The Irrelevance of the State

I continue to receive responses from readers who cannot understand why I do not have a “what can we do?” answer to the problems that beset not only America, but the entire world. There is a sad, childlike quality to many of these e-mails, as though there were some authority figure—be it a politician or a writer—who could offer a magic solution to any difficulty. When I suggest to them that there is nothing that anyone “in authority” can do to change any of this, and that the only change that can begin to correct our present course is to be found within their own thinking, their shattered confidence in me to offer yet another “bold new program” turns to frustration and anger. We have for so long abdicated individual responsibility for the direction of our lives, that any suggestion that it is now timely to reclaim it meets with cries of contempt.

For those who have not yet gotten the message that our present condition is beyond institutional repair, and that civilization itself has run out of “solutions” to the problems it has created and is now in a state of collapse, you might wish to consider the warnings of a top CIA official. In an address at Duke University on April 11, 2002, CIA Deputy Director for Operations, James Pavitt, declared: “Now for the hard truth. Despite the best efforts of so much of the world, the next terrorist attack—it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.” Even though, today, his agency has “more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA,” Pavitt noted that “with so many possible targets and an enemy more than willing to die, the perfect defense isn’t possible.” To his credit, he added that increased counter-terrorism measures would require the sacrifice of so many liberties as to turn America into a system “not worth defending.”

Pavitt’s words confirm one of the central theses of “chaos” theory: complex systems are too unpredictable to be controlled in furtherance of a given objective. This is why the Soviet Union and other systems of pervasive state planning have either collapsed or are in a state of disrepair. When this man declared “we in the government of the United States could (sic) neither prevent or precisely predict the devastating tragedy of the September 11th attacks” he was, knowingly or not, confirming the irrelevance of the state in a complex world.

There you have it, from someone at the top of the political food-chain: short of turning America into the kind of vicious police-state so familiar to KGB and SS operatives of the past, there is nothing that the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world can do to prevent more attacks such as occurred on September 11th. Out of respect for this man’s candor, please do not deluge him with e-mails berating his stance. Take his words as yet another wakeup call to your own sense of responsibility. You and I are the only persons who can bring about any fundamental changes in the butcherous madness that now besets our world. And our only means of doing so requires you and me to go deep within our own thinking, in order to identify—and discard—the divisive, conflict-ridden, and destructive assumptions whose ancestral voices we continue to channel.

Each of us must learn to energize our minds, to give up our habits of passively recycling the lies that are told us—as well as the truths that are withheld—by institutional voices. We must cease the practice of allowing others to formulate what should be our questions, heeding the warning of Andre Malraux: “[A] civilization can be defined at once by the basic questions it asks and by those it does not ask.” We must also give up our eagerness for quick and easy answers—which any sharpie is well-equipped to provide—recalling the words of Milton Mayer: “the questions that can be answered are not worth asking.” In short, each one of us must pursue what we most dread in this world: our own sense of responsibility.

The apparatus of the state has neither the capability nor the inclination to protect any of your interests. To the contrary, you are expected to provide the means—including your very lives—in order to protect the state. This is why wars have always increased the powers of political systems as they diminish individual liberties. The state is as dependent upon wars as orthodontists are on overbites, or lawyers are on disputes, or physicians and nurses are on illness.

While the ostensible enemy is always portrayed as faceless “others,” in reality every war is conducted by the state against its own citizenry. If you doubt this, ask yourself these questions: whose liberties have been more greatly curtailed since September 11th, members of al-Qaeda or yours? Whose belongings are being searched at airports and other public buildings; whose telephone, computer, credit card, medical, bank, and employment records are being monitored: terrorist operatives or yours? Whose taxes will be increased and whose children will be called upon to die in this eternal war: leaders of the Islamic Jihad or yours? And who does the state have in mind as the object of a current federal bill to require driver’s licenses to contain computer chip records of the details of your life: Saddam Hussein or you?

If you have not already figured out the essential nature of the state, it is time for you to do so. Every political system is a racket, run by and for the benefit of the most disreputable people in any society, and employing those methods that, to any decent folk, represent the lowest qualities in human behavior. Lying, threatening, coercing, killing, corrupting, deceiving, are such common characteristics in political life that we scarcely comment upon it anymore. And yet, if your child grew up exhibiting such traits, you would rightfully regard yourself as a parental failure!

Government schools have conditioned us in the belief, long ago stated by Thomas Hobbes, that without the direction and supervision of the state, our lives would be “nasty, brutish and short.”5 Might this man have been doing anything more than projecting onto all of mankind his own “dark side” fears? How is it even conceivable that a society organized not around the political principles of monopolistic violence, but of voluntary cooperation and exchange, could begin to match the dehumanizing horrors that define the history of states? Might the surviving victims of the massive bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Wurzburg, Vietnam, Iraq, to mention the more familiar examples, have anything to tell us about Hobbes’s delusions? Might any of them raise the question unasked by this dystopian speculator, namely, what individuals—not enjoying the collective power to forcibly direct the lives or exploit the wealth of others—would have either the capacity or incentive to produce the weapons, prisons, torture facilities, or other dehumanizing and life-destroying tools? The trillions upon trillions of dollars necessary for such a system would depend upon practices that could only reduce mankind to the dreary image foreseen by Hobbes.

We have been told that, while we are incapable of managing our own lives, we are capable of electing wise leaders to do this for us! We have learned how to recite all of our socio-political catechisms with nary a glitch in meter. We laugh at notions of “political correctness,” not realizing that the joke is on us: our minds have become little more than a mélange of contradictory beliefs and bromides about the necessity for the political domination of our lives. How many among us, while chortling over some bureaucratic nonsense, are prepared to admit to the absurdity of all of politics? “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a story that every parent should not only read to his or her children, but should discuss with them its significance.

The “War on Terror” is the clearest expression of the failure of the state to foster a harmonious and orderly society. Having a diminished appeal to the minds and souls of increasing numbers of people, the American state has had to resort to ubiquitous fear and violence in an effort to sustain its authority. In so doing, it has revealed its own terrorist inclinations, the “dark side” of its character that it prefers to project onto others.

There are many otherwise intelligent people declaring that the attacks of September 11th were occasioned not by policies and practices of the United States government, but by some combination of “evil,” petulance, and cultural envy! According to this view, some dozen and a half “terrorists” carefully plotted and carried out the destruction of the World Trade Center—knowing full well that they were going to be killed in the process—for no other reason than resentment of the fact that we have MTV and Calvin Klein jeans and women who can go out into public without being covered by a tent. In the end, their sandbox syllogism comes down to nothing more than this: “we” are “good,” but “they” are “evil.”

These same babblers are quick to condemn any who would doubt the validity of the party line. To suggest that these attacks were brought on by American government policies, they intone, is to justify them; a proposition reflecting not only an intellectual bankruptcy, but their ignorance of Newton’s “third law of motion” (i.e., that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction). The men and women who died in the WTC collapse no more “deserved” to die than did those killed by an earthquake or tornado. If one is to speak intelligently about such matters, he or she ought to have proper respect for distinctions between causation and justification.

But intellectual clarity is not what these apologists for statism have in mind. I suspect that they are aware of the deeper implications these attacks have for the future of the state. The order and liberty that most people have been conditioned to expect from hierarchically structured political systems has been called into grave doubt by a handful of men armed only with box-cutters. Many of those who had been trained to believe that an all-powerful state could protect them from any threat, are now beginning to ask the sorts of questions left behind on government school playgrounds.

Having just completed a century that witnessed the state-caused deaths of some 200 million human beings in wars and genocidal practices; and having become aware of how politicians have manipulated wars and other crises in order to advance state powers, many of us have been looking elsewhere for the peace, liberty, and order that is not to be found in political systems. But to the statists, such inquiries are to be discouraged. And so, we are witnessing a spate of attacks upon “libertarian” thinking of late—some of it even coming from those with pretensions of libertarian sentiments. Those of us who understand that war has always been the greatest threat to liberty, have been accused of being “people who hate America,” “delusional,” “anti-American,” “naïve,” and “anti-business,” by men and women with a more restricted sense of what it means to live freely.

