This is the basic question that Aristotle took to be the beginning of politics, the first and basic question which gives rise to the field.  Until recently, I thought so as well — until I realized the error involved.  There is another question that comes before this one, but which almost no one even knows is there to be asked.

Today, political questions are approached in pragmatic terms: How should men best be organized?  What’s the most efficient way to organize our groups, our societies?  If you examine nearly all political discussions, both ancient and modern, they pertain to that question right there.  Going forward, I’ll describe such questions as pertaining to “the problem of organization”.

Are all political questions problems of organization? If you can find anyone in the mainstream nowadays who is even aware that there could be such a question, their answer would be “yes”.  To them, there is no deeper fundamental political issue.  For such people, the idea that there might exist a prior moral fact or principle that constrains the manner or options of organization simply does not compute.

From Leftist government power freaks, Catholic “distributists” and other religious theocrats to libertarian “nudgers”, mainstream political discussion nowadays consist entirely of debates over whose ideas would “work” best when imposed as organizing principles.  To them, politics pertains to solving the problem of organization — with only incomplete concern over dissent or such a thing as the “rights” of any involved individuals.

Objectivists (and the deepest core of the collectivist Left, and certain of the religionists) DO see and acknowledge that deeper question: before one can ask “how” should men organize, one must first consider *why* they should organize, and on what moral terms.  This is the question I call “the moral problem of society”.

When men first consider the possibility of cooperation, of associating with one another, they find that this new state of being — “society”, the state of association —  offers a tremendous potential benefit,  and a great potential danger.  The benefit, of course, is the economic potential, of specialization and division of labor and teamwork that multiplies potential productivity and offers additional protection against external dangers.  The risk?  A danger that was not present before: the potential for the use of force by other men. Crime, theft, murder, and slavery. The man in front of you may wish to be your friend, colleague, trading partner — or a thief, enemy, or oppressor.

Clearly, to realize the benefits of society, that risk must be mitigated, if not outright eliminated.  A society with no moral constraint against the use of force is not a society at all — it is a war of all against all.  Men are better off isolated and alone than living in such an environment.

Before there can be “problems of organization”, society must first be made civil; there must first be established the moral terms upon which men organize, terms which work to constrain men in society such that men can realize the tremendous benefit and value in working together.

The forbearance of the use of force, to leave men free to think, act and organize as they choose, is the first principle of civilization in the Objectivist view.  This is our answer to the moral problem of society: that force cannot be tolerated and must be abolished, that individuals are morally sovereign and must be left free from the threat of force.  Hence “individualism”, the moral base for organizational capitalism.

This is the context in which I understand Ayn Rand’s statement that  “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”

The only alternative is the idea that force *is* permissible, that society is somehow *above* moral law (and therefore, significantly, its own moral agent), even if individuals are not.  Hence “collectivism”, the moral base for every other politics in history.  I’ve often discussed the end of the Left’s road; this right here is where it begins.

This is how the moral problem of society defines the true measuring stick of politics: individualism versus collectivism.  This alternative is exhaustive; a society is of one type or the other, and this remains true no matter the particulars of how such societies are subsequently organized.

This is why it is important for us as Objectivists to remember that when we discuss individualism versus collectivism, or “the individual versus the State”, we are dealing with the moral problem of society.  When we discuss inefficient government, the pitfalls of government intervention, perverse versus good incentives etc. *then* we are dealing with problems of organization.  There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but if we don’t retain your grounding in our stand on the moral problem of society and our awareness of it as a separate and prior alternative, it’s easy to get thrashed around in a maze of concrete arguments — because mainstream political discussions all deal with questions of organization.

How many times have you had people wave aside your principled arguments and demand that you provide “practical solutions” (“how would you voluntarily fund government?  Who builds the roads?  What about the poor? How do you deal with the “free rider” problem etc.)

How many times have you heard alleged “pro-capitalists” arguing for liberty in terms of its “benefits to society”?

How many times have you argued against the idea that “The government should mandate X” by saying it’s not the government’s business to mandate anything, only to be asked “Why not, don’t you think X is a good idea?”

How many times have you encountered someone who hears “individualism versus collectivism” in terms of “being all alone” versus “working together” (thereby conflating collectivism, a type of society, with society as such), even despite the plain evidence that  people plainly “work together” under capitalism?

How many times have you heard Leftists conflate “society” with government, and/or peddle the myth that “government is ‘us’”?

Yes, collectivism is part of the intellectual bedrock in our culture, always part of someone’s given assumptions about which they care not to make the effort to question, and that is what’s going on in these examples.

But there is an additional insight to be had in realizing exactly how it is that collectivism remains frozen in place as a background assumption everywhere we look:  in the mainstream mind, the problem of organization IS the whole of politics. This is the gigantic frozen abstraction fallacy sitting at the root of mainstream politics.  They are treating as “society” what is in fact only one of two types of society, and their entire approach to politics is trapped in that frame.  This is why they see individual liberty and force as merely two pragmatic options to be “balanced” against one another as society (the ultimate moral agent — not any individual) sees fit.

Consider the downstream effects of this error.  People who substitute collectivism for society, will therefore conflate society with *force*.  “You gotta have some force in society, man, can’t let anybody just do what they want.”  To such minds, the question of the moral terms upon which society is based or by which it is constrained make no sense, because force is a given, implicit in the concept “society”. That’s why their response to any competing politics is to demand and argue each other’s coercive “solutions” — and why a common attack on Objectivists is that we don’t provide any (yes, they don’t take us seriously because we are not telling them what to do — we are not seeking to coerce them as *we* see fit!)

In their minds, all politics are problems of organization — and individual liberty, instead of being the moral premise upon which society is constituted and constrained, is just one of many organizational options that are decided, limited and “balanced” against one another as society chooses!  Liberty is a matter of permissions, not rights, in this view; for such people, the debate is not over whether or not the people should be chained, but over the “optimum” number of links they should have.

When Ayn Rand says that capitalism cannot survive on any other philosophical base, this is the point of failure right here.  You certainly can build a society that is “organized” around individual liberty and individual initiative, that has the superficial characteristics of a capitalist society (such as private property, businesses, stock markets and banks). But so long as force is understood as permissible somewhere in the system and that “society” decides organizational matters, sooner or later those who covet wealth (or worse, power) without knowing or caring for its source will make use of the peculiar tools such a society necessarily has lying around.  If it pays off today, they’ll go for more tomorrow.  Men find themselves increasingly under attack and end up banding together into tribes for protection, or to attack other tribes as the society degrades into the war of all against all.

This is the *organizational* source of such societies’ instability — and I daresay, is the reason why human civilizations have always collapsed throughout history.

Individualism, strictly speaking, is not a “system” at all from the standpoint of the organization problem. It is merely the moral context within which systems are built by free men.  It does not tell you whether a hippie co-op “works” better than a corporation, that you should have stock markets, or how a government might best be voluntarily funded.

None of this is to say that we should have nothing to say to such problems of organization.  We do.  We simply have to be careful to first put down the fact that we are not primarily arguing for any particular organization of society; we are arguing for a specific moral context within which men in the state of association with other men operate.  How men organize within that context is up to them.

As for those who, after all of this, demand: “But what if force is our only option?”, I have only one answer: that’s why I need an AR-15.

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

On September 27, I tweeted that Conor Friedersdorf “does not understand the Left, at any level”.  I did so on the grounds of this article by Friedersdorf, which included this line:

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. (Emphasis mine.)

I, who do understand the Left, immediately thought: *Why* would anyone ever think that?

Friedersdorf is one of an ever-shrinking cadre of otherwise sharp individuals who cling to the illusion that Leftism is “liberal”, despite the clear evidence over the years that liberalism (properly understood) is *incompatible* with Leftism.  That such men still exist is, to me, a remarkable — one might even say amazing — fact.  It’s easy to blame it on evasion, concrete-bound mentalities etc. but those explanations, in addition to being Objectivist-syncratic, were never satisfactory to me.  There is more to it, a “more” which I have been exploring by means of the principle of ideological causality.

Then along came another example of a “civil liberty” Leftist brushing up against the contradictions involved in his position.  This time, the person involved shows a greater level of awareness, both of self and of the contradiction.  Even better, his experience offers a rare snapshot into the very mechanism by which ideological causality works in men, including those who do not deal in ideas.

Cory Doctorow, another “civil liberties” Leftist like Friedersdorf, tweeted the following after President Obama’s re-election:

Amazing to think that that I’m relieved at the victory of the pro-wiretapping, pro-extrajudicial-assassination, anti-whistleblower candidate.

As with Friedersdorf, my initial reaction: why would that be “amazing to think”? That’s the logic of being Leftist, there’s nothing amazing about it at all — to me.

But when I considered why would it would be amazing to Doctorow, that’s when it struck me how rich a snapshot his tweet really is, a perfectly timed photoflash exposure of the process by which ideas move a man’s mind.  Let’s step through it.

Doctorow’s tweet describes two emotions, one a reaction to the other: first, relief, and then amazement upon reflection.

The relief Doctorow experienced is a response to the fact of President Obama’s re-election.  It is (to Doctorow) a primary.  The amazement on the other hand, follows from his conscious evaluation of that emotion, in the context of his **professed** value — his civil-libertarian concerns with wiretapping, rule of law and whistleblowers.

That “relief” emotion is the more important one; the reason why it came first, is because it is a function of Doctorow’s deeper premises, the ideas he has internalized and that define (and truly **motivate**) him.  For far too many people — including Doctorow, as we’ll see in a moment — these premises are unacknowledged and unintrospected; such people become aware of them only in the form of seemingly unaccountable emotions, or “internal voices”, which can and often do conflict — sometimes violently — with one’s consciously held ideas, values and intentions.

Doctorow’s “amazement” is his sense of just such a conflict.  He sees Obama as a problematic president for several reasons, according to his conscious convictions, but the summary result coming from his initial emotional reaction – the one connected to his reactive subconscious — is *relief*.

Doctorow’s relief emotion is telling him that, at a deeper level, he believes the following:

1. there are things that are more important than civil liberties

2. those things were served by the election of a president who is plainly hostile to those civil liberties

3. In accordance with point #1, this result is a good thing.

Summation: “relief”.

That’s an important clue.  That Doctorow found this reaction “amazing” is because he is sufficiently self-aware to note the apparent incongruity with his professed (or “public”) values, and to tell us about it — but not sufficiently aware to know its source, to know the terms of the summation that the “relief” emotion represents. Those are the unchecked premises.  We know they are not checked, because if they were, Doctorow would not find their revelation “amazing” any more than I did.

Now we get to why I found this tweet so remarkable.  It represents a snapshot of how the logic of ideas move a man.

First, recall that the Left is *essentially* collectivist and nihilist.  Its end of road is not merely tyranny, or war, or mass murder; those are just waypoints on the road, means to the end.  That end-of-road is a negative, the annihilation of one idea — autonomous man, the sovereign individual, and of every derivative thereof: idea connected to these things: free will, moral individualism, political freedom/capitalism, the Enlightenment, the United States.  This is the road traveled by all Leftists whether they know it or not.

This essential core acts as a logical “attractor” of sorts, setting the logical flow of ideas (or “direction of traffic”) towards the end-of-road for anyone who accepts Leftist premises. It does so whether the premises are consciously held, picked up passively by cultural osmosis, or internalized via logical implication of accepted derivative ideas.  It doesn’t matter where a man was when he started, nor where he imagines his intended destination to be.

It does so by both conscious logic and, below the level at which any given man deals with ideas, via their emotions.

I have written before about how this process moves cultures; in Doctorow’s tweet, we gain a snapshot of the mechanism in action, of how this process happens in one man.  As Ayn Rand once said, in a quote which anticipates ideological causality:

The enormously powerful integrating mechanism of man’s consciousness is there at birth; his only choice is to drive it or be driven by it.

How does this mechanism drive men?  How does it drive a man?

Ideological causality runs in both directions.  That integrating mechanism works out the downstream logical consequences of an idea, “If A, then follows B”; it also works out the upstream implications of said idea: “If B, than implies A”. (This is why the starting position ultimately doesn’t matter.)

Highly intelligent minds perform this integration with greater speed and to greater depth.  This is why intelligent Leftists are often the most extreme, unhinged ones; they are fast travelers on the roads of ideas.  Being much more hostile to hypocrisy than their conservative counterparts, intelligent Leftists are also much more prone to willfully travel all the way to the end of the road, even embracing the truth of the hell that awaits them there.

What Doctorow’s tweet demonstrates is the tension between “surface” ideas (his putative concern for “civil liberties”) and the logical, essential core.  His integrating mechanism has worked out the logical consequences of his Leftism to a further stage than he is willing to admit — and when it gave him the results by an emotion, he was “amazed” to see the apparent contradiction.

What exactly did his emotions tell him?  What is the “something” that is more important than civil liberties?  That a Leftist like Obama be in power. Power > “civil liberties”.

That is the reality of being Leftist, which is to me an unremarkable fact, but Doctorow found “amazing” to glimpse, and which escapes Friedersdorf despite all the evidence he has at hand.  This is the process by which the core premises of any ideology move a man towards a destination which he may very well, in all sincerity, wish to avoid.

