The New Ruling Class
by Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter on September 29, 2009
Over 230 years ago our Founding Fathers created a concept of freedom and individual liberty unique in recorded history. At its core was a concept of multiple centers of authority, notably a federal system with certain enumerated powers with the national government divided into three separate branches and the remaining power left to the individual states.
Whether the drafters of our Constitution were Federalists or Jeffersonian Republicans, the compromise framework that emerged from their deliberations had at its center the preservation of individual liberty from rulers whose claim to power was based on royalty, nobility, or birthright.
From our origins as a fledgling state set in a substantially undeveloped continent with a tiny population, the engine that has been responsible for our growth into the greatest wealth producer in history which has lifted millions of people the world over out of poverty, and our emergence by the early 20th century into the world’s preeminent economic and military power has been individual opportunity to pursue our best interests and to make our own decisions, and to invest and build with a minimum of government interference.
Preserving this liberty and keeping the nation free from foreign enemies and remaining an indivisible whole has come at enormous cost in both human and material treasure. Over 1,300,000 of our citizens have given their lives in military action not only to preserve our freedom but to defeat tyrants and oppressors who have emerged to enslave people in the four corners of the globe.
Given the enormity of our success and the checks and balances our founding fathers created to prevent excessive interference with our liberty and the price we have paid to defend it, it is ironic that we now face from within a new insidious threat to our individual freedoms proceeding step by step on an incremental basis, and unwittingly with the presumed “consent of the governed” who seem not to have noticed the erosion of the historic right of Americans to make daily decisions for themselves.
Until very recently, with the exception of the terrible stain on our nation of slavery and its racist aftermath and the exclusion from political participation, until less than a century ago, of women, our elected representatives have reflected the makeup of the population itself.
For most of our history, those people who were elected to political leadership positions in Washington or state governments were drawn from our ranks of farmers, lawyers, businessmen, laborers, and entrepreneurs. They did not come directly from academia or, fresh from higher education programs and degrees in political science or public policy into government internships, aides to elected officials, or stints in the vast bureaucracy we have erected to write rules, regulations and standards that take on the force of statutory law.
In recent years, the trend has been increasingly to bestow leadership positions to what we refer to as a new ruling class, comprised of people who have never held a private sector job, have never personally invested in job creating activities, who know nothing of risk-taking, who are largely ignorant of the daily challenges that businesses small and large have to face and who, in fact, see private for-profit business as evil and profits as ill gotten gains. It is difficult not to see their resemblance to the old Soviet nomenclatura whose bureaucratic power and patronage placed them in the upper echelons of society.
Consider these facts!
The federal government now owns or is heavily regulating, to one degree or another, the banking industry, the auto industry, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the energy industry, and the health-care system (with more of that just ahead). At last count President Obama has appointed over thirty czars to manage various sections of the economy, none of who are subject to Congressional confirmation or oversight and whose expertise is in many cases suspect. We even have a compensation czar.
Let us “stipulate,” as lawyers say, that these are all smart people. But being smart is not the only, or even the leading, attribute to achieving successful outcomes or even mere effectiveness. Common sense and experience invariably count far more.
This ruling class of appointed czars and bureaucrats and officials (both elected and unelected) who are bereft of any private sector experience or who disdain it are increasingly making what were once our own individual decisions and divesting us of our own individual, family and societal responsibilities.
From the President (whose only non-government experience is as a community organizer) through the ever present Henry Waxman, the omnipresent Barney Frank, the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, we are increasingly being led by people whose view of the private sector is almost entirely negative (except, of course, when seeking campaign contributions) and who have never contributed productively to our economy (“productivity” being defined as one whose labors add to the nation’s gross national product and collective wealth).
What these government officials do offer us is the empty promise that the government can provide for all our basic needs and that the costs can and should be borne by the “rich” who, under the definition of our lawmakers, are those who make more money than a Senator or Congressman. Can this lead anywhere but total cradle to grave dependence on a government that cannot possibly finance all the obligations it seeks to assume. Who will pay this tab?
Everyone agrees that the accumulated national debt is unsustainable. Will “the rich” simply be expected to fork over an ever-increasing share of the tax load? As it is, by 2006 over forty percent of Americans paid no income tax. What happens when that percentages reaches fifty and above. Will anyone ever vote against further free lunches? Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. Will the economically productive job creators continue to invest?
State and local government officials have the same philosophy as their federal counterparts and, since, unlike the federal government, they cannot print money and monetize their debt, the economic distress they face is more acute.
For a current snapshot of where this leads, we need look no further than California, our most populous state, where 144,000 taxpayers in a state with a population of 36 million people pay over 50% of the state’s income tax. Year after year those citizens paying the tab are voting with their feet and leaving the Golden State, once the nation’s fastest growing. Rather than rein in costs, elected officials protect bloated bureaucracies, spend inefficiently for services that private industry can better provide and continue to search like oil prospectors for new sources of revenue. Taxes on paper bags, soft drinks, transfats or anything considered sinful are the current rage. Internet transactions are being jealously eyed.
This new ruling class has come to power by peddling the promise of being our protector, our 24 hour a day nanny, and slice by slice they are accumulating the powers over us that would make our Founders spin in their graves. They bear very close resemblance to what Milovan Djilas, the former Vice President of Yugoslavia under Tito, referred to as the “new class” who saw property not as material goods or private ownership but as political control. Similarly, new deal economist John Kenneth Galbraith also posited a technocratic “New Class” which was necessary because modern society was too complex and required guidance by well educated elite.
This generation’s well educated elite are even less well prepared to lead than their predecessors in Galbraith’s day. Today they graduate with what Emeritus Professor Victor Davis Hanson of California State University calls a “Studies” curriculum.“ Fill in the blanks, Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture–specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.” As he puts it, this therapeutic curriculum holds “no eternal truths, but only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority.”
This new class, which, in their higher education eschewed history and economics in favor of a curriculum which posits American wealth as oppressing various victim groups, sees no real differences between our American democracy or a Venezuelan thugocracy, is now turned loose on us to make what was individual daily decisions and to run our economy.
Now they are bidding to control, or intrude into, our private and precious individual health care decisions. This is a path to a very slippery slope. Under the guise of a “crisis” (the most overused word of an overreaching government) they are preparing to manage our health care decisions or alternatives, through rationing, which sooner or later, and, more invidiously, will involve government bureaucrats ultimately determining who among us should be given treatment, or, less delicately, the right to decide who lives and who dies as is the case in Oregon for those relying on state financial assistance for their health care.
Rationing of health care does, of course, take place every day throughout America. But it is individuals and families who make those choices for loved ones who often can only be kept alive by heroic but futile means. And, yes, insurance companies manage risk by precluding or limiting (rationing) coverage for pre-existing or other specified conditions. However, most families and most employers that provide health insurance can change, or seek to change, their insurance company if they are not satisfied with the coverage offered. That won’t be an option under a government provided health plan.
Some health official (drawn from the same group of 30ish policy wonks) will decide who gets dialysis or a heart bypass operation and make the decision whether someone is too far gone, too old, or too disabled, to merit treatment. In one of the versions Congress is considering, the elderly were to be offered “end-of-life” counseling, a provision that, we are told, has been dropped given the public’s very negative and very vocal reaction. Are we going to someday be a society in which, through bureaucratic decisions, the government is making very personal medical decisions for the nation’s families?
For all these years we saw the biggest threat to liberty as coming from foreign enemies. We have spent untold trillions and spilled the blood of the best of our young of every generation on military defense to preserve our unique American form of liberty. And now, almost like a cat that quietly crept into a room, our freedom to make our own legal choices, to live our lives free from interference so long as we aren’t injuring others, to support our fellow citizens with our own charity and generosity, is being taken, slice by slice, away from us by this self-appointed ruling class.
We are, increasingly, being governed by bureaucrats and autocrats who actually believe the country can grow its debt and its expenditures faster than it grows its economy and still survive. The fact is, such a society cannot survive except by pillaging the wealth of its own citizens wherever it can find it. The taxpaying classes, upper and middle, should thus be forewarned. The taxman cometh.
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot “this is the way freedom ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”
Of Thee I Sing essays may, with attribution, be reproduced, quoted or excerpted.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Europe and Human Accomplishments
Western culture has by and large enjoyed the benefits of greater political freedom and more individualism as opposed to the common emphasis on consensus and traditionalism. Purpose and autonomy are intertwined with another defining cultural characteristic of European civilization, individualism. Autonomy refers to a person’s belief that it is in his power to fulfill the meaning of his life through his own acts. Anti-individualistic cultures inhibit individual accomplishment as originality is suspect. According to Murray, “Highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball.”
Christianity played an important part in this, too. As Murray writes, “It was a theology that empowered the individual acting as an individual as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message was realized more completely in one part of Christendom, the Catholic West, than in the Orthodox East. The crucial difference was that Roman Catholicism developed a philosophical and artistic humanism typified, and to a great degree engendered, by Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274). Aquinas made the case, eventually adopted by the Church, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.”
Charles Murray argues that Christianity was an important variable, not that it explains everything. He does not say that it is impossible to find purpose in a secular life and achieve great accomplishments, only that it is harder to do so. It is here that Christianity has its most potent advantage: devotion to God trumps devotion to most human causes. Even the greatest of talents have to spend a lot of time and work on practice and on absorbing external impulses. From Michelangelo to Beethoven, the willingness to engage in such monomaniacal levels of effort is related to a sense of vocation. Consequently, a person with a strong sense that “I was put here on Earth to do exactly this” is more likely to accomplish great things than someone who lacks such a sense of purpose. By this Murray means a transcendental element, something more important than the here and now. Those accomplishing great achievements are not necessarily indifferent to worldly motives like money, power, fame and glory, but the giants often had a strong feeling that their lives had a purpose, a feeling they had even before they had achieved anything substantial.
The Enlightenment’s passionate commitment to reason was close to religious, yet after Freud, Nietzsche and others with similar messages, the belief in man as a rational being took a body blow. It became fashionable in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to see humans as unwittingly acting out neuroses and subconscious drives. God was mostly dead among the European creative elites at this time. Such beliefs undermined the belief of the creative elites that their lives had purpose or that their talents could be efficacious. Murray believes that the twentieth century witnessed a decline in per capita accomplishment, as intellectuals rejected religion. He expects that almost no art from the second half of this century will be remembered 200 years from now. It's a challenge for democratic societies to keep up standards of excellence when there is an obsession with making everyone equal. He has noticed that young Europeans no longer take pride in their scientific and artistic legacy; attempts to point this out to them will typically be met with pessimism and a sense that European civilization is evil and cursed. The decline of accomplishment in Europe, once the homeland par excellence of geniuses, was in all likelihood initially caused by loss of self-confidence and a sense of purpose.
Maybe belief in a higher purpose is necessary for the creation of true greatness. Achievements that outlast the lifespan of a single human being are generated out of respect for something greater than the individual. Many Europeans no longer experience themselves as part of a wider community with a past worth preserving and a future worth fighting for, which is perhaps why they see no point in reproducing themselves. Europe in the past believed in itself, its culture, its nations and above all its religion and produced Michelangelo, Descartes and Newton. Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century believes in virtually nothing of lasting value and so produces virtually nothing of lasting value. It remains to be seen whether this trend can be reversed.
fjiordman
Christianity played an important part in this, too. As Murray writes, “It was a theology that empowered the individual acting as an individual as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message was realized more completely in one part of Christendom, the Catholic West, than in the Orthodox East. The crucial difference was that Roman Catholicism developed a philosophical and artistic humanism typified, and to a great degree engendered, by Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274). Aquinas made the case, eventually adopted by the Church, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.”
