This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Ludwig von Mises’ economics, and Edith Packer's psychology. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Note that I assume ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
In a previous post, I argued that our current culture has become “Goebbelsian,” meaning that a torrent of hyperbole, BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09), half-truths, and outright lies, best described as smears, has become the norm in communication. It is a way of life for much of our press and many politicians.
Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His strategy was to tell a big lie, then say it loud and a lot, until the ignorant populace begins to believe it. The contemporary strategy, since rational people often do not believe the first lie, is to switch to a second lie, and then to another, and then another.
Switching generates confusion and a disbelief in the possibility of truth. The postmoderns, of course, have been teaching for many years that reason, logic, and truth are out, leaving each of us with our own “narratives,” which I prefer to call fictions.
Facts, to most of these “thought” leaders, don’t matter.
Yesterday, the “lethality” of a coronavirus was the message of the day. Today, it is “defund the police.” Tomorrow it will be something else. An underlying theme for decades has been “America’s systemic racism to protect white privilege.” As with Goebbels, today’s leftist propaganda is agenda driven—to destroy capitalism and now to remove or defeat our current president (who represents capitalism). But I want to identify a more fundamental point driving the agenda: the ethics of altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice.
“Compassion” is the buzzword used to intimidate and silence anyone who may object to this leftist propaganda. “You’re not compassionate toward the poor, the black, women, LGBTQ’s, etc.” Why? “Because you can’t feel what they feel. You enjoy white (rich, male, straight) privilege.”
The problem with this ruse is that too many rational people (non-leftists) don’t buy the alleged discrimination the propagandists say these groups of people (Marxist classes) are still experiencing in the year 2020. Rational people also therefore do not buy the guilt trip that is being laid on them.
The left now has to go further down the rathole to find additional “classes”—criminals and terrorists—to feel compassion for. This goes beyond societal status to blatant immorality and injustice, stretching the rational person’s credulity. (A rathole, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a seemingly bottomless or unfillable hole.” Leftists who wear the environmentalist hat have moved further down to the unhuman and inanimate: trees and rocks that we must feel compassion for. Have we hit bottom yet?)
If you object? “Well, it’s obvious you have no compassion! We must have compassion for the least well off and that includes illegal aliens and nonviolent criminals.” Looting and burning buildings? “That’s just property. We have to understand the looters’ plight.”*
Where does this come from?? It comes from the epistemological requirement of consistency and the ethical and political “maximin” principle of Harvard philosopher John Rawls.
The doctrine of self-sacrifice means to give up a higher value to a lower or non-value. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 43-44):
Self-sacrifice means, for example, the pursuit of a career to please one’s parents instead of the career one truly loves and wants. It means marrying a person one does not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity. It means doing your job because it’s your duty, not because you enjoy it. It means giving birth to a child you do not want and enslaving yourself to a mistake or accident that occurred when you were young.
According to altruism, all of these actions are moral, making you virtuous. To be consistent, it also means you must care about and give up your values for the sake of those who are less well off, even if the sacrifice drags you down to their level. That is the ultimate goal of altruism and it is the goal and meaning of Rawls’ maximin principle.**
“Maximin” means to maximize the minimum. It does not mean to raise the least well off up to the level of those who are in a better situation. It means, if necessary, according to Rawls, to drag those in the middle and upper social regions down to the level of the lower. This would then make society truly just—socially just—and equal, that is, egalitarian. Rawls states (p. 227):
All inequalities should be arranged for the advantage for the most unfortunate even if some inequalities are not to the advantage of those in the middle positions.
It is not just a redistribution of wealth, but also of social position. The poor are not just to be given some of the wealthy’s money, but also their status.
This is Marxism and Marx’s updated determinism. The fundamental assumption is that all social and economic positions in society are dealt to each of us at birth, but some, those in the higher positions, acquired additional status and wealth by stealing from the poor and downtrodden. Such people, whether bourgeoisie or white, straight males or capitalists must be punished to rightly achieve justice.
