The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Below is the second of three reposts in this election season on politics. (The third repost will be on November 1.) The present essay was posted on October 7, 2020, six months after the beginning of what I subsequently labelled covid totalitarianism. I used the terms in seven essays posted in 2021 and ’22.
 
 
Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.
 
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.
 
In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.
 
Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)
 
In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.
 
For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and “cancel culture,” Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”
 
It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.
 
In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate [Joe Biden] “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.
 
Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?
 
Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.
 
In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.
 
Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*
 
Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.
 
No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.
 
Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.
 
The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.
 
Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!
 
Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??
 
 
* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).

Dictatorship by the Administrative State

In an earlier post, I wrote the following:

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law (Applying Principles, p. 328; see also, pp. 117-21).

Bureaucracy and administrative state are essentially the same thing. Bureaucrats are unelected administrators and policy makers who run the various governmental bureaus—about 432 in the United States to be exact. (Another, more recent term to disparagingly describe these bureaus is “deep state,” though it is broader including think tanks, military leaders, and the national media.)*
 
In contrast to the administrative state, as I continue in the above earlier post:

A truly free society . . . says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others.

And according to defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, criminal law during the early days of this country was simple enough to be read and understood while running!
 
What we have discovered in recent years, however, is that excessive law, vague and overly broad law, and complicated law that cannot be “read and understood while running” are not the only obstacles to a truly free society.
 
Many top bureaucrats in the administrative state are highly partisan, and in some cases, power-mongers who have little respect for their duties as administrators and policy makers, often following the progressive mantra of  “logic, consistency, and truth be damned.”
 
In our American bureaucracy, to administrate means to execute or implement the policies of the sitting president. As policy makers, the obligations of the various bureaus are to make recommendations to the current administration. Nothing in the job description says that bureaucrats may refuse to comply with the Executive’s orders.
 
“Refusal,” however, is the least of what occurred in our previous presidential administration.
 
James Sherk, domestic policy advisor to the President Trump, states that there are about 4000 “at will” political appointees in the bureaucracy, but a total of 2.2 million—essentially tenured—bureaucrats, because it is nearly impossible to fire them. The “at will” appointees, in contrast, can be fired by the Executive. Delegation of work to be done is usually handed down to those senior, unfireable bureaucrats.**
 
It is the higher echelons of this semi-permanent deep state that are the ones who can cause problems for a sitting president. For example, Sherk summarizes what such career bureaucrats have often been guilty of:

• Withholding information;
 
• Refusing to implement policies;
 
• Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;
 
• Deliberately underperforming;
 
• Leaking to Congress and the media; and
 
• Outright insubordination.

Among the worst of bureaucratic subterfuge and insubordination were the self-appointed dictators of public health who led the charge to establish, and continue to rule over, the past two years of covid totalitarianism. Refusal to listen to, implement policies for, or cooperate with the sitting president was worse than palpable. Deception, manipulation, and glaring incompetence due to lack of medical qualification are now being bragged about in post-covid books (see analytical reviews by Lerman and Tucker).
 
Not reading the science or respecting the judgments of such people as Dr. Scott Atlas was typical. Atlas, for example, would walk into meetings of the coronavirus task force with arms full of recently read and analyzed scientific studies—only to be greeted with blank stares and sometimes explicit statements that said, “We don’t care about that.”
 
And Dr. Paul Alexander reports that the bureaucrats he dealt with told him that neither he nor the President had any power, which meant he should toe the line of the deep state or resign. When he was threatened to have his career destroyed—initially, the bureaucrats at Health and Human Services, who hired him, refused to pay him—he resigned.
 
To counter the disingenuousness of these career bureaucrats, Sherk spearheaded the development of executive order Schedule F, signed into law a couple of weeks before the 2020 election, but rescinded almost immediately by the incoming administration. The order focused on making it easier to remove ill performing or insubordinate career bureaucrats. Sherk comments: when the deep state caught wind of the order, “it lit their hair on fire.” Hence, the immediate cancellation.
 
The source of the growing bureaucracy began with the Pendleton Act of 1883 that eliminated the “spoils” (crony) system, though the difficulty of firing bureaucrats did not begin in earnest until the 1940s.
 