Charles Murray argues that Christianity was an important variable, not that it explains everything. He does not say that it is impossible to find purpose in a secular life and achieve great accomplishments, only that it is harder to do so. It is here that Christianity has its most potent advantage: devotion to God trumps devotion to most human causes. Even the greatest of talents have to spend a lot of time and work on practice and on absorbing external impulses. From Michelangelo to Beethoven, the willingness to engage in such monomaniacal levels of effort is related to a sense of vocation. Consequently, a person with a strong sense that “I was put here on Earth to do exactly this” is more likely to accomplish great things than someone who lacks such a sense of purpose. By this Murray means a transcendental element, something more important than the here and now. Those accomplishing great achievements are not necessarily indifferent to worldly motives like money, power, fame and glory, but the giants often had a strong feeling that their lives had a purpose, a feeling they had even before they had achieved anything substantial.
The Enlightenment’s passionate commitment to reason was close to religious, yet after Freud, Nietzsche and others with similar messages, the belief in man as a rational being took a body blow. It became fashionable in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to see humans as unwittingly acting out neuroses and subconscious drives. God was mostly dead among the European creative elites at this time. Such beliefs undermined the belief of the creative elites that their lives had purpose or that their talents could be efficacious. Murray believes that the twentieth century witnessed a decline in per capita accomplishment, as intellectuals rejected religion. He expects that almost no art from the second half of this century will be remembered 200 years from now. It's a challenge for democratic societies to keep up standards of excellence when there is an obsession with making everyone equal. He has noticed that young Europeans no longer take pride in their scientific and artistic legacy; attempts to point this out to them will typically be met with pessimism and a sense that European civilization is evil and cursed. The decline of accomplishment in Europe, once the homeland par excellence of geniuses, was in all likelihood initially caused by loss of self-confidence and a sense of purpose.
Maybe belief in a higher purpose is necessary for the creation of true greatness. Achievements that outlast the lifespan of a single human being are generated out of respect for something greater than the individual. Many Europeans no longer experience themselves as part of a wider community with a past worth preserving and a future worth fighting for, which is perhaps why they see no point in reproducing themselves. Europe in the past believed in itself, its culture, its nations and above all its religion and produced Michelangelo, Descartes and Newton. Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century believes in virtually nothing of lasting value and so produces virtually nothing of lasting value. It remains to be seen whether this trend can be reversed.
fjiordman
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Stupid is as Stupid does
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY by Carlo M. Cipollaillustrations by James Donnelly
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.
THE SECOND BASIC LAW
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that
The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of them were stupid. As σ's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after all the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW
The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom's mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION
Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavours.
From all that proceeds, it does not follow that we can chart on the basic graph only stupid individuals. We can calculate for each person his weighted average position in the plane of figure 1 quite independently from his degree of inconsistency. A helpless person may occasionally behave intelligently and on occasion he may perform a bandit's action. But since the person in question is fundamentally helpless most of his action will have the characteristics of helplessness. Thus the overall weighted average position of all the actions of such a person will place him in the H quadrant of the basic graph.
The fact that it is possible to place on the graph individuals instead of their actions allows some digression about the frequency of the bandit and stupid types.
The perfect bandit is one who, with his actions, causes to other individuals losses equal to his gains. The crudest type of banditry is theft. A person who robs you of 100 pounds without causing you an extra loss or harm is a perfect bandit: you lose 100 pounds, he gains 100 pounds. In the basic graph the perfect bandits would appear on a 45-degree diagonal line that divides the area B into two perfectly symmetrical sub-areas (line OM of figure 2).
However the "perfect" bandits are relatively few. The line OM divides the area B into two sub-areas, B1, and B2, and by far the largest majority of the bandits falls somewhere in one of these two sub-areas.
The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people. All bandits who are entitled to a position in area B1 are bandits with overtones of intelligence and as they get closer to the right side of the X axis they share more and more the characteristics of the intelligent person.
Unfortunately the individuals entitled to a position in the B1 area are not very numerous. Most bandits actually fall in area B2. The individuals who fall in this area are those whose actions yield to them gains inferior to the losses inflicted to other people. If someone kills you in order to rob you of fifty pounds or if he murders you in order to spend a weekend with your wife at Monte Carlo, we can be sure that he is not a perfect bandit. Even by using his values to measure his gains (but still using your values to measure your losses) he falls in the B2 area very close to the border of sheer stupidity. Generals who cause vast destruction and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a medal fall in the same area.
The frequency distribution of the stupid people is totally different from that of the bandit. While bandits are mostly scattered over an area stupid people are heavily concentrated along one line, specifically on the Y axis below point O. The reason for this is that by far the majority of stupid people are basically and unwaveringly stupid - in other words they perseveringly insist in causing harm and losses to other people without deriving any gain, whether positive or negative.
There are however people who by their improbable actions not only cause damages to other people but in addition hurt themselves. They are a sort of super-stupid who, in our system of accounting, will appear somewhere in the area S to the left of the Y axis.
THE POWER OF STUPIDITY
It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:
a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.
The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW
That helpless people, namely those who in our accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all surprising. Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is that also intelligent people and bandits often fail to recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up defenses.
One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner.
This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that:
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW
Instead of considering the welfare of the individual let us consider the welfare of the society, regarded in this context as the algebraic sum of the individual conditions. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law is essential to the analysis. It may be parenthetically added here that of the Five Basic Laws, the Fifth is certainly the best known and its corollary is quoted very frequently. The Fifth Basic Law states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The corollary of the Law is that:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
The result of the action of a perfect bandit (the person who falls on line OM of figure 2) is purely and simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. After the action of a perfect bandit, the bandit has a plus on his account which plus is exactly equivalent to the minus he has caused to another person. The society as a whole is neither better nor worse off. If all members of a society were perfect bandits the society would remain stagnant but there would be no major disaster. The whole business would amount to massive transfers of wealth and welfare in favour of those who would take action. If all members of the society would take action in regular turns, not only the society as a whole but also individuals would find themselves in a perfectly steady state of no change.
When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs shows that while all actions of individuals falling to the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare of a society; although in different degrees, the actions of all individuals falling to the left of the same line POM cause a deterioration.
In other words the helpless with overtones of intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent (area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H1) manage to add losses to those caused by stupid people thus enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the fraction of stupid people is a constant σ which is not affected by time, space, race, class or any other socio- cultural or historical variable. It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.
(There is genius at work in this thesis. It came round about by way of reader Sam Keen, who sent us a thin gray monograph printed in Bologna, Italy. The trail eventually led to Carlo M. Cipolla, the author, who is currently Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley
- Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth Review. Spring 1987 p2-7)
Update: Prof. Cipolla retired from UCB in 1991, and died on September 5, 2000, in Pavia, Italy. His heirs have tried to assert control over the text, but it was released to the public domain, and cannot be retracted.
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The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.
THE SECOND BASIC LAW
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that
The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of them were stupid. As σ's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after all the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.
THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW
The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom's mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent. Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful reflection you must admit that these are not the events which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION
Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavours.
From all that proceeds, it does not follow that we can chart on the basic graph only stupid individuals. We can calculate for each person his weighted average position in the plane of figure 1 quite independently from his degree of inconsistency. A helpless person may occasionally behave intelligently and on occasion he may perform a bandit's action. But since the person in question is fundamentally helpless most of his action will have the characteristics of helplessness. Thus the overall weighted average position of all the actions of such a person will place him in the H quadrant of the basic graph.
The fact that it is possible to place on the graph individuals instead of their actions allows some digression about the frequency of the bandit and stupid types.
The perfect bandit is one who, with his actions, causes to other individuals losses equal to his gains. The crudest type of banditry is theft. A person who robs you of 100 pounds without causing you an extra loss or harm is a perfect bandit: you lose 100 pounds, he gains 100 pounds. In the basic graph the perfect bandits would appear on a 45-degree diagonal line that divides the area B into two perfectly symmetrical sub-areas (line OM of figure 2).
However the "perfect" bandits are relatively few. The line OM divides the area B into two sub-areas, B1, and B2, and by far the largest majority of the bandits falls somewhere in one of these two sub-areas.
The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than the losses they cause to other people. All bandits who are entitled to a position in area B1 are bandits with overtones of intelligence and as they get closer to the right side of the X axis they share more and more the characteristics of the intelligent person.
Unfortunately the individuals entitled to a position in the B1 area are not very numerous. Most bandits actually fall in area B2. The individuals who fall in this area are those whose actions yield to them gains inferior to the losses inflicted to other people. If someone kills you in order to rob you of fifty pounds or if he murders you in order to spend a weekend with your wife at Monte Carlo, we can be sure that he is not a perfect bandit. Even by using his values to measure his gains (but still using your values to measure your losses) he falls in the B2 area very close to the border of sheer stupidity. Generals who cause vast destruction and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a medal fall in the same area.
The frequency distribution of the stupid people is totally different from that of the bandit. While bandits are mostly scattered over an area stupid people are heavily concentrated along one line, specifically on the Y axis below point O. The reason for this is that by far the majority of stupid people are basically and unwaveringly stupid - in other words they perseveringly insist in causing harm and losses to other people without deriving any gain, whether positive or negative.
There are however people who by their improbable actions not only cause damages to other people but in addition hurt themselves. They are a sort of super-stupid who, in our system of accounting, will appear somewhere in the area S to the left of the Y axis.
THE POWER OF STUPIDITY
It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:
a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.
The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW
That helpless people, namely those who in our accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all surprising. Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is that also intelligent people and bandits often fail to recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up defenses.
One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner.
This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that:
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW
Instead of considering the welfare of the individual let us consider the welfare of the society, regarded in this context as the algebraic sum of the individual conditions. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law is essential to the analysis. It may be parenthetically added here that of the Five Basic Laws, the Fifth is certainly the best known and its corollary is quoted very frequently. The Fifth Basic Law states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The corollary of the Law is that:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
The result of the action of a perfect bandit (the person who falls on line OM of figure 2) is purely and simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. After the action of a perfect bandit, the bandit has a plus on his account which plus is exactly equivalent to the minus he has caused to another person. The society as a whole is neither better nor worse off. If all members of a society were perfect bandits the society would remain stagnant but there would be no major disaster. The whole business would amount to massive transfers of wealth and welfare in favour of those who would take action. If all members of the society would take action in regular turns, not only the society as a whole but also individuals would find themselves in a perfectly steady state of no change.
When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs shows that while all actions of individuals falling to the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare of a society; although in different degrees, the actions of all individuals falling to the left of the same line POM cause a deterioration.
In other words the helpless with overtones of intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent (area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H1) manage to add losses to those caused by stupid people thus enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the fraction of stupid people is a constant σ which is not affected by time, space, race, class or any other socio- cultural or historical variable. It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.