One can only ponder the vision of humanity shared by those who can, simultaneously, support the marketplace as a regulator of our economic needs while embracing the war system that negates the value of human beings. Do they believe that the collective exercise of deadly force is the essence of human values? Are missiles, invading armies, and F-16 fighter-bombers what they conceive of as market forces? Shall this become the mantra of the incestuous marriage of political and economic systems—to be emblazoned on allegedly “libertarian” think-tank T-shirts—“General Electric: Love It or Leave It”?

Perhaps the silliest attack on libertarianism came from the conservative Francis Fukuyama, a man whose earlier misprognosis of “the end of history” has not dissuaded him from offering this self-contradictory twaddle: after noting “the hostility of libertarians to big government,” he declared that
Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

One must accumulate the benefits of many doubts in Mr. Fukuyama’s favor in endeavoring to explain this absurd paragraph. Perhaps he was lacking in the study of both history and evolutionary biology when he declared, earlier, that human history had come to an end; or perhaps he has an insufficient understanding of basic physics, chemistry, or engineering, giving him a diminished understanding of causality. Then, again, perhaps his parents never read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to him when he was a child. That he could fail to recognize that his own words confirm the libertarian critique of the state is remarkable. “The terrorists were attacking . . . symbols of American power” on September 11th, and this is why the libertarian criticism of state power is flawed? Perhaps Mr. Fukuyama should read Mr. Pavitt’s assessment not only of September 11th, but of the capacity of the state to prevent future attacks!

There is desperation in the voices of those statists who hope that, by declaring libertarian thinking dead, they will have a clear field for what is the core premise of their social thinking: the subjection of human beings to domination by the state. They may have differing ideas as to how much leg chain to give to each of us—so that we may enjoy the illusions of liberty—but share that attribute so well observed by Hayek: “a fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces.”

In this outpouring of writings about the demise of libertarian thinking, one is reminded not only of Shakespeare’s admonition about people who “protest too much,” but of Mark Twain’s retort that reports of his death had been “greatly exaggerated.” There is more wishful thinking than credibility in such assessments, not unlike that of the Elvis worshippers who would have us believe that he is really alive.

By any standard with which you judge the efficacy of any system, the state is irrelevant. Neither your health, economic well-being, the education of your children, the protection of your life and property, are in any way facilitated by the state: to the contrary, such interests are threatened by political institutions. Every political system is constructed on a rationalization for theft, and depends upon a recognized sovereign authority to compel obedience. In one of those last remaining functions that defenders of the state have clung to—i.e., national defense—events of 9/11 have shown the utter uselessness of the state, a fact that finds confirmation in the remarks of the CIA’s James Pavitt.
The state may not be able to survive in a world of instant global communication, decentralized decision-making, and computerized “virtual realities.” If so, its demise will come about not through “terrorists” or violent revolutionaries, but out of a sense of boredom; it will simply cease to entertain. The statists understand this. They know that, in a world of competing amusements, they must stage a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza—a never-ending war against the entire world—if the boobs are to be induced to keep buying tickets.

While working on my uncle’s farm as a child, I recall seeing him behead chickens. The birds flapped and fluttered about, spattering blood wherever their dying bodies took them. They made a mess of everything and a lot of noise, giving every appearance, to a young child, of purposeful behavior. But the chickens’ fates were sealed. So too, I believe, is that of the state, which insists in going out with the same bloody fanfare as the chickens.

In this age of decentralizing systems, there remains only one state function of which free men and women would readily approve: to go out of business. Its functions are no longer relevant to a complex and interrelated world. Politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, judges, prison officials, tax collectors, one and all, would then be freed up from the burdens of “public service.” In the words of Lysander Spooner, they could then return to their homes, and “content themselves with the exercise of only such rights and powers as nature has given to them in common with the rest of mankind.”

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

Civilization in Free-Fall

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
—T.S Eliot

The news story and accompanying photo were quite startling. According to the report, Sony—a dominant firm in the electronic industry—held a party to announce a new computer game it was putting on the market. As part of this soiree, a goat was decapitated, with the photo showing its not fully severed head hanging over the table on which it lay, having been sacrificed to the gods of corporate sales. Party guests were even encouraged to reach inside the goat’s body cavity to remove and eat the offal to be found therein.

All around us can be found the evidence of a civilization in its death throes; a culture that has devolved from the creation of life-sustaining values to the ritualistic celebration of death. Dr. Pangloss’ “best of all possible worlds” has backslid into an anti-life swamp. Sony’s public relations stunt did not generate this collapse, but only reflects it.

Upon reading this news report, my first response was to seek the confirmation of its validity elsewhere. Might this be nothing more than a dark side version of one of my favorite websites, The Onion? Jon Stewart, The Onion, and a few other sources have helped us to appreciate the difficulties associated with satirizing absurdity; only a faithful commitment to reciting the ludicrous details of what we now accept as “reality” will suffice.

Where does one begin to describe—much less analyze—our institutionalized commitment to death? The war system is certainly the most dramatic, having accounted for some 200,000,000 deaths in the twentieth century alone. So insistent is our culture on the perpetuation of this corporate-state slaughterhouse that those who sponsor debates among presidential aspirants have systematically excluded the two candidates—Democrat Mike Gravel and Republican Ron Paul—who have most consistently opposed continuation of the war in Iraq.

And what of the academic and corporate institutions that derive so much of their income from designing and producing “new and improved” weapons systems that reduce the unit costs of butchering others, thus fostering the values of “efficiency” by which the spiritually-bankrupt calculate their bottom-lines?

The state—with its recognized powers of deadly force—manifests this same hostility to life. Its very nature is to compel people to do what they do not otherwise choose to do. Life is a spontaneous, self-directed process; and to forcibly intervene in human action is to make life become or do what it does not choose to be or do. Because uncoerced people will always act for the purpose of achieving their desired outcomes, governmental action will, of necessity, produce lesser degrees of well-being.

And why does the state engage in such life-depleting behavior? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that there will always be some segment of humanity that enjoys the exercise of coercive power over others. As H.L. Mencken observed: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

But there are others who find the use of force quite useful for their own ends: those with concentrated economic interests wanting to control political machinery in order to restrain the competitive behavior of others. Major business interests and labor unions have been the principal examples of such restrictive desires. My book, In Restraint of Trade, documented such efforts during the critical years in the development of government regulation of the marketplace. Such coercive efforts have both increased the costs and limited inventiveness in the production of goods and services upon which life depends.

This institutionalized war against life permeates our entire culture. Our world abounds with people-pushers who want to use state power to control the kinds and quantities of food we eat; how we raise our children; the language we can use with one another; the drugs we are both prohibited from and required to ingest; whether and where we can smoke; the weights, measures, and prices at which produce can be sold; and the health care services we may use. These are but a few examples of this mania, with additional proposals being offered on a regular basis.

The state insists upon its mechanisms of control, with expanded police powers, warrantless searches, the erosion of habeas corpus, increased government databases of people, an exponential increase in prison populations in America, and a greater domestic military presence. These are among the current practices that go largely unquestioned. In Great Britain, surveillance cameras and recording devices have become so widespread that it is estimated there is one such camera for every fourteen people! This has led at least one critic of the system to grasp the anti-life implications of such practices in saying that Britain risks “committing slow social suicide.”

At this point, in an effort to define the nature of our cultural collapse, one normally hears an indictment of television, motion pictures, rock music, video-games, or that all-encompassing demon: Hollywood. Such is an expression of the superficiality of our understanding. When Cho Seung-Hui shocked us, in 2007, with his slaughter of 32 fellow students at Virginia Tech, the shallow-minded reflexively blamed guns, computer games, violent films, or any other factor that would save them the trouble of looking more deeply. I was reminded of the vacuous responses to the Columbine massacre that sought an explanation in teenagers wearing long coats!