The solution to getting rid of this approach to dictatorship is to start closing down government agencies. As columnist Jeffrey Tucker said, talking about the US Department of Education:

Pull the plug on the whole thing and sell the real estate. . . . New CEOs do it all the time. They shut down whole divisions, let go thousands of employees, end relationships with suppliers, sell off properties, and do anything possible to save the company. They do it in order to survive. The company in this case is the United States and it too needs saving.

Send the bureaucrats packing to find honest jobs in the marketplace where their primary task is to satisfy paying customers. Most have likely never held such a job. They have no clue what working in business is really like.
 
Once accomplished, the government may then get back to its constitutional function of protecting individual rights—rather than violating them.
 
 
* Regulatory agencies in particular are unconstitutional because they combine the executive, legislative, and judicial into one governmental organization, violating the separation of powers. The progressive supreme court of the 1920s and ‘30s disagreed, allowing the alphabet soup of agencies to grow seemingly exponentially (see Philip Hamburger, The Administrative Threat; also Applying Principles, pp. 81-83; and here).
 
** The bureaucratic process of trying to fire someone allows for a variety of appeals, requests for reconsideration, and, ultimately, arbitration, which after several months or years often ends in declaring it unjust to fire the employee. Not unlike the academic world.

Business Ethics, Moral Values, and the Herd Conformity of Virtue Signaling

So-called virtue signaling means showing off to the significant others of one’s group in order to maintain identity as a prominent and respected member. It is always other directed with eyes on conforming to the herd. “Sucking up” might be a vernacular way of describing the behavior. “Looking good to be good” is another way.

Genuinely virtuous behavior is an expression of one’s character and what others think of us is fundamentally irrelevant.

Ethics (or morality—the two words are synonyms), as Ayn Rand defined it, is “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.” The first part of this definition is the genus and includes not just Ayn Rand’s theory, but the other ethical theories that have been developed throughout history. More importantly to understand, the genus also includes the applied sciences and the many personal values we choose that are morally optional, such as taste in ice cream, choice of romantic partner and career, or the eating of red meat and drinking water out of plastic bottles.

Moral values are universal. Optional values are not, which means they do not have to be accepted and pursued by everyone.

The second part of the definition is the differentia that gives us a standard of moral value, as well as the derivative values and virtues that guide our choices and actions. A value is whatever we act to acquire and enjoy and a virtue is the action to acquire it. Moral values and virtues are broad abstractions and general actions, not concrete objects or specific actions.

Rand’s standard of moral value is human life as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Her fundamental value, then, is reason with the corresponding virtue of rationality. Deriving from that standard, Rand identifies several other moral values, including honesty, courage, integrity, independence, productive work, and justice, to name several that are relevant for the present discussion.

The corresponding virtues derived from reason and rationality are telling the truth, acting against great odds or opposition, remaining loyal to one’s fundamental values, relying on one’s own mind to perceive reality, purposeful pursuit of a rewarding career, and judging oneself and others by conformity to moral and legal standards, including especially in business by the standard of the ability to do the job. Vices are the opposite: lying, cowardice, corruption, dependence, indolence, and unfairness. Irrationality means placing something higher than reason, such as faith or emotion.

At this point let me highlight the optional values that guide our lives. First, the applied sciences. The engineer has a code of values to guide his or her thinking and development processes of designing and making tools to improve human life. The end value may be to build a bridge; the principles of civil engineering are the guides. We normally do not call the actions of engineers moral virtues and the mistakes vices, unless dishonesty or cowardice is involved. The values and principles of action required of applied sciences, and the behavior of their practitioners, are assumed to be moral unless one has reason to think otherwise.

Our personal values also are assumed to be moral, but just as everyone does not have to be a civil engineer, or an engineer at all, not everyone has to like vanilla ice cream or even like ice cream at all. We all hold and pursue a large number of morally optional or personal values. Choice of romantic partner and career both are extremely personal and optional, but also complicated in the sense of requiring a great deal of thought, planning, and knowledge before making the choice. And both do have moral components, as Rand has discussed extensively (1, 2), but I am focusing here are the optional element.

