s spring 1969 uprising at New York University, that is, its occupation and disruption of academic life, is detailed and alarming. His description of the corresponding spinelessness of the school’s administration is equally detailed and alarming.
Not a friend of the New Left in the 1960s, Hook declared its campaigners “anti-intellectual” and “barbarians of virtue.”
And to set the record straight on whether or not, in earlier years, Communist Party members had infiltrated US educational institutions—the New Left had rewritten history to say otherwise—Hook cites Communist Party instructions to its members to teach Marxist-Leninism in every class without being caught or exposed. This confirms what I once heard Ayn Rand say, this time in Hook’s words: the duty of card-carrying communists was “to deceive and to cheat.”
The main political debate throughout Hook’s life, especially as stated by him, was democracy vs. totalitarianism. Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism represented the latter, but as a lifelong socialist—on moral, not economic, grounds—the former meant democratic socialism.
For Hook and his socialist colleagues, socialism is the ultimate end of Jeffersonian democracy and the Bill of Rights. This is sometimes called social democracy, though more often in the US its close cousin is social or progressive—as opposed to classical—liberalism. Social liberalism is an alleged improvement on the classical type.
At the end of his life (and book), Hook acknowledged that collective ownership of the means of production—the socialist state as giant post office, to use Lenin’s metaphor—does not work. Thus, he describes himself as “an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax.” Interventionism, in other words, with a strong leftward bias.
Although he spent many of his last years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1985 by President Reagan, Hook was no conservative. He was a secular humanist (and naturalist), which means he was a lifelong atheist and ardent supporter of science and scientific method.**
Democracy for Hook, however, was primary. He and nearly everyone else in the world today, including the Marxists and communists, seem to advocate democracy. So what does Hook mean by it?
In the absence of genus and differentia, he gives descriptions, such as “free discussion,” “freely given consent,” “voluntary [consent], not subject to coercion,” and, most importantly, the absence of economic obstructions to that consent and to the pursuit of education, jobs, and happiness.
Hook’s moral basis for being a socialist was, of course, his unexamined assumption that capitalism exploits workers. Socialists are more moral because they are “nicer” (meaning more altruistic, though Hook does not use the term) than the capitalists who are mean and selfish. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite of modern democracy is that economic power must be put under political control.
I say the main debate today is, or should be, capitalism vs. democracy, rather than vs. socialism, because of the near-universal endorsement of democracy and equally near-universal failure to define it. Hook’s somewhat muddled understanding is how most currently see it.
Socialism, to be sure, still needs to be refuted, though Ludwig von Mises did it thoroughly in 1922. And telling a naive voter that the government often abuses its legal monopoly on the use of physical force is likely to produce a “but we are the government and we can change it” response.
What percentage influence does a voter have in a typical US presidential election? Less than a millionth of a percent!
As I suggested in an earlier post, the vote is not unimportant in a free society, but it is neither primary nor fundamental. Hong Kong, after all, did quite well for decades with no general elections. What it did have was the English constitution and legal system.
This means that if democracy is a term to be endorsed at all, it must be defined as voting restrained by individual rights and those rights must be clearly distinguished from the collectivized versions of the social liberals. Individual rights are freedoms to take action, not entitlements to things, that is, to food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, and happiness.
I’m tempted to say that democracy should be tossed entirely in defenses of the free society. If capitalism is understood as a social system, not just economic, it can be put where it belongs—in philosophy—and therefore cannot be dismissed as “just economic,” which most opponents and the ignorant alike do when the term comes up.
Discussions of social systems come from the fourth branch of philosophy called social (or political) philosophy. Social philosophy defines the nature and proper function of government, which brings rights and ethics into the discussion of capitalism, which means egoism should also be brought in, as well as a theory of human nature, and a theory of consciousness and universals, among other fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.
Sidney Hook was a philosopher who knew about discussions of this sort, at the fundamental level, and used fundamentals to defend Marx and socialism. He was an advocate of Enlightenment values: reason, science, technology, freedom, and, of course, rights and democracy, as most socialists of his era were.
Defenders of the free society cannot just say they are advocates of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, technology, freedom, rights, and democracy . . . and expect to win arguments.
What is required today for a proper defense is the elevation—that is, the boosting, heightening, raising up—of discussion from our current concrete-bound, trivial, and disconnected mess to universal and fundamental principles.
Socialism was a moral ideal in the 1920s, ‘30s, and, according to Ayn Rand, until the end of World War II. As a practical ideal it died with the USSR collapse in 1991, yet its flotsam lingers in 2016 to obstruct passage to a genuinely free society.
It lingers by default because of the lack of principled opposition.
Sidney Hook was a significant member of the generation that sought to promote a moral ideal. His book provides lessons for anyone in 2016 who wishes to do the same, this time, one would hope, promoting the ideal of laissez-faire capitalism and all that it rests on.
* Chambers became a neoconservative and wrote the infamously sleazy review of Atlas Shrugged in William Buckley’s National Review. “From almost any page,” says Chambers, “a voice can be heard . . . commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’” Chambers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1984 by President Reagan.
** F. A. Hayek, in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” points out that conservatives are not averse to using coercion to achieve their goals and he even suggests that coercion is the common denominator uniting “repentant socialists” (like Whittaker Chambers) and conservatism. True (classical) liberalism, says Hayek, supports liberty over equality or democracy.
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