Institutions that either employ, or advocate, the use of coercion are, of course, responsible for the consequences of their actions. Furthermore, the butchery practiced by operatives of the state is quantitatively more destructive than that perpetrated upon a goat in order to kick off a sales campaign. Having said that, I am obliged to look beyond institutions for the explanations of our anti-life, self-destructiveness. Even the state itself, for all its life-consuming viciousness, is of lesser significance in our plight than is the real culprit: our thinking.

Our conflict-ridden thinking has generated the institutions that mobilize our inner divisiveness. The state has expanded its powers over us by playing upon our fears: be it of “communists,” “illegal immigrants,” “drug dealers,” “the Hun,” or the now-fashionable “terrorists.” This scapegoating practice was the critical means by which Hitler was able to exploit various groups of non-Aryans to expand his tyrannical regime. As “Muslims” and “Mexicans” are offered up as modern sacrificial lambs, it is well for us to observe the inner source of our conflicts: others are able to enjoy power over us only as we abandon both the authority and responsibility for our own lives. As Shakespeare expressed it: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Once we learn to look outside ourselves for meaning and direction in our lives, we set ourselves up to be exploited for whatever purposes our “authorities” have in mind for us. Having given up our own centeredness—our own integrity—we become as balls in a pin-ball machine, capable of being moved about by forces over which we have no control. Our conduct becomes guided by those who control the levers with which we come into contact. Over time, the logic of the machine defines our mindset and, like Pavlov’s dogs, we learn to slobber on cue and press the levers that deliver our prearranged rewards.

When our minds become other-directed, we should not be shocked to find our actions reflecting the values and emulating the behavior of external forces. To what extent might Cho Seung-Hui have unconsciously identified the faceless bullies who had terrorized him in his youth, with the faceless schoolmates he ritualistically slaughtered? To what extent might his rage against his innocent victims have found rationalization within a nation that continues to wave the flag against innocent Iraqis made to serve as surrogates for the faceless wrongdoers of 9/11?

Why did Sony undertake its tasteless and grotesque action? Probably for the same reason that it sells video games that appeal to appetites for computerized violence: because there are enough people whose thinking attracts them to such products. That there is a demand for such merchandise provides no more justification for criticizing the marketplace than attends the sale of anything else. Animal-rights advocates who would turn to the state to prohibit such conduct unwittingly contribute their energies to a disrespect for life that generates the wrongs they seek to prevent.

Our civilization is experiencing more than a “slow social suicide.” It is more in a state of free-fall. A vibrant society is one that encourages the production of life-sustaining values—which include a respect for the inviolability of the lives and property interests of one another, a condition that becomes synonymous with peace. America, however, is a nation in a constant state of war, not only with the rest of the world, but with itself. What condition that people-pushers are quick to identify as a “social problem,” does not carry with it proposed legislation to forcibly restrict how others are to live their lives?

For reasons largely explainable as a reaction to the increased decentralization that threatens the institutional order, our formal systems—as well as those who take direction from them—are becoming increasingly sociopathic. The day may soon be upon us when cannibalism will emerge as the “politically correct” solution to all our problems; with Hillary writing a cookbook; and The New York Times editorially praising her for her “bold” program to “serve her fellow man.” In that day, cable news channels may continue to challenge our minds with inquiries into the fate of the teenage girl in Aruba.


Obama Revives a Tradition

I don’t know why so many people are getting agitated over the Obama administration’s acknowledged use of a “secret panel” to order the killing of Americans without any judicial due process. The practice is an old American tradition, one particularly resorted to in time of such economic downturns as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like the Obama reinstitution, the earlier model operated in secret and without any legislative authority or judicial supervision. The members of such agencies were not made public, nor were the criteria by which victims were chosen for assassination identified. Presumably, the current panel will attract the same kind of “socially responsible” members as did its predecessor: prior to his appointment to the United States Supreme Court by FDR, Hugo Black had been a member of this secret organization.

Like their earlier counterparts, members of the secret Obama death panel will take all necessary steps to hide their identities. Operating under the National Security Council will provide them with many means of concealment. For added precaution—and to reinforce the sense of tradition upon which this new agency rests—they might want to consider using the tool of secrecy employed so effectively in past generations: bedsheets to cover their bodies, and with eye-holes in their percaled hoods to allow them to see!

President Obama will now be able to boast that, in addition to being the nation’s first black president, he has restored an old American tradition for dealing with “undesirables.” At long last, “equality” has come full circle!

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

Libertarian Lessons from Aesop’s Fables

Aesop lived around the year 620 B.C in Greece. Though he was born into slavery, he later earned his freedom as a reward for his wit and skills as a storyteller. His fables reflect his valuation of liberty over tyranny as well as freedom over coercion—themes consistent with modern libertarianism. Oral tradition preserved the fables until philosopher Demetrius Phalereus recorded them in Latin around 300 B.C. Today their lessons, such as “slow and steady wins the race,” and “beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing,“ permeate the literature and languages of all countries. 

The Wolf, the Dog and the Collar

A comfortably plump dog happened to run into a wolf. The wolf asked the dog where he had been finding enough food to get so big and fat. ‘It is a man,’ said the dog, ‘who gives me all this food to eat.’ The wolf then asked him, ‘And what about that bare spot there on your neck?’ The dog replied, ‘My skin has been rubbed bare by the iron collar which my master forged and placed upon my neck.’ The wolf then jeered at the dog and said, ‘Keep your luxury to yourself then! I don’t want anything to do with it, if my neck will have to chafe against a chain of iron!

Lesson: Freedom should not be exchanged lightly for comfort or financial gain. Maximizing individual liberty ensures protection from coercion, of which slavery is a form.

The Rooster and the Jewel

 A Rooster, scratching the ground for something to eat, turned up a Jewel that had by chance been dropped there. “Ho!” said he, “a fine thing you are, no doubt, and, had your owner found you, great would his joy have been. But for me, give me a single grain of corn before all the jewels in the world.”

Lesson: Value is subjective. Adam Smith’s modern analogy, “The Diamond-Water Paradox,” illustrates that goods do not have an inherent worth; instead worth is intrinsic. In other words, value depends on the importance the acting individual places on the good. Thus, voluntary trade in free markets increases total “wealth” taking into account personal valuations of goods. Markets with fixed prices and other such distortions are less efficient in increasing wealth.

Jupiter and the Frogs

While the frogs were hopping about in the freedom of their pond they began shouting to Jupiter that they wanted a king who could hold their dissolute habits in check. Jupiter laughed and bestowed on the frogs a small piece of wood which he dropped all of a sudden into their pond […] After studying the king, the frogs all raced over and began jumping on the piece of wood, rudely making fun of it. When the frogs had showered their king with shame and scorn, they asked Jupiter to send them another one. Jupiter was angry that they had made fun of the king he had given them, so he sent them a water-snake, who killed the frogs one by one with her piercing sting. As the water-snake was happily eating her fill, the useless creatures ran away, speechless in their fright. They secretly sent a message to Jupiter through Mercury, begging him to put a stop to the slaughter but Jupiter replied, ‘Since you rejected what was good in order to get something bad, you better put up with it - or else something even worse might happen!’

Lesson: Tyranny in the form of coercion and violence is dangerous: “Better no rule than cruel rule.” The sacrifice of any degree of freedom brings risk of oppression.

Anne Hobson is the New Media Associate for The American Spectator. Follow Anne on twitter here.

Subscribe

Donate

When the World Went Bankrupt

To understand the machinations of a complex world, one must become sensitive to how apparently separate phenomena interconnect to produce unexpected consequences. Otherwise intelligent men and women struggle to make sense of the destructive turbulence that is fast becoming the norm in modern society. Wars that fail to satisfy even the most meager of excuses for their prosecution; rapidly-expanding police states rationalized as necessary for the ferreting out of “terrorist” bogeymen; state-sponsored torture conducted for no more apparent purpose than an end in itself; the wholesale looting engaged in—with bipartisan support—for the purpose of creating trillions of dollars of booty to subsidize the corporate owners of American society for losses sustained through incompetent management; these are the major examples of the failure to see interrelated causes of social disorder.
Throughout all of this, we see exhibited by those who presume the powers of omniscience and rational planning, a thorough ignorance not only of the causal factors that continue to produce our horribly disrupted world, but of the propriety of statist actions that respond to such dislocations with the same mindset that produced the turmoil. One sees symptoms of this disconnectedness in such absurdities as Al Gore’s receipt of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, or the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics to Paul Krugman. It is as though the Nobel Prize judges wanted to go out of their collective way to refute the proposition attributed to Einstein: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Another example of ultra-myopic thinking is to be found in a recent editorial from the erstwhile free-market publication, The Economist. Focusing on the travails that beset economies throughout the world, the magazine advises: “This is a time to put dogma and politics to one side and concentrate on pragmatic answers. That means more government intervention and co-operation in the short term than taxpayers, politicians or indeed free-market newspapers would normally like.”