As stated above, red meat and water in plastic bottles are not moral values and acting to acquire and use both are not vices. Someone putting a slab of red meat over your face such that you cannot breathe would be a moral issue, but then we would be talking about attempted murder!

In a free society, no one will stop you from refraining from eating red meat, if you think that is necessary for your physical health. But it is not a moral issue. Neither will anyone stop you from drinking water out of non-plastic bottles.

Individual rights mean that everyone has the moral right to choose whatever each person wants to eat and whatever container each wants to drink water out of. Preaching a gospel of “immoral” foods and containers is the moralization of concretes that I have written about before. It is rampant in today’s culture and a major source of “virtue signaling.”

It is also condescending and phony, condescending because the signalers are convinced they are right and everyone else is wrong and phony because the signalers are playing at ethics without a clue as to what ethics really is.

Leaders of the intelligentsia, however, do or should know better, especially when they are spewing communist/fascist propaganda, such as: “the United States is systemically racist,” “recent state laws are election suppression,” and the favorite of all Marxists, “capitalism puts profits over people.”*

Such signals as these are either false (the first and third) or highly questionable without further investigation (the second). And all, in contrast to true moral values and virtues, are political catchphrases used as virtue signals to intimidate any opponent into thinking he or she is immoral.**

For business leaders to cite and promote them is not just gutless compromise of the principles of individual rights and capitalism, but their actions bring up 1932 Germany (1, 2) when twenty-two business leaders urged President von Hindenburg (who some said was senile) to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.

The group that today’s business leaders are sucking up to is the communist/fascist left and they, the business leaders, apparently think they will be protected when the left finally takes over the US government. Think again, business leaders, and do your homework about what happened to business leaders in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Business ethics does not differ from general ethics, as moral values and virtues are broad enough to cover all applied fields. Business leaders, therefore, need to practice Rand’s virtues. Justice is particularly relevant to business ethics and virtue signaling because it means judging each individual person according to the moral standards of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, and productive work and treating each person by his or her conformity to those standards. It does not mean judging one by membership in a group, class, race, or by sex or sexual orientation (i.e., social justice). Individual justice in society means abiding by the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights and treating everyone equally, regardless of group, class, race, sex, or sexual orientation.

All virtue signaling is manifestly unjust because it is a pretension to ethics that does not treat each individual fairly or equally. At root it is collectivist. To some virtue signaling may be a psychological problem, which means they want to be liked, but for the virtue-signaling leaders, especially our business leaders, it puts us on a dangerous path to dictatorship—as in one-party rule, show trials or worse, expropriation of private property, and censorship.

Are we there yet, business leaders?

You and many others in the intelligentsia have become true believers, to borrow Eric Hoffer’s words on mass movements. You seem to be seeking, in your desperate and foolish virtue signaling, to identify with the left’s holy cause (1, p. 12; 2).

Hoffer has many phrases to describe the true believer, but here is a choice one (p. 62): each individual member of the movement “must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness . . .  by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body.”

It means conformity to the herd.

In the late nineteenth century an advertising client asked his agent if he had any good ideas for ads. The agent replied, “Try honesty for a change!”

Altering this advice a bit, my suggestion to you, dear business leaders, is to try a genuinely virtuous behavior for a change—especially one of honesty, courage, integrity, independence, justice, and productive work.

A virtuous character is not a signal. It is a way of life.


* The intelligentsia does far worse. Cancel culture, according to David Horowitz, is tantamount to Nazi book burning and should be called what it is. And most or all of today’s leftist leaders are bigoted racists. Their intimidation tactics are right out of the Nazi playbook. Ominous parallels? The problem with conservatives, says Horowitz, is that they want to “play patty cake with the devil.”

** Racism, as Shelby Steele has demonstrated (1, 2), effectively ended in the 1960s with desegregation. What we have now is systemic white guilt. Issues of election irregularities or fraud are factual issues that need to be thoroughly examined, not evaded. And under capitalism, profits are earned through customer satisfaction. They are not deductions from the wages of workers; wages are deductions from profits (1, 2).
 

The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.

In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.

Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)

In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.

For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and "cancel culture," Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”

It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.

In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.

Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?

Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.

In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.

Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*

Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.

No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.

Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.

The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.

Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!

Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??


* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: (1) we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and (2) we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).
 

Intellectual Cowardice and Pre-Censorship as the Expressway to Dictatorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are several degrees of pre-censorship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Eliminate Deep State Dictatorship

Why “deep state dictatorship”?

Let me start with the notion that most people would call the middle point between capitalism and socialism a “mixed economy,” which they also continue to say is a “mixture of freedom and controls.”

I’ll grant the “mixed economy” part but add also that the middle point is a “mixed society”—of freedom and dictatorship. When initiated coercion is used against citizens, it is a tactic of the dictator to control not just the economy but every citizen’s behavior. The mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

The more initiated coercion is instituted by a government, the more that country will move toward a totalitarian society.

Capitalism is a social system in which the government remains completely out of our personal and business lives. It requires a complete separation of church and state, and complete separation of business and state. Individual rights, especially property rights, are its supreme values and are inviolate. The only function of government is to protect those rights and the only justified use of force is self-defensive to retaliate against those who have initiated coercion. This means all businesses, including schools and highways, are privately owned and operated.*

The “deep state” is a relatively new term coming to us apparently from Turkey where it means a secretive, extralegal collection of military, bureaucrats, and politicians who seek to undermine and, in some cases, overthrow a government (1, 2). In the United States, the term refers primarily to the unelected federal bureaucracy, currently estimated to be about three million,** and occasionally to collaborators, such as lobbyists at the federal level (about 12,000), assorted think tanks, military leaders, and corrupt politicians, some (many?) of whom would gladly sell their souls to undermine an administration and, perhaps, overthrow it. The national media, who repeatedly print and broadcast leaked classified information and seem unable to use objective methods of reporting facts and truth, must be added as the deep state’s courtiers.

But what is the origin of the bureaucracy and how necessary is it? In the Roman Empire, there was a large bureaucracy built on patronage, appointed by the emperor in power. The form and purpose of our present system, however, stems from the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC – AD 220)—the “Mandarin system”—and came to us by way of Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then, finally, by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service act in the United States (1, p. 157; 2; 3).

The significance of the Han system is that it established testing to determine who was “qualified” to serve in the government; it is actually a pretense at objectivity and is the system we have today. (See Megan McArdle on “America’s New Mandarins.”) The aim of the Pendleton Act was to eliminate the (unqualified) bureaucrats of the spoils system and give us supposedly highly qualified government workers. The difference between the two systems is that the spoils workers (a very small number in the US) were usually gone when the next president was elected. In modern systems, bureaucrats, which in numbers multiply like rabbits, may and often do spend their entire careers in the nation’s capital, outlasting many presidents.

This is our inheritance from the Progressives of the late nineteenth century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the Progressives who were trained in Germany by their democratic socialist professors. The deep state, encroaching more and more on the private sector and our rights, is rapidly moving us toward the giant post office that Lenin envisioned as the socialist state.

The deep state is dictatorial because nearly all of its rules, regulations, and laws are initiated coercion. The message to citizens is always some variation of “you must do this” or “you cannot do that.” These are not rules, regulations, and laws to protect individual rights against initiated coercion. They are themselves the initiation and are therefore dictatorial.***

How do we eliminate the deep state dictatorship? Going back to the spoils system would be a good start. Managing the police, military, or legal system, which is what bureaucratic management properly is (Applying Principles, pp. 31-33), does not require an Ivy League education. Reducing the bureaucracy’s size to a tiny percentage of what it is today and selling all business-like governmental assets, such as the post office and all of the federally owned land (28% of the total acreage in the US) would go a long way toward reducing the national debt.

Drastically reducing the unelected bureaucracy would quickly reduce or eliminate the need for lobbyists and think tanks and might even send away those courtiers in the national media to look for honest jobs where they must actually report news based on facts and truth.

For about 130 years, the Progressives—in the name of  “democracy,” “helping the poor,” and “protecting competition”—have been marching us closer and closer to that “heaven” on earth they call socialism. Their recent behavior indicates either that they are desperate and on the precipice of failure (one can only hope!) or that they see an opportunity to steamroll their ideas on the rest of the country.

Deep state dictatorship must be defeated and removed.