At the cultural level, the same thing happens when the inconsistent one faces attack from the more logically consistent (“extreme”) factions on their own side.  Liberals gave way to socialists, socialists give way to fascists/communists.  “In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins“, as Ayn Rand put it.

Even the notion of “civil liberties” shows the pattern; it is a watered-down remnant of the principle of individual rights inherited from genuine liberalism, but shrunken down to exclude economic/property rights and stripped of its absolutism — an increasingly threadbare “Edgar suit” of liberalism for the Left.  Where “individual rights” is a principle, “civil liberties” are merely “A Good Thing”, one of many tokens on the table which are to be weighed against other such tokens, like the “public good”… and whose relative heft in such weighings is, logically, ever-decreasing.

Wonder no longer why men sense that something is wrong, but continue to move towards the cliff.  They know something is wrong, they sense the logic of their ideas, but for lack of something — most often, an understanding of ideas, their logic and their *power* — they continue traveling down the road to hell with a dread sense of inevitability.  They smell the smoke, they feel the heat, but their damned eyes are closed.  Ayn Rand put her finger on this one too:

Today, the voices proclaiming disaster are so fashionable a bromide that people are battered into apathy by their monotonous insistence; but the anxiety under that apathy is real. Consciously or subconsciously, intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer. …

People do not want to find any answers to avert their danger; all they want, all they are looking for, is only some excuse to yell “But I couldn’t help it!”

I don’t doubt that men like this — Conor Friedersdorf, Cory Doctorow, Glenn Greenwald are three examples — would dismiss in all sincerity the notion that they *intend* to lead us to hell.  I also don’t doubt that they, in all sincerity, are capable of reversing direction and overriding the logic of Leftism — sometimes, on particular issues (as Greenwald did on free speech recently).  Men have free will after all.

Of course, if they *can* reverse course, they can do so for good — and they are therefore responsible for their choice not to do so.

And that is why they remain morally responsible for their contribution to the results, such as they are, and will not be absolved for them.

Ayn Rand, “Extremism”, or the Art of Smearing

——————————————

Blogger Ann Althouse comments on the knee-jerk Leftist response by E.J. Dionne to yet another mass “gun-free zone” shooting incident:

I’m fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something.

My comment to her post follows:

I’m fascinated by how the Left has so successfully and deeply entrenched everyone, even non-Lefties, into default “boxes” of thought without anyone noticing.

Well, anyone minus one, as I did notice it. EJ Dionne’s presumed range of options is to either pass more laws or to do nothing.

Completely left out is a third option: repeal laws.

Am I wrong? Not Althouse or anyone in this thread seems to have noticed; search “repeal” on this page and there’s one comment with that word in it, and it’s a reference to Prohibition.

Leftists’ entire political worldview rests on that unstated premise: laws only ever get passed. Government control only ever expands, and “at worst” it stops growing.

It throws William F Buckley’s slogan “Standing athwart history shouting Stop!” into a new light, doesn’t it?

It should be clear that we’ve reached a pass where conservatism’s professed goal, even if they adhered to it 100% (which, quite pathetically, they don’t) — to be a brake on history — has failed, as it must fail.

A brake only slows you down; it does not change your direction.  We don’t need a brake anymore; we need an accelerator and a 180.

Let’s turn this bucket around.

– attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt

As many Objectivists, myself included, are the geeky sort, today’s XKCD has already become the subject of some discussion, particularly at Jenn Casey’s place.  The following is a refined version of the comment I left there.

Randall Munroe is an extraordinarily sharp guy, whose geeky sense of humor I love.  More than once he’s written about an idea or thought that I’ve had and never heard elsewhere; one of my favorites is the notion of using tranducers and a phase inverter to mess around with the idiots with big booming car stereos.

He has referenced Ayn Rand in the past here, in the mouseover text.  I didn’t find that one particularly offensive; I saw that one as more of a good-natured sort of ribbing rather than the usual sort of gratuitous diss we normally get, in contrast to Trey Peden who was more offended.  Disappointingly, Randall Munroe’s latest jab confirms that Trey’s call was right the first time.

However, in joining the cottage industry of garden variety Ayn Rand bashing, Munroe’s ultimate joke ends up on the others in that cottage.

Overall, I like and use Jenn’s positive approach of contrasting the stereotype with the hard fact of who is standing right in front of them.  My rather geeky mental phrasing for it is as follows: “Well, unless you think I’m an asshole/demagogue/[insert smear here], I break your theory of Objectivism.  I am the fact that does not fit.  Deal.”

Where I see the limitation is that this “mythbusting” approach works best at the personal level.   It forces the person in front of you, someone who already knows you personally, to re-evaluate his “theory” of Objectivists, or confess to being the asshole himself right on the spot.

In the public square, a different and IMO sterner approach is called for.  XKCD author Randall Munroe isn’t in front of any of us. He’s a public figure, taking shots at **people** (but not at ideas; that’s a key distinction there), in the public square, and to a large audience who also do not see us.  Neither he nor they are aware of the fact that many Objectivists aren’t assholes, and he and they don’t care.

In that sphere, the discussion ought to be about ideas, not about people.  Therefore, in that space, my goal is to make it about the ideas.

Here, the joke Munroe plays ends up less on Objectivists than it does on our attackers, on three levels that Objectivists can appreciate.

First, nearly all of what purports to be “serious” criticism of Ayn Rand follows precisely the pattern of what Munroe believes is a joke.  Other than being in stick drawings, Munroe’s joke is undifferentiable from what passes under more “serious” venues, such as the New York Times.  On this unintended point, I agree completely with him: what passes as mainstream criticism of Ayn Rand/Objectivists is a joke.

Second: Munroe illustrates another common pattern among our “critics”: in choosing to act like a jerk to us, he acts on the premise that Objectivists *as a group* are not worthy of even the most basic respect, or what they call “common decency”.  This, too, is regrettably common to the point of being nearly universal.  Such things as simple goodwill, trying to understand someone’s POV first before criticizing, doing due diligence, even “Godwin’s Law” — all go out the window when dealing with Objectivists.  It speaks extremely poorly of the true worth of our opponents’ professed convictions, that they would permit themselves this moral license to piss on any group of human beings.  It is completely fair for Objectivists to call such interlocutors out for “true colors” on this count.

Last but not least: almost without exception, all of this sort of thing is always directed at people (“You have terrible taste”) and NEVER THE IDEAS.  In the famous mouseover text, Munroe writes:

I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at ‘therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.’ ”

Attack the person — check.

Make something up — check.

No reference to actual ideas — checkmate.

As with the likes of Paul Krugman, if he isn’t attacking Ayn Rand or Objectivists *personally*, or making shit up wholesale about what Objectivist ideas actually are — he is silent.  We already know why that is the case, of course: Ayn Rand’s actual ideas scare the hell out of these people.  They can’t know — but strongly suspect — that if Ayn Rand’s actual ideas ever gain a foothold in the marketplace of ideas, theirs will lose.  They are so strict about it that they almost never risk stating the ideas in public, even for the purpose of attacking them.  This is why the entirely of their efforts in regard to Objectivist ideas is to wave people off of them *before* they look; those aren’t the ideas you are looking for.

Now, of course Randall Munroe probably doesn’t believe himself a “serious critic” of Objectivism in the first place.  He implicitly acknowledges this fact in his choice of platform — a webcomic — for his bit of “attack under cover of humor”.  If cornered, I can easily imagine him and his supporters whining “Dude, it’s a webcomic, chill out, can’t you take a joke?”  He does at least have that expedient, unlike the Anthony Daniels and Roger Kimballs of the world.

I know it’s a webcomic.  I know it’s a joke.  The joke’s on all the other Ayn Rand attackers; now we can simply laugh, link to XKCD #1049 and say “Your argument rises to the seriousness of this joke.”  What Randall Munroe’s comic has done, is throw more light on this truth:  Ayn Rand’s ideas have few (if any) serious, intellectual critics.

Imagine that scene in Highlander where McCleod wanders the battlefield shouting “They won’t fight me! Why won’t anybody fight me?” — except instead of the opposing clan, with the Kurgan lurking among them, it’s a playground littered with children whose only option is to stick you in the back and scurry away.

Amid these rugrats, my chosen option is to respond sternly, addressing any adults lurking nearby:

Is that all you’ve got?

When any of you want to get serious, we’re easy to find. We can be found at the adult table, talking ideas.  Feel free to engage us any time.

Any time.

“How do you reconcile individual rights with something like private discrimination?”

“Discrimination”:

1
a : the act of discriminating b : the process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently
2
: the quality or power of finely distinguishing

Source.

Discrimination, in its original meaning, means to be carefully selective — to recognize and choose between “finely distinct” alternatives, e.g. a “discriminating” customer. We discriminate every day, as part of living — between food and poison, between the road and the shoulder, between good deals and bad ones, between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy.

Doesn’t it seem odd to you that *this* is the word has come to mean prejudicial choice, and highly evil prejudices at that — such as racism?

This isn’t an accident of semantics; it’s a clue to the ideological causality underlying and driving Leftist ideas like Jonathan Chait’s  — and to the biggest “Trojan Horse” in American ideological history.

Individual rights necessarily include and necessitate freedom. Freedom necessarily means that different individuals will reach different conclusions and therefore make different choices — including choices that you or I won’t like.

This is crucial to grasp — because it gives us insight into why the Left specifically chose “discrimination” as the term to convert into a dysphemism for “racism”.

Remember, the Left is at root collectivist, and therefore an anti-Enlightenment, anti-individualist, anti-liberty movement. That is its essential root premise. It is, therefore, the one constant that can be seen in all Leftist thought, and the one motive and goal that integrates and explains all Leftist strategies and tactics.

This explains why the Left’s putative “anti-racism” should find itself expressed most commonly as “anti-discrimination“. This is because the Left is NOT “anti-racist” — it is anti-CHOICE. “Anti-racism” is the mask; anti-choice, the underlying essential.

If one holds that Leftists are anti-racist, there are many things they do and/or tolerate nowadays that simply do not compute. Overt racism, sexism etc. are relatively easy to observe among Leftists nowadays (including in particular the ongoing return of anti-Semitism).

But if you understand the Left as Objectivists do — as primarily collectivist and anti-liberty — these things are a perfect fit, and no surprise at all. On the contrary, if they were currently not observable, ideological causality would tell us to *expect* them!

“Anti-racism” is a liberal idea, a logical outgrowth of individualism, that it shares with Objectivism. Unfortunately, liberalism was co-opted by the Left in America over the course of the last century. In addition to giving it cover, wearing the liberal mask allows the Left to perpetuate profoundly illiberal ideas under its ” brand”, Trojan Horse style. “Anti-racism” is the most devastating one of these, as it has allowed the Left to attack and erode freedom of association.

They have been so successful in this regard, that the term “discrimination” nowadays will always conjure up prejudice as its meaning. Google the word and see for yourself.

The primary payload of this exercise is to poison the well for liberty: to convince people that freedom of choice is the problem.  The pattern of this position goes: if people are left free to choose, “some percentage” will tend to make wrong, destructive choices , so they must be constrained for the good of society.  (In the wild, the clause “some percentage” varies from 1% to 100% according to the speaker’s level of hatred for mankind; the underlying premise remains constant, however.)  This is precisely what Chait is asserting when he says that “libertarian principles support racism”; he is asserting that freedom is the problem because it leaves immoral people free to make immmoral choices.  In much the same way that “to be human” is used to refer to failure despite the existence of human success, they want “freedom to choose” to be associated with immoral choices despite the fact that a man is just as free to be moral.

How pervasive is this prejudice?  Well, it’s just as common among mainstream conservatives as it is with Leftists; in fact, this view effectively defines the mainstream.  That should tell you about how “soaked in” it is.

Standing in opposition to them is, of course, Objectivism.  Objectivism specifically holds the opposite position: 

Freedom is the solution, because it leaves moral men free to make moral choices.  In other words, what is important is not to constrain the evil, but to Unchain the Good.

And *that* is the fact which Jonathan Chait and his thinkalikes among his purported enemies (Rick Santorum, I’m looking at YOU) cannot afford to see in the mainstream.  The weapon against wrong ideas like racism, is right ideas, delivered under the aegis of freedom — of thought, of communication and of association.

Freedom is its own best protection. A racist is free to discriminate? Well, so are the rest of us. The moral can discriminate against the immoral.  We can not only hire, work for, and patronize the individuals he won’t, but we can do more than that:  we can ostracize and exclude him and his supporters.   We can work to identify racists, and speak out publicly to identify them.  Above all, we can withdraw moral sanction.  Chait asserts “Social power” without defining it, and this is why: there is no such thing outside the context of culture.  In an individualist culture, complete with a free marketplace of ideas, such men have no power at all.

But what if the culture IS racist?  What if racial collectivism is mainstream?  Do the racists have the non-governmental power to keep things the way they like it?  Contra Chait, the historical evidence says no, and supports Objectivism on this point.