Whenever I hear or read such arrant nonsense, I am reminded of my law school jurisprudence professor, Karl Llewellyn’s interchange with a classmate of mine who had challenged a statement of Llewellyn’s by saying: “that may be good in theory, but it isn’t practical.” Llewellyn responded: “if it’s not practical, it’s not good theory.”

Much of the explanation for this disconnected mindset can be found in the “specialized” ways in which we learn and work. Economists, lawyers, historians, scientists, et al., are to learn and to practice a presumed “expertise” in their chosen field. Each is to stick to his territory, and to defend the collective interests of his colleagues by attacking those who presume to speak or write in subject areas for which they do not hold graduate degrees. This is the ultimate form of reductionist thinking, a travesty which, fortunately, is openly confronted by the holistic premises of chaos theory. The world is simply too complex; subject to a myriad of interconnected influences that are both unidentifiable and not confined to the tenets of any academic discipline.

So many of our current difficulties are underlain by the kind of unfocused, fragmented thinking expressed in The Economist editorial. “Pragmatism” has no meaning in the absence of ends to be served, objectives that necessarily incorporate explicit or implicit values of the actor. One who seeks “pragmatic answers” to problems—without addressing the principles by which “answers” are to be evaluated—is engaged in the smuggling of hidden premises into the discussion. If people act to be better off afterwards than they were before, what criteria and purposes motivate their actions?
In our commercially-dominant culture, it is too often assumed that material values pre-empt all others, an assumption that seems to direct almost all of the proposals offered in response to the economic turbulence now besetting both America and the rest of the world. As one who regards the Industrial Revolution as the most humanizing period in history, I unequivocally acknowledge that material values are important to pursue. While such ends are necessary for living well, they are not sufficient. Let any who doubt this inform me of the value of a baby, or the costs associated with German National Socialist concentration camps or Soviet gulags!

Materialistic thinking that is separated from other values dominates proposals for dealing with the current economic collapse. Politicians and media voices speak in terms of numbers, but not much else. Congress’ giving trillions of dollars to banks is defended on the grounds that “it will strengthen their balance sheets.” Of course it will, just as a mugger will have more money in his pockets after a night of robbery. But at whose cost? “Will this work?” is another commonly-asked question, reflecting the same kind of morally bankrupt questioning with which most address the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the propriety of torture.

If, as seems to be the case, Western Civilization is in a state of collapse, we might have occasion to consider the causes so that we might rethink our assumptions—and behavior—for whatever is to follow. The well-being of any system depends upon more than just its material characteristics. A vibrant business organization, for instance, requires more than abundant investment capital. Whether the firm’s decision-making is centralized in an individual who issues directives to underlings, or is decentralized among those who perform the work of the organization, will have much to do with determining how much creativity and job satisfaction will be fostered. Likewise, the well-being of a family depends on more than the principal wage-earner bringing money home for the purchase of goods and services.
In the same way, the prosperity of a society or a civilization requires much more than the generation of material wealth. All dynamic systems depend upon the importation and integration of life-sustaining influences to overcome—at least temporarily—the second law of thermodynamics. The failure to ingest such energies helps to bring about the demise of systems. These factors include peaceful relationships with one another (i.e., respect for the inviolability of the person and property interests of others, premised upon voluntary rather than violent relationships); and individual liberty (a condition necessary for the expression and production of the varied ends that enhance life). This is what is meant by living with integrity: interacting with others, holistically, from within a non-contradictory center on the basis of values and principles that sustain one’s well-being. But our institutionalized conditioning reminds us that living the integrated life in peace and liberty with one another in society is only an idealistic fantasy. How impractical, we tell ourselves, as we play out the violent, conflict-ridden premises in which our thinking has been carefully structured. What masses of contradiction have we become when we condemn young men who kill their classmates at school, while cheering those who kill strangers in foreign lands; when we are unable to see that “our representatives” in Washington, D.C. are treating us no differently than is the mugger we encounter in a dark alley?

It has become fashionable to speak of the impending bankruptcy of the American economic system. To so focus our attention, however, is to overlook the fragmented nature of what we have allowed ourselves to become. Economic bankruptcy does not arise independently of related factors. The seeds of such bankruptcy were planted long ago, and have been carefully tended to by subsequent generations. There is a more generalized bankruptcy whose disintegrative influences have combined to produce our impending collapse.

The first of such causal forces can be referred to as moral bankruptcy, a phrase intended to cut much deeper than the kinds of personal habits and lifestyle concerns that get conservatives agitated. I refer, instead, to the willingness of so many of us to rationalize the unearned taking of property from owners and bestowing it upon others, provided the process is stamped with the imprimatur of the state. This shortcoming also finds expression amongst those who sanction the conduct of wars, or who have no problem devoting their energies to designing or operating military weapons and other systems for monitoring or controlling the actions of people.

A most troubling expression of moral bankruptcy is reflected in the aforementioned editorial from The Economist; for the failure to live an integrated, centered life has detrimental consequences. Moral and other philosophic principles have the most practical implications for the very existence of our lives. Stated another way, the refusal to integrate moral and philosophic principles in one’s life is the reflection of a principle, albeit one that is deftly smuggled into a discussion in service to unstated ends. Upon close examination, however, one discovers that the disguised principle is one that fragments rather than integrates one’s life, producing destructive conflict rather than wholeness.

Intellectual bankruptcy has been another major contributor to our socially disordered world. The failure to understand the nature of economics, and the principles of causation and conservation of both mass and energy; the failure to respect the inviolability of property rights and contracts; as well as an ignorance of history, have been additional catalysts for our present disarray. Politicians who ought to have learned from recent history about the destructive effects of inflation and the stultifying nature of state socialism, responded to an immediate crisis by generating more than $1,000,000,000,000 of additional inflation and partially socializing banks! In so doing, Congress was unable to rise above the habit at which it has proven itself adept, namely, to print more debased currency and bestow it upon its corporate friends. As in the aftermath to 9/11, its reaction was one of reflexive desperation rather than considered analysis; like blind men throwing darts at a dart-board. As our entropic decline continues, the politicos generate no more intelligent purpose than to preach the need for “economic stabilization” (i.e., to maintain the status quo).

The intellectual insolvency of our culture has been demonstrated in the response of many politicians and news media people to the McCain/Palin charge that Obama is a “socialist.” No doubt such allegations are correct—so, too, of course, does the accusation apply to McCain—but notice the response thereto. Were “socialism” to become an issue in this campaign, news reporters, commentators, and political hacks, would have to be prepared to analyze its philosophic, historic, and economic implications. One would have to have a mind versed in intellectual concepts, and such are not part of the curricula of journalism departments. The “debate” must thus be shifted to a safe topic about which no challenges to the mind can arise: Sarah Palm’s wardrobe! One writer went so far as to try to equate criticism of “socialism” as an expression of racism!

The confusion about socialistic thinking and government regulation has been aided by the collapse of respect for the principle of privately-owned property. This, in turn, has been abetted by what we saw earlier in Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of the movement from owner-controlled to manager-controlled business firms, wherein non-owners become decision-makers over the property of others. We need to move beyond the kind of thinking that drives political systems. Governmental policies are like so much of traditional medicine that only covers up symptoms without treating the underlying disease. If Americans have any hope of restoring a vibrant, productive economy, we need all the destabilization we can muster. President George W. Bush babbled such incoherencies as how state socialism will preserve a free market—words that recall the Vietnam War illogic about “destroying a village in order to save it.” With such thinking directing economic policies in Washington, you can be assured that institutionalized foolishness is what will end up being stabilized.