(There is genius at work in this thesis. It came round about by way of reader Sam Keen, who sent us a thin gray monograph printed in Bologna, Italy. The trail eventually led to Carlo M. Cipolla, the author, who is currently Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley
- Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth Review. Spring 1987 p2-7)
Update: Prof. Cipolla retired from UCB in 1991, and died on September 5, 2000, in Pavia, Italy. His heirs have tried to assert control over the text, but it was released to the public domain, and cannot be retracted.
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Monday, September 14, 2009
Whigs and Liberty
The Whigs and Liberty - part 2 13 September 2009A Brief History of the Whigs and Classical Liberals and Their Influence in Bringing Personal Liberty to The Ordinary Citizen.
We would like to draw to your attention, that all law everywhere has been originally designed around The Ten Commandments. If you have not read them, buy a Bible and do so. The Ten Commandments and the Book of Proverbs alone are worth the price of any bible. Nobody can go wrong if they obey the Commandments.
Unfortunately, some politicians, lawyers and legislators think they know better than the wisdom of the ages. The craving for unearned wealth by those who produce nothing, and the subsequent meddling with free markets and the laws governing the secure property rights and free market actions of participants, brings us most of the world’s strife.
As explained above, social commentator and philosopher, Albert Jay Nock pointed out that the great social philosophers of the 17th and 18th century England, the Whigs, contemplated a government whose interventions should be purely negative in character, and that beyond these negative interventions it should not go. It should have no coercive power to enforce any positive interventions what-so-ever on the individual.
The Whigs ‘wither away’ the omnipotent State
Nock continues:
“When the Whigs came into power, they kept all the foregoing tenets in mind, as did the early Liberals who succeeded them. They worked steadily towards curbing government’s coercive power over the individual; and with such an effect as historians testify, that by the middle of the eighteenth century Englishmen had simply forgotten that there was ever a time when the full ‘liberty of the subject’ was not theirs to enjoy. In this connection the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the statute book and when they found a statute which bore against ‘the liberty of the subject’ they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands.
“In fact, in 1873, the secretary of the law society estimated that out of the 18,110 acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four fifths, [about 14,488], had been wholly or partially repealed. The thing to be observed here is that this negative method of simple repeal left free scope for the sanitive processes of natural law in dealing with all manner of social dislocation and disabilities.
“These processes are usually slow and usually painful, and impatience with them leads to popular demand that the government should step in and anticipate them by positive statutory intervention when anything goes wrong. The [Classical] Liberals were aware that no one, least of all a ‘practical’ politician can foresee the ultimate effects, or even all of the collateral effects, of such interventions, or can calculate the force of their political momentum. Thus it regularly happens that they bring about ultimate evils which are not only far more serious than the specific evils which they were meant to remedy, but are also wholly unexpected.
“American legislative history in the last two decades shows any number of conspicuous instances where the political short cut of positive interventionism has been taken towards remedying a present evil at the most reckless expense of future good. The prohibition amendment is perhaps the most conspicuous of these instances.”
But it was the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism which was instrumental in turning a society of serfs into a nation of free men - the freest men in all of history. The repeal of the corrosive laws of positive interventionism by the state, prying into every facet of men’s lives, was one of the keys which turned tiny England into Great Britain. It made them, through competition and free trade, the most productive men in all of history, and they became the most prosperous people ever. The market oriented, unplanned dynamic society, about which F.A. Hayek has so eloquently and passionately written, had arrived on earth for the first time in all of history.
World War I, beginning in 1914, became the start of England’s decline. That war cost Great Britain alone almost seven and three quarter billion pounds, and the introduction of a heavy progressive income tax stopped the dynamic progress in its tracks. Future living standards were blown away in the form of guns, shells, bombs, unprecedented bureaucracy and senseless slaughter of millions of young men. But that is another story.
Unfortunately intellectuals thought that by government planning, by allowing governments to indulge in positive interventions, they could improve upon Man’s state of affairs. The early pre-Marxian French socialists, Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte knew nothing of economics and were mathematicians. They thought that prosperity for the masses was merely an ‘engineering’ problem. Dwelling upon the highly regarded scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton, they thought that as the universe was controlled by the marvels of mathematics, it would be an easy matter to organise human affairs likewise, by developing their ‘scientific’ plans for society. This is the very basis of Keynesian economics today; econometrics they call it; men engineering their fellow men and their affairs. Late 19th century lawyers, and the influence of the early Fabians, overran the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism.
In the space of only from three to five generations the intellectuals under the influence of Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, Rousseau, Marx, the Fabians and Keynes and their disciples have made the about turn complete. And today, all over the world we have the people of many previously free and prosperous nations suffering from the results of positive intervention, some indeed, from intervention in its most virulent form, socialism - which is total positive interventionism.
The 20th century will stand as a historic witness to the stark horrors of socialism everywhere - in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in countless other societies around the world, and to a lesser, but still serious extent in England, once the cradle of liberty.
On February 19th, 1948 Winston Churchill said, ‘I am told that 300 officials have the power to make new regulations, apart altogether from parliament, carrying with them the penalty of imprisonment for “crimes” hitherto unknown to the law’. And today, unelected officials do what they like, all at citizens’ inconvenience and expense.
The personal liberty, so dearly won by the preceding generations and the Whigs, has been dissipated by both unelected and elected Pied Pipers. The individual now dances to the tune of those who hold the reigns of state power. It is well at this point to remember, as we descend into a fascist state, the words of Benito Mussolini:
Fascism, is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. Fascism ... the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.’
The Fuhrer, Lenin and Stalin and Chairman Mao and Pol Pot, and other socialist dictators thought likewise.
This is the future we face unless we have a change of heart. We have already discussed briefly, one of our nations’ greatest impediments to personal and national development, severely overzealous taxation, one of the hallmarks of the fascist state.
Recommended Reading: Our Enemy the State by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The State of the Union by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.The Counter-Revolution of Science by F.A. Hayek.How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. Three Rivers Press, New York.THE FATAL CONCEIT - The Errors of Socialism by F.A. Hayek. Edited by W.W. Bartley III. The University of Chicago Press.
To view all of Ronald's previous articles, click here>>>
We would like to draw to your attention, that all law everywhere has been originally designed around The Ten Commandments. If you have not read them, buy a Bible and do so. The Ten Commandments and the Book of Proverbs alone are worth the price of any bible. Nobody can go wrong if they obey the Commandments.
Unfortunately, some politicians, lawyers and legislators think they know better than the wisdom of the ages. The craving for unearned wealth by those who produce nothing, and the subsequent meddling with free markets and the laws governing the secure property rights and free market actions of participants, brings us most of the world’s strife.
As explained above, social commentator and philosopher, Albert Jay Nock pointed out that the great social philosophers of the 17th and 18th century England, the Whigs, contemplated a government whose interventions should be purely negative in character, and that beyond these negative interventions it should not go. It should have no coercive power to enforce any positive interventions what-so-ever on the individual.
The Whigs ‘wither away’ the omnipotent State
Nock continues:
“When the Whigs came into power, they kept all the foregoing tenets in mind, as did the early Liberals who succeeded them. They worked steadily towards curbing government’s coercive power over the individual; and with such an effect as historians testify, that by the middle of the eighteenth century Englishmen had simply forgotten that there was ever a time when the full ‘liberty of the subject’ was not theirs to enjoy. In this connection the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the statute book and when they found a statute which bore against ‘the liberty of the subject’ they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands.
“In fact, in 1873, the secretary of the law society estimated that out of the 18,110 acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four fifths, [about 14,488], had been wholly or partially repealed. The thing to be observed here is that this negative method of simple repeal left free scope for the sanitive processes of natural law in dealing with all manner of social dislocation and disabilities.
“These processes are usually slow and usually painful, and impatience with them leads to popular demand that the government should step in and anticipate them by positive statutory intervention when anything goes wrong. The [Classical] Liberals were aware that no one, least of all a ‘practical’ politician can foresee the ultimate effects, or even all of the collateral effects, of such interventions, or can calculate the force of their political momentum. Thus it regularly happens that they bring about ultimate evils which are not only far more serious than the specific evils which they were meant to remedy, but are also wholly unexpected.
“American legislative history in the last two decades shows any number of conspicuous instances where the political short cut of positive interventionism has been taken towards remedying a present evil at the most reckless expense of future good. The prohibition amendment is perhaps the most conspicuous of these instances.”
But it was the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism which was instrumental in turning a society of serfs into a nation of free men - the freest men in all of history. The repeal of the corrosive laws of positive interventionism by the state, prying into every facet of men’s lives, was one of the keys which turned tiny England into Great Britain. It made them, through competition and free trade, the most productive men in all of history, and they became the most prosperous people ever. The market oriented, unplanned dynamic society, about which F.A. Hayek has so eloquently and passionately written, had arrived on earth for the first time in all of history.
World War I, beginning in 1914, became the start of England’s decline. That war cost Great Britain alone almost seven and three quarter billion pounds, and the introduction of a heavy progressive income tax stopped the dynamic progress in its tracks. Future living standards were blown away in the form of guns, shells, bombs, unprecedented bureaucracy and senseless slaughter of millions of young men. But that is another story.
Unfortunately intellectuals thought that by government planning, by allowing governments to indulge in positive interventions, they could improve upon Man’s state of affairs. The early pre-Marxian French socialists, Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte knew nothing of economics and were mathematicians. They thought that prosperity for the masses was merely an ‘engineering’ problem. Dwelling upon the highly regarded scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton, they thought that as the universe was controlled by the marvels of mathematics, it would be an easy matter to organise human affairs likewise, by developing their ‘scientific’ plans for society. This is the very basis of Keynesian economics today; econometrics they call it; men engineering their fellow men and their affairs. Late 19th century lawyers, and the influence of the early Fabians, overran the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism.
In the space of only from three to five generations the intellectuals under the influence of Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, Rousseau, Marx, the Fabians and Keynes and their disciples have made the about turn complete. And today, all over the world we have the people of many previously free and prosperous nations suffering from the results of positive intervention, some indeed, from intervention in its most virulent form, socialism - which is total positive interventionism.
The 20th century will stand as a historic witness to the stark horrors of socialism everywhere - in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in countless other societies around the world, and to a lesser, but still serious extent in England, once the cradle of liberty.
On February 19th, 1948 Winston Churchill said, ‘I am told that 300 officials have the power to make new regulations, apart altogether from parliament, carrying with them the penalty of imprisonment for “crimes” hitherto unknown to the law’. And today, unelected officials do what they like, all at citizens’ inconvenience and expense.
The personal liberty, so dearly won by the preceding generations and the Whigs, has been dissipated by both unelected and elected Pied Pipers. The individual now dances to the tune of those who hold the reigns of state power. It is well at this point to remember, as we descend into a fascist state, the words of Benito Mussolini:
Fascism, is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. Fascism ... the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.’
The Fuhrer, Lenin and Stalin and Chairman Mao and Pol Pot, and other socialist dictators thought likewise.
This is the future we face unless we have a change of heart. We have already discussed briefly, one of our nations’ greatest impediments to personal and national development, severely overzealous taxation, one of the hallmarks of the fascist state.
Recommended Reading: Our Enemy the State by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The State of the Union by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.The Counter-Revolution of Science by F.A. Hayek.How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. Three Rivers Press, New York.THE FATAL CONCEIT - The Errors of Socialism by F.A. Hayek. Edited by W.W. Bartley III. The University of Chicago Press.