While the Americanist premise of individualism was undoubtedly stronger in the 1850′s than now, that culture was nonetheless less than a century removed from an era when individualism was just a novel idea held by some intellectuals, while slavery was a non-controversial, mundane fact. Unless you expect cultures to turn on a dime, it is plain that racism was part and parcel of a huge legacy of pre-Enlightenment culture going back thousands of years — not a product of any radical ideas of “freedom to discriminate” which only showed up for real, at “street level”, after 1776.

By the 1960′s, that strength had severely weakened racism in America.  As time wore on after the Civil War, it became clear to the racists, again and again, that if the trends they saw with their own eyes were not stopped, they and their culture were the doomed ones.  (Can you imagine these guys going bug-eyed if someone back then told them that they had all the “social power”?)  They knew this well enough that they resorted to a familiar device in their attempt to preserve their primitive prejudices, culture and ideas: they attacked individual freedom of choice through government power. Enter the Jim Crow laws.  Enter the beginnings of gun control.  Enter nativism and the genesis of immigration law.

Even with those, the historically novel firefighters of individualism were well on their way to putting out the ancient fire of racism by the 1960′s.  The Civil Rights act, by taking out the Jim Crow laws, was poised to be the final blow.  Unfortunately, the 1960′s was the decade when American liberalism died of the Leftist tumor that had been eating it out from within since Herbert Croly and his Progressives.  Title II, the horrendous contradiction at the heart of the Civil Rights Act, was one of their first large-scale legal attack against the culture of individual rights that was killing racism.  Even as the last of America’s liberals trumpeted this defeat of racism, the Left was preserving its ultimate instrument of its survival, by undercutting the primary weapon of its real enemy.  The portents were there, too, as the 1960′s saw the first manifestations of modern Leftist racism in the form of the Black Power movement and associated groups.

While racism has since then continued to “decline” as the public recoils from the superficial forms in which it historically manifested in American culture (“Song of the South”, the “mammy” stereotype etc.), its roots now find sustenance in the rising tide of cultural collectivism being driven by the Left and in the shielding given it by the ongoing assault on individualism and liberty.  Even as they “fight the fire”, the Left is feeding its flames while eroding its enemies’ main water supply: moral individualism.

– John Galt, from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait posts an example of the kind of tendentious, on-plantation tract that seems intended solely to reassure its denizens that it’s the right place to be.  The logical fallacies present therein are sufficiently obvious that the reader will either spot them in just a few minutes — or see nothing on account of having his eyes closed.

The point of my critique is not the refuting of it, as formatting this text will take more brainpower.  The point is to supply an illustrative example of a well-known and commonly used fallacy, but in a context where people usually fail to recognize it — unless one is armed with the principle of ideological causation.

Chait’s article is entitled “How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism”.  That’s a pretty big, unambiguous claim isn’t it?  Chait’s going to show us how libertarian principles support racism.  Chait is saying that he intends to establish causation between “libertarian principles” and racism.  That would be huge, wouldn’t it?  He’d be refuting the core of the Enlightenment in one fell swoop!

So let’s see what he actually does.

In the first two-thirds of the article, Chait supplies us with examples from Ron Paul’s spoken and written words.  He doesn’t pull any of the usual tricks here.  The quotes aren’t sufficiently ambiguous to be conveniently distorted into straw men, nor are they out of context.  What Chait is isolating from Paul’s words is indeed the principle of individual rights as it is familiar to Objectivists and libertarians alike.  Chait’s point isn’t to call Ron Paul a racist (though he does that by passive-aggressive implication that he may be an “unconscious” one); on the contrary, the article isn’t about Ron Paul at all.  For a change, this Leftist is attempting to deal with ideas instead of people!  Stand back!

Remember, he’s up against some formidable logic.  We hold, from the basic logic of the ideas involved, that the principle of individual rights directly contradicts the principle of racism; the former rests on the individualist premise (in terms of individual sovereignty, and individual moral self-authorship) while collectivism, of which racism is a species, follows from the direct inversion of those principles (group sovereignty, and individual interchangeability).  It’s pretty, um, “airtight” — no gaps, no contradictions.

With only one third of the article left, this is going to be one short and sweet refutation of liberty for all time, isn’t it?  It has to be, to deliver on that headline.

Is the suspension getting to you yet?

All right.  Here it comes!

Ok, that’s the standard weak sauce Leftist boilerplate, I know.  Logic versus reality, equating economic and political power, no concept of the nature of government, package dealing, yeah.

But he does point out an historical correlation (though a weak one, fraught with unanswered questions and which does not account for cultural backgroundat all), and he asserts his case right there at the end.  So that amazing argument is coming right up in the next paragraph, isn’t it?  It’s got to be an earthshaker, given what Chait promised us in that headline!  We’re going to see the causation any minute now!

Well, except that the article ends there.  That’s it.  Ta da.

Yes, folks, that’s really all he’s got:  post hoc ergo propter hoc.  That correlation IS the causation, as far as Chait is concerned.  Because some racists argued for slavery in terms of property rights and individual rights (of property owners), those principles must therefore support racism.  Never mind the whopping contradictions involved! Never mind that the abolitionists were also speaking in such terms, but without such contradiction.  Never mind the *actual*, logical causation of the ideas involved.  The non sequitur is the thing.

What Chait is doing is the equivalent of walking up to a house on fire, observing that the house is full of fire and full of water together, and concluding that the firefighters are actually the arsonists.  That’s the argument he presents to the public as being worth taking seriously.  No joke.

For defenders of liberty, Chait’s decision to publish this is telling.  If this is meant solely for internal consumption by Leftists seeking reassurance, it tells us how intellectually crippled Chait’s audience is (or he thinks it is).  If he imagines that this is serious and incisive argument that is somehow supposed to impress those of us outside the Leftist compound in external reality, it tells us how intellectually crippled Chait himself is — how truly small our Leftist opponents really are, intellectually, from top to bottom.

And every hand’s a loser.

–Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Just this morning, the following items came across my radar. Can you detect the basic alternative that is common to all of them?

At the New York Times, Eddy Nahmias asks: “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” (A very good read in its own right, I’m not linking it just for the title!)

Via Twitter, Linda Cordair (@CordairGallery) tweets:

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

From Jennifer Casey, at her blog “Rational Jenn”:

Morgan said the most interesting thing to us the other day. It was something like this:

“There are three people who can invent me–you two [pointing at me and Brendan] and ME!”

That statement led to a fascinating conversation about how, yes, we created her, but she is primarily responsible for inventing herself.

Because she is. We gave her the raw materials, but she must learn and figure things out and integrate concepts and make decisions, all things which will shape her mind and sense of self and sense of life–each of which will in turn affect future decisions and her thinking (and even the decision to think).

Emphasis mine.

Those of you who have read enough of my writings about ideological causation should already be able to suspect what’s coming, as I have touched on this connection before.  The obvious form of the alternative, is free will versus determinism, yes — but I want to discuss a closely related expression of this alternative: ideological versus physical causation as the motor of human action.

Ideological causation is my integration of “the inexorable logic of ideas”, with the premise of free will. I first conceived of it sixteen years ago when I spotted the false presumption behind David Kelley’s accusing Leonard Peikoff of “Hegelianism” in regard to the latter’s invocation of “inexorable logic” in explaining that it is ideas that move men (in the latter’s essay “Fact and Value”). “Hegelianism”, as I understood Kelley to mean, was the notion that ideas themselves are the moral agents, and that men were *passively* moved by them.

My immediate reaction to that claim, was to laugh out loud. It was clear to me that Dr. Peikoff had left unexpressed, for simple reasons of economy, the basic premise of free will which all genuine Objectivists would know was part of the underlying assumptions. In other words, ideas do move men, so long as they accept them.  Men are always free to get off that train, I thought.  Else what is the point of Ayn Rand’s most famous quote: “Check your premises”?

That is the key right there. The differences between physical and ideological causation are as follows:

1. Physical causation, or ordinary causality, is driven by the laws of physics, and is deterministic. The entities involved, from quarks to galaxies, act as determined by those laws — there is only one causal path they may follow.

2. Ideological causation is driven by basic logic – and the entities involved retain the ability to interrupt it and to redirect their course onto different causal paths.

“Different causal paths” is of course what I am referring to with my road metaphor. The central idea involved here, is “the ability to interrupt”, also known as free will — and the entities involved are of a special sort: they are the ones possessing a conceptual form of consciousness. Human beings are the only entities we know of that fit this criterion.

Philosophical determinism is, in essence, the insistence upon substituting physical causation for ideological causation as the motor of human action. The very notion of “ideological causation” is that ideas are efficacious in the world, and that is what is specifically being denied by determinism. If that is clear to you, dear reader, the examples of this error in action all over our culture should be multiplying in your mind right now.

Obvious examples of this error are Eddy Nahmias’ neuroscientists, and their thinkalikes in the evolutionary psychology field.  From there, you can see it in every article trumpeting the latest “Gene for X found“, where “X” is some human behavior. But it just keeps going from there.

How many times have you seen some political commentator insist that his opponents are “crazy”? If we take “crazy” to mean an actual illness or other physical issue with his opponent’s brain, that commentator is doing the same thing — he is ascribing physical rather than ideological causation to explaining his opponents’ ideas. This is common with both Leftists and conservatives, and it is due to ideological (not physical) causes that are common to them both.  Conservatives in particular are known for their disdain for the efficacy of ideas; it’s a direct side effect of their “Original Sin” premise (more on that below).

In addition to disease or injury (“you fell on your head/ate paint chips as a kid, didn’t you?”), another common form of physical causation invoked to explain ideological effects, is genetics. This one should be familiar from one of its most virulent and common logical expressions: racism.

Racism is a species of collectivism, of course, so now let’s shine that light over there (yes, this is a very target-rich topic). Among other things, collectivism views individuals as interchangeable. This makes perfect sense from a viewpoint informed exclusively by physical causation: if the active causative agent is genetics, then all individuals bearing the same genes will enact the same effects (i.e. their identity is a function of the physical aspect defining the group, not of any choices made by any individual). They will look the same, act the same, smell the same; one is as good as any other of that particular group.

None of this changes when you swap in some other physical cause. Jump from “nature to “nurture”; now the physical causation involved is one’s environment. From that bizarre “your tools condition your mind” notion that Ayn Rand lambasted in “Atlas Shrugged”, to Marx and his economic determinism, to the Left’s fetish with the deterministic power of society — the end result is the same: if you came from culture X, that is what determines your identity. That’s what you were seeing when some Leftists were asking if Barack Obama was “black enough” — and why Lefties, like religionists, become unhinged in the face of “apostates” who don’t follow the expected program (Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter for four quick examples.) Then you come to Harry Belafonte and his infamous “race traitor” comments, and you see how all of these examples start blending together when viewed from the correct perspective. (Funny how that happens!)

How about non-physical causes?  Cue the religionists!  What exactly do you think that “Original Sin” or “The devil made me do it” IS, if not another example of a claimed external and determinate cause of individual behavior? The posited cause is “spiritual” rather than physical, the group so defined is humanity itself, and the ultimate “determinor” is God’s law rather than the laws of physics or genetics — but these differences pertain entirely to metaphysics. The essence of the idea, and its moral consequences, are the same. (Christianity has not been consistent on this point over its history with regards to free will, but it has never corrected the basic error. Such is the, er. ideologically determined nature of inherently arbitrary doctrines.)

And finally, this: does anyone recognize Kant’s notion of “innate ideas” here? “Innate” means innate to the nature of the subject being discussed — human nature, in this case. In other words, ideas in the mind that are predetermined by some physical cause. This is the ultimate abstraction of all the concretes I just described, and it’s the one active whenever you hear someone blaming “human nature” for anything.

Here we finally come to one of the signature expressions of the direct opposition between Ayn “Man is a being of self-made soul” Rand, and Immanuel “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made” Kant!

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my explanation of the ideological causation behind the “physical causation” fetish.

As for its psychological manifestation, I’ll bet many of you are ahead of me on that one: the signature behavior is that of making excuses. Blame luck, blame God, blame one’s genetics, blame IQ, blame human nature, blame the weather, blame one’s parents or one’s rotten lousy hometown — it doesn’t matter. Such people are petrified of the responsibility of self-authorship, and I am dead certain that a significant portion of the visceral hatred for Ayn Rand comes from those who glimpse this aspect of her philosophy.  Atlas Shrugged is full of this sort of character; they are the ones, like Eric Starnes, screaming “But I couldn’t help it!”  Ayn Rand clearly had their number.

When she said “Man is a being of self-made soul”, she meant specifically that, as individuals, we author ourselves — and are morally responsible for the results. As I have written before, it is our *character* that we author, not our physical bodies or our nature as human beings. It is our character which is “tabula rasa”, not our nature. The latter does not determine the content of our character, but merely defines the potential that every individual has. It’s up to each one of us to actualize it.

We can see the alternative logically playing itself out among Eddy Nahmias’ apostles of physical determinism.

It’s the meaning behind Linda Cordair’s quote: true family is not defined by the physical accidents of birth or genetics, but by the values chosen in common by the individuals involved. (The bond of common experiences in growing up together, counts as such a choice.)