It is the spiritual bankruptcy of our culture that is most in need of recovery—a “bailout” that can be accomplished only by mobilizing the inner resources of individuals. The regeneration of the human spirit can arise only from a person’s believing in his or her existential worthiness; to regard the individual, in Kant’s words, “always as an end and never as a means only.” It is only in the power of individuals to transcend their experiences and formal learning that a society can be rejuvenated. As we rediscover our individuality and withdraw our energies from the collective abstractions to which we have attached ourselves, our personal and social integrity will no longer be in destructive contradiction.
As institutional interests struggle to overcome their terminal fate, there is a wonderful opportunity for each of us to reinvest in ourselves and, in so doing, help our world to become human-centered. The corporate, political, academic, and media voices will continue to condemn our “selfishness” even as they insist upon satisfying their appetites for greed and power. But the creative and orderly forces of chaos will prevail—they always have. When former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified that he didn’t see the housing bubble crisis coming, he was unwittingly admitting to the incapacity of anyone to do what he insisted was his power to do, namely, control and fine-tune a society of three-hundred million people to reach desired ends. “We all misjudged the risks involved. Everybody missed it—academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.” “Neither all the king’s horses nor all the kings men”—with all of the violence, paper money, or prisons available to them—can achieve by indirection, political magic, or other quickie solutions to long-term problems, what you and I, alone, can accomplish by introspection.

Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed our present situation quite well: “This time, like all other times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

Politics and War as Entertainment

If I were to offer a seminar on the nature of war, I believe the first class session would include a showing of the film Wag the Dog. Those who wish to justify the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of total strangers in the name of “good” versus “evil,” or “national honor,” will likely find the movie discomforting. As the governments of India and Pakistan self-righteously, and in the name of “God,” threaten one another with a nuclear war that could instantly kill anywhere from ten to twenty million people, it is time for decent, intelligent people to put down their flags and begin to see war for what the late General Smedley Butler rightly termed it: “a racket.” This film offers a quick reality fix.
Randolph Bourne’s observations about the nature of the state are familiar to most critics of militarism, but few have delved into why this is so. Statism is dependent upon mass thinking which, in turn, is essential to the creation of a collective, herd-oriented society. Such pack-like behavior is reflected in the intellectual and spiritual passivity of people whose mindsets are wrapped up more in images and appearances than in concrete reality.

Such a collapse of the mind produces a society dominated by entertainment—which places little burden on thinking—rather than critical inquiry, which helps to explain why there has long been a symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and political systems. Entertainment fosters a passive consciousness, a willingness to “suspend our disbelief.” Its purpose is to generate amusement, a word that is synonymous with “diversion,” meaning “to distract the attention of.” As the word “muse” reflects “a state of deep thought,” “amuse” means without such a state. The common reference to movies as a form of “escape” from reality, reflects this function. Government officials know what every magician knows, namely, that to carry out their illusions, they must divert the audience’s attention from their hidden purposes.

Michel Foucault has shown how the state’s efforts to regulate sexual behavior—whether through repressive or “liberating” legislation—serves as such a distraction, making it easier for the state to extend its control over our lives. It is instructive that, in the months preceding the World Trade Center attacks which, in turn, ushered in the greatest expansion of police powers in America since the Civil War, the news stories that dominated the media had to do with allegations of adulterous affairs by a sitting president and a congressman. It is not coincidence that both the entertainment industry and the government school systems have helped to foster preoccupations with sex.

The authority of the state is grounded in consensus-based definitions of reality, whose content the state insists on controlling. This is why so-called “public opinion polls,” rather than factual analysis and reason, have become the modern epistemological standard, and why imagery—which the entertainment industry helps to foster—now takes priority over the substance of things. That the government’s interest in expanding its control over human activity under the guise of “global warming” was helped along by Al Gore receiving an Academy Awards “Oscar” for leading this campaign, reinforces the point.
Politics and entertainment each feed upon—and help to foster—public appetites for illusions and fantastic thinking. The success of such undertakings, in turn, depends upon unfocused and enervated minds, which helps to explain why motion picture and television performers, popular musicians, and athletes—whose efforts require little participation on the part of the viewer—have become the dominant voices in our politicized culture. It also helps to account for the attraction of so many entertainers throughout the world to visionary schemes such as state socialism, as well as the increasing significance of entertainment industry gossip and box-office revenues as major news stories.

The entertainment industry helps shape the content of our consciousness by generating institutionally desired moods, fears, and reactions, a role played throughout human history. Ancient Greek history is tied up in myths, fables, and other fictions, passed on by the entertainers of their day, the minstrels. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, was Homer relating a war that actually occurred, or was he only engaged in early poetry? This is a question modern historians continue to debate. We need to ask ourselves about the extent to which our understanding of American history and other human behavior has been fashioned by motion pictures, novels, and television drama. Regular gun-fights at high noon in nineteenth century western towns may make for exciting films, but don’t seem to reflect the historic record.5 Through carefully scripted fictions and fantasies, others direct our experiences, channel our emotions, and shape our views of reality. The fantasies depicted are more often of conflict, not cooperation; of violence, not peace; of death, not the importance of life.

Nowhere is the interdependency of the political and entertainment worlds better demonstrated than in the war system, which speaks of “theaters” of operation, “acts” of war with battle “scenes,” “staging” areas, and “dress rehearsals” for invasions. Modern war-planning carries with it an “exit” strategy. Fighter planes at an air-base are often parked on “aprons” which, in theater, refers to the front area of a stage. The pomp and circumstance of war is reflected in military uniforms that mimic stage costumes, all to the accompaniment of martial music that can rival grand opera. Powerful pyrotechnics have been used to create battlefield-like settings for many rock concerts.

A Broadway play can become either a “bomb” or a “hit;” troops are “billeted” (a word derived from the French meaning of a “ticket”); while the premiere of a movie is often accompanied, like a World War II bombing raid, by searchlights that scan the skies for enemy planes. Even the Cold War was framed by an “iron curtain.” Is it only coincidence, devoid of any symbolic meaning, that at the end of the American Civil War—one of the bloodiest wars in human history—its chief “protagonist” (another theater term) was shot while attending the theater, and that his killer was an actor who, upon completing his deed, descended to the stage, pausing at center stage where he uttered his line “Sic Temper Tyrannis,” and then “exited”?

Adolf Hitler understood, quite well, the interplay between political power and theater, making use of the filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, to advance his ideology. This symbiosis continues to reveal itself in entertainers involving themselves so heavily in political campaigns, some even managing to get themselves elected to Congress or the presidency! Nor was it surprising that one of the first acts of the Bush Administration, following the announced “War on Terrorism,” was to send a group of presidential advisers to Hollywood to enlist the entertainment industry’s efforts to portray the war as desired by Washington! Frank Capra’s World War II government-commissioned film series, “Why We Fight,” was not the last insistence by the “military/entertainment complex” to write the scripts and define the characters required to assure the support of passive minds in the conduct of war. George M. Cohan used his stage musicals to help reinforce a militaristic fervor. Even Walt Disney enlisted some of his cartoon characters in the war effort. In June, 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden—the vice-president’s wife—came to Hollywood to encourage the creation of films that “inform and inspire” a more positive presentation of the military.

Furthermore, because entertainment is often conducted in crowded settings (e.g., theaters, stadiums, auditoriums) there is a dynamic conducive to the generation of mass-mindedness. One need only recall the powerful harangues of Adolf Hitler that coalesced tens of thousands of individuals into a controllable mob, to understand the symbiotic relationship between entertainment and politics. On a much subtler level, one sees the exploitation of such energies in modern sporting events that seem to have taken on increasing military and patriotic expressions.