To view all of Ronald's previous articles, click here>>>
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Remnant
May 21st, 2007 2:10 pm
YOU ARE NOT ALONE (Part 1)
Folks, you are about to be hit with a BIG IDEA.
It’s not entirely my big idea, but I’m willing to hang some tinsel on it and take credit for it.
First, a brief set-up, and then (and I will make an announcement in BOLD CAPS) comes the Big Idea.
Okay, the set-up:
I’ve written a dozen or so major essays since I hung my shingle over this little corner of cyberspace, and received wonderful e-mails about all of them. But two – the last two – have generated a very specific response: more passionate; desperate, even.
The first was Tribes, which basically posited that there were people who relied on themselves and people who relied on the State. The second was Seeing the Unseen, which took a look at conspiracy theories and the mental illness required to believe in ‘chemtrails’ and the 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB pathology.
Those both generated reams and reams of heartfelt sentiment, and that sentiment was much the same time and time again.
I thought I was all alone, people said. And I see this sense of despair and resignation spreading all across the web; from individuals in comment sections, or in lonely posts on obscure blogs.
Now here’s what’s interesting: this response is the same, again and again, although the stimulus is different. It might be increasing public irrationality and paranoia, or falling educational standards, or unchecked illegal immigration, or activist judges. Maybe it’s tolerance of crime, or endless lawsuits, or general mean-spiritedness. Perhaps it’s rampant defeatism, cynicism, a lack of common decency, and the sense that courage and honor are dying qualities that time is passing by.
And maybe it’s the dawning realization that our elites in politics, academia and entertainment (which controls our mythology) are leading the charge not to salvation but to the cliffs that seem so obvious to so many common people.
Something seems to be failing, something essential, as if all the nails and glue that hold a house together were dissolving all at once. And many people – perhaps you are one of them – watch all this happening and feel powerless to stop it.
Well, you are not alone.
So many stimuli, and always the same response: has the world gone mad?
What do those stimuli have in common?
HERE COMES THE BIG IDEA.
THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA
Not too long ago, just in passing, my friend Richard Riley pointed me to a famous case in game theory called The Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Now we need to really understand this, because if we do I think many of our present troubles will become clear.
Here’s how Wikipedia presents the case:
Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act? The dilemma can be summarized thus:
Prisoner B Stays Silent
Prisoner B Betrays
Prisoner A Stays Silent
Each serves six months
Prisoner A serves ten yearsPrisoner B goes free
Prisoner A Betrays
Prisoner A goes freePrisoner B serves ten years
Each serves two years
In deciding what to do in strategic situations, it is normally important to predict what others will do. This is not the case here. If you knew the other prisoner would stay silent, your best move is to betray as you then walk free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If you knew the other prisoner would betray, your best move is still to betray, as you receive a lesser sentence than by silence. Betraying is a dominant strategy. The other prisoner reasons similarly, and therefore also chooses to betray. Yet by both betraying they get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent. So rational, self-interested play results in each prisoner being worse off than if they had stayed silent.
Okay, we can simplify this:
If I screw you, but you don’t screw me, I win very big and you lose very big.
If you screw me and I don’t screw you, I lose very big and you win very big.
If neither screws each other, we both suffer mild punishment.
If we both screw each other, we both suffer medium punishment.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, therefore, is an analogy we use to test the results of how people treat each other.
Now, if this game is played one time, the winning strategy invariably is to Screw the Other Guy. If he doesn’t screw you, you get off free. If he does, you serve two years. But if you didn’t, and he decided to screw you – ten years. No one wants to risk that. Screw the Other Guy is the only smart position, and when the game is run thousands of times on computers it comes out the very clear winner.
But! What happens if the game is played again and again, against the same person? Does Screw the Other Guy continue to be the best strategy?
It does not!
The best strategy for a repeating game (called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma) is not Screw The Other Guy, and — surprisingly at first glance — it’s not Always Cooperate With The Other Guy, either.
The winning strategy is Tit-for-Tat. That is, you do to the guy what he did to you last turn. If he cooperated, you cooperate. If he screwed you, you screw him back. Over thousands and millions of computer runs, using every strategy from complete aggression to complete forgiveness, Tit-for-Tat “wins” every time – that is, it results in the least jail time for you.
Robert Axelrod examined this outcome in a book called The Evolution of Co-operation. (That word ‘evolution’ having great power in this context, as we will see in a second.)
Wikipedia again:
By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.
NICE
The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not betray [Screw the Other Guy] before its opponent does. Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice. Therefore a purely selfish strategy for purely selfish reasons will never hit its opponent first.
RETALIATING
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must always retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such softies.
FORGIVING
Another quality of successful strategies is that they must be forgiving. Though they will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to play betrayals. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
NON-ENVIOUS
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent). Therefore, Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious. [And, they will hit back when they are hit first, and keep hitting back until the opponent stops Screwing the other Guy; upon which they will revert to cooperation.]
One of the most important conclusions of Axelrod's study of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is that Nice guys can finish first.
(Emphasis and brackets mine – BW)
Now things get really interesting. In The Prisoner’s Dilemma, these behaviors are expressed as choices made by individuals. But now substitute entire cultures, where the cultural norm is made up of these choices, and what do you see?
You find the easy, knee-jerk reaction is to form a society where everyone tries to screw everyone else. It’s the short-term approach, and it makes sense in the short term. Presumably all robbers and cheats want to maintain short-term relationships with their victims. If they had to meet them again (if the game was iterated) this strategy would be, shall we say, somewhat less successful and the victims would begin to Hit Back.
When I look out into the Third World, this is what I see: short-term strategies for immediate gain at the cost of long-term success. A swarm of trinket vendors on a beach in Mexico all need to make an immediate sale in order to eat that day, even if the cost is being so annoying and frustrating to the tourists that it prevents them from ever returning. Short term gain, long term loss.
I make no value judgment on that behavior, because it works on some level or it would not be so prevalent. In societies where short term values trump long-term ones, it is easy, safe and stable to Screw the Other Guy. But in the long-term, nothing of consequence grows, because nice, forgiving and non-envious are advanced strategies that require a topsoil of general goodwill, trust, and respect for the rule of law.
Societies that embrace these qualities will always out-compete those that don’t.
You want to know what that short-term gain mentality looks like in the real world? Here you go:
Do you see any long-term disadvantages to an arrangement like the one above? I mean, aside form the obvious fire risk, who is actually paying for all that stolen electricity? And in a Screw the Other Guy society, why should he pay? He spends money, for what gain? Why not just steal it like everyone else? And when no one pays, guess what happens to the electricity. It goes away.
But as we see from The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is an unnatural island of stability that is far more successful, and it is not simply trusting everyone and being all-cooperating all the time. That strategy is the worst, because it rewards being screwed by competing strategies that eat it for breakfast everytime. It is de-selected. It vanishes from the gene pool, so to speak. You see no society like that in the real world, and now you know why. Are you listening, Marxists? It doesn’t work.
But Tit-for-Tat combines generosity and toughness. And look at the terms used to describe the most successful strategic version of Tit-for-Tat: Nice. Retaliating. Forgiving. Non-envious.
Now, this is where my own analysis kicks in, because frankly, nice, retaliating, forgiving and non-envious pretty much sums up how I feel about the West in general and the United States in particular. The web of trust and commerce in Western societies is unthinkable in the Third World because the prosperity they produce are fat juicy targets for people raised on Screw the Other Guy. Crime and corruption are stealing, and stealing is Screwing the Other Guy. It’s short-term win, long-term loss.
Alright, now here come the brass tacks:
If you think about it, all of our laws – and indeed, the very idea of respect for and equality under the law – are written to protect Tit-for-Tat, because Tit-for-Tat produces the best results. You may sell your product at a profit, but if you lie about what it does we will call that fraud and you will go to jail because successful societies start nice but retaliate against those that decide to Screw the Other Guy. The punishment of fraud is what gives us confidence in the claims made by other products. Retaliating against Screw the Other Guy is not mean-spiritedness or a lust for revenge. It is essential to protect the confidence needed to stay focused on long-term wins. And that’s how, in theory, you build a cooperative society.
You retaliate against those that take advantage of the common trust. In other words, you punish the cheaters.
If you do not punish the cheaters, you have an “always cooperate” society that produces, consistently and rapidly, the worst possible outcome because it encourages – it selects – competing nasty strategies, by providing them with what I can only describe as a food source. Without retaliation against cheaters, cheaters thrive because that becomes the smartest strategy. There’s nothing “kind” about non-retaliation, nothing noble or good. Non-retaliation is suicide. Plain and simple.
Remember all those stimuli I mentioned before? What do they have in common?
Cheating in class (or getting a diploma without passing the required tests), cheating by crossing the border illegally, cheating by committing crimes and not paying for it, cheating by bribery and corruption, cheating in general rewards Screw the Other Guy as a social strategy and makes chumps of the people who need a level of societal trust – they need retaliation against Screw the Other Guy – in order to continue to cooperate. Society needs to retaliate against cheaters because not to do so flips the coin from cooperation to betrayal. And that’s the end of everything we have worked for and cherish.
And – and – you don’t need to be a master of game theory to know this in your bones. Because if you are offended by cheaters, it is because you are being betrayed into – you are in fact being forced into – becoming a cheater and betrayer yourself. Always-cooperating dies quickly: if you never betray and the other guy always does, he goes free and you get 20 years every time. (In other words, he’s out getting high while you work to support him.) Sooner or later, even the most dense moralist gets the message.
When a tipping point is reached – when enough people are allowed to cheat – the system swings to a different stability mode (the default mode) and Screw the Other Guy becomes the only rational choice.
The rational choice. Think about that for a moment.
Does that make you angry? It damn well better. And if it does, then you are not alone.
The more I thought about this, the more amazed I became. I could waste the rest of your day coming up with examples, but let’s just pick five quick ones to show how several real-world cases can be found to demonstrate the enlightening quality of this idea. In order of increasing societal relevance:
1. You are in a line of cars on the freeway heading for a high-traffic exit ramp. The line slows. The line is the most efficient and fair way to get the cars off the highway – first come, first served. But people are using the faster surrounding lanes to get to the head of the line and merge at the last instant. When more cars end up bypassing the line than are waiting in it, being in the line no longer makes sense. Cooperation flips to Screw the Other Guy as the best strategy, since so many people are merging at the exit the line now barely moves at all. These haphazard merges slow not only the exit lane, but also the surrounding ones as people decelerate to find a last-minute merge opportunity. It becomes a safety hazard. Everybody loses. And your willingness to commit homicide increases perceptibly.
2. You are in a relationship. You are nice, forgiving and non-envious. You may think it is loving and kind not to retaliate when you are treated unfairly, but you’d be wrong. Anybody with any self esteem knows that if you are being wronged, you cannot just continue to take it. You must punish behavior that tries to take advantage of your good nature, in order to maintain the self-respect and reputation you need in order to be treated well. Failure to retaliate will lead to more and more abuse. Failure to retaliate makes Screw the other Guy the optimal position for the other person: they can behave as selfishly and recklessly as they like with no consequences – what’s not to love?
Every one of us sees this every day, either in our own lives or those of our friends. Rachel Lucas raised this example when I was floating this theory. She said, “You have to teach people how to treat you.” Exactly so. One way or another.