In today’s world, the worst off “poor” are not those who live in slums, but those who have been prevented from coming to this country or who loot and destroy property. The least advantaged, when the altruist premise is pushed to its most consistent extreme, are illegals and criminals—and terrorists.
Sacrificing everything we have worked for and earned is the ultimate giving up of higher values for the sake of lesser or non-values.
As I wrote in 2016, the reductio of bureaucracy (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) is the concentration camp. Because, as Victor Frankl wrote about his experience in such a camp, “the list had to be correct.” Totalitarian societies are massive bureaucracies and the camps are just one more bureau.
So similarly, the reductio of altruism is the sacrifice we must all make to criminals and terrorists (and trees and rocks).
Says who? The left. The preaching of sacrifices is how they seek and, if not stopped, gain power.
Ayn Rand warned us: “It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
Rand also taught us that the smallest minority on earth is the individual, not groups or Marxist classes (or trees or rocks). This means, simply, we should all be advocates and promoters of philosophical individualism! This also means we each can then work hard and strive to lift ourselves up beyond our “original (Rawlsian) positions.”
Our current president, incidentally, is not an altruist, which is why he is so hated. He does not want to sacrifice anyone’s interest, including our national interests, to anyone else. He in fact wants every individual to be able to lift him- or herself up to as high a level as possible!
* One synonym of compassion is pity and one definition of pity is “a somewhat disdainful or contemptuous feeling of regret over the condition of one viewed by the speaker as in some way inferior or reprehensible.” An appropriate description of leftist condescension.
** Rawls apparently did not like the maximin designation, since he saw it as coming from rational choice theory. He does, however, spend several pages discussing it in his major work, A Theory of Justice (chap. III, sec. 26). The words have become associated with his theory.
As a child I witnessed our family cat having his nose forcibly introduced to something in the house that he shouldn’t have deposited. Then, he was summarily tossed outside.
It was not a pretty picture.
The communist/fascist Left today rejoices at doing something similar to anyone who is religious, especially those who are politically conservative Christians and Jews. The Left revels in hurling ad baculum shouts of rage, hostility, and aggression, which Laird Wilcox has so aptly identified as “ritual defamation.”
And, to continue the analogy of “tossing outside,” leftists try to get anyone who challenges them, or disagrees with their mantra, silenced or fired—for example, YouTube’s restricting of Prager University’s five-minute videos for violating “community guidelines” and the sacking of political commentators Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, plus several others.*
Full disclosure before continuing: I am an atheist and have been since I was sixteen. Around that time, in 1963, I watched a television show called “The Defenders,” starring E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, father-son attorneys who represented an atheist high school teacher. I did not know the meaning of the word “atheism,” so I had to look it up. Hmm, I said to myself, that sounds interesting! Soon after, I read Ayn Rand, majored in philosophy in undergraduate school, and never looked back.
Be that as it may, dear leftists, I did attend a Protestant church and Sunday school for those first sixteen years—and our culture is decidedly Judeo-Christian and has been for at least five thousand years, give or take several centuries or millennia. Our cultural history is part of our cultural identity. It cannot be denied out of existence.
I do disagree with a number of religious issues, including the not insignificant one about the existence of a god. I also disagree with the concept of sin, the emphasis on self-sacrifice, and abortion. (See the second footnote in my earlier post about the insincerity of both pro- and anti-abortionists and what both should be fighting for.)
On the positive side, I relish watching Prager University’s five-minute videos, which are highly polished and highly essentialized, often with strong messages defending free speech and free markets. I don’t agree with all of them—this usually includes those of founder Dennis Prager, himself a Jewish conservative and biblical scholar. His videos usually concentrate on religion and the assumption that morality can only come from God. Socrates, Ayn Rand, and many other philosophers throughout history disagree.