Entertainment is a part of what we call “recreation,” which means to “recreate,” in this case to give interpretations to events that are most favorable to one’s national identity and critical of an opponent. In this connection, entertainers help to manipulate the “dark side” of our being which, once mobilized, can help to generate the most destructive and inhumane consequences. World War II movies portrayed Japanese kamikaze pilots who crashed their planes into U.S. Navy ships as “crazed zealots,” while American pilots who did the same thing to Japanese ships or trains were represented as “brave heroes,” willing to die to save their comrades. German and Japanese soldiers were presented as sneering sadists who delighted in the torture of the innocents, while the American soldiers only wanted to get the war over with so they could get back home to mom and her apple pie and the girl next door! How many of us, today, think of nineteenth century U.S. cavalrymen—as portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Randolph Scott—as brave soldiers, while Indian warriors are considered “savages” for having forcibly resisted their own annihilation?

The motion picture industry provides a further example of how politics and entertainment feed upon psychological forces. The images with which we are induced to identify ourselves—whether on stage, screen, or the battlefield—are often projections of unconscious inner voices. (Why, for example, do the “bad guys” always have to lose?) These images, in turn, are made conscious through acts of “projection”: getting the motion picture images to the front of the theater, a stage actor’s voice to the back of the theater, and maintaining an enthusiastic audience for the theater of war, all depend upon projection.

All of this leads me to ask whether the entertainment industry is an extension of the war system, or whether war is simply an extension of our need for entertainment? What should be clear to us is that entertainment is one of the principal means by which our thinking can be taken over and directed by others once we have chosen to make our minds passive, which we do when we are asked—whether by actors or politicians—to suspend our judgment about the reality of events we are witnessing. When we are content to be amused (i.e., to have our attention diverted from reality to fantasy), and to have our emotions exploited by those skilled in triggering unconscious forces, we set ourselves up to be manipulated by those producing the show.

Politics differs from traditional theater in one important respect, however: in the political arena, we do not call for the “author” at the end of a war. Most of us prefer not to know, for to discover the identities of those who have scripted such events might call into question our own gullibility.

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

“Klaatu barada nikto!”

If you want to protect your life—and those of your children and grandchildren—you’d better memorize this phrase. It may save you from a threat apparently being voiced at NASA: an attack from another planet somewhere in the vastness of our universe.1 Why might such an assault be forthcoming? Because we humans have not heeded the warnings of Al Gore! Our carbon-based activities could spread their deadly influence to other planets which, for the sake of their own survival, might lead them to decide to destroy our planet. This would be done, of course, as an act of “preventive war,” a proposition that has caused Boobus Americanus to embrace the Bush-Obama doctrine of declaring war against anyone on the planet. If such a notion provides sufficient cause for Americans to unfurl their flags against the rest of the earth, why wouldn’t it equally justify an attack by the forces of the planet Zanyptikon? We might even find ourselves targeted by an alliance of other planets! At this point, there may be those who will argue that having the earth obliterated as an act of self-defense by other worlds is less objectionable than having it destroyed in order to make way for a planned intergalactic highway.
I know what you’re thinking: Shaffer is just rattling our cage; not only is there no factual basis for supposing such an attack, there is no evidence—not even among the Cassandras at NASA—of any life existing beyond the planet Earth. After the absurdity of this claim became evident to intelligent minds, its apparent author—describing himself as a post-doctoral employee of NASA—admitted that it had been “a horrible mistake” to “have listed my affiliation as ‘NASA headquarters’” This is the sort of mea culpa often heard from members of the political classes whose peccadilloes have been made public. Perhaps this man—having seen how much mileage had been obtained by those who triggered intra-planetary wars with lies, forged documents, and visions of mushroom clouds over American cities—decided to get in on the game. After all, if Al Gore could make so much headway with the chattering classes with his scientifically unfounded allegations of global warming having been caused by SUVs, why not take the charade to the next level?

But in a world in which truth is a negotiable commodity; in which reality and fantasy have become interchangeable qualities, our NASA muse may have a fallback position. To those with a spirited imagination, there is empirical evidence of just such an impending attack; evidence clearly available to anyone whose epistemological skills have been honed by Hollywood films. The 1951 motion picture, The Day the Earth Stood Still, remains one of the better sci-fi efforts. In it, an interplanetary visitor, Klaatu—played by Michael Rennie—is sent to earth to warn humans that the continued proliferation of atomic weaponry will threaten the existence of life on other planets. In response to such a danger, Klaatu intones, the planets he purports to represent will have no choice but to destroy the earth. Klaatu is accompanied on his journey by a robot, Gort—who has the physique and disposition of ten combined NFL linebackers on steroids—along with great powers of destruction. Should Klaatu be captured—which he is—he tells the earthly heroine—played by Patricia Neal—that she can restrain Gort’s violent powers by saying to it: “Klaatu barada nikto.” She does so, Gort returns to the spacecraft—along with Klaatu—and earthlings are left to contemplate Klaatu’s warning.

Is this what passes for scientific inquiry and research at NASA these days, or is someone generating a hoax at NASA’s expense? Considering that so much of what the institutional order regards as “evidence” has the solidity of grape jelly left out in the sun all day, one must confront such reports—whether coming from the state or from its critics—with an abundance of skepticism. The environmental movement is little more than a secular religion made up of members of the faith I described as “Gang-Green.” Complete with its version of “original sin” (i.e., being human), an assortment of saints (e.g., Rachel Carson, Al Gore, et al.), a multitude of sins (virtually anything associated with the processes of living), and an apocalypse, it has all the fervor of a tent-revival show. Whenever I see news coverage of an Al Gore speech, I half-expect to see mothers rushing to the stage screaming “bless my baby!, bless my baby!”

I wrote, as well, of the satirical book, Report From Iron Mountain3 which purported to be the product of a lengthy study, begun under the Kennedy administration, to determine the consequences to political systems should universal peace suddenly break out in the world. The alleged study took place over a period of some three years, with academicians from various fields of study as well as non-academicians. Understanding that war “is the basic social system” for the organization of nations, and that “the end of war means the end of national sovereignty,” the participants explored the question of how “alternate enemies” might be developed to serve the herding function brought about through fear. Possible substitute threats included environmental pollution, attacks from other planets, and ethnic minorities, among others. “Selective population control,” and the “reintroduction of slavery” through “’universal’ military service,” were offered as means to such ends. If an existing “enemy” could not be found, the report stated, “such a threat will have to be invented.” Shortly after Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, his chief of staff—and now Chicago mayor—Rahm Emanuel told a Wall Street Journal conference: “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” These words echo the Iron Mountain mindset; they may even have inspired NASA’s fabulist.

One can obtain insight from the creative use of parodies. Humor allows us to see beyond the boundaries of our limited understanding, and allows a sense of humility to overcome any tendencies for self-righteousness. This explains why bureaucrats, clinging to the absoluteness of their ordained rules, are such a humorless lot. Their lives would be stripped of all meaning were they to grasp the farcical nature of their work. But what are the consequences for sane living when people take the parody as literal fact? How does one satirize absurdity? Jon Stewart has provided one effective method: give politicians and government officials a platform upon which to play out the burlesque character of their thinking.

It is in times of social turbulence—such as we are now experiencing—that “dark side” forces often get loosed upon the world. The Reformation and the emerging scientific revolution were destabilizing influences to the established order of the Middle Ages, leading to the prosecution of heretics and witches. It has been estimated that, between the years 1500 and 1660, some 50,000 to 80,000 witches were executed in Europe. The witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 arose during a period in which political turmoil in England threatened the existence of the colony through the revocation of the Charter that had created it. The reign of terror that helped to define eighteenth century France arose during the frenzy of the French Revolution. The nineteenth century Luddite machine-breaking riots were the violent reactions of many artisans to the major economic transformations occurring during the Industrial Revolution, a reflex action that continues to find expression among critics of capitalism. The collective insanity of Nazi Germany arose from the post-World War I excessive burdens imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty. The collapse of the Soviet Union discommoded the established order in America by eliminating the need for an enemy powerful enough to cause Boobus to prostrate himself before the state. The resulting stress upon the system led to a search for “alternate enemies.” Child abductors were offered as a possible threat, with childrens’ pictures appearing on milk cartons until the FBI advised that almost all such abductions arose out of parental custody battles. Satan—having served the institutional order so well during the earlier persecution of witches—was then auditioned for the role, with Tipper Gore seeking his presence in rock music, while others tried exploiting his influence in preschools. But “Old Scratch” didn’t have sufficient staying power, leaving the system in limbo until the ubiquitous and amorphous threat of the “terrorist” was concocted. Al Gore added “global warming” to the mix, giving the state a base from which it could conduct its endless wars against endless enemies.

