“In this, the congressman differs from other GOP contenders for the White House and, for that matter, from most politicians, period. Your average pol might rail against the intrusion of government into the private lives of its citizens, then turn right around and advocate a law regulating what a gay man does in his bedroom–and see no contradiction. [Very true] Paul is too intellectually honest for that.” [Mr. Pitts, you're starting to make Paul look really good]

“Intellectual honesty is a good thing, if only because it can lead you to reconsider a faulty premise.(If only? It has no other value?) But in Paul’s take on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he doubles down on the bad premise instead.” [Here Pitts confuses government enforced segregation with private prejudice and treats them as equal malfactors which of course they're not. Here the 'bad premise' is private prejudice.]

“In other words, forcing a restaurant to take down a Whites Only sign infringed the rights of the restaurant owner.[Yes, it did] A similar argument was made by segregationists in 1964–and by slave owners in the 1850s.” [Not actually. Slavery and the Jim Crow laws were enforced by local and state governments and should have been repealed. Had they been repealed sooner, market forces would have eroded the private prejudices even sooner than history shows.]

“Can government be overlarge, overbearing, overwhelming, overrestrictive, overintrusive? Of course. And where it is those things, it is the right–and duty–of the electorate to pare it back.” [Obviously Mr. Pitts doesn't think today's government is any of those things because the Tea Party which he opposes, exists to pare it back. Notice too that he doesn't object to the government being restrictive or intrusive, just overly so. He doesn't understand that he is actually saying don't overchain your slaves but chains are ok. But what would happen if the chains were removed completely?]

“On the other hand,unless you enjoy salmonella in your food and lead in your paint, unless you think it’s OK that your doctor has no medical degree and your lawyer no licence, unless you’re fine with breathing sooty air and drinking tainted water, and unless you really think a black woman in Mississippi, locked out of public places by threat of violence and force of law, should have been required to wait on market forces to rescue her, you must regard Paul’s moral imbecility with a certain awe.” [This is a partial rewrite of history. According to Pitts we were walking over bodies in the streets who died from salmonella, lead, tainted water and air and doctors and lawyers who didn't have government permissions to practice until the caring, loving government came along to save us all. Utter nonsense.]

[I have noticed that when statists mentalities are on the brink of achieving or losing their goals, they become more bold in the accuracy with which they identify their true goals and ideals.]

“Heaven help us if the intellectual rigidity he symbolizes is really the only alternative to the intellectual malleability of so many of his colleagues.” [Wow! An open admission that intellectual malleability is the ideal, the norm to be achieved and admired. I will only add that Mr. Pitts is to be admired for his cognitive precision in identifying the intellectual status of Paul's Republican colleagues.]

With pundits like Mr. Pitts bombarding the public with ideas like this it is no wonder that the public has no principled leaders. My hope is that there are principled leaders out there taking notes on the election campaigns and deciding whether the public is ready for principled leadership. I think a growing number are. I just don’t know how big that number needs to be to turn this country around. Perhaps 2012 will give us a clearer picture.

“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.

1. Obama loses election
2. Republicans take Senate and add to House
3. ObamaCare repealed
4. Dodd/Frank repealed
5. Sarbanes/Oxley repealed
6. Departments of Education and Energy to be phased out/privatized
7. Fannie Mae,  Freddie Mac and TSA to be privatized
8. Community Re-investment Act repealed
9. Federal Reserve mandate to provide full employment repealed
10. All bureaucracies to be examined for initiating force thus violating rights
11. Eric Holder under investigation for crime of aiding and abetting public enemies (drug cartels) by arming them against american citizens
12. George Soros under investigation for ties to election fraud activities. 
13. (Bonus headlines)

•  NYT and WAPO losing more readers
• MSNBC bought by conservative publisher and revamped or shut down due to lack of viewers
• Well that’s it for this year’s hopeful headlines. You can add yours in the comments of course.

Their primary impetus seems to be that someone read Marx and told them that the rich are taking their wealth from the rest of us. This was untrue in the 19th century when it was written (excepting government-backed monopolies which were anti-capitalist, anyway). And it was a baffling confusion of capitalism and the feudal system. But, more to the point, it is patently ridiculous in this day and age. The problem is, the writings that these people are ultimately basing their complaints on predate the modern age of the welfare state and its progressive tax systems.