Most importantly, this is what Jennifer Casey is teaching her children, and they will be far and away the better off for it. It will be that sense of self-authorship which forms the basis for Morgan’s self-respect, and self-discipline. The goal of such parenting is not to “imbue the child with one’s values” as so many think it is, but to provide the child with as solid a base as possible from which to sally forth into the world and discover them for herself; as Jenn puts it: “This idea of self-invention relates to my parenting principles in that I deliberately try to stay out of their self-invention as much as possible.” Compare and contrast this with all the square pegs being shoved into round holes by parents whose preconceptions of what their kid is determined to be, overrides what the child himself may think (if he even makes it that far).

It’s not about the cards you are dealt; those merely set your limits. Your character lies in how you play the hand.

– from Dr. Andrew Bernstein’s “The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages” at The Objective Standard.

The Dark and Middle Ages are a gaping maw of a weak spot in the arguments of primitive religionists who seek to usurp the fruit of the secular Enlightenment — in particular, liberty and America — for themselves and their Judeo-Christian beliefs.  For the most part in Internet fora, religious conservatives pushing this line will run like hell (or drop to schoolyard invective) from anyone with even a passing knowledge of Dark Ages history.

The only exceptions I’ve seen invariably revolved around some variant of the idea that the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all, but had merely been misrepresented as such by anti-clerical thinkers during the Enlightenment.  If this claim could be solidified, then those fleeing religionists might finally have a card to play.  In light of this demand, it should be no surprise that Rodney Stark’s book is exactly what the doctor of theology ordered: an attempt to give that weak evasion some intellectual traction.

It is telling that the only one so far that is equipped to recognize and call out this fraud, is an Objectivist like Dr. Bernstein.  Thank you Dr. Bernstein for this ammunition; I’ll be putting it into my ideological holster, ready for use when the Dark Ages apologists start deploying Stark.

– from “Witch Hunt” by Neil Peart for the band Rush

Uncle blogs a pithy, yet profound quote summarizing the difference between the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Tea Party:

The Tea Party wants to remove the Crony from Crony Capitalism.

OWS wants to remove Capitalism from Crony Capitalism.

The profundity here lies in the fact that capitalism is liberty; notwithstanding the contradictions which may yet prove fatal to the Tea Party movement, liberty *is* the essential difference between that movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is of interest here, is the pattern of apologia I am seeing in and around the Occupation movement — not only in the movement itself and its historical parallels, but also in the response to it elsewhere in the culture.

The Occupation movement itself is easy to figure out; it is following the same pattern as all similar Leftist movements in history. The development of these movements always share the same stages. For now, we are concerned with the first stage, where the movement is at its most apparently benign.

Pay No Attention to the Idea Behind that Tent Flap!

The Occupation currently presents a superficially confused, contradictory and mutable appearance, with few (if any) actual principles. The resulting appearance of “fuzzy warmth” and a “grassroots” quality creates a mantle of apparent well-meaning populism, and as a means of attracting and recruiting similarly fuzzy-headed people, the sort some have termed “useful idiots”.

These people play a role similar to the “moderates” of both Left and conservatism: they help to obscure the core essence of the movement from those who do not think in terms of fundamentals, and serve to blunt the criticism of those who *do* see through it. They do so by means of enabling most people to cavalierly dismiss such criticism: “Naw, they don’t really *mean* that! It’s just a bunch of indebted college kids!” They act like a biofilm, blunting the intellectual “immune response” while feeding and sustaining the nascent core, buying time for it to coalesce and grow.

An example of this process in action is the arguments of the commenter “Sebastiano” in the comments at Uncle’s place. It’s the same “two-step” hand-waving pattern I am seeing in all the defenses of the Occupation around the ‘net — not only in purportedly “neutral” fora, but also at supposedly rightist/conservatives sites.

(A fascinating side note I wish to make here: the split reaction by the right is fascinating. While the Left is monolithically anti-Tea Party and monolithically pro-Occupation, the right as a whole is a bit conflicted about the Tea Parties — and VERY ambiguous on the Occupation. In particular, there is a lot of support coming from the Occupation coming from the Ron Paul/Zero Hedge wing of the libertarians. I suggest this article by Alexander Marriott on why that is so. It speaks to the pervasiveness of Leftist terms of thought, even on the so-called “right”.)

Here’s how the defensive misdirection usually works:

1. Hand-wave away any genuinely insightful comments of OWS, specifically its identification with the anti-capitalist Left, as “misrepresentation” or “hyperbole”.  Dismiss out-of-hand the idea that the actions of “a few thugs” or ” a small minority” are at all indicative of the movement as a whole.  Absolutely do not engage these viewpoints, only dismiss them.

2. With the other hand holding the cigar, blow in the obscuring smoke of non-essential PR talking points in everyone’s faces — it’s just a bunch of people angry at the involvement of government with business, who can’t find jobs, who are just concerned for the future, who merely see a problem and are trying to fix it by drawing attention to it, and sundry other non-objectionable surface details, blah blah blah. (Tellingly, Sebastiano characterizes insightful criticism as exactly what *he* is doing. Some day I should write about projection as a manifestation of ideological causality.)

They are all about discussion and debate, so long as we keep off questions like “What are the fundamental ideas driving this movement?”

That smokescreen, and its concise demolition, turn up in these three paragraphs from a San Francisco Chronicle article discussing developer Phil Tagami, now famous for deflecting a wave of Occupier violence with his shotgun:

City Administrator Deanna Santana apologized to business owners for the “chaotic events” that enveloped the city. Mayor Jean Quan called the rioters “a small and isolated group.”

“It shouldn’t mar the overall impact of the demonstration and the fact that people in the 99 percent movement demonstrated peacefully and, for the most part, were productive and very peaceful,” Quan said.

Tagami disagreed, calling the Occupy Oakland encampment “basically concealment and cover for anarchists who are doing this to our city.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Mr. Tagami is precisely correct. This why the “it’s just a bunch of extremists” defense is dishonest hand-waving. Even if it were true that the large majority of Occupiers were non-violent, they are still enablers — and it is they who are the non-essential surface ephemera of the movement, not the thugs.

It’s pretty clear that the Occupations are an anti-capitalist movement at root. While that’s a truth that the likes of Deanna Santana, “Sebastiano” and so many others desperately wish to suppress like it’s some big dread secret, it is nevertheless not really news.

What is news, and the point I shall be making here, is that the Occupation is an effort to inject European-style anti-capitalism into the American political mainstream. As such, we discover the only genuinely important point of commonality to be found between the Occupation and the Tea Parties: each is a manifestation of certain fundamental ideas that heretofore have been largely obscured behind the facades of the Ackbar Spectrum. They both represent the ongoing ideological clarification that we seem to be undergoing at the moment. The Left is really “coming out” from behind the mask of American liberalism behind which it’s been hiding for over a hundred years.

This is a good and necessary thing in itself — but as far as the Occupation is concerned, that is where the good things stop. There are fundamental reasons why the entrenched presence in mainstream American politics of a European style of anti-capitalism, would be a very bad sign.

So let’s take a look at what’s incubating behind that tent flap, shall we?

—-

Aw, They’re so Cute at that Stage!

It is plain that the Occupation, at this time, is not a totalitarian movement of any sort, yet [**]. Those who have visited actual Occupations have often found them rather unremarkable. For his part, Dr. Harry Binswanger noted (via HBL):

“I had the sense that, unlike the New Left demonstrations of the ’60′s, this demonstration was not orchestrated by anyone, lease of all by whatever leftist leadership still exists. It was simply a group of mild, placid oldsters left over from the headier days. There were smiles, not hatred. It was not the dirty, drug-soaked event we have been told that it is.” (It is worth noting that Dr. Binswanger was actually present at Columbia University in the ’60′s, and makes his comparison from direct experience.)

Mind that biofilm! As I wrote in my comment at Uncle’s:

“Most OWS folks are not totalitarians, this is true. That was true of the earlier instances of this phenomenon. It doesn’t matter: just because the road leads to hell doesn’t mean the pavement actually travels there — or that the “pavement” does not share in the responsibility for leading us there.”

The “earlier instances” to which I refer, are all the various Leftist movements in history, including those that actually made it to full-blown totalitarian status, and those that didn’t.

An example of such a movement that ran out of gas: the hippies of the 1960′s. The excuse given by hippie apologists to this day usually involve the phrase “selling out”; either they were sold out, or did the selling out themselves. In reality, they simply ran out of steam in the face of cultural resistance; they showed up too soon, developed to their pure (thug) stage quickly, and were then summarily rejected qua hippies. They were forced to assimilate to have any influence, and are now mostly Democrats. America culture was insufficiently de-Enlightened in 1969 to supply them with a leader nor submit to one, had such arisen.

Some examples that did make it: The French Revolution of 1793, the very first Leftist (NOT “liberal”) movement — the Russian Revolution (Bolshevik version), and the one I will examine in more detail: the original German Worker’s Party. Konrad Heiden writes in Der Fuehrer, written and published in 1944:

“To this end, Rohm founded the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. It might be said to have existed before him, first under the simpler name of the German Worker’s Party. But that was a club, sitting in the back rooms of little restaurants, talking. At all events, a mere idea. And an idea it remained until the club, seeking to win over the German workers, became the party of soldiers.”

In its original form, the German Workers Party was probably no more anti-semitic than the general population at that time. In all likelihood, the original GWP members were just some relatively innocuous intellectual flotsam that wouldn’t personally hurt a flea. They would all but certainly recoil in sincere horror from what a time machine might show them about the events at the end of their road less than twenty years hence. I can even hear them sincerely exclaiming: “Aber ich meinte nicht das!”

And as always, it didn’t matter. Their road was already worn by the footprints of the socialists and Mensheviks before them. What matters is ideological causality, which did to them what it does to all “well-meaning” early members of all totalitarian movements: it moved them towards a different destination than they imagined, and by the time it became obvious to them, it was too late.  The movement would cast them aside (if not into the camps) and proceed towards what to them was a “new” destination — one that they usually dared not admit to themselves and against which they would be morally disarmed in any case. This is usually the point where the excuses come out — “we were betrayed/co-opted/hijacked” etc.

On that last note, take a quick look again at that Occupation apologia. Note in particular this video example. See what he’s doing? Not only do we have another demonstration of that oddly precise projection as we saw with Sebastiano (in this case, the speaker’s “three card monty” analogy), but this person is already setting up the “we were co-opted” bolt hole for later moral escape. I doubt he’s consciously aware that he’s doing this, but the predictability of it all is surprising to see. Ideological causality is often like that, causing unaware people to behave almost as if they are executing a preset program!

Ideological history is really rhyming with conviction here, isn’t it? Even one of the Youtube commenters (at the time of writing) is executing the same damned program down to the last instruction:

“The worst thing that could happen is for this movement to become co-opted. Don’t listen to all that bullshit rhetoric about it needing to be more defined, it needing goals or leaders. It has goals and it doesn’t need leaders.”

[Emphasis mine.]

The longer the Occupation lasts as a movement, it will begin to seek its logical end-of-road; eventually, its ideological core will win out, casting off the non-essentials, the flotsam and jetsam of assorted useful idiots who provided cover for its genesis. As it does so, the least blinded/most perceptive of them will eventually fall away from the movement. Sadly, such people are rarely able to turn around and fight it — it’s one thing to realize one is on a wrong track, but to find the right one is much tougher. As a result, such people are often morally disarmed in the face of their monstrous progeny, unable to convincingly oppose it. In the meantime, more “extreme” elements filter in, accumulate at the core, and accelerate the process. Thusly do the Wesley Mouches and Philip Reardens eventually give way to Cuffy Meigs and the other thugs who invariably end up in charge. Thusly do such movements “purify” themselves over time. From the revolt of the volunteer cooks to the violence that has already manifested itself by stated intent[*] and by actual action, this process can already be seen happening in little fits and spurts all over the Occupation.[**]

The road to tyranny is necessarily paved with anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism is *the* red flag, the one reliable long-range indicator of any movement’s genocidal potential; no totalitarian movement since 1793 has failed to vigorously wave it. It does not matter how inchoate or undefined a movement is — if that element is present and fundamental to it, the movement can only travel one ideological road to its end.

One telling sign of the Occupation’s essential anti-capitalism is their choice of symbolic target; Manhattan in New York, the same symbol of American capitalist liberty selected by noted anti-capitalist Osama bin Laden — who was known to crib from Leftist talking points for good reason.

So what should we expect if the Occupation doesn’t burn out, but succeeds in becoming a permanent movement with popular support? What if the Tea Parties fail to oppose them effectively, due to being co-opted by conservatives (a genuine threat), or simply fizzling out themselves? What if America has reached the same cultural state as the Weimar Republic?