With Boobus under the spell of “dark side” forces, is it so remarkable that the Iron Mountain mandate to invent threats might have inspired a NASA post-doc to dream up his own contribution to the effort? Perhaps he had seen The Day the Earth Stood Still and thought substituting “global warming” for “atomic warfare” would provide a plausible threat for an alien attack! Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s allusion to such an interplanetary invasion—in order to illustrate Keynesian stimulus policies—must have added encouragement to the fantasy.

As Carl Jung and others have observed, the “dark side” resides within each of us, ready to be mobilized when we are adequately provoked. Periods of great turbulence are often the breeding ground for the proliferation of enemies and other threats upon whom can be directed our latent fears, anger, and uncertainties. Nor can we take comfort in pretending that such eruptions are generated only by the ignorant among us: neither intelligence nor formal education has any inverse correlation with such behavior. Inquisitors and Robespierre alike were intelligent, educated men. The person most associated with the Salem witch trials was Cotton Mather, a Harvard grad whose father was president of that university. Paul Krugman is an alum of both Yale and M.I.T., while the aforesaid NASA visionary reportedly holds a doctorate degree. Nor are the rest of us immune to such fanciful thinking. Our ancestors who cheered the burning of witches, or rubbed elbows with the likes of Madame Defarge, are not as far removed from us as we like to imagine. We laugh at the mass-suicidal runs of the lemmings, even as we march off to self-destructive wars which, to many, provide the highest meaning to their lives.

As our civilization continues its entropic collapse—with our resistance to goofy thinking being tested in the process—it is timely to review some of the better contributions to the study of mass-mindedness. One should start with the works of Carl Jung, and revisit such classic writings as Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, Otto Friedrich’s more recent The End of the World: A History, as well as Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Perhaps some ambitious soul might want to update Charles Mackay’s nineteenth century classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

In the meantime—and to play it safe, lest the Al Gore Brigade is now being mobilized against us somewhere in the constellation Andromeda—we might heed the words of Klaatu. Perhaps some of the expeditionary forces from Zanyptikon are already in our presence. Should you be confronted by a menacing Gort-like humanoid, just say to it “Klaatu barada nikto.” At the very least, it may find your words confusing and disarming; at best, it may cause the creature to get into its vehicle and depart!

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

Saving Our Brave, New World

The symptoms of our decline-and-fall are becoming increasingly evident even to those who, not so many years ago, regarded the outcome of an American Idol contest as their most pressing concern. A public-opinion-poll mentality substitutes for thinking in our modern world, creating a collective mindset that insists upon instantaneous answers to questions that few people are capable of asking. As the processes of causation play out the inexorable consequences of premises grounded in utter stupidity, a holiday for the expression of socio-economic fantasies has beset us. Hardly a week goes by without some twit—whether in or out of office—upping the ante in a bull market for runaway imbecility. Such efforts continue to produce an upswing in GDP (“Grotesquely Delusional Programs”), with politicians, academicians, and media hacks jostling one another—like San Francisco cable-car passengers—to be first aboard.

Murray Rothbard said, more than once, that there was nothing wrong about a person not fully understanding economics; but that those ignorant of economic principles ought not to be proposing governmental policies to govern economic activity. I have a hard time imagining Murray remaining calm as multitudes of men and women—with nary an understanding of economics—consult their Ouija boards for additional “solutions” to the calculated chaos generated by earlier practitioners of political mysticism.

Unable to engage in the economic analysis that would both explain and provide a basis for resolving current crises—an approach that would call into question the entire logic of statism—the established order has been forced to seek other rationales for its authority. The New Deal gave us a proliferation of alphabetized federal agencies to do what Plato envisioned could be done, namely to plan for and direct the course of economic systems. But the study of chaos and complexity—along with the failed histories of state planning—have shown the fallacy of such thinking. As but one glaring example, ordinary people are discovering what Ron Paul and others have long observed: the vaunted, “independent” Federal Reserve system is not only incapable of regularizing the marketplace, but has been a principal agency for sowing confusion into our economic life.

The Platonic image of “philosopher kings” sitting atop pyramids of power and directing the lives of hundreds of millions of people to ill-defined ends, is increasingly questioned by those who produce the genuine order in society. Contrary to the basic tenets of all forms of statism, it is the spontaneous order generated by the individual pursuit of self-interests in a marketplace that accounts for both our liberty and material well-being. But in the marbled halls of state, as well as the sycophantic media and academic institutions that are well-paid to propagate a continuing faith in the cult of centralized power, the mantra is still heard, with only the content of the litanies modified to fit new situations. “Save the planet” now substitutes for “save democracy,” but the premise of state power structures remains intact.
For a culture fast descending into history’s memory hole, and with the illusion of central planning no longer enjoying the intellectual support it once did, the established order has turned to the most desperate of measures: magical thinking enforced by undiluted, unprincipled coercion. No longer does the pretense of a scientific, rational basis for state planning prevail. Instead, resort is had to a kind of political sorcery—wrapped in the behavior-modification terminology of “stimulus.” Trillions of dollars are given away to the corporate friends of those in power, and the system waits to see what happens. When vice-president Joe Biden admitted, on a Meet the Press program, that “everyone guessed wrong” on the government’s stimulus program1, the state has revealed its underlying sophistry.
In a society as thoroughly politicized as ours, the boobeoisie will always react with demands for the state to “do something,” a mindset that gives the statists a continuing incentive to identify—or concoct, if necessary—fears that can be used to increase state power. When the civilization, itself, is in collapse, Boobus will insist that something—anything—be done, if for no other reason than to keep alive the illusion that the state is still in charge of events in the world, and can act to bring about desired results. An awareness that there is nothing the state can do to reverse the fate it has unleashed is as unavailable to most people as would be a physician’s assurances, to family members, that Uncle Willie’s terminal condition cannot be overcome with Dr. Quack’s Cancer Salve!

What else could be expected from political systems, whose only distinguishing characteristic is an enjoyment of a monopoly on the use of violence? “Reason” in the mouths of government officials, always reduces to no more than rationalizations to justify whatever it is the statists want to do. When the promised results of economic planning are not forthcoming, the troops—with their tanks, armored personnel carriers, attack helicopters, and machine guns—will be sent in to enforce the state’s will. At that point, Boobus may begin to learn what the German and Russian people learned, namely, that the alleged distinction between “law enforcement” and “national defense” has been but another deception employed to protect the establishment from its own people.

And so, we seem to have reached that stage where state violence has become its own raison d’etre. Social and economic problems are no longer considered within the sphere of authority of legislative bodies; Congress is too slow to act when “we need action, now!,” and so the president or governor takes over and appoints—without anyone else’s approval—“czars” to rule over various realms of human activity. My thesaurus advises me that synonyms for “czar” include “despot,” “tyrant,” “dictator,” “slave driver,” “duce,” “oppressor,” and “fuhrer.” One source informs us that some thirty-three “czars” have been appointed by President Obama.

This is what we have become, a consequence that should reveal to all that scribbling words on parchment and calling them a “constitution” is ineffective to prevent any significant number of people from doing whatever they want to do. The response of some mainstream media’s “talking heads” to America’s embrace of “czars” has been not to question the statist power implications, but only to suggest calling such officials by a different name! As has become the norm in our world, if we use an alternative word to describe something (e.g., “waterboarding” instead of “torture”) it becomes a different act.