3. Criminals need a lawless environment in order to prosper. When simple laws enforcing common decency – excessive noise, public urination – are not enforced, the signal goes out that this is a retaliation-free zone and the invisible skull-and-crossbones flag of Screw the Other Guy flies from every building. This is why where you find broken windows you will find every manner of vice under the sun and moon. Because if people can break windows without retaliation, then they know the rules and they know what strategy to play.
New York City now has a lower crime rate than London. Why? Because Rudy Giuliani and Bill Braxton made it a policy to enforce the small laws. My father managed the Taft Hotel briefly towards the end of his career in 1979. On a visit to Times Square in those days you kept one hand on your wallet and the other was used to shoo away the pamphleteers hawking live sex shows. Now Times Square is like Disney World. I have walked out of the Viacom building after edit sessions ending at 2:00 am and walked through Times Square with complete confidence.
London, on the other hand, not only confiscated citizens’ handguns, they actively prosecute the few souls still willing to defend their own property. The London Police – once the envy of the world – now openly admit that they will not prosecute entire classes of crime. They have, in short, done precisely the inverse of what Giuliani and Braxton did: they have refused to retaliate, refused to punish the criminals and in doing so destroyed the trust needed for people to live in their own homes without fear. They have paid a large price for that already and I hope they have their checkbooks opened because they are a long, long way from being finished.
4. Large numbers of non-citizens want to live in the United States. Large numbers. A society can only assimilate so many people in a given year. If millions and millions of people come here illegally, they are loading the system to capacity at the expense of the honest, decent people who are doing the right thing by applying to immigrate legally. If we reward illegal immigration with amnesty, we have allowed the illegals not only to screw our own people and laws, but even more so they harm their own countrymen who are trying to get here by cooperating.
The biggest losers in our inability to control illegal immigration are the legal immigrants. What benefit do these honest people gain from playing by the rules? This is as clear a real-world example as you are likely to see of the lack of retaliation flipping a system from cooperation to betrayal.
And, by allowing this to happen, you also set a precedent, which I think is even more destructive: you are saying not only to the illegals but to the entire society that laws are for chumps. Cheaters win. How much of this do we need to be immersed in before everyone realizes the smart move is to flip from cooperation to betrayal? How much damage does it do when the very people sworn to uphold the law – uphold the rules that allow this amazing cooperation game to continue — are the ones who seem most enthusiastic to reward cheating? Finding out the cops are in on the crime is enough to drive even the most stout-hearted person to despair.
A steady diet of this message is not going to end well.
Finally,
5. Everything the West has achieved – all the science, prosperity, security and freedom – is based upon the free exchange of ideas. We tolerate offensive ideas so that this free exchange of information may continue. Disagreement is the crucible of wisdom. The price we pay for this cooperation is the daily offense we suffer at the exposure to ideas we find distasteful.
However, when radical Muslims living in the West demand that their religion not undergo these same stresses and trials and turns violent – burning buildings or killing those who disagree with them – well, we as a society have a choice. We can be “always cooperating,” which rewards that behavior, or we can retaliate, which punishes it.
Which do you think – reward, or punishment – is likely to produce more of this savagery, and which less?
And frankly, which behavior is more worthy of contempt: slapping someone repeatedly in the face, or watching someone thank his assailant for doing it to them? That is not moral superiority. That is the neurosis of the masochist.
If you are not built that way, then you are not alone.
Okay, everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it. When so much of this lack of rigor and disregard for right and wrong is in our faces every day, what is a decent, law-abiding citizen to do?
Protest in the streets? Yeah, that’s effective. I think it was Heroditus who said, “We old-skool niggaz don’ roll like that, yo.”
So what’s left? Well, the further off the beaten track the better the adventure. You may find this next briar-ridden path leads to an interesting garden…
THE REMNANT
Chances are you have no idea what the term The Remnant refers to. Four years ago I certainly did not have the slightest clue. But just when I started this weblog adventure, some very good friends gave me an essay by a fellow named Albert Jay Nock. It was called Isaiah’s Job.
In it, Nock talks about a very peculiar conversation God has with his messenger. Nock writes:
[T]he Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."
Albert was a very highly educated fellow. He observes that, strangely enough, Plato himself used precisely the same word – Remnant — when referring to the same group, the people whose force of character was the mortar that held ancient Athens together. Curious…
He clarifies that he is not talking about an educational or aristocratic elite:
As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
I have been, and remain, a staunchly anti-elitist individual. I find the idea of belonging to a special group the most dangerous philosophical ground you can stand on. But what is remarkable about this Remnant is that the people that compose it seem to be drawn completely at random. It is not a philosophy. It is a frequency. You are on it or you are not. And this is not a million-dollar lottery win, either: it is a call to face unpleasant facts and impending hardship. It is a quiet summons to duty. It often makes one uncomfortable, and, most often, this unfocused, vague desire – this need – to do something useful most often makes one feel very much alone.
What’s remarkable about the Remnant — to me, anyway – is the sheer unpredictability of its composition. Perhaps that homeless drug addict, panhandling under the overpass… perhaps he will be the one to run into a burning building while other decent and good people stand idle, waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for someone to happen.
During the 1992 L.A. riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled from his vehicle and nearly beaten to death by a mob of enraged blacks. Cinderblocks and fire extinguishers where hurled at his head. The police had been told not to enter the area. He was rescued by other black neighbors, who at great risk to themselves waded into that fury and took him into one of their own homes. He eventually recovered.
That was Remnant. Not the actions of Delta Force operators or other First Responders – the obvious assumption — but rather of decent, ordinary people who showed extraordinary decency and courage when the moment called them.
And what did the passengers of United Flight 93 have in common? Men and women, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor… who knows, and more importantly, who cares? They were motivated to do extraordinary things – not all of them, for most of the people remained in their seats. But some of them (enough, as it turned out) heard that ancient and distant call, heard that tone, that frequency – and likely saved the Capitol building, symbol of our government; not to mention all the people in and around it.
That is Remnant. That is the strength, the foundation, the core, the essence of civilization and decency in the face of barbarism and murder.
If this sounds like a fun thing to be then I have not been making myself clear. Nock elaborates:
[I]n any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them… You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade…
…If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the [subconscious] of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
I was myself “corrupted” by this idea of the Remnant four years ago. The more I think about it, the more it haunts me.
Because if you understand and believe that some people carry within them an inextinguishable spark, not of intellect or courage even, but rather of character, then you eventually come to the point where you realize — as did Nock and Isaiah and Plato – that mere numbers of people mean nothing. For if these men are correct, being outnumbered a thousand to one is irrelevant. And about a thousand to one is the number that Isaiah is given by God when he asks how many of the Remnant there may be.
Now you may be thinking that I am positioning this for you to consider yourself the Remnant and Your Humble Author the latest incarnation of their Prophet. I can assure you I mean no such thing. Because the maddening and magnificent thing about this quality of character is that it cannot be hustled, preached to, manipulated or organized:
He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off…
… they take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard – that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions.
This seems to me to be exactly right. If I take Nock at his word – and more and more I am inclined to do exactly that – then Nock was simply transmitting a message “in the blind,” with no hope or thought to who might read it, or when. And that idea (as he predicted) has burrowed deep into my mind – so much so that I too now feel compelled to re-transmit it in a way that Plato or Isaiah or Albert Jay Nock could never have imagined: at the speed of light to magic lanterns scattered across the entire planet.
One in a thousand of the world’s population is 6 million people. If luck breaks a certain way, this message might reach one percent of that one in a thousand. But the beautiful thing is… that will be enough. Because we are not powerless. There is, indeed, something we can do.
Alone.
Together.
(Part 2 continues below or by clicking here)
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YOU ARE NOT ALONE (Part 1)
Folks, you are about to be hit with a BIG IDEA.
It’s not entirely my big idea, but I’m willing to hang some tinsel on it and take credit for it.
First, a brief set-up, and then (and I will make an announcement in BOLD CAPS) comes the Big Idea.
Okay, the set-up:
I’ve written a dozen or so major essays since I hung my shingle over this little corner of cyberspace, and received wonderful e-mails about all of them. But two – the last two – have generated a very specific response: more passionate; desperate, even.
The first was Tribes, which basically posited that there were people who relied on themselves and people who relied on the State. The second was Seeing the Unseen, which took a look at conspiracy theories and the mental illness required to believe in ‘chemtrails’ and the 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB pathology.
Those both generated reams and reams of heartfelt sentiment, and that sentiment was much the same time and time again.
I thought I was all alone, people said. And I see this sense of despair and resignation spreading all across the web; from individuals in comment sections, or in lonely posts on obscure blogs.
Now here’s what’s interesting: this response is the same, again and again, although the stimulus is different. It might be increasing public irrationality and paranoia, or falling educational standards, or unchecked illegal immigration, or activist judges. Maybe it’s tolerance of crime, or endless lawsuits, or general mean-spiritedness. Perhaps it’s rampant defeatism, cynicism, a lack of common decency, and the sense that courage and honor are dying qualities that time is passing by.
And maybe it’s the dawning realization that our elites in politics, academia and entertainment (which controls our mythology) are leading the charge not to salvation but to the cliffs that seem so obvious to so many common people.
Something seems to be failing, something essential, as if all the nails and glue that hold a house together were dissolving all at once. And many people – perhaps you are one of them – watch all this happening and feel powerless to stop it.
Well, you are not alone.
So many stimuli, and always the same response: has the world gone mad?
What do those stimuli have in common?
HERE COMES THE BIG IDEA.
THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA
Not too long ago, just in passing, my friend Richard Riley pointed me to a famous case in game theory called The Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Now we need to really understand this, because if we do I think many of our present troubles will become clear.
Here’s how Wikipedia presents the case:
Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act? The dilemma can be summarized thus:
Prisoner B Stays Silent
Prisoner B Betrays
Prisoner A Stays Silent
Each serves six months
Prisoner A serves ten yearsPrisoner B goes free
Prisoner A Betrays
Prisoner A goes freePrisoner B serves ten years
Each serves two years
In deciding what to do in strategic situations, it is normally important to predict what others will do. This is not the case here. If you knew the other prisoner would stay silent, your best move is to betray as you then walk free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If you knew the other prisoner would betray, your best move is still to betray, as you receive a lesser sentence than by silence. Betraying is a dominant strategy. The other prisoner reasons similarly, and therefore also chooses to betray. Yet by both betraying they get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent. So rational, self-interested play results in each prisoner being worse off than if they had stayed silent.
Okay, we can simplify this:
If I screw you, but you don’t screw me, I win very big and you lose very big.
If you screw me and I don’t screw you, I lose very big and you win very big.
If neither screws each other, we both suffer mild punishment.
If we both screw each other, we both suffer medium punishment.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, therefore, is an analogy we use to test the results of how people treat each other.
Now, if this game is played one time, the winning strategy invariably is to Screw the Other Guy. If he doesn’t screw you, you get off free. If he does, you serve two years. But if you didn’t, and he decided to screw you – ten years. No one wants to risk that. Screw the Other Guy is the only smart position, and when the game is run thousands of times on computers it comes out the very clear winner.
But! What happens if the game is played again and again, against the same person? Does Screw the Other Guy continue to be the best strategy?
It does not!
The best strategy for a repeating game (called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma) is not Screw The Other Guy, and — surprisingly at first glance — it’s not Always Cooperate With The Other Guy, either.