If this happens, the basic pattern to be expected is quite clear.[**]

Right now, in the first (populist) stage, it’s all about quantity, not quality — they need monetary sustenance and the appearance of a groundswell, and that means lots of bodies. These bodies do not (yet) need to be ideological harmonious; an amalgam of credulous dupes is sufficient. This is why they must initially resist “programs and leaders” in favor of the unidentifiable, inchoate fluidity they trumpet. They must resist “labels” or any other identification of ideas so they can be all things to all people while alienating none but the most discerning. That line they feed thesemselves about the danger of being “co-opted” foreshadows the use of that excuse when the movement does “gel” and acquire an identity that some of them don’t like.

That moment will come once critical mass is achieved and the movement’s traction sufficient that they can finally declare “No More Mr. Nice Guy!” [**]. This will mark the movement’s very first — and mildest — purge. Once again, this pattern repeats; not only did this happen with the German Worker’s Party as it transitioned into the National Socialists, but it happened in Russia as the Communists logically transitioned from Marx through Trotsky to Lenin as dramatized in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. (Lesser known, however, is that the exact same pattern happened with the 1960′s hippies, which began as a much more Americanish movement before purifying into Woodstock, the SDS and the Black Panthers. LINK to Zombie)

With the acquisition of cohesion and an ideological program, the progress to the next stage — where the organization acquires a strong centeralized leadership — is fairly direct. For the German Worker’s Party, it was the transformation of the group into a party of soldiers that made it saleable in the German culture of the day — and the arrival of Alfred Rosenberg and his copy of the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion which supplied the product to sell.

Once this process is complete, the group must find the right refinements of its central ideology that will sell it to the masses. This is achieved by the use of propaganda, as Konrad Heiden explains thusly:

“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study the masses. The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration. In forever setting new and contradictory assertions before his audience, Hitler is tapping the outwardly shapeless substance of public opinion with instruments of varying metals and varying weights. When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them.”

The Left has been wanting an answer to the Tea Parties for some time (who themselves were sparked by an opposing resonance triggered by Rick Santelli); to that end, many Leftists have been pinging around, looking to ignite some segment of the culture inclined to catch their sort of fire. Kalle Lasn of Adbusters was the first to hit the right note: he identified Wall Street as a symbol of capitalism already tarnished by its connections to government (while carefully failing to note which of government and business actually *drove* the relationship), and utilized it in what is otherwise an unremarkable bit of Leftist agitprop. Unremarkable, that is, except for the resonance that resulted.

Who will refine the note and strengthen the resonance further? Who knows. There is no shortage of all sorts of people trying.

But through it all, note that what drives the whole process in such repeatable patterns are the unchanging ideas underneath — the same anti-capitalism that moved the hippies and the German Worker’s Party, moves Kalle Lasn and the Occupiers. The ideas flowing through a culture as a whole are what determine the natural “pitch”, and its readiness to accept the next step on the ideological road it travels. Anti-capitalism is the logical outgrowth of nihilism in philosophy, and annihilation for its own sake is what such ideas achieve in practice.

Observe the end results: (most quotes courtesy Jeffery Lord, who despite the handicap of conservatism, also sees the patterns.)

“Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished.” Robespierre, 1793.

“We will make France a graveyard” — Jean Baptiste Carrier, 1793

“Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie…” From The Red Sword, a newspaper of the new Cheka secret police in Russia, 1918

“We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” Martin Latsis, deputy chief, Cheka, 1918

“We will wreck this world.” Kalle Lasn, Occupation instigator from his book “Culture Jam”, 2000.

“We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.” — from the Twenty-Five Points of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), 1920

Thankfully, the Occupation is only a popular movement right now; there have been several of these in my lifetime in the U.S. and in Canada, and none of those were able to reach their end-of-road on the widest scale.  It is not a totalitarian movement, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. It is a fair cop on the part of their defenders to point out that one cannot selectively point to certain individuals tagging along that happen to fit one’s preconceptons and declare “THIS defines THAT.” The Occupation is not a murderous mob, it is not a full-blown socialist movement (of either the National or International stripe), and there are a lot of otherwise decent people who agree with some of their nominal positions. Hell, I agree with them — and so does Yaron Brook — on their nominal position that the banks should not have been bailed out, and that the incest between the banks, large corporations and the government needs to be ended ASAP.

The point is not where they are; it’s where they are going, the potential they have — all the “yets” that were unstated in the previous paragraph. The Occupation has all the required DNA to *become* a totalitarian movement, much as the acorn has all the DNA it needs to become an oak. And as far as all the Communists, anti-Semites, “professional” homeless and plain criminals — has anyone thought to wonder why movements of this sort **ALWAYS** attract such people? Obviously, those groups see an affinity there and always have, going back over a century. The Occupiers need to ask themselves why this is so. They may not like such rabble, but the rabble certainly like the Occupation and similar Leftist activities. And even if they really didn’t like the Occupation much, they see good recruiting among their numbers. They aren’t wrong.

My answer is simple: those groups are traveling the same road. They may not represent the Occupation’s present, but they certainly embody stages and aspects of its logical future.  They certainly will make Occupiers uncomfortable, given what they indicate — but unlike the Tea Parties when they were faced with a few such attempts at hanging on (many of which turned out to be Leftist false flag operators), these “moderate” Occupiers will be unable to resist infiltration by their more consistent ideological brothers. The presence and endorsements of those thugs are the warning signs which should induce Occupiers to check their premises — and perhaps get off this road before it’s too late.

Should the Occupation fail to heed those warnings and stay on that road to hell despite all the warnings and the historical evidence, rest assured that NO Occupier — going all the way back to the very first tents and Youtube videos — will be absolved.

[*] Yes, that’s Lee Stranahan on the other side of that link. Don’t laugh, the material he presents is pretty solid; now that he’s following Andrew Breitbart around, he’s got a big hate on for the Occupiers and for the Daily Kos dogs who gave him fleas.)

[**] ADDENDUM:

Starnesville, USA

The bulk of this post was written about 10 days before I posted it, and events are already moving quickly down the paths predicted. In Zucotti Park, the “extremist” ideological core is already coming together and is flexing its muscle as it prepares to make the trains run on time. Ed Morrissey discusses this article by former Occupier Fritz Tucker discussing the Occupations’ first coup: the formation of a Politburo-style oligarchy, the Spokes Council.

In conjunction with that, this article by Candice Giove of the New York Post includes this line:

“We have three-quarters of a million dollars in the bank and all these f–king people are not doing financial accounting while we’re calling for it from the larger corporations,” says the transgender leader. “A lot of good people are quitting.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Who wants to bet that these “good people” were muttering something about “we were co-opted” or something about the “betrayal” of the movement?

All of this is a good sign; it tells me that the Occupation movement is moving much too fast, and thanks to informative local reporting (versus the plain obfuscatory malfeasance of national media), it will reach its logical end in full view of the country *before* it finds the “marketing cover” it needs to reach stage two as a mature, accepted political movement. If so, it’s another data point suggesting that the Left is reaching its intellectual end before it reaches its political end — that it may yet finally die, losing its intellectual coherence and pretensions before reaching the political power necessary to kill off America.

If so, the Occupation movement shall hopefully reverse one historical pattern, and fail to end as it began: in camps.

Usually.   Sometimes, however it can cover ground damn fast.

From the source:

One Oakland police supervisor said that the participants first appeared to him as “freethinking activists” but have since devolved into something more sinister. He said it was “interesting for a group that claims to be against current civilization and rules to set up a far more oppressive society than our own.”

(Via Instapundit & American Glob.)

When these days have passed long ago

Will they read of us with sadness

For the seeds that we let grow?

– from “A Farewell to Kings“, by Neil Peart of Rush.

In discussing conservatism’s peculiar emphasis on local and state-level power, often under the rubric of “federalism”, a member of HBL termed it “this democracy theory”.  While this pernicious idea of “localism” is indeed usually advanced in democratic terms and in regard to (currently) democratic governments in the United States, in fact it finds its ultimate origins in a political context which is both anti-democratic *and* anti-liberty.  As those of you who follow me (@jimm_eh) or Yaron Brook (@ybrook) on Twitter may have seen, I recently wrote:

“The idea that one fights tyranny by localizing it, is a long-standing conservative absurdity.”

In fact, it has stood far longer than most modern conservatives would admit, if they knew — much longer, in fact, than America.  And when one shines the sharp light of ideological causality upon the context of ideas that underlie it, the roots of the absurdity are revealed to run deep.

The usual rationalization offered for localization, is that localized tyranny is “easier to fight”.  Unfortunately for conservatives, some of us know some history prior to 1750, and what lies back there ought to give them pause.  We have already had a period of history with multiple examples of highly localized and unconstrained authority, with a weak, nominally sovereign central government.  That system is known to historians as “the Dark and Middle Ages”, and its pre-eminent form of society was *feudalism*.  It was so easy to fight we only needed 1300 years or so to get out from underneath it.

Under feudalism, real power rested with the *local* lords and nobles, who were free to levy taxes and wage their own wars while the distant king was often ineffective outside his own holdings.  Notwithstanding the nonessential detail of localism, the Middle Ages were an important instance of a society based on the premise of the ruler (secular or Christian) as sovereign and individuals as *subject*, where the basic role of society and its rulers are as paternal caretakers of the medieval serfs who formed the large majority of the populations.

That is the principle against which THIS nation was born, in revolt.  And yet, it is exactly the sort of society one should expect to result from such ideas as these: individual men are base creatures, whose nature must be held in check by a paternal elite retaining moral sovereignty and acting in loco parentis, lest there be anarchy.  All of that is necessary, of course, because reason is too feeble to grasp moral truth; for that, ordinary individuals require religious faith, and the guidance of the epistemological elites of religion, without which we are all lost sheep — or wolves.

This should be no surprise, when one recalls that conservatism as we know it now was born in the remnants of clerical reaction against the Enlightenment, as it hid and regrouped in the epistemological space preserved for them by Immanuel Kant.  Modern conservatives’ emphasis on “prudence” and “tradition”, the hostility towards reason, intellectuality and “innovation”, its groundless insistence that there is no way to derive “ought” from “is”, the similarly arbitrary yet utterly strident insistence that without God, all is permitted — all of this is the ancient voice of Christian feudal cant, phrased in Enlightenment-ish terminology and still protected in its core by Immanuel Kant’s stick save against reason.  Put it all together — conservatism’s past as seen in history, and its future as shown by ideological causality — and the logic of the “localization” fetish snaps cleanly into place.

From dust to dust; feudalism and religious paternalism is conservative’s natural home *and* its ultimate destination, the magnetic north that the logic of its ideas inexorably seeks.  Localism, far from being a “theory of democracy”, is an expression of conservatives’ feudal origins, steeped in religious paternalism.  Even as it is couched in the modern terminology and settings of democratic government, localism’s goal is not to “fight” tyranny per se, but to localize and *protect*
 it from the constraint of the central government — regardless of whether said constraint is on behalf of individual rights.  (See “states’ rights” and its not-infrequent traveling companion, Civil War revisionism, for case studies of this fact.)  Conservatives will also insist that localism is set against “mob rule” or “anarchy” — but in their mouths, that terminology packages the incommensurable opposites of Leftist-style democracy and genuine American liberalism ( pre-Herbert Croly).  Those contemporaries of 1776 who immediately decried the radical new nation as anarchic, with “every man a sovereign”, were the logical ancestors of today’s “states’ rights” conservatives.

And, once again: you will find few, if any, modern conservatives who consciously know and pursue this (though they do exist; they tend to be most obvious at “First Things”).  Once again, it doesn’t matter.  The core of the movement is its center of mass, and its road goes where it logically goes, no matter the sincerity of individual travellers’ illusions about its end.  To the extent that any individual conservative actually does move us towards freedom, he does so despite his conservatism, not because of it — and so long as he does it, he is NOT a conservative.

” Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side—then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.”  –Ayn Rand, “Requiem for Man“

Before I begin, however, I would like to segue in via a slight detour first.  Rick’s graphic reminded me of the visual aids to a joke I told to a teacher many years ago, to express my distaste for the conventional political “spectrum”:

I first drew the conventional spectrum on the blackboard, with fascism to the “right” and communism to the “left”, and then drew a dollar sign above it to make a triangle like Rick’s.  I explained that in this view, I was neither Left nor Right, but “Top”.  I then said that I didn’t care whether my opponents were “left wing nuts” or “right wing nuts”, because “they are all wingnuts, and they are all Bottom feeders!” and then circled the “bottom” to collapse it into a *point* on the vertical line.  He got quite a laugh out of it, but I know he got my idea.  (That was good ol’ Dr. Schlotzhauer.  He is who I think of when I refer to “old guard liberals” whom I could respect — and like that style of American liberalism, he is likely no longer with us.)

OK, down to brass tacks.

First, let us ground our ideas.  The left-right model purports to be a “spectrum”, or what I in math-speak would refer to as a one-dimensional finite coordinate system.  The essence of this idea is that points on the spectrum are located and defined by a single variable (hence: one-dimensional), which varies from a minimum at one end to a maximum at the other.