Don’t get me wrong – we need to abolish both as the immoral and impractical monsters that they are. But, since they are here, they do make the cookie-cutter Marxist complaints of OWS a bit of a poor fit. Not only don’t the rich steal their wealth from the rest of us, but they pay the largest share of the taxes in this country, by a wide margin. Both in terms of percentage of their income, and in absolute terms. Even accounting for people like Warren Buffet.

But let’s back up for a minute. Theirs is, on a much more fundamental level, a silly idea.

Not just wrong, but silly and childish, because anyone whose knowledge of economics consists of more than what-some-guy-who-once-read-Marx-told-them knows that wealth is something that is created. Created by men, that is, and not popped into existence in a magical pie that is simply “out there” for no reason which then gets “distributed” through some Byzantine process.

Wait, magical pie? Am I the one being silly? Then, what pray tell do they mean by their claims of “unjust distribution?”

As Thomas Sowell pointed out many years ago, a great many Leftists confuse the statistical term of “distribution;” i.e. the statistical frequency of occurance, such as that of wealth – with the other definitions of “distribution.” Specifically, the ones in which someone or something is actually doleing out quantities, as in a soup kitchen. This definitional error deliberate obfuscation of the English language is responsible for the Leftist call for “redistribution.” If wealth isn’t being created, earned, and exchanged, as it is in the real world, but rather “distributed,” (as if from a Magical Space Pie) then they can simply “re-distribute” it if they don’t like the outcome.

But of course this is the real world, and wealth is created, earned, and exchanged. The wealthy, in fact, generate wealth where there wasn’t any before. (excepting, of course, cheats, thieves, and lobbyists) It is not “distributed,” unless you are using the statistical definition. And the only way that the concept of “redistribution” makes any sense at all is if one believes in the Magic Space Pie (MSP) theory of economics.

There are other implications to the MSP theory, as well. For instance, Occupy Wall Street and their ideological forefather Marx would have you believe that if any given capitalist did not exist, then the MSP would have given the capitalist’s wealth (“distributed” it) to the poor, who would thus be better off.

The opposite is true: if that capitalist didn’t exist, his wealth wouldn’t either – or at least the vast majority of it wouldn’t have ever been generated. This is because that wealth didn’t come from a Pie. It came from the capitalist. If he were gone, the poor would be infinitely worse off, as without that wealth, there would be that many less jobs, and that much less competition for labor, so their wages would be lower, and their consumer goods more expensive or simply nonexistent. And, as I said before, the higher share of taxes that our hypothetical capitalist paid wouldn’t exist either, leaving those poor with an even worse government debt and tax burden.

And if you think I’m exaggerating, just look at their signs and stated grievances. For many of them, it is probably worse than even the MSP theory. All they know is that there are some people out there that have money, and other people that don’t. They don’t like this, and think there should be a forcible transfer.

That’s it.

There’s no concept whatsoever of who made that money. Just that, with no investigation into whether anyone deserves the money they have or not – whether they earned it, created it, stole it, or had the Magic Space Pie “distribute” it to them, OWS protestors are willing to say that it isn’t “fair” that some people have more of it than others. On stark, naked envy alone.

In truth, if their goal was to make things more *fair* in this country in terms of wealth and taxes, it would involve decreasing the taxes on the richest 1%, who pay a higher percentage for no reason other than being more productive, and *increasing* them on the roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the population who don’t pay anything at all.

So they have it exactly backwards.

Ah, but what about the fact that the government did funnel money into AIG, Solyndra, the auto bailouts, and so on? Isn’t this an example of the rich getting rich by stealing their money?

Why, yes. In fact, it is.

But notice what I said, there: “The government did funnel money.” The government takes massive amounts of wealth and gives it out as bailouts. So these geniuses protest Wall Street. Not the government, who actually did it. The most horrendously anti-capitalist acts of Corporatist Cronyism in recent history are perpetrated, and their solution is to abolish capitalism; to give that same government more power and demand that it engage in more “redistribution.”