* And are profit-making. I take laissez-faire capitalism to mean that there would also be no nonprofit organizations, as they are creatures of the state, the tax laws in particular. (All nonprofits today, to remain viable, must show an excess of donations over expenditures. Some are highly “profitable.”)

** Add about 16 million state and local employees, including public school teachers.

*** How many rules, regulations, and laws? Estimates, of course, vary, but I would put the minimum around 200,000. (In 2016, there were 3853 regulatory rules and 214 Congressional bills added to the Federal Register.) See my post on the “administrative state” (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83), as Philip Hamburger calls the deep state.

On the Path to Dictatorship: Why Our Current President Must be Reelected

Democratic socialists have always paved the way for brutal totalitarian dictators, historically and logically. Our current president is the only person standing between us and such a dictatorship. Here are my reasons why.

Democratic socialists, as Hayek taught us (1, p. 158; 2), don’t have the guts to enforce their coercive policies. Dictators do, with blood. “Armed robbery and murder” is how George Reisman (part I) describes the means of establishing and maintaining a socialist society. This is true historically wherever socialism has been implemented and by logical necessity of the initiated coercion the socialists aim to impose on citizens.

“Progressivism” is the Left’s euphemism for democratic socialism (and sometimes communism). It is a specter, to use Marx’s word, that has haunted American culture and political life since the 1890’s (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13). Today, its coercive policies are nakedly explicit.

Socialism is not just government ownership of the means of production, which the Left certainly is seeking, but it is also, more fundamentally and menacingly, government ownership of you, and all of us, the citizens. Taking our guns, so we can’t defend ourselves, and shutting down free speech, so we can’t criticize the dictators and propose radically different ideas, are just the first steps.

Government ownership of you is what total control means and that is what produces the totalitarian state. (And fascism is a form of socialism that only differs superficially.) Here is Ludwig von Mises on the path to socialism and how its acolytes are treated along the way:

As soon as a socialist deviated an inch from the orthodox creed, Marx and Engels attacked him furiously, ridiculed and insulted him, represented him as a scoundrel and a wicked and corrupt monster. After Engels' death the office of supreme arbiter of what is and what is not correct Marxism devolved upon Karl Kautsky [Marxist philosopher and theoretician].

Sound familiar? Just substitute today’s versions of the post-moderns’ political correctness for Marxism. The goal is the same, to silence dissent. Mises continues:

In 1917 it passed into the hands of Lenin and became a function of the chief of the Soviet government. While Marx, Engels, and Kautsky had to content themselves with assassinating the character of their opponents, Lenin and Stalin could assassinate them physically” (Theory and History, pp. 131-32).

Assassinations and gulags are the end—the dead end—of socialism, that is, unless you happen to be one of the elites who lives well, that is, again, unless you offend the wrong person and end up with a bullet between the eyes.

The list of past and present socialist assassins is lengthy: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, and Maduro. For 130 years, Progressives have been moving us ever so inexorably closer to that end.

Our current president, and his constituency, seem to know this, at least implicitly, if not in some respects, explicitly. The Left is attacking and eroding the American sense of life. The president and his constituency represent it.

The dishonest blather—and “blather” is too kind a word to describe the babblingly vicious attacks made on our president—whether about his alleged “rude,” “crude, or “mannerless” words and behavior or his alleged dishonesty, are the Left’s projection of what they have done for 130 years and are doing in spades today. Our president may have rough edges and speak bluntly, which makes him transparent, but the Left talks out of both sides of their mouths and holds hearings in basement star chambers.

The Left, however, does rightly feel legitimate fears that the president is out to destroy their fiefdoms. The “good ‘ol boy” networks of lobbyists, the unelected deep state, and corrupt politicians are what he accurately calls “the swamp.” The mixed economy, after all, is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship. Freedom requires dismantling these Machiavellian strongholds.*

It is absurd to say that our current president would establish a dictatorship. That is the Left’s Goebbelsian smear campaign. So what if he sometimes falls back on ad hominem attacks? The Left’s smears are nonstop and far worse, stemming from their updated Marxian polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-10; 2) that celebrates relativism and the collapse of reason, logic, and Enlightenment values.