The winning strategy is Tit-for-Tat. That is, you do to the guy what he did to you last turn. If he cooperated, you cooperate. If he screwed you, you screw him back. Over thousands and millions of computer runs, using every strategy from complete aggression to complete forgiveness, Tit-for-Tat “wins” every time – that is, it results in the least jail time for you.
Robert Axelrod examined this outcome in a book called The Evolution of Co-operation. (That word ‘evolution’ having great power in this context, as we will see in a second.)
Wikipedia again:
By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.
NICE
The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not betray [Screw the Other Guy] before its opponent does. Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice. Therefore a purely selfish strategy for purely selfish reasons will never hit its opponent first.
RETALIATING
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must always retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such softies.
FORGIVING
Another quality of successful strategies is that they must be forgiving. Though they will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to play betrayals. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
NON-ENVIOUS
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent). Therefore, Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious. [And, they will hit back when they are hit first, and keep hitting back until the opponent stops Screwing the other Guy; upon which they will revert to cooperation.]
One of the most important conclusions of Axelrod's study of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is that Nice guys can finish first.
(Emphasis and brackets mine – BW)
Now things get really interesting. In The Prisoner’s Dilemma, these behaviors are expressed as choices made by individuals. But now substitute entire cultures, where the cultural norm is made up of these choices, and what do you see?
You find the easy, knee-jerk reaction is to form a society where everyone tries to screw everyone else. It’s the short-term approach, and it makes sense in the short term. Presumably all robbers and cheats want to maintain short-term relationships with their victims. If they had to meet them again (if the game was iterated) this strategy would be, shall we say, somewhat less successful and the victims would begin to Hit Back.
When I look out into the Third World, this is what I see: short-term strategies for immediate gain at the cost of long-term success. A swarm of trinket vendors on a beach in Mexico all need to make an immediate sale in order to eat that day, even if the cost is being so annoying and frustrating to the tourists that it prevents them from ever returning. Short term gain, long term loss.
I make no value judgment on that behavior, because it works on some level or it would not be so prevalent. In societies where short term values trump long-term ones, it is easy, safe and stable to Screw the Other Guy. But in the long-term, nothing of consequence grows, because nice, forgiving and non-envious are advanced strategies that require a topsoil of general goodwill, trust, and respect for the rule of law.
Societies that embrace these qualities will always out-compete those that don’t.
You want to know what that short-term gain mentality looks like in the real world? Here you go:
Do you see any long-term disadvantages to an arrangement like the one above? I mean, aside form the obvious fire risk, who is actually paying for all that stolen electricity? And in a Screw the Other Guy society, why should he pay? He spends money, for what gain? Why not just steal it like everyone else? And when no one pays, guess what happens to the electricity. It goes away.
But as we see from The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is an unnatural island of stability that is far more successful, and it is not simply trusting everyone and being all-cooperating all the time. That strategy is the worst, because it rewards being screwed by competing strategies that eat it for breakfast everytime. It is de-selected. It vanishes from the gene pool, so to speak. You see no society like that in the real world, and now you know why. Are you listening, Marxists? It doesn’t work.
But Tit-for-Tat combines generosity and toughness. And look at the terms used to describe the most successful strategic version of Tit-for-Tat: Nice. Retaliating. Forgiving. Non-envious.
Now, this is where my own analysis kicks in, because frankly, nice, retaliating, forgiving and non-envious pretty much sums up how I feel about the West in general and the United States in particular. The web of trust and commerce in Western societies is unthinkable in the Third World because the prosperity they produce are fat juicy targets for people raised on Screw the Other Guy. Crime and corruption are stealing, and stealing is Screwing the Other Guy. It’s short-term win, long-term loss.
Alright, now here come the brass tacks:
If you think about it, all of our laws – and indeed, the very idea of respect for and equality under the law – are written to protect Tit-for-Tat, because Tit-for-Tat produces the best results. You may sell your product at a profit, but if you lie about what it does we will call that fraud and you will go to jail because successful societies start nice but retaliate against those that decide to Screw the Other Guy. The punishment of fraud is what gives us confidence in the claims made by other products. Retaliating against Screw the Other Guy is not mean-spiritedness or a lust for revenge. It is essential to protect the confidence needed to stay focused on long-term wins. And that’s how, in theory, you build a cooperative society.
You retaliate against those that take advantage of the common trust. In other words, you punish the cheaters.
If you do not punish the cheaters, you have an “always cooperate” society that produces, consistently and rapidly, the worst possible outcome because it encourages – it selects – competing nasty strategies, by providing them with what I can only describe as a food source. Without retaliation against cheaters, cheaters thrive because that becomes the smartest strategy. There’s nothing “kind” about non-retaliation, nothing noble or good. Non-retaliation is suicide. Plain and simple.
Remember all those stimuli I mentioned before? What do they have in common?
Cheating in class (or getting a diploma without passing the required tests), cheating by crossing the border illegally, cheating by committing crimes and not paying for it, cheating by bribery and corruption, cheating in general rewards Screw the Other Guy as a social strategy and makes chumps of the people who need a level of societal trust – they need retaliation against Screw the Other Guy – in order to continue to cooperate. Society needs to retaliate against cheaters because not to do so flips the coin from cooperation to betrayal. And that’s the end of everything we have worked for and cherish.
And – and – you don’t need to be a master of game theory to know this in your bones. Because if you are offended by cheaters, it is because you are being betrayed into – you are in fact being forced into – becoming a cheater and betrayer yourself. Always-cooperating dies quickly: if you never betray and the other guy always does, he goes free and you get 20 years every time. (In other words, he’s out getting high while you work to support him.) Sooner or later, even the most dense moralist gets the message.
When a tipping point is reached – when enough people are allowed to cheat – the system swings to a different stability mode (the default mode) and Screw the Other Guy becomes the only rational choice.
The rational choice. Think about that for a moment.
Does that make you angry? It damn well better. And if it does, then you are not alone.
The more I thought about this, the more amazed I became. I could waste the rest of your day coming up with examples, but let’s just pick five quick ones to show how several real-world cases can be found to demonstrate the enlightening quality of this idea. In order of increasing societal relevance:
1. You are in a line of cars on the freeway heading for a high-traffic exit ramp. The line slows. The line is the most efficient and fair way to get the cars off the highway – first come, first served. But people are using the faster surrounding lanes to get to the head of the line and merge at the last instant. When more cars end up bypassing the line than are waiting in it, being in the line no longer makes sense. Cooperation flips to Screw the Other Guy as the best strategy, since so many people are merging at the exit the line now barely moves at all. These haphazard merges slow not only the exit lane, but also the surrounding ones as people decelerate to find a last-minute merge opportunity. It becomes a safety hazard. Everybody loses. And your willingness to commit homicide increases perceptibly.
2. You are in a relationship. You are nice, forgiving and non-envious. You may think it is loving and kind not to retaliate when you are treated unfairly, but you’d be wrong. Anybody with any self esteem knows that if you are being wronged, you cannot just continue to take it. You must punish behavior that tries to take advantage of your good nature, in order to maintain the self-respect and reputation you need in order to be treated well. Failure to retaliate will lead to more and more abuse. Failure to retaliate makes Screw the other Guy the optimal position for the other person: they can behave as selfishly and recklessly as they like with no consequences – what’s not to love?
Every one of us sees this every day, either in our own lives or those of our friends. Rachel Lucas raised this example when I was floating this theory. She said, “You have to teach people how to treat you.” Exactly so. One way or another.
3. Criminals need a lawless environment in order to prosper. When simple laws enforcing common decency – excessive noise, public urination – are not enforced, the signal goes out that this is a retaliation-free zone and the invisible skull-and-crossbones flag of Screw the Other Guy flies from every building. This is why where you find broken windows you will find every manner of vice under the sun and moon. Because if people can break windows without retaliation, then they know the rules and they know what strategy to play.
New York City now has a lower crime rate than London. Why? Because Rudy Giuliani and Bill Braxton made it a policy to enforce the small laws. My father managed the Taft Hotel briefly towards the end of his career in 1979. On a visit to Times Square in those days you kept one hand on your wallet and the other was used to shoo away the pamphleteers hawking live sex shows. Now Times Square is like Disney World. I have walked out of the Viacom building after edit sessions ending at 2:00 am and walked through Times Square with complete confidence.
London, on the other hand, not only confiscated citizens’ handguns, they actively prosecute the few souls still willing to defend their own property. The London Police – once the envy of the world – now openly admit that they will not prosecute entire classes of crime. They have, in short, done precisely the inverse of what Giuliani and Braxton did: they have refused to retaliate, refused to punish the criminals and in doing so destroyed the trust needed for people to live in their own homes without fear. They have paid a large price for that already and I hope they have their checkbooks opened because they are a long, long way from being finished.
4. Large numbers of non-citizens want to live in the United States. Large numbers. A society can only assimilate so many people in a given year. If millions and millions of people come here illegally, they are loading the system to capacity at the expense of the honest, decent people who are doing the right thing by applying to immigrate legally. If we reward illegal immigration with amnesty, we have allowed the illegals not only to screw our own people and laws, but even more so they harm their own countrymen who are trying to get here by cooperating.
The biggest losers in our inability to control illegal immigration are the legal immigrants. What benefit do these honest people gain from playing by the rules? This is as clear a real-world example as you are likely to see of the lack of retaliation flipping a system from cooperation to betrayal.
And, by allowing this to happen, you also set a precedent, which I think is even more destructive: you are saying not only to the illegals but to the entire society that laws are for chumps. Cheaters win. How much of this do we need to be immersed in before everyone realizes the smart move is to flip from cooperation to betrayal? How much damage does it do when the very people sworn to uphold the law – uphold the rules that allow this amazing cooperation game to continue — are the ones who seem most enthusiastic to reward cheating? Finding out the cops are in on the crime is enough to drive even the most stout-hearted person to despair.
A steady diet of this message is not going to end well.
Finally,
5. Everything the West has achieved – all the science, prosperity, security and freedom – is based upon the free exchange of ideas. We tolerate offensive ideas so that this free exchange of information may continue. Disagreement is the crucible of wisdom. The price we pay for this cooperation is the daily offense we suffer at the exposure to ideas we find distasteful.
However, when radical Muslims living in the West demand that their religion not undergo these same stresses and trials and turns violent – burning buildings or killing those who disagree with them – well, we as a society have a choice. We can be “always cooperating,” which rewards that behavior, or we can retaliate, which punishes it.
Which do you think – reward, or punishment – is likely to produce more of this savagery, and which less?
And frankly, which behavior is more worthy of contempt: slapping someone repeatedly in the face, or watching someone thank his assailant for doing it to them? That is not moral superiority. That is the neurosis of the masochist.
If you are not built that way, then you are not alone.
Okay, everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it. When so much of this lack of rigor and disregard for right and wrong is in our faces every day, what is a decent, law-abiding citizen to do?
Protest in the streets? Yeah, that’s effective. I think it was Heroditus who said, “We old-skool niggaz don’ roll like that, yo.”
So what’s left? Well, the further off the beaten track the better the adventure. You may find this next briar-ridden path leads to an interesting garden…
THE REMNANT
Chances are you have no idea what the term The Remnant refers to. Four years ago I certainly did not have the slightest clue. But just when I started this weblog adventure, some very good friends gave me an essay by a fellow named Albert Jay Nock. It was called Isaiah’s Job.