They’re so caught up in their erroneous worldview that they simply must blame corporations, and can’t blame the government, even though the government is painfully, obviously, at fault.

Then again, these are people whose economic theories essentially rely on Magical Pies. They’re going to be blind to a great many things, because their entire world view is full of dangerous nonsense. And not just any nonsense: self-reinforcing nonsense.

Ah, but that is a topic for another day.

What few people consider about a system based on deductions is the flip side of the coin. For every behavior that the government sees fit to “encourage” with deductions, it is, by definition, penalizing other behaviors which do not carry deductions. By becoming involved in the topic at all, a Pandora’s Box is opened, from which the government becomes the moral police of the land, issuing citations and boons to all for practicing “correct” and “incorrect” behaviors.

That alone should merit the ire of every red-blooded American. Ours is supposed to be the land of the free, not the land of Children and Subjects, nannied by the all-knowing State, which has both the wisdom and moral authority to tell us what is best for us. But, it gets worse.

A system of deductions is infinitely corrupting, creating massive lobby systems and ultimately providing the most rewards to those people who are best at gaming the system, especially the ones that can do so in dishonest ways. (This is what is generally meant by the popular term, “loopholes”) Furthermore, this system causes conflicts that are unnecessary to a free society, as people are pitted against each other in never-ending debates about which behaviors to reward and punish. People eternally complain about the problem of “corruption” caused by lobbyists, but few seem to recognize that the root of this problem is a government which is empowered to grant favors (i.e. deductions) in the first place. If the government did not have the power to favor one company over another with deductions, nobody would have any reason to hire lobbyists to curry such favors. (There is also an important lesson to be learned about regulation, here…)

What’s more, our tax code causes compound problems and countless unintended consequences. To take one example, by allowing health insurance to be deducted through employers, we’ve made it impossible to get affordable health insurance without working for someone. This has caused distortions in both the job market and the health care market, which have, themselves, lead to further government “solutions,” which have then caused ever-multiplying problems of their own.

And let us not forget the nightmare our system makes for us every April, when we have to file tax returns. Not only is this a headache for individual filers, it is a massive expense as both business and the IRS have to employ legions of accountants to manage, enforce, or comply with our bloated tax code. This money serves no productive purpose whatsoever; it is simply millions of dollars gone from our economy.

Some have argued – convincingly, I will concede – that any flat tax system implementation would likely be exploited to serve as a tax increase. But even supposing this were true, I believe that the moral victory of giving the government even one less vector to act as our Master is well worth any such consequence. And the economic benefits of removing all of the anti-market behaviors encouraged by the tax code, as well as removing many costs of compliance, may serve to offset some of the burden a tax raise would impose.

Besides, I think that we are well past the point of avoiding tax increases. The debt crisis may be mathematically impossible to solve without massive spending cuts, but I don’t believe it is realistic to say that, in the current political climate, tax increases of some kind aren’t anything other than inevitable. Consider, also, the fact that our government has shown that it is willing to engage in near-Weimar-levels of inflation. There are worse things than a tax increase.

Indeed, as an argument against a flat tax, the threat of a tax increase loses much of its potency in the dire context of today’s politics.

It’s high time we threw out the whole tax code and made it illegal for the government to use the tax system to punish or reward peoples’ private behaviors. Preferably in such a way as to lower taxes across the board, but especially in a way that ends the injustice and class warfare of the so-called “progressive” tax system.

It wouldn’t fix every problem (especially without massive budget cuts), or even every rights-violating immorality of our government and tax system (i.e. entitlements), but it would be a start.

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.

And another point of their ignorance is: what is the distinguishing attribute of the 1% who aren’t innocent? That 1% isn’t the biggest 1%. It isn’t the richest. It’s the group that are in bed with the government; that use government power rather than free market acumen to gain their wealth.

This, then, leads to the third question they are blind to: who is ultimately to blame for this? When a man with a gun and a man with money make a deal, who is wearing the pants?

And, then, one last question I’d like to highlight, that goes unasked by OWS: Who put that man with the gun in power? They won’t ask this because it is them. THEY put a government in power that meddles in the free market. They got exactly what they asked for; they’re just ignorant of the implications of what they’d asked for. And now they’re screaming for more. MORE! MORE OF THE SAME!