So what if the president talks nicely to dictators? Seriously? How do you conduct a negotiation by saying to your opposite, “You’re evil! Now, let’s talk.” The essence of good negotiation is sticking to principles, especially the principle of national self-interest, something our president has practiced far more consistently than his predecessors. He refuses to sacrifice himself to others and our nation to other countries.

And so what if the president is not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism? Seriously again? That is a reason not to vote for him?

He is proud to be an advocate of capitalism as he understands it. He is proudly self-interested—for himself and for both the nation and his constituents. He is proud to be rich and wants everyone else to become rich. He is proudly and vehemently opposed to socialism and any kind of leveling of society to its lowest common denominator.

I did vote libertarian in 2016 because I thought the Republican candidate was “too socialistic” and that my California vote was a useless throwaway, but I immediately changed my mind when I saw the putsch mentality and fervent hatred take over political discussion. I have since written some twenty blog posts touching on political issues and essentially defending our current president. I plan to vote Republican next November!

Would a winning Democratic candidate in 2020 really establish a dictatorship? Probably not, because the American sense of life is still strong enough to provide pushback against the worst trying to rise to the top. But in twenty, forty, or sixty years?

The American sense of life must be articulated explicitly to the electorate. Our current president, with his confident selfishness and equally confident condemnation of the swamp are good starts.


* And then there are the Pravdas and Izvestias that whine and cry when the president describes them as “enemies of the people,” which they are. If they had any guts or integrity, they would be upholding the principles of a free society and writing factual stories about the Left—a Left that would surely shut them down as soon as acquiring power or attach them to the government. On the dead end of an unelected deep state, see my 2016 post, “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21), where I argue that the final product of bureaucratic management is to be found in the gulags of totalitarian dictatorship.

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.

The Elites and the Underground: No Law vs. Rule of Law vs. Excessive Law

“Rule of law” is an unquestioned prerequisite today for any free society and growing economy. Unfortunately, there is too little rule of law for 80-95% of the world’s population and too much for the rest.

The former population are what Hernando de Soto calls “extralegal” poor who want and need to be able to join the middle classes and thrive in those segments of the developed world that are now a decided minority (1, 2).

The latter are the political and economic elites who live in varying degrees, depending on country, officially under the rule of law but are facing, year after year, increasing erosion of that protection with the growth of dictatorship by excessive law.

The extralegals, as de Soto’s research has found at his Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, have no legal existence in most third-world countries. They have no titles to their property, no legal descriptions of its location and other public records, and therefore no way to accumulate and protect assets—also known as capital. Yet most of these productive and innovative black-market entrepreneurs want to join the rest of their societies and be just as prosperous as everyone else.

The problem is that most of the ruling elites don’t want them to prosper. The solution is property rights and the rule of law.

Evita: Why We Love That Musical about a Dictator

Facts don’t matter . . . in art.

I recently attended a touring performance of the musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice. The production debuted in London’s West End in 1978 and on Broadway in 1979. The show loosely chronicles the rise and short political life of Eva Peron, wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. It is an operatic rags-to-riches love story that ends with cathartic tragedy when the heroine dies of cancer at age 33. The production comes complete with Greek chorus in the form of the character, narrator-critic Che.

Heroine? Therein lies the debate. Can the wife of a dictator be admired, and therefore her artistic portrayal enjoyed, while a talented, professional cast sings and dances to beautiful music in her name?

The Root of Dictatorship

In Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 117), I gingerly suggested that the root of dictatorship is the parent/child relationship. The simple reasoning was that if one thinks it is right to coerce children, then it must also be right to coerce adults. (Restraining children who are about to harm others or themselves is not counted here as coercion.)

It seems, however, that my comment was too tame and needlessly cautious. At least that is my conclusion after reading works by Alice Miller, Lloyd deMause, and Bruce Perry.

Miller, a Swiss psychologist (and former psychoanalyst), provides the strongest link in her book For Your Own Good,* in which she quotes the untranslated German text Schwarze Pädagogik, a collection of extensive excerpts from child-rearing and educational guidebooks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. “Black pedagogy” is the literal translation of this work, but Miller refers to it as “poisonous pedagogy.”