With Boobus having learned his catechisms about health-care costs, and the terrible-of-terribles attending “climate change,” might we expect some of these “czars” to get together and plan a solution to both? Perhaps we shall soon be informed that each person produces approximately 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per day, an amount that translates into 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year for all six billion humans. Perhaps people could be euthanized at age 65—when most have become economically nonproductive, and increasingly costly drains upon Social Security and the health-care system—a result that would greatly reduce their production of carbon dioxide. While such a program would exempt the philosopher-kings from its operation, the next generation of Boobus—unfamiliar with both the philosophically-principled and spiritual nature of what it means to be human—could probably be counted upon to embrace it. All it would take to reinforce a popular commitment to ridding the planet of us pesky humans would be an occasional showing of the picture of a polar bear clinging to its melting patch of ice.

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate

Why TSA, Wars, State Defined Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War on Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, are Essential to the State

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest accumulation of depotentiated social units.
—Carl Jung

The title of this article encompasses topics that arouse attention and criticism among persons of libertarian persuasion. The discussion of such matters usually treats each issue as though it were sui generis, independent of one another. Most of us respond as though the woman who is groped at the airport has no connection with the man who is tasered by a police officer; that the person serving time in prison for selling marijuana is unrelated to the men being held at Guantanamo. The belief that one person’s maltreatment is isolated from the rest of us, is essential to the maintenance of state power.
What we have in common is the need to protect one another’s inviolability from governmental force. When we understand that the woman being groped by a TSA agent stands in the same shoes as our wife, mother, or grandmother; when the man being beaten by a sadist cop is seen, by us, as our father or grandfather, we become less willing to evade the nature of the wrongdoing by invoking the coward’s plea: “better him than me.” The state owes its very existence to the success it has had in fostering division among us. Divide-and-conquer has long been the mainstay in political strategy. If blacks and whites; or Christians and Muslims; or employees and employers; or “straights” and “gays”; or men and women; or any of seemingly endless abstractions, learn to identify and separate themselves from one another, the state has established its base of power. From such mutually-exclusive categories do we draw the endless “enemies” (e.g., communists, drug-dealers, terrorists, tobacco companies) we are to fear, and against whom the state promises its protection. By becoming fearful, we become existentially disabled, and readily accept whatever safeguards the institutional fear-mongers impose, . . . all for our “benefit,” of course!

Look at the title of this article: do you find any governmental program or practice therein that is not grounded in state-generated fear? “Fear,” as Spencer MacCallum has so well-stated, “is the coin of the realm of politics.”1 Each program—and the numerous others not mentioned—presumes a threat to your well-being against which the state must take restrictive and intrusive action. Terrorists might threaten the flight you are about to take; terrorist nations might have “weapons of mass destruction” and the intention to use them against you; your children might be at risk from drug dealers or from sex perverts using the Internet; driving without a seat-belt, or eating “junk” foods might endanger you: the list goes on and on, changing as the fear-peddlers dream up another dreaded condition in life.

It is not sufficient to the interests of the state that you fear other groups; it is becoming increasingly evident that you must also fear the state itself! Implicit in its legal monopoly on the power to coerce is the recognition that is the recognition that there be no limitations on its exercise, other than what serve the power interests of the state. In relatively quiet and stable periods (e.g., 1950s) the state can afford to give respect to notions of individual privacy, free speech, and limitations on the powers of the police. In such ways, the state gives the appearance of reasonableness and respect for people. But when times become more tumultuous—as they are now—the very survival of the state depends upon a continuing assertion of the coercive powers that define its very being.

For a number of reasons—some of it technological—our social world is rapidly becoming decentralized. The highly-structured, centrally-directed institutions through which so much of our lives have been organized (e.g., schools, health-care, government, communications, etc.) no longer meet the expectations of many—perhaps most—men and women. Alternative systems, the control of which has become decentralized into individual hands, challenge the traditional institutional order. Private schools and home-schooling; alternative health practices; the Internet, cell-phones, and what is now known as the “social media,” are in the ascendancy. With the state becoming increasingly expensive, destructive, economically disruptive, oppressive, and blatantly anti-life, secession and nullification movements have become quite popular.

Of course, such transformations are contrary to the established institutional interests that have, for many decades, controlled the state, and with it the coercive power that is its principal asset. Having long enjoyed the power to advance their interests not through the peaceful, voluntary methods of the marketplace, but through such coercive means as governmental regulation, taxation, wars, and other violent means, the established order is not about to allow the changing preferences of hundreds of millions of individuals to disrupt its traditional cozy racket.

Because the institutional order has become inseparable from the coercive nature of the state, any popular movement toward non-political systems is, in effect, a movement away from the violent structuring of society. The corporate interests that control the machinery of the state may try to convince people that government does protect their interests vis-à-vis the various fear-objects. Failing in this, the statists must resort to the tactic that sustains the playground bully: to reinforce fear of the bully, who controls his victims through a mixture of violence and degradation.

Neither the TSA nor the alleged “war on terror” have anything to do with terrorism. The idea that the TSA came about as a consequence of 9/11 ignores the fact that the state’s practice of prowling through the personal belongings of airline passengers goes back many decades. I recall how upset a friend of mine was—in the early 1970s—when government officials went through his hand-luggage, and ordered him to unwrap a birthday gift he was carrying home to a relative. The purpose of such a search then, as now, was to remind passengers of the bully’s basic premise: “I can do anything I want to you whenever I choose to do so.” It is for the purpose of keeping us docile—an objective furthered by degrading and dehumanizing us—that underlies such state practices. The groping of people’s genitals and breasts is but an escalation of this premise, and should the TSA later decide that all passengers must strip naked for inspection, such a practice will go unquestioned not only by the courts, but by the mainstream media who will ask “. . . but if you don’t have anything to hide . . .” Those who cannot imagine state power going to such extremes to humiliate people into submission, are invited to revisit the many photographs of German army officers at such places as Auschwitz, who watched—as “full body scanners”—naked women being forced to run by them.

The extension of wars—against any enemy that any president chooses as a target—serves the same purpose. It is not necessary that there be any plausible rationale for the bombing and invading of other countries: it is sufficient that Americans and foreigners alike be reminded of the violence principle upon which government rests. “I will go to war against you if it serves my interests to do so, and any resistance on your part will only confirm what a threat you are to America!” The state directs its wars not so much against foreign populations, as against its own. War rallies people into the mindset of unquestioning obedience because, by engaging in such deadly conduct, the state reminds us of its capacities to destroy us at its will.

You can apply this logic to any of the aforementioned government programs. The state—and the corporate order that depends upon the exercise of state power—is fighting for its survival. Rather than treating this as a “war against terrorism,” it is more accurate to consider it as a “war to preserve the institutional order.” There are too many trillions of dollars and too much arbitrary power at stake for those who benefit from controlling the state’s instruments of violence to await the outcome of ordinary people’s thinking. If the survival of the corporate-state power structure required the extermination of two billion people, such a program would be undertaken with little hesitation. Destructive violence becomes an end-in-itself to an organization that is defined in terms of its monopoly on such means.
On the other hand, I continue to remain optimistic that these institutional wars against life will come to an end. I believe that the United States of America is in a terminal condition; its fate already determined. But America—whose existence predates the United States—may very well survive in a fundamentally changed form. What is helping this transformation process are innovative technological tools for the decentralized exchange of information; mankind is rapidly becoming capable of communicating with one another in the most direct ways, methods that make traditional top-down forms less and less relevant. The Internet is one system that is the tip of an iceberg whose deeper challenges have thus far not captured the attention of crew members of the ship-of-state. Wikileaks is another step in the evolution of decentralized information systems that will bring greater transparency to the activities of the ruling classes. In the process, men and women will discover just how liberating the free flow of information can be. When the rest of the world has access to the same information that political systems try to keep secret, the games played at the expense of people begin to fall apart.

In the meantime, in an effort to keep Boobus and other members of the herd within their assigned stalls, the ever-present threat of force and its consequent degradation of the individual will be invoked as the state works feverishly—and futilely—to shore up its collapsing foundations.

Read More

Buy it now for only US$15.00

Donate