– 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.

2. A great idea.

3. The Taranto Principle.

4. The Obama administration plumbs new depths in divisiveness using the First Lady as an attack dog.

5. The last time I posted about EMP, the idea was debunked in comments. But if it is really impossible, a lot of people have not heard the news.

6. Alexander Marriott shows how to detect fake internet quotes.

2. President Robespierre.

3. The solutions are out there.

4. Obama’s political skills are lacking.

5. Why does Peter Schiff even bother trying to reason with these people?

6. California’s economic suicide. I’m seriously think it’s time to move…

We get an awful lot of spam comments here. They make me laugh because they are written as if english were a spammer’s second language, or maybe third.

“I am learning good informations from your prolific writings. I love this blog!”

“This is being so deep! I must tell all the peoples about your blog!”

Gotta love it.

UPDATE: Got this one today, October 22, 2011:

I am really satisfied with this posting that you have given us. This is really a stupendous work done by you. Thank you and looking for more posts

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.)

Unlike the Tea Party, which was a spontaneous reaction to the Democrats’ frightening power grabs, OWS (or the Flea Party) is a calculated movement orchestrated by the leadership on the left. An ad in Craig’s List offered people between $350-$650 a week to protest. Behind the ads is the Working Families Party, which is tied to ACORN. The money for the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” comes from George Soros, among others.

So there is something happening here. But what exactly? Here is my explanation, as informed by my understanding of Austrian economics.

The mixed economy is a combination of freedom and controls. It is freedom “regulated” by the state, but the controls are not yet dictatorship. All the economic problems in a mixed economy come from the state intervening in the free market. Statist propapaganda is aimed at hiding the state’s role in our problems, and keeping the blame on freedom. They do this by demonizing the rich.

Ludwig von Mises explained why the mixed economy leads to ever greater government control, and eventually to dictatorship. Don Lavoie (PDF) summarizes the Mises Interventionist Thesis:

Attempts to violently manipulate the outcomes of [the market] process lead to reactions that the intervener can neither specifically predict nor effectively prevent. Efforts to make the initial intervention work as designed must take the form of ever-wider and more obtrusive interventions, which are in further conflict with the workings of the market mechanism. In the end the interventionists must either extend their activities to the point where the process has been completely sabotaged or they must abandon their quest to control the market. Any “middle way” between the extremes may, of course, be advocated but would consist in a series of haphazard shocks to the system….

We are in an economic crisis created entirely by state intervention in the economy, through onerous regulations, taxes and misallocation of capital caused by the Federal Reserve. Corporate greed and corruption cannot affect an entire economy; only the government can do that. I believe we are at a pivotal moment: will we begin to repeal the intervention or intervene even more and plunge toward total state control?

Me, I’m not optimistic. The chances are our next president will be Mitt Romney, a Rockefeller Republican. He won’t repeal a damned thing. ObamaCare will be cemented into place and we will continue down the road to serfdom. We might not run to the abyss of dictatorship as fast as the Democrats want, but we’ll get there.

As Mises himself wrote,

It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.

With nothing but nihilists on the left and fools on the right, there is little hope.

And that’s what’s happening here.

The EPA is regulating industry to death.

First, check out this video promoting a new book from Encounter.

Second, read about the EPA violating property rights in the name of protecting “wetlands.”

Third, read how the EPA will shut down 28 gigawatts of energy.

Of course, to the MSM anyone who sounds off about these power grabs is a nutty extremist and probably a racist. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

I would say that if you’re not afraid, you’re either a leftist or you’re not paying attention.

So why don’t these rich leftists start a campaign to get the wealthy to volunteer to give more money to the federal government? They don’t need to wait for the state to confiscate it.

They don’t do it, I believe, because there is something more fundamental than money at stake here. They want state control of the individual. This is not about more or less money in the US treasury, it’s about liberty vs. power.

Should the individual be in control of his own life for his own selfish ends? Or should the state force the individual to sacrifice for the collective?

The smarmy rich liberal feels uncomfortable without chains tying him down. It’s too bad his opposition to freedom will have us all in fetters.