To be useful and valid, a spectrum must first be grounded in reality by meeting certain criteria:

1.  The Highlander test (“There can be only one”.)  What is the **single** variable being measured?  E.g. for the electromagnetic spectrum, it is wavelength.
2.  That variable must be **exhaustive**, i.e. all possible real-world measurements of that variable must fall *somewhere* on your spectrum, and be present in all concretes that are considered as possessing that variable. For example, all electromagnetic wavelengths fall somewhere on the EM spectrum; what does not fall anywhere on that spectrum, is not EM.  If some “EM” isn’t on your spectrum, it isn’t EM — or you’re measuring something other than EM.
3.  If there are two endpoints designated as the “opposite extremes”, the spectrum is finite, with a definite scope.  The variable is at an absolute minimum (usually zero) at one end and a maximum (100%) at the other.  From not there, to all there.  The *visible* spectrum has two endpoints, two extremes, set by the human eye.
4.  More to the political and Objectivist point: the variable must be important, a fundamental.  An inessential variable has the same consequences for your spectrum that a definition-by-nonessentials has for your concepts, and for the same epistemological reasons: it detaches it, and anything that relies upon it, from reality.  Instead of clarifying, it blinds.

Now take a look at the left-right model. Remember, the conventional spectrum has fascism at one end and communism at the other.  I challenge anyone to identify the fundamental variable that moves from a minimum to a maximum between communism and fascism.

While I’m willing to entertain any attempts at answering that question, I hold that there is no answer — because there is no fundamental difference between communism and fascism, and therefore of the supposedly opposite “extreme left” and “extreme right”.  Observe the equal presence in the Occupy Wall Street movement of the purported opposites; “right-wing” Ron Paulites and Zero Hedge “libertarians” mingling with actual communists and Daily Kos style “liberals”… and with sprinklings of anti-Semitism evenly spread all around.  Observe the relative ease with which Jared Loughner and the IRS plane crasher mixed “leftist” and “rightist” talking pints together in their screeds, enough that each “side” insisted that these crazies belonged to the other “side” all, with equivalent semi-plausibility.

The reason for this is simple: they aren’t “opposites” at all.  The “opposites” are two flavors of one kind of idea.  Jared Loughner belongs to all of them, all of the Occupiers.  He is one with them, and they with each other.  They are a *single* extreme.  The irony is that the more intelligent in the mainstream are able to notice this, up to the point of speaking of these “extremists” going so far around the bend that they “come back from the opposite direction”, i.e. that the “spectrum” bends around in a circle.  Obviously, that’s not a valid spectrum — but I’ve not seen anyone take the next step to realizing what that “spectrum” really is: a TRAP.

I will now illustrate how such a trap is constructed.

Imagine the following:  Over on OEvolve, a new poster has come along who claims to have come up with an idea that will revolutionize eating.  They have a Food Spectrum, which will serve as the ultimate yardstick which anyone can use to navigate the universe of food choices.

When pressed for more, however, all this hypothetical poster has to say is that his spectrum is defined at one end by grapes, and at the other end by coconut cream pie.

So — what’s the variable?  Well, grapes are fruit, while pies are man-made, so that would establish the variable as degrees of artificiality.  That *is* an important variable, as OEvolve members know… but there’s more.

Is it exhaustive?  Well, that’s an easy “no”.  Where do fish fit in there — next to the pie?  Are mushrooms “middle of the road”?  Or how about beef jerky, or celery sticks?  Evidently, the world of food is far larger than is dreamt of in this tiny little “spectrum”; and there simply is no rhyme or reason to slotting in these items onto this “food spectrum.  If you hate celery sticks, you could just as easily pigeonhole celery sticks as “extreme pie” or “extreme grapes”, depending on which of those you favor over the other.  Or, if you are sufficiently intelligent to get this far but no farther, you might just dismiss celery sticks as being “beyond the pale” — i.e. not food at all.

The variable is finite, at least; natural grapes are near the minimum of artificiality, while a Pepperidge Farm coconut creme pie comes pretty close to “food-like substance”.

That brings us to the question of fundamentality.  That’s where this one really falls down.  Can you imagine the absolute chaos that would result in the entire world of food if this “spectrum” were the only yardstick people had when dealing with food questions?  Imagine starting from there, examining all the options of sugary foods available to you — oh wait, you noticed that too?  Sugar is a pretty big deal, isn’t it — but it isn’t even accounted for in this “spectrum” of food; it’s just universally present, “underneath” it all, an unquestioned, unaddressable, unchallengeable, inescapable constant.

Isn’t that a bit suspicious?  Assuming you were sufficiently active-minded to even notice this sleight-of-hand, one could reasonably suspect having been played by someone with a vested interest in trapping you into a world of sugar — while excluding fish, mushrooms, beef jerky and celery sticks from the realm of “food”.  Good luck trying to introduce a person long trapped in this “food spectrum” to the notion of grass-fed beef!  “Grass-fed what?  I can’t eat that, there’s almost no sugar in it — it isn’t even food!“

They can’t get here from there without rejecting everything they “know” and starting over!

It is clear that this spectrum is worse than useless for any purpose related to food.  Not only is it not “exhaustive”, but the variable, such as it is, is not really fundamental at all.  While there is a correspondence between processed foods and poor nutrition, there are plenty of naturally occurring “foods” that are worse than a Twinkie (poisonous mushrooms, for instance).  Other variables can be divined from the postulated “extremes” — color, for example, if we’re talking about Concord grapes — but again, that variable has a tenuous at best, and non-essential at worst, relationship to food.  Poisons come in just as wide a variety of colors.  The real variable, of course, is actual nutritional content — of which sugar levels are a dominant component.

I expect that, at a minimum, the paleos in the audience would have some fun trying to “extend” that system, but I hope that my point is made.

As used in mainstream political discussion, left-right is not merely an invalid spectrum; it is my contention that it was built that way, intentionally, by the academic Left (more on that choice of terminology in a minute), for the express purpose of “you can’t get there from here”.  It is intended to trap people into their little space of omnipresent statism.  In the meantime, liberty floats unmoored from its principle, now absent from the basic terms of mainstream political thought.  It drifts in fragments all over the false spectrum without rhyme or reason, while the flavors of statism, firmly at home, grows in all directions between its twin “extremes” of Leftism[*] and conservatism.  Thusly scattered, it registers to most people as an accidental, optional abstraction, making the process of identifying the *proper* political variable a far harder struggle than it should ever be.

Imagine what it does to those minds sufficiently active to try and make sense out of that hash.  Such will take one of three courses:

1. Accept the false alternative, surrender the principle, and pick whichever mixture of statism and liberty seems to cost him the fewest uncomfortable contradictions.  You’ll find the better “conservatives” here.
2. Abandon politics entirely, leaving it to the lesser minds that currently dominate the field and either don’t notice contradictions at all, or know how to exploit them.  This is all the highly rational yet compartmentalized people you know who parrot utter crap, when they can be bothered to think about politics at all.
3. Transcend it all and work to independently discover and define a proper spectrum for themselves — including the identification and abstraction of the correct principle (individual rights), and thusly the correct, exhaustive and fundamental variable (liberty).,  From there, it’s a quick step to measuring that variable, and defining a new spectrum, complete with the properly opposite extremes — tyranny versus capitalism.  That’s us.

In the meantime, while advocates of liberty are essentially homeless in this milieu, statists are at home *everywhere*.

Our job as advocates of liberty — one extreme of the *valid* political spectrum — is to help as many people as we can to reach #3 — not to “patch” a worse-than-nonfunctional product.

To put it in terms of Rick’s graphic: in my joke to Dr. Schlotzhauer, I did not “extend” the left-right model.  I *collapsed* it into the correct model, by *replacing* the non-essential left-right distinction with the essential “top-bottom” one: liberty versus tyranny.

I have long considered this topic to be a big deal.  I believe that we Objectivists *and* our allies in the Tea Party, such as they may be, must nail this down as a key part of fighting our single enemy intellectually — as well as solidifying the ground we stand on.  Individual rights simply cannot be “fit in” or otherwise expressed in terms established by the left-right model.  As nearly all of us encounter every day when we try to communicate the principles of liberty, we have to deprogram all kinds of crap out of a person’s intellectual way before we can even *introduce* them in any substantial way to our ideas.  Consider how off-base is so many people’s reaction to Atlas Shrugged, even among those who love the book!

When people are asking the wrong questions, the answers don’t matter!

In studying and integrating the flow of ideas in this culture, the role of the left-right false alternative as a trap is been one of the most prominent ones I see.  I believe that demolishing that “spectrum” outright is a key step in breaking the flow of ideas, the basic *terms* of political thought, from the academic heights dominated by the Left[*], into the culture at large (including most conservatives and many libertarians.)

[*] Some notes regarding my terminology:  I use the term “Left”, capitalized, as a proper name to designate that cultural-philosophical movement that most people associate with the political “left”, particularly socialists.  It designates what became of the Enlightenment post-Kant, i.e. a mutated, zombie anti-Enlightenment that has nothing to sustain it but the destruction of all remaining vestiges of that Enlightenment.  Like James Taggart coming to his dead end when he realized that he sought John Galt’s death at the price of his own, the Left will cease to exist should it achieve its goal.

The other side, which I rarely ever refer to as “rightist”, is conservatism, born of religious anti-Enlightenment reaction, the voice of the ancient feudal order speaking with pretensions to Enlightenment modernity, but ultimately distrusting it and logically seeking return to that benighted era before it ever existed.  Conservatism’s only hope is to be the last man standing after the Left destroys the Enlightenment for it.

Historically distinct yet philosophically commensurate, they form the twin fists of our single philosophical *and* political enemy, or the relatively insignificant “bottom” of the triangle opposite Objectivism.

So, when I write “left” or “right”, it is during those relatively few times where it is necessary for me to distinguish between the opposing “teams” of mainstream politics in terms compatible with mainstream commentary.  As such, considering that spectrum’s fundamental brokenness, its only remaining utility for me and for friends of liberty in general, is comparable to that of identifying team colors in a football game.  You know that they are playing against each other, and that there are two teams, so it’s useful for keeping track.  Beyond that, the colors tell you nothing about the fundamentals of how they play that game… or that it is the same game they are playing.

(edited to remove bits of an email that weren’t supposed to be here; apologies to Rick Kiessig.)

Diana rejects the notion implicit[*] in that phrasing, that “trumps” implies a conflict between these two rights — a notion which Objectivism flatly rejects, for reasons explained by her and by Dr. Leonard Leikoff in quotes supplied by Diana.  Taking the meaning of “trump” as “winning a conflict or fight”, I agree with her.  Rights cannot logically conflict, simply because there can be no such thing as the right to violate a right.

The key concepts that I use to understand and explain rights in practice, are as follows.

1.  Rights are logically self-limiting.

2.  In any context involving an apparent conflict of rights, the most fundamental principle involved is the ones that applies.  When this happens, the derivative rights become logically inapplicable; they cannot contradict or override their logical “parent”.

The first one is how I refute the notion that truly “absolute” freedom includes the freedom to murder etc. and that society must therefore curb, limit and “balance” this “freedom” in order for society to function.  This annoyingly common falsehood finds its root in the Kantian concept of “absolutism” as being of infinite extent and context-free, as exemplified in his well-known “principle” that lying is *always* wrong“.  That *always* is your tipoff, right there, as it means “regardless of any context”.  As happens in ethics classes every year, it isn’t hard to come up with examples of how such an “absolutist” viewpoint can be shown to result in profoundly anti-life consequences in the real world; from there it’s a short step to the declaration that truth, while a high value, is not an *absolute* one.  So, compromise and “Balance” are necessary, society must set the “boundaries”, e.g. the prohibition against murder.

As Diana puts it:  “Of all the errors in modern politics, the idea that people’s rights routinely conflict is probably the most pernicious of all. It opens the door to any and all rights violations — from OSHA to Medicare to the ADA to the Drug War — because when logic is removed from politics, it’s deuces wild.“ (Emphasis mine.)

A significant result of this confusion is the conflation of moral right with mere physical capacity.  Freedom, remember, is a moral principle sanction men’s freedom of action in a social context.  Physical capacity, on the other hand, consists of physical facts about living entities.  It does not follow from men’s physical capacity to murder, that they are morally “free” to do it.  Rather, the actions which men are free to do, are a subset of what they are capable of doing — a subset defined by the internal logic of individual rights: if a man’s right to life is grounded in his nature as a man, then ALL men possessed of that nature, have that right.

Society, therefore, cannot (and shouldn’t try) to “limit” or suppress the “freedom to murder” because there is no such thing.  It is not society that sets that boundary — it is the moral principle itself which does this, by its internal logic.  Individual rights are thusly logically self-limiting, and self-constraining.  Society’s role, properly constituted, is simply to recognize and enforce these logical, moral boundaries between men — not to author them.

The second concept pertains to the expression in morality of fundamentality.  Consider the following example:  a man takes his baseball bat and beats his neighbor to death.  The police arrest him and haul him into court.  His defense?  “It was MY baseball bat, your honor.  My property rights are absolute, so you have no right to interfere with what I choose to do with my property.”  The root error is the “always” view of absolutism, but what is the fallacy involved with this contradiction?  The stolen concept fallacy.