Nonetheless, Prager’s little book (110 pages, with study questions) on The Ten Commandments is illuminating. The general (and, to me, surprising) thrust of Prager’s commentary is that the commandments are what have driven the development of civilization and are therefore necessary for its continuation.**
The word “commandment” in Hebrew, Prager points out, is correctly translated as “statement,” thus the Ten Commandments should be referred to as the Ten Statements. If true, this significantly demotes the deontological, duty-based interpretations of the Judeo-Christian ethics.
Other insights: the sixth commandment, “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13), as worded in my 1953 Revised Standard Version of the King James translation, should be “Do not murder.” That’s because the word “kill” in 1610 also meant “murder.” If the commandment literally meant “kill,” Prager emphasizes, we would all have to be vegetarians.
The tenth commandment, “do not covet,” says Prager, is the only one that “legislates thought,” as opposed to behavior. And this is significant, he continues, because it underlies and motivates the previous four—murder, adultery, stealing, and perjury. The thief’s coveting of my wallet or computer eventually causes him to help himself to both.
Equally illuminating is the book Killing Jesus by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. The two Catholic writers have convinced me that Jesus, a middle easterner, did not look like those white Anglo-Saxon Protestant movie actors of the 1950s!
The book is about the historical Jesus with fascinating detail, but not overly detailed like many scholarly histories. Indeed, I would describe all of the books in the authors’ Killing Series as masterpieces of essentialization. They are page-turners.
The most significant new detail, to me, is the shape of the Roman cross. It was a capital “T,” with no ascender extending above the horizontal crossbeam. The vertical beam was left permanently in the ground, so the crossbeam and prisoner had to be lifted up to be put into position.
What Jesus and other prisoners carried to the killing ground was the horizontal beam. And that would be after a vicious whipping by a couple of Roman soldiers, who were watched carefully by their superior officer to ensure that they gave no leniency, nor did they kill the prisoners. This last would deprive the prisoners of their ultimate humiliation by crucifixion.
As a historical portrayal, the authors handle Jesus’ alleged miracles by writing “people say” or “it was said” that such and such occurred.
A considerable part of the book portrays Jesus’ integrity and independence against the Pharisees, Temple elders, and others who felt threatened by him. The Pharisees were experts on the 613 commandments or laws of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, which also include the more familiar ten). The Pharisees repeatedly tried to trap Jesus so they could have him arrested and executed.
Jesus frequently responded to the entrapment schemes with parables that puzzled his tormentors, or he answered their questions with his own question. The latter part of the book becomes something of a thriller with the various parties to his demise struggling to come up with a justification for his execution.
Pontius Pilate, for example, could not go against Jewish law to order a crucifixion, unless Jesus posed a clear threat to Rome. The threat to Rome Jesus finally admitted to was that he was king of the Jews, therefore a sovereign. To Pilate, though, Jesus was essentially still a preacher, so Pilate’s solution was to offer a choice to the Temple parishioners, who in fact were shills of the elders and Pharisees. They, of course, chose Barabbas; Jesus was sent to his death.
So . . . communist/fascist, rabid leftists, you hate religious people so much that you cannot find anything of value in their cultural heritage, including the above, which, of course, is also your heritage? You hate them so much that you must treat them like dehumanized scum??
Get a life, leftists. Or, rather, get some ideas, based on reason, logic, and objective reality that can be discussed in rational discourse.
Your envy, cynicism, and malevolence are defeating you. What’s that Christian virtue? Ah, pity!
I’m starting to pity you.
I think I’ll go have a discussion about the Ten Commandments and Jesus with a devout Christian or Jew.
* Unfortunately, because of today’s epistemological chaos, Prager University is mistakenly calling their treatment by Google, owner of YouTube, “censorship,” which it is not. Censorship is an act only performed by the government. . . unless Google has been blessed with crony governmental handouts and other favoritisms, as in the “renewable” energy and electric car industries. If so, censorship would be the appropriate term. Otherwise, I have to acknowledge that Google seems to be exercising its property rights.
** “The Ten Commandments,” says Prager, “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society” (p. 79). And a good society that the commandments establish, Prager says earlier, is a free society (p. 6).