In it, Nock talks about a very peculiar conversation God has with his messenger. Nock writes:
[T]he Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."
Albert was a very highly educated fellow. He observes that, strangely enough, Plato himself used precisely the same word – Remnant — when referring to the same group, the people whose force of character was the mortar that held ancient Athens together. Curious…
He clarifies that he is not talking about an educational or aristocratic elite:
As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
I have been, and remain, a staunchly anti-elitist individual. I find the idea of belonging to a special group the most dangerous philosophical ground you can stand on. But what is remarkable about this Remnant is that the people that compose it seem to be drawn completely at random. It is not a philosophy. It is a frequency. You are on it or you are not. And this is not a million-dollar lottery win, either: it is a call to face unpleasant facts and impending hardship. It is a quiet summons to duty. It often makes one uncomfortable, and, most often, this unfocused, vague desire – this need – to do something useful most often makes one feel very much alone.
What’s remarkable about the Remnant — to me, anyway – is the sheer unpredictability of its composition. Perhaps that homeless drug addict, panhandling under the overpass… perhaps he will be the one to run into a burning building while other decent and good people stand idle, waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for someone to happen.
During the 1992 L.A. riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled from his vehicle and nearly beaten to death by a mob of enraged blacks. Cinderblocks and fire extinguishers where hurled at his head. The police had been told not to enter the area. He was rescued by other black neighbors, who at great risk to themselves waded into that fury and took him into one of their own homes. He eventually recovered.
That was Remnant. Not the actions of Delta Force operators or other First Responders – the obvious assumption — but rather of decent, ordinary people who showed extraordinary decency and courage when the moment called them.
And what did the passengers of United Flight 93 have in common? Men and women, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor… who knows, and more importantly, who cares? They were motivated to do extraordinary things – not all of them, for most of the people remained in their seats. But some of them (enough, as it turned out) heard that ancient and distant call, heard that tone, that frequency – and likely saved the Capitol building, symbol of our government; not to mention all the people in and around it.
That is Remnant. That is the strength, the foundation, the core, the essence of civilization and decency in the face of barbarism and murder.
If this sounds like a fun thing to be then I have not been making myself clear. Nock elaborates:
[I]n any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them… You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade…
…If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the [subconscious] of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
I was myself “corrupted” by this idea of the Remnant four years ago. The more I think about it, the more it haunts me.
Because if you understand and believe that some people carry within them an inextinguishable spark, not of intellect or courage even, but rather of character, then you eventually come to the point where you realize — as did Nock and Isaiah and Plato – that mere numbers of people mean nothing. For if these men are correct, being outnumbered a thousand to one is irrelevant. And about a thousand to one is the number that Isaiah is given by God when he asks how many of the Remnant there may be.
Now you may be thinking that I am positioning this for you to consider yourself the Remnant and Your Humble Author the latest incarnation of their Prophet. I can assure you I mean no such thing. Because the maddening and magnificent thing about this quality of character is that it cannot be hustled, preached to, manipulated or organized:
He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off…
… they take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard – that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions.
This seems to me to be exactly right. If I take Nock at his word – and more and more I am inclined to do exactly that – then Nock was simply transmitting a message “in the blind,” with no hope or thought to who might read it, or when. And that idea (as he predicted) has burrowed deep into my mind – so much so that I too now feel compelled to re-transmit it in a way that Plato or Isaiah or Albert Jay Nock could never have imagined: at the speed of light to magic lanterns scattered across the entire planet.
One in a thousand of the world’s population is 6 million people. If luck breaks a certain way, this message might reach one percent of that one in a thousand. But the beautiful thing is… that will be enough. Because we are not powerless. There is, indeed, something we can do.
Alone.
Together.
(Part 2 continues below or by clicking here)
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009
FAITH \ Science
The little problem science has with religion
An interesting exchange between prevailing orthodoxy and traditional faithSome of you may have seen this before, but for others, something to ponder upon....
"Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his newstudents to stand...."You're a Christian, aren't you, son?"
"Yes sir," the student says.
"So you believe in God?"
"Absolutely!"
"Is God good?"
"Sure! God's good."
"Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?"
"Yes."
"Are you good or evil?"
"The Bible says I'm evil."
The professor grins knowingly. "Aha! The Bible!"He considers for a moment, "Here's one for you.Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?"
"Yes sir, I would."
"So you're good!"
"I wouldn't say that."
"But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't."
The student does not answer, so the professor continues."He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?"
The student remains silent.
"No, you can't, can you?" the professor says. He takes a sip of water from glass on his desk to give the student time to relax. "Let's start again,young fella. Is God good?"
"Er...yes," the student says.
"Is Satan good?"
The student doesn't hesitate on this one,"No."
"Then where does Satan come from?"
The student falters, "From God."
"That's right. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"
"Yes sir."
"Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?"
"Yes."
"So who created evil?" The professor continued, "If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil."
Again, the student has no answer.
"Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?"
The student squirms on his feet. "Yes."
"So who created them?"
The student does not answer again, so the professor repeats his question, "Who created them?"There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized."Tell me," he continues onto another student."Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?"
The student's voice betrays him and cracks. "Yes, professor, I do."
The old man stops pacing, "Science says you have five (5) senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?"
"No sir. I've never seen Him."
"Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Yet you still believe in him?"
"Yes."
"According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son?"
"Nothing," the student replies. "I only have my faith."
"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."
The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of his own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"
"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."
"And is there such a thing as cold?"
"Yes, son, there's cold too."
"No sir, there isn't."
The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet.
The student begins to explain . . . "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or noheat, but we don't have anything called 'cold.' We can hit up to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest-458 degrees. Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 Fahrenheit) is thetotal absence of heat. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure inthermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it."
Silence across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer.
"What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"
"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"
"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and its called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"
The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. "So what point are you making, young man?"
"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with and so your conclusion must also be flawed."
The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time, "Flawed? Can you explain how?"
"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains . . "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a 'thought'. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it." Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"
"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"
The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going; a very good semester, indeed.
"Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?"
The class is in uproar.
The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided."To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean." The student looks around the room, "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?"
The class breaks out into laughter.
"Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir; So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?"
Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable. Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers, "I guess you'll have to take them on faith."
"Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life," the student continues, now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?"
Now uncertain, the professor responds, "Of course, there is. We see it everyday. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."
To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
The professor sat down.
If you read it all the way through and had a smile on your face when you finished, mail it to your friends and family.
PS: The student was Albert Einstein.
First, let me make the frighteningly obvious point that most of the debate regarding the supernatural (religious dogma), is not a question of evidence, and it should be, but rather one of chosen interpretation. We are drawn to one analytical framework or another. I will attempt to explain why it is that I prefer the abio/evolutionary framework over the supernatural.The first reason is tired and old, but one that became so precisely because it bears repeating; naturalistic explanations that have passed through the filter of the scientific method or that are at least founded upon reasonable inductive hypotheses based on the available evidence have proven again and again to be far superior to any other method in bringing us to a better understanding of the universe, life, and even our place in it.Physiology and psychology began the evisceration of metaphysics as the province of philosophy and theology (although it is only right to recognize the extensive assistance of both philosopher and theologian in this task) and carried much of this lofty battle to a less friendly scientific arena where rude physical truths must be accounted for. In a similar way the development of the scientific method and the consensus it brings, combined with the academic and intellectual freedoms of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, left less and less room for literal interpretations of any creation stories. It does us well to remember that Darwin was not operating in an intellectual vacuum regarding an old earth. The prevailing scientific viewpoint was that the earth was extremely old by the 1800s, which was at odds with a literal interpretation of the bible. Assuming a natural explanation for phenomena has been validated again and again. Even the work of great intellects who sought to use their scientific discoveries as proofs of the glories of God, men like Copernicus and Newton, has been pressed into the service of naturalism. Their methods and the evidence thereby derived were completely sound; their motivations noble. Nevertheless, the naturalist has encompassed their learning and driven on, pushing back the limitations of naturalism further and further into the past, surging up even to the gates of the Original Origin itself.The second reason is to some extent predicated on the first – as naturalism has had such coruscating success, why place limits on what it might achieve? Introducing supernaturalism into the picture is an unnecessarily limiting factor, particularly when the existence of this creator is itself speculative. Some would argue that this is a contradictory position to take; that locking out the divine from the picture is blinkered thinking. But I have yet to see a convincing argument as to how allowing for supernatural creation really advances our understanding. Without a plausible framework to show us how we are to know the sculptors hand or understand the tools that he used, it is futile. Until theology or creation science can come up with a plausible means to investigate the method of supernatural creation, some tentative hypothesis, a beginnings of a framework, then what useful role can they have in advancement of knowledge? Even the more sophisticated arguments of intelligent design only seem to serve as foils for complexity, not as alternative mechanisms. In physics, when infinity shows up as a result of equations, the equations are not considered solved; they are considered to have no real-world validity. Supernatural intervention as a function seems to have a similar deadening effect.Is this approach hubris? Is it misplaced pride? I don’t believe so, if we proceed such that human knowledge is still paltry and unsure, especially when compared to the vast spans of energy, matter, and time that encompass us. We have made some astounding discoveries and gained some amazing insights into the fundamentals of nature, but there is so much left to be discovered and it may never be possible to answer the most significant questions with any certainty. Even the purest realms of deductive reasoning are bounded by the rules of their own systems. Knowledge, evidence, inductive or deductive reasoning aren’t absolute.But for now, why not proceed as if no boundary is absolute, no barrier unassailable and see where it leads us. It is far too early in the game to be throwing up our hands. That, I think, is something that many of us, religious or otherwise, can agree on.Ruggedtouch 08.17.09 - 12:51 am #
Ruggedtouch I think your last line sums it up perfectly. We simply don't know. Lets be astute enough and mature enough to leave room for differing opinions.My position as regards the atheist, (or more correctly the Marxist driven kind), is that he elevates science to a dogma, not because be believes in it, more often than not, he has little understanding of it, but because it serves his ends.There is no doubt in my mind that the tribe mentality, which at one and the same time has protected people and created conflict between peoples, is exactly what is in play in these secular vs religious disagreements.Given that much of our morality comes straight out of our religious convictions of a bygone age, I think we should be very wary to cast it all out upon the premise that science cannot verify any of it. Always remember, science is our own creation, bounded by our own limitations. Who's to say its foundational premise is solid and not flawed ... us, we cannot travel beyond the realms of the dimensions under which nature has granted our existence. I think we can agree that the assault upon Christian belief, raging around the world during these times, is a fight for dominion over the minds of men. This of course, is somewhat obtuse to your own position, but must be factored into any equation concerning this debate.Given the above supposition, who among us is under any illusion as to the utter horror of the final outcome, should the Marxist philosophy currently being foisted upon a Western World, under the guise of compassion and universal brotherhood, will have any other conclusion than every other attempt at creating that always elusive communist paradise.All of the above, of course, is a divergence from the original focus of this post Just Another Richard 08.17.09 - 2:54 am #
"We simply don't know" is precisely the point (though we're getting closer to knowing).The problem is people who think they know - the word "think" being the operative. They don't actually KNOW - they THINK they know; which is a very different matter.
An interesting exchange between prevailing orthodoxy and traditional faithSome of you may have seen this before, but for others, something to ponder upon....
"Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his newstudents to stand...."You're a Christian, aren't you, son?"
"Yes sir," the student says.
"So you believe in God?"
"Absolutely!"
"Is God good?"
"Sure! God's good."
"Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?"
"Yes."
"Are you good or evil?"
"The Bible says I'm evil."
The professor grins knowingly. "Aha! The Bible!"He considers for a moment, "Here's one for you.Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?"
"Yes sir, I would."
"So you're good!"
"I wouldn't say that."
"But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't."
The student does not answer, so the professor continues."He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?"
The student remains silent.
"No, you can't, can you?" the professor says. He takes a sip of water from glass on his desk to give the student time to relax. "Let's start again,young fella. Is God good?"
"Er...yes," the student says.
"Is Satan good?"
The student doesn't hesitate on this one,"No."
"Then where does Satan come from?"
The student falters, "From God."
"That's right. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"
"Yes sir."
"Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?"
"Yes."
"So who created evil?" The professor continued, "If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil."
Again, the student has no answer.
"Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?"
The student squirms on his feet. "Yes."
"So who created them?"
The student does not answer again, so the professor repeats his question, "Who created them?"There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized."Tell me," he continues onto another student."Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?"
The student's voice betrays him and cracks. "Yes, professor, I do."
The old man stops pacing, "Science says you have five (5) senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?"
"No sir. I've never seen Him."
"Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Yet you still believe in him?"
"Yes."
"According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son?"
"Nothing," the student replies. "I only have my faith."
"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."
The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of his own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"
"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."
"And is there such a thing as cold?"
"Yes, son, there's cold too."
"No sir, there isn't."
The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet.
The student begins to explain . . . "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or noheat, but we don't have anything called 'cold.' We can hit up to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest-458 degrees. Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 Fahrenheit) is thetotal absence of heat. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure inthermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it."
Silence across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer.
"What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"
"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"
"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and its called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"
The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. "So what point are you making, young man?"
"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with and so your conclusion must also be flawed."
The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time, "Flawed? Can you explain how?"
"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains . . "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a 'thought'. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it." Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"
"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"
The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going; a very good semester, indeed.
"Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?"
The class is in uproar.
The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided."To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean." The student looks around the room, "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?"
The class breaks out into laughter.
"Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir; So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?"
Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable. Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers, "I guess you'll have to take them on faith."
"Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life," the student continues, now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?"
Now uncertain, the professor responds, "Of course, there is. We see it everyday. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."
To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
The professor sat down.
If you read it all the way through and had a smile on your face when you finished, mail it to your friends and family.
PS: The student was Albert Einstein.
First, let me make the frighteningly obvious point that most of the debate regarding the supernatural (religious dogma), is not a question of evidence, and it should be, but rather one of chosen interpretation. We are drawn to one analytical framework or another. I will attempt to explain why it is that I prefer the abio/evolutionary framework over the supernatural.The first reason is tired and old, but one that became so precisely because it bears repeating; naturalistic explanations that have passed through the filter of the scientific method or that are at least founded upon reasonable inductive hypotheses based on the available evidence have proven again and again to be far superior to any other method in bringing us to a better understanding of the universe, life, and even our place in it.Physiology and psychology began the evisceration of metaphysics as the province of philosophy and theology (although it is only right to recognize the extensive assistance of both philosopher and theologian in this task) and carried much of this lofty battle to a less friendly scientific arena where rude physical truths must be accounted for. In a similar way the development of the scientific method and the consensus it brings, combined with the academic and intellectual freedoms of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, left less and less room for literal interpretations of any creation stories. It does us well to remember that Darwin was not operating in an intellectual vacuum regarding an old earth. The prevailing scientific viewpoint was that the earth was extremely old by the 1800s, which was at odds with a literal interpretation of the bible. Assuming a natural explanation for phenomena has been validated again and again. Even the work of great intellects who sought to use their scientific discoveries as proofs of the glories of God, men like Copernicus and Newton, has been pressed into the service of naturalism. Their methods and the evidence thereby derived were completely sound; their motivations noble. Nevertheless, the naturalist has encompassed their learning and driven on, pushing back the limitations of naturalism further and further into the past, surging up even to the gates of the Original Origin itself.The second reason is to some extent predicated on the first – as naturalism has had such coruscating success, why place limits on what it might achieve? Introducing supernaturalism into the picture is an unnecessarily limiting factor, particularly when the existence of this creator is itself speculative. Some would argue that this is a contradictory position to take; that locking out the divine from the picture is blinkered thinking. But I have yet to see a convincing argument as to how allowing for supernatural creation really advances our understanding. Without a plausible framework to show us how we are to know the sculptors hand or understand the tools that he used, it is futile. Until theology or creation science can come up with a plausible means to investigate the method of supernatural creation, some tentative hypothesis, a beginnings of a framework, then what useful role can they have in advancement of knowledge? Even the more sophisticated arguments of intelligent design only seem to serve as foils for complexity, not as alternative mechanisms. In physics, when infinity shows up as a result of equations, the equations are not considered solved; they are considered to have no real-world validity. Supernatural intervention as a function seems to have a similar deadening effect.Is this approach hubris? Is it misplaced pride? I don’t believe so, if we proceed such that human knowledge is still paltry and unsure, especially when compared to the vast spans of energy, matter, and time that encompass us. We have made some astounding discoveries and gained some amazing insights into the fundamentals of nature, but there is so much left to be discovered and it may never be possible to answer the most significant questions with any certainty. Even the purest realms of deductive reasoning are bounded by the rules of their own systems. Knowledge, evidence, inductive or deductive reasoning aren’t absolute.But for now, why not proceed as if no boundary is absolute, no barrier unassailable and see where it leads us. It is far too early in the game to be throwing up our hands. That, I think, is something that many of us, religious or otherwise, can agree on.Ruggedtouch 08.17.09 - 12:51 am #
Ruggedtouch I think your last line sums it up perfectly. We simply don't know. Lets be astute enough and mature enough to leave room for differing opinions.My position as regards the atheist, (or more correctly the Marxist driven kind), is that he elevates science to a dogma, not because be believes in it, more often than not, he has little understanding of it, but because it serves his ends.There is no doubt in my mind that the tribe mentality, which at one and the same time has protected people and created conflict between peoples, is exactly what is in play in these secular vs religious disagreements.Given that much of our morality comes straight out of our religious convictions of a bygone age, I think we should be very wary to cast it all out upon the premise that science cannot verify any of it. Always remember, science is our own creation, bounded by our own limitations. Who's to say its foundational premise is solid and not flawed ... us, we cannot travel beyond the realms of the dimensions under which nature has granted our existence. I think we can agree that the assault upon Christian belief, raging around the world during these times, is a fight for dominion over the minds of men. This of course, is somewhat obtuse to your own position, but must be factored into any equation concerning this debate.Given the above supposition, who among us is under any illusion as to the utter horror of the final outcome, should the Marxist philosophy currently being foisted upon a Western World, under the guise of compassion and universal brotherhood, will have any other conclusion than every other attempt at creating that always elusive communist paradise.All of the above, of course, is a divergence from the original focus of this post Just Another Richard 08.17.09 - 2:54 am #
"We simply don't know" is precisely the point (though we're getting closer to knowing).The problem is people who think they know - the word "think" being the operative. They don't actually KNOW - they THINK they know; which is a very different matter.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Unsustainable Environmentalism
AGW is just the excuse du jour for attacking the life-blood of civilisation.
This is at the heart of what George Reisman rightly identifies as The Toxicity of Environmentalism.
"The reason that one after another of the environmentalists' claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims, the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists' tender mercies. The claims rest on unsupported conjectures and wild leaps of imagination from scintillas of fact to arbitrary conclusions, by means of evasion and the drawing of invalid inferences...
"The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one--not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology--had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather--for the next one hundred years!
"It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution...
"If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of people, we shall be safer from the wind and rain, the environmental movement alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement claims. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our health better than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement asserts.
"There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction. Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus speaks the environmental movement.
"All of the insanities of the environmental movement become intelligible when one grasps the nature of the destructive motivation behind them. They are not uttered in the interest of man's life and well-being, but for the purpose of leading him to self-destruction." [Emphasis added]
That's the key to his argument. Here's the kernel:
"Such statements [as these from David Graber & Steve McKibben et al hoping for "the extinction of the human species"] represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.
"These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking of only 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement - the "deep ecology," Earth First! wing - they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.
"But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is substantially greater even than parts per hundred. It is certainly at least at the level of several parts per ten. This is obvious from the fact that the mainstream of the environmental movement makes no fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of Messrs. Graber and McKibben."
This is at the heart of what George Reisman rightly identifies as The Toxicity of Environmentalism.
"The reason that one after another of the environmentalists' claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims, the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists' tender mercies. The claims rest on unsupported conjectures and wild leaps of imagination from scintillas of fact to arbitrary conclusions, by means of evasion and the drawing of invalid inferences...
"The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one--not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology--had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather--for the next one hundred years!
"It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution...
"If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of people, we shall be safer from the wind and rain, the environmental movement alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement claims. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our health better than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement asserts.
"There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction. Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus speaks the environmental movement.
"All of the insanities of the environmental movement become intelligible when one grasps the nature of the destructive motivation behind them. They are not uttered in the interest of man's life and well-being, but for the purpose of leading him to self-destruction." [Emphasis added]
That's the key to his argument. Here's the kernel:
"Such statements [as these from David Graber & Steve McKibben et al hoping for "the extinction of the human species"] represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.
"These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking of only 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement - the "deep ecology," Earth First! wing - they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.
"But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is substantially greater even than parts per hundred. It is certainly at least at the level of several parts per ten. This is obvious from the fact that the mainstream of the environmental movement makes no fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of Messrs. Graber and McKibben."
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Freedom Tolerance
"The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Vol. 1, Notes to the Chapters: Ch. 7, Note 4
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Vol. 1, Notes to the Chapters: Ch. 7, Note 4
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
To Stand? How? Or Die?
This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read.
His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read.
The author of this email is said to be Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist.
A German's View on Islam
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates.
When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care.
I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.
Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything.
I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims
just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant.
It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
It is the fanatics who march.
It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide.
It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave.
It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque.
It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals.
It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist.
Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery.
Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany,
they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died
because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts--
the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read.
The author of this email is said to be Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist.
A German's View on Islam
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates.
When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care.
I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.
Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything.
I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims
just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant.
It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
It is the fanatics who march.
It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide.
It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave.
It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque.
It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals.
It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist.
Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery.
Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany,
they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died
because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts--
the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Bread Conspiracy
The bread lobbyists have been covering up this report for years, now the truth must be told.
More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever and influenza ravaged whole nations.
More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low occurrence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after only two days.
Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter and even cold cuts.
Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
Newborn babies can choke on bread.
Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:
No sale of bread to minors.
No advertising of bread within 1000 feet of a school.
A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
Hardcore bread use or "Toasting" will be banned outright
More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever and influenza ravaged whole nations.
More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low occurrence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after only two days.
Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter and even cold cuts.
Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
Newborn babies can choke on bread.
Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:
No sale of bread to minors.
No advertising of bread within 1000 feet of a school.
A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
Hardcore bread use or "Toasting" will be banned outright
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