Recall that in any situation involving two or more people interacting, the possibility of the use of force arises.  The answer to that problem is the moral principle of the right to life, from which the prohibition against the initiation of the use of force directly arises.  As this baseball bat murder is a direct violation of the victims right to life, issues of property rights become logically inapplicable in such situations (they do not “lose a conflict”).   As with the “freedom to murder”, property rights simply don’t go that far.  Again, it is the internal logic involved which sets this “boundary”.  As the right of property is a derivative of and therefore logically dependent upon the right to life, it cannot conflict with, constrain, or otherwise override it’s logical “parent” — that road only goes one way: it is the fundamental right which necessitates and sets the context for the derivative right, which can only ever be a subset of the fundamental.

The derivatives themselves arise as applications of the fundamental in ever more special circumstances; property rights, for example, are the application of the right to life in a context involving the right of use and disposal of the finite physical objects and substances which are involved with human life.

All of this comes together in the understanding that there can be no such thing as the right to violate rights.  In Dr. Peikoff’s example of the shipwreck survivor who swims to an island only to have the owner tell him that he can’t come ashore, actual life is at stake.  It is not a violation of the island owner’s property rights if the survivor ignores him and comes ashore anyway — the survivor’s right to life does not override or “trump” the owner’s property rights.  Rather, the owner’s property rights are simply inapplicable in that situation; they are not involved at all.  To put that another way, the owner’s property rights do not include the right to kill the survivor by barring his access to the only safe place available.  The logic here is the same as in the example of the baseball bat murderer.

Only *one* right is applicable to any given situation; the most fundamental one directly involved.  Part of doing our moral due diligence lies in recognizing which rights and principles are involved, and which are logically inapplicable.  And most importantly, it is *logic* which makes this determination — not society, nor law, nor social convention.  Being derivatives of that logic in a properly constituted society, the role of these things is not to define, but only to recognize the logical boundaries of individual rights, and conform themselves thereto as closely as possible.

As the old saying goes, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”  In the same way that your arm length (as opposed to an external barrier) stops you from *physically* punching a man who is ten feet away, it is the logical boundaries of the right to life and liberty (as opposed to society and the law) which stop you from *morally* punching a man who is two feet away.

I therefore agree with Diana that the right to life does not “trump” any lesser rights, if “trump” is taken in the sense of “winning a fight or conflict”.  As Dr. Peikoff explained, ultimately it’s just the one right, the individual right to life, that is operating in any situation involving the moral interactions of men.

[*] A semantic quibble:  There is another meaning of “trump” as meaning “supersede according to the rules”, in the sense of an ace being “trumped” in a card game.  As I noted to Diana in a comment, if the original speaker meant this sense of the word, then the right to life does “trump” property rights, according to the “rules”, the logic, of the “game”.

There is another interesting angle to it, however, in which this accusation contains a grain of truth: it’s when the “atheist” in question is a Leftist.  The following is a comment I left on Ann Althouse’s recent post where she interviews the infamous “Skepchick” (of the now infamous complaint about being asked out on an elevator at 4AM).  My response is worded to her question “Why don’t atheists just move on?”, but is mainly aimed at the dozens of religionist commenters deploying the “atheism = faith” charge.

You are confusing rational atheists with the Leftist sort, like “Skepchick” (who, as Glenn Reynolds pointed out, seem to have used up all their skepticism on one topic).  They aren’t the same.

Rejecting all arbitrary claims as having no greater cognitive status than pig grunts, is the reasoning mind’s first and most crucial filter in distinguishing signal from noise.  This is what distinguishes rational atheism from “skeptical” atheism.

Skepchick doesn’t know that, of course; she wouldn’t be a Leftist if she did.  And that’s why she and other “skeptics” like her are the perfect foil for religionists to keep up this “atheism is a religion” canard; Leftists like “Skepchick” do in fact function very similar to religionists at the epistemological level, especially in regards to made-up, arbitrary beliefs.  That’s why they function so very well as the foil for this “atheism is just another faith” meme.  It’s like they were custom-fit for that role.  It’s no wonder that religionists act as if all atheists were skeptics like “Skepchick”;  the other sort would just ruin the whole game.

We do exist, and despite your strongest wishing, aided and abetted by the likes of Skepchick, our atheism is not a belief at all; it’s merely a negative, a reasoned rejection of the arbitrary.  No more than that.

We’ve just moved on, you see.  We have no dog in a fight of competing faiths.

– Ayn Rand, anticipating Art Uncut’s accusation that U2′s Bono isn’t sacrificing enough.

At Pajamas Media, there is an appalling post declaring that “the American experiment has failed”.  I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that it was authored by a conservative — and one that I have already fisked before, here at The New Clarion.

Once again, Matt Patterson gives us another striking example of ideological causality.  Here, Patterson demonstrates how conservatism plays off the Left in attacking their common enemy: America, and the Enlightenment ideals it concretizes.

Have you ever wondered why conservatives insist on ascribing the term “liberalism” to the Left, despite the clear contradictions between actual American liberalism and Leftism?  Why would they aid and abet the Left’s co-opting of liberalism?  The answer lies in conservatism’s essential anti-Americanism.  The Left seeks to discredit and destroy liberalism — i.e. Americanism –  from within, by passing off illiberal ideas in its name.  When these ideas have their logical, destructive results, the conservatives point to the wreckage and declare “thus fails liberalism.”

Either way, it is genuine liberalism — Americanism — that is discredited, diluted, and floated away as if it never existed.  This underlying, collusive synergy between the soi-disant “opposites” against their common target is itself a function of ideological causality; that is, most of the participants are unaware of the synergy.  (I don’t envy you the unpleasantness should you ever encounter one of the few Leftists or religionists who DO know it).  This is why Objectivists and all defenders of liberty must remember that at a certain, fundamental level, we are dealing with a single enemy.

I’m quite certain that Patterson would genuinely recoil from the accusation of moral treason that I direct against him in the comment I posted on his article, and which I reproduce below.  It doesn’t matter.  His terms of thought, his underlying premises, manifest themselves according to their own internal logic no matter what Patterson tells himself he believes…. and down that road he goes.

Ideological causality is a bear.

Ah, Matt Patterson strikes again!

Mr. Patterson: After fisking your last similarly themed post, I am disappointed to find that you are doubling down on your bet against America, and against mankind.

Before you can declare any experiment a success or a failure, you have to understand the nature of the experiment — what it is that is being tested or tried. Knowing that, you then have to make sure that your experiment is not tainted by the presence of outside, interfering contaminants that are not the subject of the test.

You fail on both counts, so egregiously that I once again find myself suspecting bad faith on your part, all the way down the line.

The “American experiment” was mankind’s first foray into a form of society based not on the accidents of war or ethnic congregations, but on an idea. This was unique in many respects; not only in being the first nation founded on the (then and still) radical principle of individual rights, but was also the first nation ever founded on a principle of any sort — i.e. the first nation founded on purpose.

This experiment was widely derided by the intellectuals and leaders of its day, in particular because the Founder’s contemporaries understood — rightly — that this notion of “individual rights” amounted, in their terms, to “every man a king” — i.e. that every individual was morally sovereign, free to discover for himself what he ought to do in the pursuit of his happiness, in living what was, for the first time in history, fully and legally recognized as his life.

This experiment was and is a wild success, dwarfing anything else in human history. The resultant explosion of human innovation, of success against mankind’s ancient enemies in nature, is the hockey stick that can’t be denied.

So what happened? Why, obviously to any honest, sentient being, the experiment became tainted. Increasingly, the nation of individual rights is being mutated into its own opposite. Like seeing a tribe of cannibals set up shop unopposed in downtown Manhattan, we are observing the rise in America of the ancient, primitive ideas that have dominated the rest of history, and against which America was a rebellious, defiant “NO!”: the idea that the individual is not morally sovereign, but morally subject — that there is something greater than him (society, race, king, fiefdom, God, tribe), to which his life and liberty are subordinate.

The expression of this anti-American idea, is the same as it’s been throughout history: out-of-control government, unconstrained by the rights of individuals and unsubordinated by any moral law. There is no excuse to be surprised at the results.

What is failing, is plainly not the American Experiment. That experiment is over, the results are in, and they are spectacular — so spectacular, that we still enjoy their results even as the experiment is being shut down. What is failing, is that shutdown.

When a magnificent structure, brilliantly designed and engineered and proven as such by many trials, becomes abandoned by its alleged protectors and becomes infested with termites dedicated to its destruction, by what infernal evasion is the resulting collapse attributed to a failure of the original design?

Why would you, Patterson, blithely tell us that it is “the American Experiment” that is failing, when it is plain that it has been corrupted by external factors?

There’s only one answer to that question: The ones screaming that the experiment has failed, have a vested interest in discrediting that experiment regardless — or perhaps because — of the successful results.

Errors of that size are not made innocently.

America stands as a shining validation of the Enlightenment, especially its core admiration for and reliance upon the moral virtue of reason, and its consequent political principles of individual moral sovereignty and liberty. The former is an affront to religious conservatism; the latter is an affront to the collectivist Left. Ideological causality dictates that no matter how much they hate each other, the summary result of the interplay between these so-called “opposites” is to move us *away* from what the great experiment has shown us; the twentieth century proves that prediction with frightening exactitude.

Should America fall, it will not be due to the failure of the American experiment. It will be due to its betrayal and murder at the hands of her conservative/Leftist enemies — as an ideologically dictated result of its success.

(Built from Randex links, OActivists posts and a Google search, with apologies to Tennyson.)

Panic to the Right of us

Panic to the Left of us.

Panic in the Front of us.

Squalling and floundered.

Storm’d at with bull and shit

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

– Neil Peart “Second Nature”, from the album “Hold your Fire”by Rush

Billy Beck is beating the drum over the murder of Jose Guerena in Arizona, and rightly so.  What I wish to highlight here is the horrible spectacle of mainstream minds raising the alarm over the increasingly violent intrusions of the government into our lives, even as their underlying ideologies move them inexorably towards that end-of-road.  To judge by the reaction around the blogosphere, both Left and Right are aghast and angry over Guerena’s death — but I will show how, in fact, both “sides” are, at root, complicit in it.

For conservatism, it is the dominant author of drug prohibition, the aegis under which the police have been so militarized in capacity and discretion — but without any of the military’s discipline or restraint.  It is conservatism that, at root, sanctions drug prohibition as a perfectly logical expression of its premise that individual human beings cannot be trusted to be moral, and that society exists in order to constrain individuals and their vices.  There exists plenty of evidence in this regard, which in the interests of brevity I leave to the reader to dig up; I suggest the First Things blog, and “The Conservative Mind” by Russell Kirk as starting points.

How about the Left, then?  The simpletons who operate in the box of conventional politics would, in expectations that Lefties oppose drug prohibition and (notwithstanding Wisconsin) are usually at odds with police, point to this article at the Daily Kos as evidence of the Left’s reaction to Guerena’s murder.

There is plenty of anger there, and overall the article is spot-on in many of its questions.  But alas, note these qualifiers sprinkled like cyanide dust throughout it, undercutting its intended message and reminding us of the internal logic of Leftism:

Is the life of one Mexican-American worth less than the lives of others?

Already, the standard Leftist re-framing of the atrocity in terms of their overarching political goals — in this case, by frightening Mexican-Americans.  Poisoning the well already!  It would appear that, in “skywriter”‘s eyes and those of all the Daily Kos authors, the life of this particular American was worth more than that of this other American.

If that were true, I’d be siding with the cops but it is not.

Really, now?  “skywriter” is referring to whether Guerena had begun shooting first.  Note the context of that statement in the facts that “skywriter” himself presents right there in his article: the residents of the home had good reason to believe that they were about to be invaded, and Guerena had his wife and child to defend against this threat — but somehow, the moment he actually DOES this, “skywriter” comes down in favor of the cops.  These facts, as they are, make it clear that Guerena would have been entirely justified in opening fire, regardless of the fact that they were cops.

But not for “skywriter”.  Again, the underlying logic of Leftism manifests itself.  Apparently, “skywriter” is bothered much less by the home invasion etc. in the name of the conservatives’ drug war, than he is by the prospect of Guerena refusing to be a victim, in which case he’d be “siding with the cops“. No, No, Jose, you are a “Mexican American”, you are supposed to be a victim! Individuals have no right to fight against the government, that’s what voting is for!

So once again, who thinks that Lefties are inherently “anti-cop”, or opposed to “law and order”?  Look past those trees, there’s quite a forest back there folks.  They are “anti-cop” when it suits their deeper fundamentals, and “pro cop” likewise.  A rather credulous Leftie I know was defending the cops in much the same way that conservatives often do when there’s a police shooting — because Scott had a gun, of course, and that should never be allowed.  Poof, there goes “anti-cop”.  Priorities, you know.  I wasn’t the least bit surprised. No one should be.

Why is there two levels of justice in the United States? One for the wealthy and another for everyone else? Would SWAT have gunned down a man in a wealthy neighborhood?

Why does there continue to be particular disrespect for people of color by law enforcement, 40 years after civil rights legislation became the law of the land?