The upshot of advice from this period is to break the child’s will, to beat the wickedness—which usually means the budding assertiveness and independence—out of the child, and to command strict, unquestioned obedience to authority (of the parent, teacher, and other adults).^† In the course of enduring this brutality, shame, and humiliation, children are expected to thank their tormentors for the “discipline” and in some cases to kiss the hand that has just viciously beaten them. It is, after all, for their own good. (Even without these demands, Miller points out, abused children defend and cling to their abusive caregivers, because the small amount of caregiving they have received is all they know.)

Hitler and all the leaders of the Third Reich, says Miller, suffered this “pedagogy” and proudly passed it on to their children and subjects. Hitler often bragged of not flinching when his father repeatedly beat him. In For Your Own Good and elsewhere^‡ Miller cites D. G. M. Schreber, whose nineteenth-century book on child-rearing went through some 40 editions and preached self-renunciation and self-denial. When his nanny fed his child before herself, Schreber fired the nanny, thus sending a message to all of Germany that the goal of child-rearing is to harden children and rid them of alleged weakness. They must learn to sacrifice from the first day of infancy on, said Schreber. With this kind of upbringing, asks Miller, is it any wonder that the German people became attached to Hitler as a father-substitute and were only too glad to obey his commands?

Lloyd deMause, psychoanalyst and founder of the Journal of Psychohistory, traces the bleak history of childhood, concluding that it “is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken” (1, p. 1; see also 2). While his psychoanalytical jargon can become a bit much, his historical facts are shockingly accurate and well documented, for example, the extensive infanticide, usually of baby girls, practiced in ancient Greece and Rome and the legal right of Roman fathers to kill their children.^§ Brutalization, terrorization, and sexual abuse were common throughout history, gradually improving over the centuries such that the descriptions in the above paragraphs are actually an advance over the past!

Although traumatic childhoods per se do not trump free will and deterministically turn children into dictators or sacrificial lambs, those experiences certainly make recovery difficult, and it would require an unusual child to break free of the circumstances. Bruce Perry, neurobiologist and psychiatrist, specializes in childhood trauma and neglect. He acknowledges (without endorsing free will or volition outright) that children do make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions while growing up (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, pp. 119-20). It is those decisions, not genes or environment, that ultimately determine whether one neglected child (such as an infant left home alone every day for hours in a dark room) becomes a psychopathic killer and another an emotionless, socially awkward adolescent.

To be sure, Perry insists, early discovery and non-drug, empathetic psychotherapy are the remedies to such disturbances. Trauma of any kind—and this includes spanking by hand—overloads the brain’s stress response systems, causing a loss of felt control and competence by the victim. That is, the trauma prevents or erodes the development of self-esteem and independence. It does not have to be physical force. Trauma can be emotional abuse brought about by raging insults, name-calling, and belittling, or the lack of nurturing warmth, hugs, and empathetic understanding. Neglect, Perry points out, is not the prerogative of the poor and uneducated. There are also many uncared for infants, children, and adolescents among the educated well-to-do.

For as far back as we can go in history, children—at least those that have been allowed to live—have been beaten by their caregivers, abused, manipulated, and commanded to obey authority. Obedience and independence are opposites. A parent/child relationship that commands obedience from the child is one that prepares the way for dictatorship. A free society thrives on independence; it requires a healthy disrespect of authority, which is acquired through nurturing, warm, and affectionate caregiving. Coercion of any kind, physical or emotional, in the parent/child relationship must be eliminated.




*Alice Miller is well known for her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child, also published under the more correct title Prisoners of Childhood. Its thesis is that childhood experiences, many of which are traumatic, influence our adult behavior, trapping us in the futile pursuit of infantile needs that were not satisfied by our parents.

^†“The only vice deserving of blows is obstinacy. . . . Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him. The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master. . . . this will rob him of his courage to rebel . . .” J. G. Krüger, 1752, quoted in Miller, pp. 14-15.

^‡“The Political Consequences of Child Abuse,” Journal of Psychohistory, 26:2, Fall 1998.

^§Carl A. Mounteer, “Roman Childhood, 200 B.C. to A.D. 600,” Journal of Psychohistory, 14:3, Winter 1987.