More well poisoning, this time against “the wealthy” (whoever they are) and once again, the injection of race.  And again, the implication that “skywriter” is concerned only with the rights of certain special classes, not of individual human beings as such.

Sadly, these manifestations undercut and destroy what would otherwise have been evidence that there might still be a salvageable Leftist in the world.

Individuals on both Left and “Right” are being rightfully alarmed about the rising manifestations of an increasingly belligerent and unconstrained government power, while carefully failing to ask the deeper questions which will lead them to realize how they themselves are, in accordance with the inexorable logic of their ideas, moving us towards it.  Paraphrasing Neal Peart: They fight the fire, while they’re feeding the flames.

Ultimately, nothing short of declaring oneself in favor of the principle of individual rights, completely and absolutely, can truly stop one from contributing to the problem.  There is no logical way to do this while remaining conservative, or Leftist in any respect whatsoever.  Period.

And again: I don’t care how sincerely any individual conservative or Leftist abhors this particular result of their ideology (and conveniently, have each other to blame); as sincerely as you may be screaming “but I didn’t mean THIS!”, you are not absolved. At a minimum, Jose Guerena’s blood (as well as those of many others) is on the hands of ALL those who support drug prohibition…. but we all know that the bloody trail of fingerprints leads far deeper, uphill on the road to authoritarian paternalism and its roots common to both conservatism and Leftism.

6/5 Edited to clear up an ambiguity regarding conservatives’ reaction to the Erik Scott case.

6/18 Edited to add the lyrics.

In my previous writings on the topic of ideological causality, I have emphasized the “end of road” of an idea and/or of ideologies, as determined not by one’s intentions, but by the logic and flow of these ideas.  Even a completely passive-minded individual does not sit still; he will still drift slowly, “downhill”, towards its destination.

Today, I will sketch out the flow of ideas with a “triangle”, going both ways along the conservative road.  I start with an article by one conservative and work backwards (or “uphill”) to its root premises — and then logically back “downhill” to another article, by another conservative, which is superficially unrelated, but fundamentally trapped within the same premises.

The first article is by Walter Russell Mead (via Instapundit), which examines the idea of California as a “failed state” in light of the recent Supreme Court decision mandating a mass release of prisoners.  The article has many trenchant observations, enmired in an utterly absurd thesis: that the problem with California is that it is too diverse, due to being too large, and that the solution is to “break it up”:

“The only hope I can see is to break it up.  California’s core problem is that it has outgrown the constitutional model we have for it.  California is too populous, too diverse, too complicated to flourish as a single state.  Unless we carve this beast into something like five more compact and manageable states, Californians will never have decent representative government at an affordable price.”

This is an expression of a rather dumb idea, sometimes expressed by Leftists but much more prevalent among conservatives: the notion that a large, diverse population is somehow more difficult to govern than is a smaller and/or culturally homogeneous one, and if large enough becomes “ungovernable”.  As any Objectivist knows (and this one even has pictures), the primary driver of government complexity is its involvement with an ever-increasing breadth of issues.  A sharp divergence or disagreement among the populace over a particular issue need not concern a government that is uninvolved with it; it’s only concern is to ensure that nobody comes to blows over it.  It is only the octopodian regulatory state, with its tentacles extending anywhere they please into private matters, which finds itself dealing with so many contradictory and conflicting demands.  Faced with this inherent hostility of statism (including the democratic form) to individual diversity, Mead’s answer is not to reject it, but simply to treat it as a given and balkanize it — to break up large states into small fiefdoms of culturally (if not racially) more homogeneous communities.

The second article is this one by Matt Patterson at Pajamas Media.  Patterson echoes a different idea which has always been visible amongst conservatives, but is very popular at the moment due to the recent release of the book “The Great Stagnation” by Tyler Cowen.  The thesis of the book is that the prosperity that mankind has enjoyed since the early 19th Century has less to do with any sort of effort of the mind (least of all that of a small group of men who “snatched a nation from the jaws of history at the last possible moment”, as Leonard Peikoff put it) than it does with “low hanging fruit”, i.e. good luck.  As Patterson writes:

“In his penetrating new book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen warns that this [the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution] may have been a temporary and anomalous phenomenon. Cowen calls the period from roughly the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries the era of “low hanging fruit.” According to Cowen, technological advances in this period were relatively easy to produce and exploit, resulting in a staggering explosion of living standards.” (Emphasis mine.)

Patterson then leaps from there to the edge of Luddism, but the greatest sin is Cowen’s; he sweeps aside the explosion of productive genius and innovation over the last two hundred years as mere “low hanging fruit”.  (Why were “advances in this period” so “relatively easy to produce and exploit”?  What took us so long?  What was so special about that period as compared to the ones before — and the ones to come?)

You can probably already detect one common premise between Mead and Cowen/Patterson:  the premise that the effort and results of man’s mind — ideas — is only a minor input into the course of history, if it makes a difference at all.  Mead and Cowen/Patterson all operate on the premise that the true ruler of men’s lives is something beyond their control.  Where Mead’s grasp of government, in the context of his solution, stops at the concrete-bound notion of physical size, Cowen and Patterson turn blind eyes to the brilliant burst of human innovation and consequent prosperity which was the Industrial Revolution, and mutter in the pleasant but fading warmth: “Boy, wasn’t that something?  Too bad it won’t last.”

Let us follow ideological causality — first uphill, than down — to discover in greater detail how these two conservative viewpoints are causally related.

Mead:  California fails because it’s too big to be a single state.

This follows from:  the conservative idea that to fight tyranny is to localize it, i.e. that collectivism is OK when it’s small, homogenous and local. See “states’ rights” and the emphasis on decentralization (rather than abolition) of government power.

This follows from: conservatism’s fundamentally primitivist approach to political organization.  Conservatives tend to idealize certain aspects of primitive society, favoring those historical examples involving small villages and towns, with a strong, local and paternal moral authority.  In the West, these examples are found prior to the Enlightenment, and are called “feudalism”. (I didn’t say “fiefdoms” above, without reason.)

This follows from: The malevolent universe premise together with the “innately depraved” view of mankind.  This combination sanctioned and guided the foundations of feudal society — first, as people banded together to swear allegiance to powerful warlords in return for their protection from other such warlords and from the nasty, brutish world beyond the walls which they were helpless to deal with or comprehend — and in the view of these people by their nobler “betters” as being little better than animals, baseborn, morally untrustworthy and in need of moral guidance, containment and husbandry by these lords, in the name of God.

This follows from: the dominance of the Christian Augustinian metaphysics in core conservatism.

Now we are at the source.  Now let’s go back downhill, following the same logical steps, but to a different expression of the same core ideas.

Starting from: Augustinian Christian metaphysics

Which holds:  The malevolent universe premise, which holds that misery and failure is mankind’s normal condition, due to his (sinful, fallen) nature.

Which leads to:  The view that happiness or enjoyment in this world is the exception, not the norm, and is therefore at odds somehow with man’s nature — it is an aberration, a deviation, a temporary anomaly

Which leads to:  The view that such deviations, being abnormal, must be a function of external causes outside our control: also known as “luck” (or God)

Which leads to:  the expectation that whatever those inscrutable, causeless forces are, we have no reason to expect that they won’t causelessly reverse themselves tomorrow

Which leads to Cowen:  boy, haven’t we been lucky for two centuries!

And that leaves Patterson:  “That luck has got to run out soon.”

And there you have a demonstration of just how locked into a certain ideological path both of these men are — how the logical causality of their ideas both blinds them to its existence, and traps them in thrall to it.  This is just a rough sketch, of course; it would take more time and effort than is suitable for a mere blog post to document in greater resolution.  But it is eminently doable.  I leave to the reader the exercise of noting the multiple intersections between these two paths, filling in the Conservative Triangle in which these men are trapped.

One example: the “luck” worldview, also known as (divine) “providence”, is pivotal to the feudal culture — and the rise of the secular Enlightenment, with its antithetical reliance on Aristotelian causation, is the cause of its demise.

One can even “color outside the lines” and observe how unremarkable the conservative fetishization of the “primitivist approach to political organization” would appear when found along a Leftist road.

Understanding ideological causality is the beginning of the process to understand and bring principled comprehension to the flow of history and of human culture — and the human condition.  It works for cultures and nations, as well as it does for a single person.  There is so much more depth to this process of detection, of following not only the logical lines of thought that occur to us today when examining these ideas, but also of tracing the lines of thought that DID occur in history, as evidenced in the writings and actions of men throughout history.

While there are a few Leftists who are aware of it (the modern-day rank and file is too intellectually destroyed to notice), there are no conservatives who know it; conservatism’s fundamental mistrust of reason forces them to reject a priori any consideration of its true power.  A conservative who is truly aware of ideological causality as being anything more than a minor driver of men and of history, ceases to be a conservative.  When confronted with it, they tend to get extremely and overtly irrational, essentially unhinged, and hostile.  I cite as evidence the infamous Whittaker Chambers hatchet job, and multiple recent equivalents.  It’s almost amusing to watch; when confronted with Ayn Rand, many conservatives cast about for the nearest hyperbole that’s handy, and whip it at us; often, these are completely arbitrary assertions of ideological causality — “A.R’s ideas will lead to gas chambers/universal murder/Justin Beiber” or some such.   But once that’s done, they’ve shot their wad.  Past that point, to add apparent substance to their loony claims, they would have to fabricate the kind of causality I outline here, and to do that they would have to grasp said causality.  For a conservative, there be dragons.

While the following quote speaks more to Cowen rather than Mead, I close with it in rejection of their common distrust of ideas — and consequent evasion of their power.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”  — Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love” (via Wikiquote)

His opening salvo:  Neoconservatism Unmasked

The attempted rebuttal by Patrick Deneen:  The American Roots of Neoconservatism

C.B.T. responds to Deneen with a tripartite response:

On Patrick Deneen’s Intellectual Method

On Deneen’s argument, or the lack thereof

Defining Americanism

All of the essays are good reads (there are others by Damon Linker and Douglas Rasmussen).

What prompted me to post about this, however, was this post and this one by Patrick Lawler, at one of the more intellectual-seeming conservatives sites, First Things.  In it, Lawler doth protest too much, shrilly insisting that Leftists, neo-cons etc. are not FASCISTS (just like that, caps and all.)  With it juxtaposed against Deneen’s essay, I was struck by two things:

1.  Deneen’s and Lawler’s posts are differentiated by length, and little else.  Both avoid taking ideas seriously, let alone Thompson’s — while expending considerable energy on topics of their own injection or invention.

They confirm my claim that when the discussion is about ideas, conservatives are simply out of their league.  With rare exceptions, they can’t handle philosophy at all, and that’s when they are emotionally on an even keel – and they never are when faced with the threat posed by Ayn Rand’s ideas.

Hell, even historical Americanism freaks them out enough to make it worth their time to bury it by way of misrepresentation-by-nonessentials, as Deneen does.  But when push comes to shove, all they have is “localism” and the pining for the “return” of a movement of individuals motivated by “something greater than themselves” (in all willful ignorance of the last century’s ideological history).

Seriously, is this the best they can do?  They absolutely, positively cannot avoid straw men, emotionally loaded language and other assorted intellectual malfeasance when faced with ideas.  Even the Left outclasses them at this level.  The only question is whether there even exists a conservative who could give CBT a good scare.  I am growing more and more convinced that conservatives per se are not serious intellectual adversaries, so much as merely being in the way.

2.  It’s worth reading all the above material with my “Road to Hell” analogy in mind.  Lawler in particular is freaked out by the idea that Thompson supposedly equated neoconservatism and fascism.  However, note what Thompson actually wrote in his book:

“The neocons are not fascists, but I do argue they share some common features with fascism.

…

In sum, I worry that the neocons are paving the road to a kind of soft despotism that might even lead one day to a type of fascism.”

(CBT quote via Alfred Centauri in a comment on the first Lawler post.)

While neoconservatism and the literal fascists may be travelling different roads, their ultimate destination (as determined by their common root premise) is the same.  All that differs is the scenery — and as the destination is approached, not even that.  (That, by the way, is why the arguments over whether such as Jared Loughner  or the Texas IRS plane crasher were “left” or “right” wing, are such a joke; the “scenery” of their writings would have been unremarkable in any of the following: Free Republic, Democratic Underground, the commenters at Zero Hedge, or the groupies of Lyndon Larouche and Ron Paul.)

Lawler and Deneen, who ultimately do not give ideas the respect they deserve, refuse to grasp this — and for good reason: they don’t want to discover that they could have known what would result from their ideas, for such knowledge would make them morally responsible for their own ideas — eliminating the moral cover of their professed intentions.  (That, of course, doesn’t stop them from making grandiose, unsubstantiated claims about where Objectivist/Enlightenment ideas will supposedly lead, but let them — I want people exposed to the concept.)

They also fear the reverse: that looking back up the road would reveal that Americanism, far from being compatible with conservatism of any -eo prefix, was indeed the result of the Enlightenment they and the Left so loathe – while conservatism traces its origins to America’s original enemies: monarchy and the brutal religious feudalism of the pre-Enlightenment.

(Originally found via Diana Hsieh.)